Chapter 2 Postcoital Epiphanies #2
We passed the home of Sam and Deirdre Stetson, a white colonial with massive hydrangea trees near the front door, their globular flowers just starting to open.
My mother was having an affair with Sam Stetson.
She didn’t know I knew, but I did. I had no plans to confront her because it was evident that she had no plans to leave my father, whom—on some level, I supposed—she still cared about.
He was not a horrible man or a terrible husband or father for that era.
But he was boring, tiresome, and largely uninterested in his daughter even though she had taken up golf as a girl to get his attention (and would turn out to be quite good at it), which is a much better way to act out for Daddy than a stripper pole.
I was sleeping with a man roughly his age, another member of the country club, and our pillow talk when we were stoned (which we were often) sometimes led to giggling fits about what a woman as charismatic as my mother could see in a fellow who could lose himself for hours in contractual fine print—a man my illicit flame clearly found more tedious than our country club’s bylaws.
Pro tip for my adolescent female readers: if you are sleeping with a man two and a half times your age, do not expect him to draw from you your better angels.
Do not expect postcoital epiphanies that are kind or profound.
And do not expect discretion from the man, except when it comes to saving his own ass and trying to preserve his own marriage and reputation, and, since he had first fucked me when I was only fifteen years old, staying out of jail.
I discovered my mother’s affair because of the very dog we were walking.
Ten months earlier, October of my senior year, I had walked home from school mid-morning during my free period because I had forgotten a history paper that was due that afternoon.
As I passed the Stetsons’, I noticed that Harvey was watching the world go by from a chaise inside their screened porch.
Either my mother or I walked Harvey in the morning, me if I had time before school, or my mother if I did not.
But he was always walked well before ten thirty.
Still, my first instinct was that my mother was seeing her friend Deirdre Stetson and simply had brought our dog along.
But then I remembered that Deirdre was looking at colleges that day in Massachusetts with her daughter, Betsy, a girl in my class with whom I was friendly—because of our parents—but not friends.
And so I did that staggeringly stupid thing that we suppose teens do only in slasher pics and went to investigate.
I told my dog what a good boy he was through the screens and was about to call hello into the house.
But the first floor was silent and, clearly, unoccupied.
And so I went to the front door, passing beneath an open upstairs window, from which I heard first a male voice—convivial, jocular, the tone (I knew) of a middle-aged man who’s just gotten his rocks off—and then my mother’s.
Instantly I backed away as if I had just touched a hot stove. Then, in something like shock, I walked quickly—the gait nearly a jog—to our home, got my history paper, and raced the long way back to school, careful to steer as far from the Stetsons’ as I could.
“Oh, look,” said my mother the day after I killed Kenny Foster, motioning at our neighbors’ walkway, “the phlox are already past their prime. This summer is just racing by.”
My mother played tennis with Deirdre at the club.
I wondered if she ever felt remorse that she was having sex with the woman’s husband.
I knew which bedroom in that house was Sam and Deirdre’s.
According to my own (forgive me) flame, my mother and Sam went both there and to my family’s house for their periodic dalliances.
They also went to the same hotel in Manhattan for their clandestine trysts as Theo and I, precisely because it was near the train station.
“Yes,” Theo once observed when we were spent in the sheets at that very hotel, “like mother, like daughter.”
Here’s another postcoital epiphany that is not especially profound but is nonetheless relevant: men lose their filters when they play golf, especially on the back nine if the halfway house has beer. Sam actually talked to Theo about fucking my mother as the men walked the links.
“The next four weeks will last forever,” I corrected her. I was supposed to leave for college in a month, and that morning no high school senior had ever wanted more to get out of Dodge.
That desire would not change, though my destination would.
“Maybe,” she agreed. “But then you’ll be in New Haven, and you’ll be so focused on classes and boys and golf and being on your own that what happened yesterday will grow fuzzier and fuzzier.
” She scooped up a load Harvey had left in the Stetsons’ grass and wiped his canine bottom with a baby wipe, which only then were becoming common.
She’d seen a TV commercial for them that spring, and ever since had been using them on Harvey.
She was obsessed. One time in June I had found her on the floor squatting like a baseball catcher before the dog as he dozed on one of our living room love seats, gently lifting one of his rear legs to use a baby wipe on the poor animal’s ass.
He was a very patient dog, and I sure did love him.
“I doubt that,” I muttered. “And as for golf—”
“Nope. I want you to be no more focused on this than if, I don’t know, you saw a car accident on the highway.
A car accident on the other side of the median.
A car accident going in the other direction.
Just keep on driving, and first it’s in the rearview mirror and then it’s so far behind you that you can’t see it, and then it’s forgotten.
Poof. Your mind is on to something else.
Coach Romming is worried this has really gotten inside your head. ”
(Yes. My mother called Heidi Romming “Coach Romming.” I’m unsure whether that was formality or deference.)
“You two talked?”
“We did. She said you were inconsolable when you spoke.”
“I’m done with golf.”
“Oh, sweetheart…”
“I am.”
She tsk-tsked in a kindly, sympathetic fashion. “Sweetheart, I want you living in…”
“Living in what?” I pressed when once more she paused.
“A happy little nirvana of forgetfulness.” She smiled at me as if she were proud of her verbal pyrotechnics.
Harvey stopped, staring at a pair of crows pecking at something in the grass. “I’m not sure I’m going to go,” I said.
“To Yale? Of course you are. You’ve always had a tendency to overreact and do something rash,” she reminded me, no doubt recalling the vehemence with which I had taken a nine iron to a car window.
“No. I don’t think I can. I want to get out of here, but I want to go someplace else.”
“This will pass.”
This will pass. It was as if I had missed an easy putt and lost a match. It was as if the flu had kept me from going to a Jefferson Starship concert at Madison Square Garden.
“Who was calling this morning?” I asked. I wasn’t going to argue with her that moment about the escalating levels of grief and guilt and despair. I knew the categories of people who’d phoned, but not the specific names.
“Your friends. Carolyn. Marie. A few of your father’s and my friends. Sarah Jacobs. Denise Rooney. Even Theo Catton called.”
Ah, Theo, the older man who played golf at the club—even once in a while with my father—and liked to fuck me from behind in the shower.
“Everyone is very concerned about you,” she tried to reassure me. “You are quite beloved.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Any reporters?”
“No. Thank God,” she said emphatically.
“The police?”
“Again, that’s a big no.”
“The Fosters? Kenny’s mom or dad? Did they call?”
She shook her head.
“Maybe I’ll go see them later today. Will you come with me?”
“Do you think you should?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“There are legal implications to anything you might say.”
“Dad says it wasn’t my fault.”
“He’s right. But,” my mother went on, “let’s not apologize until we know the lay of the land. You know, where this is all going to settle. An apology could be interpreted as an admission of guilt in a court of law.”
“You don’t have to say ‘of law.’ What other kind of court is there?”
“Public opinion, for starters.”
“I’ll feel better once I’ve seen them. Once I’ve apologized.”
“That’s nonsense. No one feels better after they confess.”
“I said apologize. Not confess.”
She looked at me and then, without realizing she had even done it, I think, stared back at the Stetsons’ house. “Oh,” she said, “of course. You’re right.”
Nevertheless, she and my father were adamant that I should not go to the Fosters’.
Which is probably why we were all caught off guard when the minister of the Episcopal church came to our house that night not long after my father returned from the train station, explaining to us that he had just been at the Fosters’, and now he wanted to see how I was doing.