Paradise girls, p.1
Paradise Girls, page 1
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BEFORE
Mary hummed carols as she draped strands of tinsel on her desktop tree. She rubbed a pine needle between her fingers and breathed deep. What a transporting smell—so forest-rich, so secret. She imagined herself in a sleigh with Ron under a snuggly blanket, whooshing through snow-laden trees, the smell of horses’ oaty breaths clouding the air, the heavy, hollow clunking of bells, flurries drifting down all around them.
Maybe she and Ron could find a place that offered sleigh rides.
Right. In Manhattan.
She looked out the window. She was on the eighteenth floor of Ron’s New York offices, and she was watching people in nearby buildings sitting at their desks in other eighteenth-floor windows. It was a week before Christmas. No snow was in the forecast. The dusky sky was laden with clouds. It was supposed to rain later tonight.
Oh well, she thought. Ron wouldn’t have gone for it anyway. He was afraid of horses.
“Twelve hmm-hmms leaping, eleven somethings um-ing,” she sang.
She’d put the tree in a concrete urn that took up most of her desk. A wooden snowman stood next to it, staring at her with black eyes and a wavery smile as if he were watching over her. She stepped back. Her desk looked tacky and cluttered and jolly, and there was absolutely no room left to work. Oh well. She wasn’t a desk kind of person anyway. Most of the time, she ended up working sitting cross-legged on the floor on her orange shag rug that Ron called “the yak-hair mat” with piles all around her, crookedly writing her articles on a sketch pad. Ron didn’t know she did that, though. It was her little secret. He’d told her that he liked her to compose on a computer, told her that her thoughts “lined up better that way.” Well, they were her thoughts—let them get out of line if they wanted to.
She looked around her office. Strands of garlands and twinkle lights swooped and wove everywhere. It was like a Christmas spider had gone crazy.
“Face it, Mary. You have decorating issues,” she said to herself. Which was ironic, she knew. She wrote for Ron’s five home magazines. Her life was décor. Ron told her she was a “guru of tasteful,” that she could do tasteful in her sleep. But, it was weird, in the past year or so, when it came to her own work space and her own home, Mary was a decorating mess.
She’d started to overdo everything. Not one inspirational sign on her wall, but six of them. Not two throw pillows on her couch, but a lumpy mountain range of them. She used to pride herself on the simplicity of her life, but now it was as if she couldn’t get enough belongings surrounding her. She kept buying more and more cute trinkets. Her home and office were turning into higgledy-piggledy muddles. Her therapist, Zelda, said that Mary was looking to “fill a kind of hole inside,” that she was “trying in vain to make home homier.”
Mary didn’t like that “in vain” part. But she knew that Zelda was right on some level. What Mary was doing was compulsive and unhealthy.
At least she hadn’t turned into a hoarder—but she watched that show sometimes as a cautionary tale. And she wasn’t a collector. Thank goodness she hadn’t taken up amassing frog statuettes or hundreds of different salt and pepper shakers. But sometimes she opened the door to her office or her condo in Brooklyn and thought, Where am I in all of this stuff?
Now she looked around her office and thought, I’ve gone overboard with Christmas too.
She said aloud, “Don’t beat yourself up. You’re doing okay. You still manage to get things done. A lot done.” That was true. She’d just completed another assignment. Somehow, out of her personal chaos, a totally together article about somebody else’s beautiful house always emerged. How she managed to pull it off, she didn’t know. Some days she felt like a total fraud.
She sighed. Twinkle lights blinked on and off around her. A garland above her head proclaimed, BELIEVE! Old-fashioned statues of Santa heads lined her shelf, and a pair of angel wings hung on the wall next to a picture of her daughter and granddaughter—CC looking like an imp with her ragged cap of brown hair and big blue eyes and Larkin looking like a miniature longer-haired version of her mother, with her serious expression and black glasses. She tried not to look at their faces. That way was sadness. She hadn’t seen them in months.
“Six somebodies doing something, five golden rings…” she sang quietly. One golden ring would be enough, she thought. Well, it was finally going to happen. She and Ron were getting married. They’d been semi-engaged for four years. Or at least that’s what Mary called it. Although he hadn’t given her an engagement ring. Well, who needed an engagement ring these days? She wasn’t a diamond lover anyway. They had a plan this time. Not like the other three times when Ron had postponed their wedding. This time it was real. They were getting married January third. Justice of the peace at ten a.m., then brunch with a few friends at a new restaurant that had just opened in a converted brownstone. Mary had a reservation for the private dining room. She’d decided on the menu (a medley of all different kinds of crepes, from quinoa lemon curd to ham, asparagus, and Swiss—so fun) and the flowers (bunches of miniature daisies), and although Ron wanted to use someone from his staff to be the photographer, she’d gone ahead and booked a young guy who was just starting out instead. He’d shot his share of indie bands and skateboarders, but never a wedding. Yet he was so sweet, so vulnerable when she interviewed him, and his photos, especially the portraits, had such sensitivity she couldn’t resist hiring him. It was only candid shots she wanted anyway. She’d put a deposit down on it all. There was no going back now.
After the wedding, she was moving in with Ron. She’d already sold her condo. The closing was in three weeks. Then they were going to buy their own house together. She’d have a chance to start over then. Make a homey home. So there, Zelda!
She was looking forward to that. So forward. She felt a hopeful blippy rise in her chest every time she thought of it. It was going to be perfect—two home-décor addicts uniting! She could almost see their kitchen—a walk-in pantry so big you could do a little dance in it, an island with storage for every shaped pot and pan, a farm sink with a faucet as big as a swan’s neck. She was so lost in her thoughts that she flinched when her phone dinged with a text from Ron.
C u in my office?
She brushed her glittery hands off on her pants and hurried down the hall. She was excited to hear what Ron was going to say. She’d emailed him earlier with an idea about starting a monthly DIY feature in one of his magazines where she showed how to redo a living room for under five hundred dollars. Snap! She knew it would be a hit. Lately she’d been longing to use her decorating skills again, besides just writing about décor.
“What did you think of my idea?” she asked him the minute she walked in the door. That was Mary. She found it hard to contain herself. It was a constant struggle around Ron because he’d become such a model of restraint. Everything was a thoughtful “maybe” or a “perhaps” these days. Never a “YES!” anymore. Mary could throttle him sometimes.
He said, “I have another project I want you on.”
He was so elegant. His pants draped beautifully as he stood up from behind his desk. Why didn’t he ever wrinkle? He looked British somehow with that aristocratic nose, those long fingers. Like a Ralph Lauren model. When Mary met him, he was always in ripped jeans and a pair of paint-splattered sneakers. Now he was rich. Imagine! And Mary had helped him get there.
She could see the perfect posture of his body reflected in the sheen on his desk, the one made out of that exotic wood from a tree that was endangered in the rain forest, only one stand of them left in the whole world, but Ron had managed to get some of it anyway when they moved into these new offices, had it made into this huge “statement” of a desk. It made Mary sad to look at it. So she looked at him instead—gorgeous, brilliant, successful him.
He said, “I’m starting a new magazine.”
Ron was always starting new home magazines these days. He knew people couldn’t get enough of home—buying, restoring, expanding, renovating—and he was making a killing off it. Ron was aware that the home craze had to do with people’s longing to change their lives but their being unable or unwilling to do that—too much emotional work! So they knocked down a wall in their foyer instead or installed some French doors in their bedroom or changed out their laminate countertops for granite, and they managed to feel okay about themselves again. At least for a moment. Home reno was the new drug, and he was pushing it hard. His business was juggernauting, higher, higher, higher. Mary was typing her heart out just to keep up.
He said, “It’ll be called Home Tweet Home. Just photos with captions. And we’d keep it down to the Twitter two-hundred-and-eighty-character limit. People’s attention spans are so short. It’s such a grea
“Perfect to write captions,” she said, her heart sinking.
She could see herself in the reflection of his floor-to-ceiling window. It was getting dark so early now. Her hair stuck out of its ponytail—why wouldn’t it ever stay put? Was that glitter reflecting on her nose? Probably. She tugged at her sweater, which was slumping off one shoulder. No matter how hard she tried to knife-edge her eyeliner, no matter how many black outfits she bought, she was never going to be a sleek New Yorker. Her Midwestern genes always won out. Her eyes were too soft for New York, her cheeks too round; her corn-blond curly hair, no matter how she tried to tame it, was always slipping its bounds. And her heart? Well, that too was well-meaning but clumsy. Sometimes around Ron these days, she felt like a puppy let loose in Tiffany’s.
“What about my idea?” she said.
When she’d first started working for him, they’d thrown ideas at each other all the time. It was such a creative, playful period. She was Ron’s only employee. He had had one home décor magazine basically running out of his garage. It was called Make Yourself a Home. Mary was constantly writing articles titled “How to Create Shelving out of Salvage!” or “Decorate with Living Branches!” or “Make Friends with Your Glue Gun!” Her use of exclamation points was rampant back then. It was so much exuberant fun. And the magazine was a hit. She and Ron had laughed together working long hours side by side in his garage office, which still had a concrete floor and a lawn mower in it and smelled like gasoline. They thought it was endlessly entertaining that they were churning out a successful home décor magazine from there.
Mary missed those days.
Now she said, “We could call the first article ‘Put the Life Back in Your Living Room!’” She rarely said things like this anymore. Now she just yielded to his direction. He was the boss. And there was no doubt he knew what he was doing. But it’s such a good idea.
She said, “I can show people how to make spaces that are rich with personality, not just money. I mean, Ron, last week I wrote an article about a twenty-million-dollar house that had a moat! Don’t you think we’re getting out of touch?”
He stared at her.
Over the years, as Ron became more and more successful, his magazines had gotten progressively more upscale too. Now they were mostly glossy showcases for mansions. Ron had even “rebranded” Make Yourself a Home a few months ago. Now it was simply called Coveted.
Why are his eyes so distant? “Alexandra called me,” Ron said.
“What?” Mary said.
She noticed that he was holding his odd snow globe of the Swiss village that he took out of the closet every Christmas and put on his desk. Alexandra was Ron’s ex, and she’d given the globe to him for their first Christmas together. It was the only thing he decorated his office with at Christmastime. Mary had always hated it. He shook it now. She could tell he didn’t even realize he was doing it, making it snow and snow and snow, burying all the little Swiss people in a blizzard.
“She’s back in town,” he told her.
“Now?” Mary couldn’t get her mouth to move right.
“She wants to see Joanna for Christmas.”
“But…”
“She says she turned her life around.”
“So?” Well, that wasn’t the right thing to say. Mary could see Ron’s mouth tug down on one edge the way it did when she slipped up, when she said anything that suggested that there might be anything wrong with him or his family. But Alexandra? Why was she back? She couldn’t say that either.
“I called Joanna. She’s coming home tomorrow,” Ron said.
“But I thought Joanna hated Alexandra.” Mary had only heard tales of Joanna’s mother—the exotic and screwed-up Alexandra. Alexandra evidently had an alcohol issue and, when Joanna was two, had taken off to live in a commune. She lived in California now. Ron called her a “mermaid artist.” As far as Mary could tell, what she did for a living was dress up in a blue sequined outfit and weave tinsel into people’s hair at craft shows. Alexandra “traveled a lot for business,” which meant she was often popping in and out of Ron and Joanna’s life, leaving a wake of emotional chaos. And Ron let her.
“Joanna wants to see her mother for Christmas.” Ron’s voice had that cold, even tone that meant he’d made up his mind.
Joanna was eighteen and had had chronic fatigue syndrome since childhood. So, in Ron’s mind, she was fragile and always needed accommodating. But was she really? Mary and Ron had set three dates in the past year alone to get married, and Ron had postponed each one because “something was going on with Joanna.”
Pale, fragile Joanna, whose IQ was off the charts. Mary barely knew her—well, she really hadn’t had a chance to know her. Joanna had gone to a private school and to a science camp during the summers, and it seemed like she had always been cached in her room reading or studying. Ron had a live-in French housekeeper, Arles, who took care of all of Joanna’s “needs” when she was home. Arles was so humorless Mary secretly called her the Anti-Poppins.
In Mary’s mind, Joanna was just a wounded kid, lost and shattered by Alexandra’s continuous abandonment of her. Mary thought Joanna needed her father to stop making excuses for her and to draw the line with Alexandra. And the whole family needed to lose the Anti-Poppins. But nobody asked what Mary thought.
Once, when she and Ron first started going out, Mary took Joanna “on an adventure” when Ron was working on the weekend. Joanna was fourteen. They went to a street fair, and Joanna learned how to juggle from a clown. She was instantly good at it too. Mary bought her a set of squishy balls at that stall to bring home and practice with. Then she’d bought them big felt hats—one shaped like a hot dog (for Mary) and the other, a hamburger (for Joanna)—and they made faces at themselves in fun-house mirrors. Then they’d eaten fried dough with powdered sugar from a food truck. When they got home, Joanna had gotten really sick. She was in bed for a week. That had been that. Ron never let her go out with Mary again. One day not so long ago, Mary found one of the juggling balls stuffed away in the back of Ron’s kitchen drawer.
But Joanna had gone away to college in September, and she’d been doing just fine there. She finally got a chance to be herself, Mary thought. She seemed healthy and happy. She was going to spend Christmas away—with her friend Evie at Evie’s house in Vermont. Evie had snowmobiles! So Mary was going to be able to spend her first Christmas alone with Ron. She’d been so looking forward to it.
Now this.
Ron said, “Xanny’s staying in a hotel for a week, so I asked her to come spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with me and Joanna. I can’t ask Joanna to spend her Christmas in a hotel room, can I?”
“Xanny?” Mary had never heard Ron refer to Alexandra that way. And here Mary was, excluded from Christmas. Again. Every year it was something. Ron said that Joanna “needs her father to herself.” Or Ron said that it would be “too foreign” to invite Mary. Now it was Xanny getting included and Mary kicked out? This couldn’t be happening.
Ron looked down.
“But we have plans to spend Christmas together,” Mary said.
Ron said, “We’ll have the rest of our lives together.”
Mary thought about buying herself another Cornish game hen for Christmas dinner instead of a turkey. She’d had to use her pinky last Christmas to stuff the tiny bird. Or she could go over to her friend Joelle’s house for Christmas dinner. She was always invited there, and she could watch Joelle’s uncle Guido throw up in the ice bucket again.
She couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
“It’s not a big deal, so don’t make it into one,” he told her. “You know how you do.”
Sure, she thought, it’s just another short-term delay. But her life had been like this for years. One delay after another, none of which had seemed like much in and of itself. But all together? They added up to something. Mary knew it. She’d felt this stone of truth in her belly for a long time now, a hardness that made her shudder. It wasn’t Joanna who was the problem. It was Ron. Why couldn’t he commit? Why was there always another roadblock, another excuse not to be with her? And now Xanny?
