Window Dressing

But I can never stay mad at Moira for long and by the time we pulled off the interstate north of Indianapolis in search of more road snacks, I’d changed the station to oldies rock.

The convenience store/gas station that beckoned us from the night had seen better days. The florescent lighting inside was so cheap it hummed like a tree full of cicadas and I could feel my shoes stick ever so slightly to the badly mopped floor. Apparently, a sweet tooth’s needs override fear of germs because the smeared and cracked self-service bakery case drew us like a couple of flies.

“Are you sure you don’t mind driving right through?” I asked Moira as we peered at a couple of questionable looking donuts hiding behind the fingerprints.

“’Course not,” Moira said. “It’ll be an adventure—speeding across state lines in the middle of the night. Besides, we’re both kid-free now. We can sleep as late as we want to tomorrow.”

I had no intention of speeding and I wasn’t at all cheerful about my new freedom to sleep late. I decided to change the subject. “Is it the bad lighting in here or do those donuts look a little green to you?”

“I consider myself somewhat adventurous,” Moira said, “but in this case I think we should stick to packaged snacks with readable expiration dates on them.”

I agreed and we went in search of the junk-food aisle.

“Cupcake?” Moira asked, once we’d buckled in again.

I grabbed the chocolate cupcake with the white squiggle of frosting bisecting the top and ate it the way I’d been eating them since I was ten—by tearing off the frosting with my teeth. It easily came off in one piece.

“Now that’s talent,” Moira said before downing half a bottle of soda in one chug. Her burp could have rivaled anything Gordy ever emitted.

“That was truly disgusting,” I said as I pulled out of the gas station and into local traffic.

She burped again. “Don’t tell me you’re not acquainted with the car rule.”

I glanced at her then back at the road. “The car rule?”

“Yeah, if it happens in a car, it doesn’t count.”

I hooted. “I bet some guy told you that back in 1978.”

Moira stuck her nose up in the air. “That may well be, but even so it is one of the few known laws of the universe,” she insisted. “Why do you think so many people pick their noses at stoplights?”

I pulled up to a stop light and we both looked to the right then started screaming with laughter. A guy with long greasy hair in the pickup next to us actually did have one of his digits shoved halfway up his bulbous nose.

“Seriously, Mo,” I said after the light had changed and we’d pulled away from digit man and turned onto the ramp that would take us back to the interstate, “what if Gordy isn’t as cool as he pretends to be about going to school? What if he’s really been acting as phony as that knock-off Fendi on the floor at your feet?”

Moira gasped and grabbed her purse. “How did you know?” she demanded as she scrutinized it. “Is it that obvious?” she implored, the threat of handbag humiliation burning in her eyes.

I sighed impatiently. One of the many things Moira and I don’t share is a love of all things fashion. “No, it’s not that obvious. You told me it was a fake—that you’d bought it when you and Stan went to Mexico last spring.”

Moira frowned. “Oh, right,” she said.

“Forget your damn purse, will you? We were talking about Gordy, remember?” I asked her testily, certain that the happiness of my son was more important than whether women more in the know than I would spy that Moira’s bag was a fake.

“Hey,” Moira said, obviously satisfied that the bag would pass inspection as she tucked it back down by her feet, “you’re not allowed to get serious on a road trip. Plenty of time for that once we’re back on Seagull Lane. Here,” she said as she tossed a cellophane bag at me, “have some pork rinds and listen to me sing backup to this song. You’ll swear it’s Cher.”

As long as it didn’t count, I ripped open the bag of pork rinds with my teeth and dug in. The thing was, Moira really did sound like Cher.

Thousands of calories and several dozen oldies later, I was maneuvering the car through the softly curved streets of a dark and sleeping Whitefish Cove.

As usual, Moira had to comment on the street names. Sea Spray Drive. Fog Horn Road. And her all time favorite Perch Place.

“Absurd,” Moira pronounced, “considering you couldn’t see Lake Michigan if you climbed to the roof of the largest Cape Cod in the Cove with a pair of binoculars.”

“But you can sometimes feel it on your skin or taste it on your tongue,” I said, parroting my usual argument in favor of all things maritime.

“Leave it to you to glamorize humidity and lake-effect snow,” Moira said as she stuffed wrappers and half-eaten junk food into a bag so we could dispose of it discreetly and avoid possible ridicule by late-night joggers or carb counting insomniacs.

The Cove was reportedly first settled by fishermen which made the street names somewhat less absurd. To me, at least. Moira, however, was sure that the khaki wearing denizens liked to think of themselves as New Englanders, which made their collective fantasy of being related to the founding fathers doable.

It was true that the Cove had a lot of white picket and waving flags and many of the houses were more than one hundred years old. Which was why I’d been so thrilled when Roger had announced that we were buying our “starter house” in Whitefish Cove. It had looked so stable. So family oriented. Two things, at twenty-two, that I’d craved more than anything.

I pulled into the meager driveway of my two story wood frame cottage. The original clapboard siding was painted white and the window boxes under the first story windows, bursting with red geraniums, were painted the same blue as the front door. I loved the place now as much as I had when we moved in, but I was in no hurry to go inside now that Gordy wouldn’t be there. When I cut the engine, the last of my energy seemed to go with it. I just sat there, arms clinging to the steering wheel.

“You’re going to have to get out and go inside sometime, honey,” Moira said. “Look at it this way, you’ll never have to wait for the bathroom again.”

Not very comforting, but true. My house was probably the only one left in the Cove with only one bathroom. It was one of the reasons Roger had wanted to dump it. Right around the same time he’d decided to dump me. In the years we’d lived there, I had bonded with the house like it was an old friend. I knew every creak. Every draft. But to Roger, the house had been nothing but an investment and, as with me, the time eventually came to trade it in on something that had a higher market value. He’d traded the house for a high-rise condo overlooking Lake Michigan. He’d traded me for a twenty-one-year old flight attendant named Suzie with a z.

Finally, Moira got out of the car and came around to the driver’s side and opened my door. To save her the trouble, I dragged myself out.

“Geeze, girlfriend, you really are in bad shape.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “Come on over and I’ll scramble us some eggs and shake us up some martinis. A couple of those and you’ll forget you have a kid.”

“Tempting, but I think I’ll just go inside and wallow a little.” I didn’t want to forget. At that moment, with the summer coming to an end and my nest newly empty, everything just seemed too precious. What I really wanted to do was put on my oldest, softest pair of cotton pajamas and climb into bed with a couple of photo albums. I truly did intend to wallow.

By late September, with the leaves starting to turn on the maple tree outside my living room window, I began to think there had to be a limit to how much a woman should be allowed to wallow. Not that I hadn’t been out of the house since Gordy had deserted it. And I’m not just talking about the twice-weekly trips to the post office to send fresh baked cookies and care packages to Bloomington.

Whitefish Cove wasn’t exactly a bedroom community, miles from real civilization where the cul-de-sac ruled and there wasn’t a decent restaurant you didn’t have to wrestle traffic on the freeway to get to. We were really a village that was only fifteen miles from the trendy east side of Milwaukee and just a few miles more to downtown. But I’d done the “meeting old girlfriends for lunch” thing to death. Moira, who’d recently started to collect art, had dragged me to every new gallery show in town. I’d gone to enough regional theater performances to fill the bottom of my purse with programs and parking stubs. I hadn’t turned down one single invitation since I’d left Gordy in Bloomington. I’d even issued a few, determined not to become a forty-one year old recluse. But I was quickly becoming sick of hearing about how lucky I was to be divorced with my only child two states away.

“Why, you can do just about anything you want to do,” a friend from my college days exclaimed over her basil, tomato and fresh mozzarella salad. I’d taken the initiative of inviting her and a former roommate to lunch at the latest trendy sensation—an overpriced café in a building that had once been a garage for city buses. The huge door at the front was left open at the owner’s discretion, which was one of the big draws. The excitement! The suspense! It was rumored that he’d opened it during a March snowstorm last year and there was a big buzz going on about whether he’d leave it open for the first snowstorm this year. Personally, I couldn’t get past the fact that I was eating a fourteen-dollar sandwich in a place where someone once drained motor oil from a city bus.

“Like what?” I asked after I’d swallowed a bite of my baby spinach and radish sprouts on asiago foccacia.

“Well—anything. You’re footloose and fancy free,” pointed out the former roommate who was trying to overcome bulimia, so she was eating nothing at all.

“Well, I have been considering finding a new kind of volunteer work—”

My former roommate laughed. “That’s Lauren. Always the good girl.”

These kinds of conversations did not make me feel better about my situation. Neither did spending the money on overpriced sandwiches since Gordy’s support had started going into a trust on the day he started college and the maintenance Roger had to pay me was in nineteen-ninety-six dollars. So I went back to wallowing and baking until Gordy called one afternoon. I was absurdly pleased to hear his voice when I picked up the phone.

“Ma,” he said before I could tell him how happy I was that he called, “you gotta stop sending all the cookies. One of my roommates saw a roach last night.”

“You’re not eating my cookies?” I asked with a modicum of mommy devastation.

“Ma—come on. Who could keep up? We get a package like every three days.”

Perhaps I’d gone a little overboard, I thought as I eyed the two batches of oatmeal cookies cooling on the kitchen counter. “Okay,” I vowed, “no more cookies. So, how are things going?”

“Things are cool, Ma. Gotta go, though. Class. See ya.”