What Goes With Blood Red, Anyway?

CHAPTER 2

Design Tip of the Day

Fabric is the self-decorator’s best friend. Done right, a couple of coordinating fabrics can pull a whole house together. Just by covering a pillow in the living room, a bench in the hall and a couple of kitchen bar stools in one fabric and making a dining room tablecloth, a photo mat and a second pillow in the living room in a companion fabric, you can move items from room to room and have them look as though they always belonged there.

—From TipsfromTeddi.com

I can’t help crying. I may be woman, I may be strong, but at the moment I’m not roaring. I’m just grateful that no one can see me. I cry until I hiccup, and I hiccup all the way down Jericho Turnpike, where I hang a right into the parking lot of Precious Things because I don’t want to go home. Who wants alone when they can have hot coffee and a sympathetic ear?

“Did he call you?” Helene, who owns the shop where just yesterday I picked up Elise’s custom-covered bar stools, asks before I’ve got one foot in the door. “I told him to call you last night. If he didn’t, he’s in big trouble.”

He is her brother, newly single, just squeaking past the Dr. Joy one-year rule. According to Helene, he is my soul mate. In fact, he did call and he does sound nice. And if I was the least bit interested in ever allowing a man into my life again, I would consider him.

“Elise Meyers was murdered this morning,” I say just as the phone rings. Helene tilts her head slightly, as if she is having trouble processing what I’ve said, and chirps a greeting into the phone. While she talks, she keeps one eye on me, rearranges some ebony candlesticks on the counter, and weaves a stray strand of her highlighted brown hair into her French knot at the same time. Her makeup is flawless and her short nails sport a perfect deep red manicure. In the last week I have popped two acrylics, which makes my left hand look like it’s missing the ends of two fingers, and the last time my makeup looked as good as hers, I was leaving the Bobbi Brown counter at Bloomingdale’s.

She points at the receiver, gives me a knowing glance and then says into the phone, “Well, Audrey, I could certainly sell it to you direct, but it will cost you the same thing as paying for it through your decorator. I can’t very well undercut her and expect her to keep doing business with me, now can I?”

Audrey Applebaum. Just yesterday she told me she changed her mind about redecorating.

“I’m not saying I charge people who come in off the street more, Audrey. I’m saying I charge decorators less. It’s how business is done. You redecorate one house every few years. They redecorate several houses every month….”

Helene rolls her eyes at me while she points to some new glass-and-wrought-iron stacking tables she thinks I might like.

Only I’m more interested in her telephone call than her telephone tables. I grab the phone out of her hand and shout into it. “Don’t you feel any obligation to your decorator? Don’t you think you ought to pay for her advice, her expertise? You think she can pay for her kids’ braces with your thanks?”

I want to slam it down, but portables don’t give you that satisfaction, so I just hit Off and throw it toward Helene, who barely catches it. For a minute Helene doesn’t say anything.

And then she begins to laugh, saying between the bursts how she can’t believe I did that.

I can’t, either. I don’t know what the connection is to Elise’s murder, except that it pushed me over the edge. When I don’t laugh, too, Helene studies me.

“Teddi, what’s wrong?” she asks, leading me toward the only piece of furniture in the shop not covered with swatch books or cords of trim. It’s a red plush chair in the shape of a spiked heel and it has a big Sale sign on it, marking it clearly as a mistake in judgment.

I sit on the instep.

“I told you,” I say flatly. “Elise Meyers is dead.”

“Oh my God!” she says, covering her mouth. There’s a silent beat. Another. Then, “Which one’s Elise Meyers?”

I remind her that Elise is the customer who couldn’t wait for Gina, Helene’s assistant, to arrange for the delivery of her furniture. Elise is the woman who had to have everything yesterday, always, all the time. I don’t mean to make her sound difficult. She was, but still, that doesn’t mean she deserved to be murdered.

“Murdered?” Helene whispers, as if not saying it aloud gives it some dignity. I think of Elise in that hot-pink satin job and dignity goes out the window.

I start at the beginning because, except for the police, I really haven’t told anyone, not even Bobbie. I tell Helene how I’d just hung up with Bobbie—whom she knows almost as well as she knows me—turned off my cell phone and got out of the car, when I noticed the dog on the lawn. At this point in my story, Gina, the twentysomething young woman who works for Helene, comes out from the back of the store with some swatches of fabric for Elise that have just come in. Helene tells her about Elise and she says how awful it is. They want to know everything, not so much because either of them care but because there’s something about being the first to know, to know before it’s on the six o’clock news, that appeals to people. I tell them everything I know and then Gina asks if I’m going to the funeral.

“How can she not?” Helene says as if Gina has asked if Helene wants to sell the high-heel chair.

You should be warned that How Can You Not? is the national anthem of Long Island. It explains the Perrier-filled water glasses at the bar mitzvahs, the catered first birthday parties, the BMWs for seventeen-year-olds, and the four-carat diamonds given to wives who have found out their husbands are cheating. There are a lot of large diamonds on Long Island.

Don’t let me give you the wrong impression. How Can You Not? also applies to allowing your neighbors to run a one-hundred-foot extension cord from their refrigerator to the outlet in your house because a storm has knocked the power out on their side of the street. It means letting some kid move into your house for the last three months of his senior year because his parents have found the perfect house in another state and you can’t imagine the poor kid transferring with only months to go. It means inviting a couple you hate to your daughter’s bat mitzvah because they’re friends with a couple you love. The rules are complicated, but they’re a comfort, too. Like in Tevye’s shtetl, everyone knows what’s expected of them.

Okay, not everyone.

It is my firm belief that somewhere there is a Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules and that certain women are given copies. My mother has one. Actually, she may be its original author. Bobbie has one. These women have been sworn to secrecy and refuse to admit it exists, but there just isn’t any way they could know all the rules without it.

I’m still waiting for mine to arrive in the mail.

Men don’t seem to know the rules, or maybe they don’t care. They surely don’t have to live by them. Which brings us to Gina’s question.

“So where was Mr. Meyers when Elise was bludgeoned to death?”

It seems wrong to tell Gina about the sham of a marriage that Elise and her husband had. First off, who am I to judge how blind Elise was or wasn’t? I mean, Rio, my ex, pulled the wool down over my eyes so far that I didn’t know what I was doing, never mind what he was up to! Second, Elise was one of those Long Islanders who would have been appalled if I aired her dirty laundry in front of anyone beneath what she perceived as her social station. I don’t really know how she’d feel about my sharing it with those above or within her circle, but since I’m from the Plainview side of Syosset, and not from Woodbury, I don’t really swim in her social pool.

And while I don’t subscribe to it, I do understand the hierarchy because I was born in the Five Towns, that area on the South Shore of Long Island where the nouveau riche have riched their limit, and clawing your way to the top of the social ladder while appearing not to care (or even notice) is not simply an art form, but a requisite survival skill.

As luck would have it, I married out of it. Just ask my mother. It’s hard to know which she and my father view as more of a disgrace—my marrying out of the faith or out of the neighborhood.

Besides, Elise is dead. And everyone knows that you don’t speak ill of the dead.

At least not until after they’re buried.

“Jack Meyers claims to have an alibi,” I tell her, but still, my money is on him. When I admit that the police seemed to suspect me for a minute, Helene stops me and flips the Back in Ten Minutes sign on the door, then locks it. She and Gina lead me back to their offices in the rear of the store and Helene puts on a pot of fresh coffee.

Gina doesn’t really have an office, but a corner of the storeroom seems to belong to her. She works there at a computer surrounded by a bunch of Snoopy paraphernalia and some family photos. There’s the requisite picture of two little tow-headed girls on an outdated Christmas card with “Season’s Greetings from our house to yours!” Pinned to the same bulletin board, held in place by a fuzzy little yarn ball with goggly eyes, flat feet and a tag that says Have A Great Day! are two Charlie Brown and Lucy comics cut from the newspaper. A Snoopy tack holds a comic from the Internet about computers. Another holds a picture of a guy in a camouflage outfit somewhere in the desert.

“Is that your husband?” I ask, because it’s better than talking about finding Elise bleeding on her floor, or about Elise’s husband screwing some client while his wife bled to death. Or concussed to death, or whatever it was that killed her.

Anyway, Gina’s in love. I remember the feeling well.

Okay, vaguely. I remember thinking I was in love. For twelve years.

“Not yet,” she says, and she waves a darling little chip of a diamond under my nose. I think of Elise and her rock and what a terrible 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.