Four
Bridie loved the weekends when her parents entertained.
She particularly loved the days leading up to the party, when she’d wake up to the sound of her mother in the kitchen thwacking dough with a rolling pin or to the smell of onions caramelizing, stock simmering, wine reducing.
And cake! Nothing smelled more like home and love and her mother than baking layers of vanilla or lemon or chocolate cake.
It seemed to Bridie that her father appreciated her mother most fully when Nina was conducting a meal in their home.
The mood in the house lightened in the days leading up to the designated evening, and today there would be leftovers.
Whatever wasn’t finished last night would be set out for a late Sunday lunch.
Cold, sliced tenderloin. Buttery potatoes.
Her mother would make a fresh salad, and her father would open a bottle of wine and pour a little into juice glasses for Bridie and Clara.
It was possible, during those languorous Sunday afternoons, to believe her family was the luckiest one on the block.
By midweek, the glow would recede, and it was always hard to tell where the gloom came from. Was it her mother? Her father? Bridie or Clara? Their collective unease?
Since second grade Bridie had kept a mental list of all the kids whose parents had divorced. It started when her best friend Carrie interrupted their regular argument—whom did they love most after Bobby Sherman: David Cassidy or Davy Jones?—to explain divorce because her parents were getting one.
“I don’t get it,” Bridie said. She and Carrie always swapped bagged lunches.
Nina would never pack the kind of store-bought lunch Carrie brought to school: cold cuts, American cheese, Fritos, and an ever-revolving selection of Hostess desserts.
And Carrie oohed and aahed over Bridie’s lunches, which were usually leftovers and always had a piece of fruit and sometimes a homemade cookie.
The day of the divorce conversation, Bridie was carefully peeling the outside chocolate layer of a Hostess Big Wheels. Carrie was eating Bridie’s leftover meat loaf on whole wheat bread. “I wish my mother would make meat loaf,” Carrie said, wolfing down the sandwich. “Maybe she will when we move.”
“You’re moving?” Bridie panicked. Carrie had been her best friend since kindergarten, the entirety of their school lives.
“Not far. I’ll still go to school here. I’ll have two houses.”
“Why?”
“Because my parents are splitting up.”
Bridie didn’t understand. She had an involuntary picture of her beloved stuffed horse Apple, the one she slept with every night until she woke one morning to find its foam innards all over the bed.
The seams had somehow ripped. She’d found the denuded shell of a horse next to her pillow.
She’d cried and cried. “Why?” was all Bridie could think to say.
“Because they don’t love each other anymore.”
Bridie vaguely understood divorce but hadn’t registered its particulars. She’d never known of parents choosing separate houses. “Where will you sleep?”
“I’ll have two bedrooms. My dad said I’ll have all the things in both places.
He said I’ll barely notice.” Carrie finished the meat loaf and fished two small tangerines out of the paper sack.
She started peeling one slowly and carefully, trying to get it off in one single strip.
Bridie didn’t know what to say. Two houses did not sound amazing.
“Sometimes parents need to live apart,” Carrie said in a rehearsed monotone that made Bridie understand not to ask any more questions. “It’s not my fault. They still love me.”
Bridie worried in fourth grade when Paul Claffey showed up looking sad and pale and when she saw him crying in the school principal’s office and when he started coming to school with a duffel bag every other Friday because he was going to “his father’s” house.
She couldn’t sleep when her favorite sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Mitchell, started taking the bus home instead of cheerfully hopping into his wife’s sky-blue Volkswagen bug with the Ecology bumper sticker on the window at the end of the day.
Sometimes he let Bridie and Carrie decorate the classroom bulletin boards on Friday afternoons, and when they were running late, he’d send the girls out to the parking lot to tell his wife he’d be down soon.
His wife had long, straight brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses and they thought she was beautiful even in her white dental hygienist jacket.
“How come you take the bus now?” Carrie asked him one afternoon while they carefully cut out paper hearts for Valentine’s Day. “Did you guys split?”
“As a matter of fact—” he said, and Bridie had to run to the lavatory so he wouldn’t see her stricken face.
And then divorce came to their street, which was terrifyingly close!
Bridie woke up one night to voices in the kitchen, women’s voices, one in distress.
She crept down the stairs and sat on the landing and listened to Mrs. Pfeiffer say some of the most remarkable things she’d ever heard.
She’d caught Mr. Pfeiffer kissing his office manager and when she confronted him—“I thought, well, this is dumb. So predictably dumb! But we can get through it”—he confessed to multiple affairs.
Told Bess she was frigid (Bridie’d had to look that one up in the dictionary) and insipid (ditto).
He packed his bags and moved into a hotel the next day.
The Pfeiffer kids were grown and all lived in other cities.
Bess told Nina she was unable to sleep alone in their house.
“What’s going to happen to me?” she cried to Nina. “What am I going to do?”
Bridie climbed back upstairs that night and got into bed and tried to calm herself.
She was not used to parents not knowing how to move forward.
The thing that rattled her most about divorce was how people changed overnight.
How the partner left behind was lost and scared or bitter and furious or all those things at once.
Mrs. Pfeiffer was a different person now.
Harder. Louder. How could a family created from love just dissolve?
People could fool you in the ugliest ways.
She was always on the lookout for trouble with her parents.
How could Bridie spot trouble between the mysterious adults in her house who were attentive, generous, unfailingly polite, but had she ever seen them kiss? Even once?
Her fear made her a snoop. She rarely found anything illuminating, but sometimes she found something interesting.
Lately, she’d noticed that her mother was buying new cosmetics.
A different perfume and face cream. She also had a few fancy bras in her drawer and Bridie wondered, drawing on her years of Talmudic-like study of “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in her mother’s issues of Ladies Home Journal, whether her mother was trying to entice her father in a new way.
Was she heeding the warnings of divorce all around them?
Sometimes Bridie would liberate small souvenirs from the room and store them in a shoebox in her closet—a pearl earring minus its mate, loose change, a peppermint ChapStick.
Last week, in her father’s nightstand, she’d found a clipped picture of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
Her dad was in the middle, sitting on a beanbag chair, looking a little out of place in his suit and tie.
She put the photo in her box, too. Something about the way her dad was smiling at the camera made her want it.
She decided to pop into her parents’ bedroom for a quick surveillance before lunch.
She went straight to the handbag shelf on her mother’s side of the closet and was randomly taking purses down to see if she could find any spare change when she pulled on a black leather handbag and a book came tumbling down with it, hitting Bridie on the head.
“Ouch,” she said quietly, even though no one could hear.
She picked up the book. Bridie stared at the cover, mouth agape.
Shut your flapper. She heard Clara’s voice in her head even when Clara wasn’t there.
She closed her mouth and read the title: The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making.
She was momentarily confused. Was this somehow related to her mother’s cooking column?
She opened the book, and it fell to page 141.
She saw the heading “Scrotum” and started reading.