Wife-in-Law Read online

  Daddy pried himself from my grasp and stood. “I have no choice.” He wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve, suddenly looking like an old man.

  “Betsy,” Mama shouted over the blaring TV, “let your father leave in peace. Remember what I told you.”

  That he’d never call or visit if I tried to talk to him about it.

  Grief and fear battled inside me, but in the end, fear of never seeing him again kept me silent. He was really going, saving himself, going to a normal family. And leaving me behind as a human sacrifice to Mama’s never-ending needs and craziness. I sat there, crushed by the horror of being responsible for Mama. It weighed so heavy, I could barely breathe.

  “There’s a good girl, now,” Daddy soothed. He reached into his pocket and handed me a business card that said “Family and Children’s Services” with some woman’s name and number at the bottom. Daddy’s voice dropped to a tight whisper. “Hide this from your mother. If she doesn’t take care of you, call this lady, and they’ll get in touch with me.”

  He kissed the top of my head, then started working his way through the narrow path to the front door. “I’ll write you,” he called without looking back.

  Too devastated to cry, I just sat there on my parents’ bed as I heard the front door open, then slam.

  This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a nightmare, and I would wake up, and everything would be the same. Daddy would just be traveling on business. He was a very good salesman, so he traveled a lot.

  I closed my eyes, hard, and willed it to be a dream. But I didn’t wake up. My parents’ room was just the way it always was, crammed with junk on Mama’s side, and clean on Daddy’s.

  Crazy, how little of the piles and piles of things in our house had been his.

  Hate exploded inside me, aimed at the idiot judge who’d refused to let me go with my daddy, and at my mother’s sickness that had driven the one person I truly loved from my life. I started screaming from the bottom of hell and couldn’t stop.

  Mama appeared at the door to her room. “Good Lord, Betsy, you’ll raise the dead. Shut up, before someone calls the police.”

  “I hope they do call the police,” I shouted through my rage and grief. “And I hope they put you in jail, so I can go with Daddy!”

  I expected her to scream right back at me, but instead, she came in and pulled me to my feet against her, gently rocking me back and forth despite my stiffness in her arms. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” she said with her cheek against the top of my head. “I didn’t want to get divorced, but your daddy couldn’t handle my sickness anymore. I couldn’t let you go. You’re all I have left in the world. You’re my daughter, and I’m your mother. Nothing should take a daughter from her mother.”

  Torn asunder, I felt like some ancient old hag, dried up and empty, with the weight of the world on my shoulders. Of course Mama couldn’t let me go. She needed me to take care of her.

  But I was just a little girl. Mama was supposed to take care of me, not the other way around.

  In that moment, I hated both my parents for what they’d done and vowed that I would never hurt my children the way Mama and Daddy had hurt me.

  Even so, I missed my father so much, I could hardly get out of bed in the morning. At first, I raced to the mailbox every day when I got home from school, praying for a letter from him, but I never got a single one.

  I made up all kinds of dramatic excuses in my mind for why he hadn’t written, but as the months passed into years, I gradually accepted the fact that he’d abandoned me.

  He was gone, but every Christmas and Thanksgiving after that, the dark bitterness of his absence hovered at the edge of my vision like a ghost. I never got over losing him.

  And the more dependent on me my mother became, the more I resented Daddy for escaping, at my expense. I came to hate him as much as I longed for him.

  So I never trusted my heart to anyone again, until my own children were born. The love I felt for my girls helped me understand why my mother couldn’t give me up, even for my own good. Thanks to that, I stopped hating her, at least.

  And I vowed to be the best wife and mother who ever breathed, so my husband would never, ever have cause to leave me.

  Seven

  November 15, 1974. Eden Lake Court

  When Kat came over for coffee, I was reading the paper and fuming.

  She greeted me with, “Lord, you look like thunder and lightnin’. What’s got yer panties in a wad?”

  I showed her the headline: WILBUR MILLS DRUNK ON BOSTON STAGE WITH STRIPPER FANNE FOX. “Can you believe that idiot?” I fumed. “Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and first he’s caught speeding with that stripper in his car, and now, just a few weeks later, he’s on stage with her, drunk as a skunk. No wonder this country’s going to hell in a handbasket, with idiots like that in Congress.”

  He was a Democrat, of course.

  Kat poured herself some coffee. “I thought it was pretty funny, myself.”

  She would.

  “Just like the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe,” I grumbled. “And LBJ and his hookers, using the Secret Service as pimps. I mean, really. Why can’t Democrats keep it in their pants?”

  “I told you,” Kat retorted, “those were just rumors about JFK and Marilyn Monroe.”

  How somebody as practical and flat-footed as Kat could still believe the myth of Camelot was beyond me, but we’d been round and round about this, so I didn’t beat a dead horse.

  “Well, there’s no denying this stuff about the stripper and Mills,” I told her. “There were plenty of witnesses. The man’s married, for God’s sake.” I slammed the paper to the table in outrage. “It’s bad enough the Democrats spend our tax money like it’s water. Why can’t they keep it in their pants?”

  “I dunno,” Kat said. “Maybe for the same reason the Republicans keep lying and selling the taxpayers down the river to special interest groups.”

  She had me there. With friends like Richard Nixon, conservatives didn’t need any enemies, and Gerald Ford was the current national joke. “Why do you think their wives put up with it?” I asked. “I’d be out of there.”

  Never mind that going home to Mama wasn’t an option. How could those women let their husbands shame them that way?

  “You wouldn’t give Greg a second chance if he had an affair?” Kat asked in genuine amazement.

  “Not if I caught him cheating on me, then he did it again, in public.” I took a sip of coffee, glad the conversation had shifted away from politics. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

  She shook her head. “Monogamy may have worked when people only lived to thirty-five, but in this day and age, it’s absurd to expect it. That’s why Zach and I don’t want to get married. We’re in the relationship because we want to be, not because we have to be.”

  Pure BS, perpetrated on women by men who didn’t have the guts to commit, but I’d already made my feelings clear to Kat on that subject too. “What if you picked up the paper and it was Zach on the front page with his mistress?”

  Kat wasn’t ruffled. “I’d deal with it. But I wouldn’t throw away a good relationship because he did something stupid. When all’s said and done, he’d come to his senses.”

  I tucked my chin. “I hope you haven’t told him that. It’s giving him permission.”

  She slowly shook her head. “No it’s not. It’s being real.” She let out a low chuckle. “But he’s not going anywhere. I give the best head in the nation.”

  “Head?” It seems impossibly ignorant that a married woman like me didn’t know what “head” meant in sexual terms, but I didn’t. Whenever I’d asked Mama about sex, she’d said it was far too private to discuss with anybody but your husband, and that was that. So I’d learned about it from prudish manuals, not by talking to anybody my own age. With family secrets like mine, close friends had always been too risky.

  “You know, head,” Kat said, then mimed what she was talking about.
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  “Oh. Sure. Of course.” I was appalled that she’d talk so openly about something so private. But at least she hadn’t made fun of me for being so ignorant.

  “You know what they say,” Kat said with a sly grin, clearly enjoying my discomfort. “You can’t keep ’em if you don’t eat ’em.”

  “Oh, gross,” I sputtered. “Way too personal.”

  Kat laughed, but she wasn’t laughing at me. “Honey, it’s just sex, a perfectly natural biological process. People shouldn’t be so uptight about it.”

  “When you look up ‘uptight’ in the dictionary,” I shot back, “you’ll find my picture, so kindly tread lightly, here.”

  There was no intimidating Kat. “Mark my words,” she advised. “You want to send Greg to nirvana, try it sometime.”

  That would shock him, for sure. He’d always taken the lead. When I considered springing something like that on him, I shocked myself, with a surprising response from my female parts.

  No way would I ever tell Kat, though, if I did try it. Or anybody.

  “What’s your favorite position?” she prodded.

  For us, there was only the one. “I don’t know.” Maybe I ought to take advantage of her more worldly experience. “What’s yours?”

  “I like to be on top, and ride him till his back arches like McDonald’s.”

  Good grief. But it might be fun to try a little variety.

  “Zach likes that?”

  Kat helped herself to a powdered doughnut. “Loves it. But I save it for special occasions.”

  I couldn’t believe we were talking about our sex lives. Or Kat was, anyway.

  She eyed me askance with mischief. “I’ve got a book you need to read. Great stuff. It’s called the Kama Sutra, from India.” She chuckled. “It’s an illustrated sex manual. It’ll do wonders for your marriage.”

  I considered, then decided that looking at a book in private would be a lot less embarrassing than talking about my love life with Kat. “Okay. But do me a favor, please. Please don’t tell anybody about it, even Zach. Or about this conversation. I’d die of embarrassment.”

  Kat patted my arm. “Don’t worry. My lips are sealed. Best friends never rat each other out, especially to their husbands.”

  Best friends?

  Nobody had ever used those words to apply to me, and my eyes welled in gratitude and astonishment. “Thanks,” I stammered. “And your secrets will be safe with me. That’s what I do best, keeping secrets.” Kat’s heart was as big as the moon, and I liked the idea of finally having a best friend at last.

  She looked at me with such compassion, I almost lost control and cried. “Don’t worry, Bets,” she said with absolute sincerity. “I’m safe. You can trust me with your secrets.”

  “Okay.” After all those years of keeping people at a distance, trusting Kat was one of the hardest things I ever did, but I never regretted it.

  As for the Kama Sutra, Greg enjoyed my experiments immensely, but eventually grew suspicious and asked me where I was getting all my ideas.

  I just smiled.

  Let him wonder. Keeping a few secrets from your husband can be very, very sexy.

  Eight

  The second Tuesday in October, 1976. Eden Lake Court

  Nineteen seventy-six was one of those good news/bad news years on Eden Lake Court. The good news was, Kat and I had become best friends. In the past two years, she’d looked out for me like nobody had since Daddy left me to fend for myself. She never questioned my helping my mother, but always took my side when Mama acted up. Kat always noticed whenever I was down, and cheered me up with funny stories from her life. She could even tell when I was getting sick, before I could (she said I “had that coming-down look”), and always brought me flowers (mostly from my own garden, but I didn’t mind). It’s the thought that counts, and she didn’t have any flowers in her own yard.

  We shopped together, did projects together. And we went to every chick flick that came to town. So, in the past two years, we’d been good company for each other, in spite of our opposite ideas about most everything, especially politics.

  The bad news was, 1976 was our first major election as friends, and a sorry election it was.

  Of all the Georgians in the history of my native state, why the good Lord and the devil made a pact to run Jimmy Carter, of all people, as our first and only presidential candidate was beyond me.

  I’m not saying he wasn’t a good man. I truly believed he was—committed to his ideals and Christian faith, and his marriage vows, which counts for something. But his platform and politics were pure pie-in-the-sky. He’d won the governor’s seat by painting himself as a fiscal and political reformer, promising to clean up the excess and corruption that had pervaded Georgia politics since Reconstruction. But all Carter did, once elected, was shuffle departments and rename them, which didn’t accomplish much besides infuriating the powers that be (including our Antichrist of a political boss, Tom Murphy). The most notorious example was the renamed state trade delegation, which couldn’t even get anybody overseas to take their calls, much less see them, till they went back to being the Georgia Trade Commission—with a whopping big stationery bill, paid for by we the people. Multiply that times twenty, and you get the picture. So much for fiscal reform.

  Not that I don’t give the man credit for trying. But it’s like what Teddy Roosevelt said about trying to reform the Department of the Navy: it was like boxing with a feather bed; when it was over, he was worn out, but the feather bed was in the same shape it was when he started.

  So there Carter was, running for president, promising to fix things nobody could fix. All the transplants in the neighborhood and at church thought I’d be thrilled to support a native son for president, but I set them straight, making sure to compliment his morals.

  I tried to set Kat straight too, but she refused to listen. Seems Carter met Zach at some state function several years ago and asked if he was married, and Zach told him he and Kat had been together for two years. Carter clapped him on the back and said a good woman was hard to find. Then, last June when Zach was in New York on business (I guess plumbers have conventions too), he ran into Carter and his entourage in a hotel lobby, and Carter not only remembered his name (hard to forget Zach and all that hair), but asked how Kat was doing.

  After that, it was all over but the shouting. The day Zach got home, he staked Carter signs every two feet along the sidewalk in front of their house, then bumper-stickered the Vanagon to smithereens. The next thing you know, Kat was volunteering fulltime at Carter’s campaign office downtown.

  Forget issues—most notably, who was going to pay for all these programs he was promising. (We, the people.) But Kat and Zach, like most Americans, had been seduced by image, and there was no talking to them about the bottom line.

  Meanwhile, I was left having to support Gerald Ford, of all people, a national joke with the face of a Gila monster, who’d pardoned Tricky Dicky (don’t get me started on him!). Worse still, the party had picked Bob Dole for his running mate, who made a pressure-treated two-by-four look like the life of the party. Most recently, Ford had embarrassed us further by publicly declaring that the Poles were free and unoppressed. How ignorant can you get?

  I mean, what kind of choice was a man like that? Definitely not the person I wanted with his finger on the red button in the war room.

  For the second time (Watergate being the first) I’d seriously considered canceling my membership to the Republican Party. But Greg—a die-hard fiscal reactionary—asked me not to, for business reasons, and my fellow party members played the Armageddon card (spendthrift Democrat policies), so I sucked it up and stayed on board.

  So, as president of the Young Republican Women, I agreed to host a makeover brunch at nine on the first Tuesday in October for fifty prospective members, with a drawing for three complete makeovers. I’d invited Kat, who needed a makeover more than anybody I’d ever known, but she’d turned me down, horrified that I’d thought she might co
nsider fraternizing with so many Republicans.

  That morning dawned clear as a bell, with a crisp, seductive little breeze that cheered up everybody, including me. By nine, the refreshment committee had set up the buffet, and the hairdresser and makeup artist were ready to make over the three lucky women who won the door-prize drawing.

  People didn’t really start arriving till twenty minutes later, which was to be expected, and they all made straight for the buffet. I stationed Sarah McGuire at the front door while I checked to make sure the homemade goodies were replenished. Sure enough, we were running low on my special spiced cider. I was adding some brown sugar and lemon to a fresh pot of apple juice on the stove when Sarah came up behind me and tugged at the sleeve of my Sunday dress. “Betsy, I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said in an urgent whisper, “but some scary-looking bums are out there picketing your house. They’re yelling at the guests and blocking their way.”

  What? “How did they get past security at the subdivision gate?”

  Alicia shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “Here.” I threw some nutmeg into the pot, then jerked off my apron and handed Alicia the ladle. “Stir. I’ll take care of this.”

  On the way to the front door, I saw that everyone had gathered at the windows, craning their necks and buzzing.

  I got to the front porch and saw Kat, along with about thirty disreputable-looking hippies chanting “Vote for Carter, vote for change!” as they picketed on the sidewalk in front of my house. Whenever one of my guests approached, the picketers deliberately blocked their way, so the sidewalk was stacking up with a frustrated traffic jam of women in their best tea party attire.

  I could not believe my best friend would do this to me. When I glared at her, Kat shot me a mischievous grin. “Down with Republican corruption,” she hollered. One side of her placard read GERALD FORD SUPPORTS CRIME, and the other, FORD WOULD PARDON HITLER.