Chapter 3 “You Took Advantage of My Disadvantage.” #2
Mrs. Foster’s nails were as bad as mine, bitten and gnawed the last twenty-four hours to scabby streaks and bloody crescents.
Unlike mine, there were still patches of polish the color of antique pewter.
It was early afternoon, and so it was no major accomplishment that she had climbed into a pair of khaki pants and a blouse, but still she had and I was impressed.
My father would have been furious had he known I had come here, and my mother would, likewise, have disapproved, though her opprobrium would—assuming she was sober—have been characteristically measured.
Nevertheless, here I was at the Fosters’, drawn to this front door like that proverbial moth that finds the backyard candle irresistible on a summer night.
I had come despite the warnings of my father the lawyer and the priest who had introduced me to the New Testament as imagined by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
My mother and father believed I was at a friend’s house.
But if this was reckless (If? Really, Mira, if?), at least it was recklessness inspired by guilt rather than by libido or a daddy thing that had gotten out of hand.
For a moment, I had the sense that she had no idea who I was.
And why would she? I’d never come to this house before, and I was a year ahead of her son at school.
Moreover, his family was new to the village, which meant our paths hadn’t crossed years earlier on those elementary school field trips when, even back then, a parent or two would actually accompany the kids on the bus from the school to the Museum of Natural History or Halloween in Sleepy Hollow.
But Tallmadge was small and insular, and after a moment she realized who was standing before her: the golf prodigy who’d killed her son.
She spoke first. “Well. I’d ask, don’t you think you’ve done enough, but it seems you feel you haven’t.”
Their house was a beige ranch, one and a half stories, perhaps fifteen years old.
It didn’t belong in Tallmadge, and even back then I had an aesthetic sense sufficiently honed that I understood the architect who put this ranch between two imposing brick and stucco Tudors wasn’t Frank Lloyd Wright.
But I knew why this family had bought it—or, to be precise, why my parents had told me they had bought it.
Nick Foster had revealed to my father at one of the boozy cocktail parties that were the grown-ups’ version of their teen children’s keggers that the family had moved here because Tallmadge had the best public school in Westchester, and he had three kids: he and his wife wanted to give them the best education possible, and he could never afford to send them all to private schools.
It was better to stretch financially on the house, which would give them equity and increase in value, than on tuition at boarding schools in New England.
Nick Foster was a rarity among the men of Tallmadge: he didn’t commute to Manhattan to a job in a skyscraper or to a hospital or doctor’s office in the county.
He produced television commercials at a little ad agency housed in a strip mall in White Plains, the sorts of ads for local auto dealers and discount stores that were regularly spoofed on Saturday Night Live, and part of his compensation was a company car, a station wagon, that had the name of the agency and its phone number emblazoned on both sides.
Years earlier he’d worked (literally) on Madison Avenue, his career vaguely glamorous, but it had begun to deflate when he’d followed a boyhood pal to his friend’s fledgling ad agency in Miami, Florida.
That detour had cost him three years of his life before the company went bankrupt and led him to another agency in Fort Lauderdale—the Fosters were still clinging to the dream that was the colonized swamp of South Florida—which would fail, too.
And now, six years older, he had wound up working at a place that sounded less like a respectable law firm (the goal of all ad agency monikers) and more like a sitcom spoof: Ads Are Us.
The name was a blinking beacon for a specific sort of clientele: those with small budgets and bad taste.
“Sharon, shhhh,” her sister murmured, and massaged her shoulder. “You’re Mira, right?” she asked me.
I nodded. “I wanted to come by.”
“I figured,” said Mrs. Foster’s sister.
“Why?” asked Kenny’s mother. “Why are you here?”