LITMIR.BIZ

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marriage she had and wonder if the size of the diamond is inversely proportional to the happiness of the marriage. Of course, it’s not, but for the moment, for Gina’s sake, I wish it were. “We’re getting married the day he gets back.”

      The picture looks like he’s in some desert so I ask if he’s in the Army or the Marines. People from the Five Towns (that would be Lawrence, Hewlett, Woodmere, Cedarhurst and Inwood), where I was raised, don’t join the service. Neither do people where I live now, in Syosset, so one uniform tends to look the same as another to me. It’s the boys and girls from Wyandanch, from Roosevelt, from Freeport, who mow the lawns and clean the gutters of those who live in the Five Towns, who don’t have trust funds to pay for college or even a used car, who sign up and serve.

      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—”

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