What Goes With Blood Red, Anyway?

But Gina says that Danny is in construction and that he goes all around the world building things like dams and bridges. “He was in Iraq for a while, and Saudi Arabia and now he’s in Qatar.”

And Helene adds that Gina was late this morning because she had to go to the post office to get off a letter to Bob the Builder. Then she offers me Valium for my nerves, Percocet for the throbbing pain in my head and the number of her masseuse, who, she assures me, can make the world go away. I’d be happy if the phone would just stop ringing.

Helene answers it, placates the person on the other end, explains that the shipment was held up in customs (shrugging at me as she wonders if the customer will buy that excuse or if she’ll have to come up with another) and finally hangs up.

“Sorry,” she says, “but you of all people know how my customers are.”

I know all too well, and, if there was another way for me to give my children all the material things I want for them and that they need without sacrificing my self-respect (assuming that Rio even could or would pay child support if I allowed him to, which is a big assumption, a huge assumption), I’d be in some other line of work. Maybe I’d still be painting custom designs on furniture or, if money were irrelevant, giving art lessons to old ladies who wear funky hats and feed squirrels in little pocket parks in Forest Hills. Unfortunately, my father knew what he was talking about when he said that money doesn’t grow on trees, and I have three kids, a mortgage, a toilet that drips, a freezer that won’t freeze and a pledge to myself to finish repaying my parents for my final semester at Parsons (where I finally got a degree in interior design last spring after quitting to marry Rio thirteen years ago).

The point here being that Helene’s customers are my customers. Bobbie and I call them Type S women, as in spoiled, self-indulgent and self-consumed. All those commercials you see on TV where people lounge by private pools while wild jaguars race by? The ads in the New York Times for thousand-dollar designer purses? They aren’t talking to you and me. They are talking to the S’s, for whom Long Island is apparently a breeding ground. Here they thrive in our strategically located gated communities, which they only leave in their GPS-navigated Lexuses (with the individual DVD players in the backseat) to cut off normal Toyota-driving people like me as they head for the South Shore in pursuit of Princess In Training T-shirts for their off-spring. Off they go, weighing less than their jewelry and dressed in the latest hot designer fashions as they foray out into the real world armed with attitude and determined not to be taken advantage of, not to be overlooked and, most certainly, not to be ignored.

For some people, worse than being seen as a bitch on Long Island is not being seen at all. This, I don’t have to tell you, makes it hard on the rest of us, who spend our lives worrying we’ll be mistaken for one of them.

Helene begins to mother me, pushing the hair out of my eyes, handing me a tissue. “Come, sprinkle some cold water on that pretty face,” she says, taking my father’s cast-off BlackBerry out of my hands and leaving it on the chair I’ve vacated. She leads me farther back in the shop and parts a velvet curtain for me. “Don’t tell a soul I have a bathroom in here,” she says dramatically. “They’ll be coming in here in droves to use it if the word gets out.”

She is not joking. Small shops save their bathrooms for people spending over five hundred dollars. You think I’m kidding? Ask if you can use their restroom and they’ll tell you to go next door to Carvel or down the block to Burger King. Now put several costly items on the counter and tell them you’ll be back for them after you find a restroom and they’ll act as though the carpenters just finished installing the fixtures in theirs. Please, be their guest.

The bathroom, no bigger than a broom closet, is outfitted for her big spenders, with a hand-painted porcelain pedestal sink that matches the wallpaper and the paper hand towels. There are no toothpaste smears on the basin, no strands of hair clinging to the neat little brush that sits on the glass shelf below the mirror. Beside the toilet there is no book turned over to hold the reader’s place, no ratty magazine with free samples of moisturizer ripped out. There are no chocolate-smeared towels piled on the floor, no pots of flavored lip gloss left open on the tank behind the toilet.

This is the kind of guest bath my mother expects to find in my house, despite three children living there and me working full time. It’s just one of the gazillion ways I disappoint her. Thank God she can’t see what I’m seeing in the mirror—a very ugly, bedraggled version of me staring blankly back. I have dark eyes anyway, only now, below them, my mascara and all that liner I carefully put on and then smudged to perfection has formed dry river beds that resemble a map of the Finger Lakes. Very attractive—perhaps in a few weeks, for Halloween. My nose, ordinarily an acceptable size and color for my face thanks to the nose job my mother insisted I have at sixteen, now rivals Ronald McDonald’s in size and hue. My very dark hair, which usually has a sort of just-got-out-of-bed come hitherness, looks like I washed it last for New Year’s Eve. And my white T-shirt looks like it needs to be laundered just to become a rag.

As I try to wash up without messing up Helene’s House Beautiful powder room, the cell phone in my purse begins to play The Looney Tunes theme, which signifies my mother is calling. (Hey, some call it sick. I call it survival.) While dear June doesn’t know her theme song, she does, of course, know I have caller ID, and rather than argue about whether I chose to take her call or not, I flip the phone open.

“On the television,” she says without any preamble. “I have to find out that my daughter escaped from the jaws of death by moments on the television? You discover a dead body and you think…what? That because we have problems of our own, real problems, you and the children aren’t still the most important thing in our lives? Roz Adelman called and I had to pretend I’d already heard it from you…. And your father! Your father is beside himself with worry.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I say, and I ask her how she knows about Elise and the fact that I was there.

“You’re on the news. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Your father is forgoing the back nine and we’re coming over as soon as he gets home so you shouldn’t be alone.”

I tell her that they don’t have to do that.

“What kind of parents would we be if we didn’t come?” she asks. “Besides, he’s losing anyway. You want me to bring you some Xanax?”

I’m thinking that the only way I’ll need Xanax is if she comes over, but I don’t tell her as much because she’s insisting that the kids and I shouldn’t be alone in the house.

She and my father will pack a bag.

And I will shoot myself.

My call-waiting clicks. I tell her to hold on, but she is on a roll about the food she will have my father stop to pick up along the way and she ignores me. Since she’ll keep talking without me, I hit the button and cautiously say, “Hello?”

Detective Scoones identifies himself and asks how I’m doing. He leaves the g off doing, and it comes out sort of intimate.

“I was thinking that possibly I could come over tonight to discuss a few details regarding the case,” he says.

I can’t think of a thing to say. For some inexplicable reason I’m seeing David Caruso’s naked butt.

“I’d hate to drag you down to the precinct to—”

“Am I a suspect?” I stop fussing with my hair, trying to fix the unfixable in the damn bathroom at Precious Things, where no one, least of all Drew Scoones, can see me.

“Nothing like that,” he says. Is that the same as no? “I’m just curious about Mr. Meyers and I thought that you, working with the two of them, and knowing Mrs. Meyers pretty well…”

I ask about Jack’s alibi and Detective Scoones says they are checking into it. Helene knocks on the bathroom door and asks if I am all right.

“So about seven, Ms. Bayer?” he says. It seems that only the time is in question. “I’ll come by your place.”

And then he clicks off and I hear my mother’s voice.

“I said, ‘Does Jesse like chocolate or regular rugelach?’”

“Oh, he likes them both,” I lie, planning to eat the ones with the raisins while Jesse, ten, and Alyssa, six, gobble the chocolate ones. (Dana, the stick, will no doubt makes noises about how she’ll be fat for her bat mitzvah while scarfing down the rainbow cookies my father always brings for her. At twelve, she is old enough to watch the other two, and I could tell my mother not to come, not to bother. But rugelach sounds like exactly what I need at the moment. And I do, after all, have a date with the police. So in the end, as always with my parents, I fold and tell her that sure, they can come over to look after the kids. And yes, I add, they can pick up some pastrami and knishes as long as they are stopping at Ben’s Deli.

I exit the bathroom to find Gina staring at me like I’m an ax murderer, clearly on the road to the electric chair.

She hands me my BlackBerry. “Your reminder went off,” she says apologetically.

Today is a day I’m not likely to forget.

As if none of this has happened, Helene returns to the subject of her brother, Howard, and reminds me that he is a food critic for Newsday. “You’d never starve,” she says with a wink as I gather up my belongings. I smile and wave, opening the door without comment. “The divorce was his wife’s fault,” she shouts after me. “His ex-wife!”

Yeah, yeah, my wave says. I bet that’s what Rio tells every woman he meets.

My phone rings again as I am getting into the car, and of course, it’s Bobbie. The neighborhood grapevine has already begun to produce fruit. Or is it whine? She apologizes to me fifty times for refusing to come to Elise’s with me this morning. When her sister, Diane called Bobbie from the precinct to tell her what happened, she couldn’t believe it. And then, after we dispense with all the oh my Gods! that we both need to get our of our system, we start hypothesizing about who could have killed Elise Meyers.

I didn’t mention it to the police, but between you and me Elise Meyers was a little off her rocker—not that I’m one to talk, which is probably why I didn’t say anything to them. Still, she was. Here’s an example: once when Rio called me on my cell at her house to yell at me for refusing to sign our joint tax return before my lawyer looked at it, she told me I should keep a list of every obnoxious thing he ever did. She said it could be very therapeutic. Then she told me that she kept lists, tons of them. She had brightly colored, leather-bound Kate Spade journals of every injustice ever done to her, every slight, every nasty glance thrown her way. She said she had a whole book of every bad thing Jack had ever done and why he deserved to die. At the end of it, she even had a list of what she’d do with his money after he was gone.

She had a separate list that Bobbie knows about and that creeps us both out, and another one in a slim, lime-green book that Bobbie doesn’t know about, at all. In that one Elise claimed she had cataloged the indiscretions of virtually everyone she knew, and she made a point of saying that I was probably the only woman she knew who wasn’t in it. The way she said it made it sound like just maybe Bobbie was, like she knew about Bobbie’s one mistake.

“What do you suppose the police would make of the How I’ll Spend His Money After He’s Gone list?” Bobbie asks me. I’ve never told her about the lime-green volume because she would totally freak, and it could be that Elise was just bragging. Maybe she told every woman she knew that she was the only one not in it.

“If Jack was the one who was dead, it wouldn’t look too good,” I say. “But I don’t suppose it will matter now. One of the other lists could be important, though. I mean, someone on one of those lists could have been the murderer.”

“My money’s on the husband,” Bobbie says.

I tell her about his “alibi.” And then I mention that there was something weird about Elise’s house, something out of place or something that should have been there and wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been there and was.

“Uh…” Bobbie says “…I guess that would be Elise’s body?”

CHAPTER 3

Design Tip of the Day

The windows in your house are your eyes on the world. They frame the view of your house from both inside and outside and demand treatment. They should reflect your house’s style, be it formal, casual or eclectic. Would you let the world see you without mascara? Don’t let it see your windows without prettying them up, as well.

—From TipsfromTeddi.com

Okay, before you meet my family, there’s something you need to know. I was switched at birth. My parents insist this is not the case, but there is no question in my mind that I am an alien child. Now, by alien I mean either that my real parents were here illegally from some foreign country and there is no Long Island blood in me or that I was switched by body snatchers from another planet.