Real Life & Liars Read online

  Her cell phone goes off, sparking snorts and muffled giggles from the backseat. It blares, Don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me… Katya throws a fiery glare at her boys while she answers the phone. They are always changing her phone’s ring tone, and she doesn’t know how to change it back. She’ll have to wait for Charles to get home.

  “Kat’s Cradle Design, Kat speaking.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Peterson, this is Forever Floral calling…”

  Katya barely listens as she rounds onto Tom’s street and stares at his two-story home, designed to look like a Swiss chalet, but with a two-car garage stuck onto the side. Her breath catches in her throat when she spies a dark figure in an upstairs window pull back the curtains to look right at her car.

  She barks at the florist, “Look, just get the damn freesia, they’re not that expensive, and I don’t really care if it’s more than what we talked about. Get it done.”

  She throws the cell phone on the floor of the passenger seat and guns the motor away from Tom’s house, and maybe away from Tom himself, staring out the window to see his old girlfriend idling past.

  She glares at the boys again through the rearview. “If you mess with my cell phone one more time, I’m taking a hammer to both of yours, I swear to God.”

  The boys smirk and roll their eyes. Katya’s shoulders slump, because she knows they’ve heard “one more time” a dozen times a day for their entire lives.

  Katya is always holding out hope they’ll behave, just this once.

  The boys thunder through the front door of her home, casting off backpacks and rancid sneakers like shedding a layer of skin. They rumble off to their bedrooms, no doubt to immediately boot up their laptops and instant message all their friends about God only knows what.

  Katya looks with dismay at their beefy retreating backs, knowing she should feed them healthier food, knowing she should make them exercise, and knowing that despite Charles’s protests to the contrary, they are not big-boned. In fact, as toddlers, they were slim, pinballing around the house from one disaster to another.

  She stoops to grab up the things they’ve dropped, and curses at yet another scratch in the hardwood from a backpack zipper. She checks the family organizer dry erase board on the refrigerator. Kit isn’t due to be dropped off for another twenty minutes. Just enough time to check her messages and return calls.

  Message one, from Charles. “Hi, honey, I’m running late tonight and probably won’t make it home on time. Oh, and I’m golfing with Roger tomorrow, just so you know. Bye.”

  Katya jams her thumb into the machine’s DELETE button. He knows damn well it’s her parents’ anniversary party weekend, or he bloody well should. It’s all she’s been talking about for weeks. Shows how well he listens. Just like the kids.

  Message two, from Irina: “Hey, Kat? It’s me. Um, I have to, um. I wanted to talk to you, but you’re not home, and I’m out of town, so never mind. I guess I’ll see you at Mom’s. Hope you’re OK.”

  Messages three and four are from clients, demanding changes that are out of scope of their original contracts. These return calls will require a minimum of a half hour each, as Katya will effect her most persuasive purr to convince them to cough up the money or shut the hell up.

  Message five, from her brother, Ivan. “Hi, Kat. Just wanted to ask if I was supposed to bring anything to the party. I can’t find my notes. Oh, and just so you know, Barbara’s not coming. Don’t ask.”

  No, Ivan, Katya thinks, I know better than to ask a man to do anything even vaguely related to social obligation. Some of her friends didn’t speak to her for weeks after the one year she let Charles handle the Christmas cards. And one of those few he did send out went to the Goldsteins, with a trumpeting angel and a manger, no less. She’d told him about the special card for them, with a snowman and innocuous “Seasons Greetings” at the top of the pile. Katya seems to remember he sent that one to his own parents, who strongly disapproved of such a secular card on such a holy day.

  In other words, don’t trust men to do the slightest thing right.

  Katya kicks off her mules and scowls at her chipped pedicure. How did that happen with her wearing shoes all day? She turns to attack the dishes she left over from her own lunch, when she’d gotten ambitious and whipped up a salad. She pulls open the dishwasher and curses out loud. It’s full of sparkly clean glasses and her elegant plates, and a fork smeared with peanut butter has contaminated all its nearby flatware. “You’d think a man who runs his own successful corporation could recognize clean dishes,” she mumbles. Katya knows it’s too much to ask that he empty the bleeding thing.

  She stacks the dishes much harder than necessary. The peanut butter knife galls her more because it’s the one thing awry in her kitchen. Her granite countertops gleam, her stainless-steel refrigerator reflects the afternoon sun coming in from the breakfast nook, and if she were prone to do such things, her utensils and pots hanging from the rack above the center island would sound like wind chimes if she brushed them with her hand.

  Once, she saw a refrigerator magnet at her mother’s house that said, “Boring women have clean kitchens.” Katya was deeply insulted.

  Katya winces as the front door bangs open into the wall behind it. She refuses to put one of those ugly doorknob cushions on her ivory wall with the gold sponge-paint effect that she slaved over for a week.

  “Mom! I’m home!” Kit saunters in, hips swaying much more dramatically than they should for a girl of eleven. Katya rebukes herself again for ever letting her watch MTV. And when she gave in to her plea to wear “only lip gloss,” it somehow crept into blush and eye shadow, too.

  Katya slams the dishwasher shut with her hip. She knows what the other mothers say about her daughter, but they don’t know how strong-willed the girl is, and if Kit had her way, she’d be in hip-huggers and crop tops. She got all her grandmother’s determination with none of her hippie values about wearing no makeup and growing out your leg hair.

  Kit pops one hip out to the side and blows a bubble with her gum.

  “How was your day, dear?” Katya asks, hoping Kit won’t answer.

  “Oh my God, Bella was so mean to Emma, and I thought Emma deserved it…”

  Katya starts dinner preparations, making commiserating noises and not listening, keeping one eye on the television, where she has turned the Weather Channel on with the sound muted. She can’t keep track of this grade-school drama, and she can’t quite believe it has started so soon. Bella, Emma. Another of her friends is named Imogene. Katya tried to give her a perfectly normal name, and called her Katherine. Everyone wanted to call her Kat, but Katya already used that name, so Little Kat became Kitten became simply Kit, which makes Katya think of that stupid TV show with the talking car.

  What would have been wrong with Kate? But one and all, friends and family simply refused to call her that. Like everything else in her life when it came to her children, Katya caved in.

  Pick your battles, she’d tell herself, and her friends in her mommy group. Trouble is, she hadn’t gotten around to those battles just yet.

  She’d wanted Kit to have a normal name because she hated being a white-bread American named Katya Zielinski. As if the clunky, impossible-to-spell Polish surname was not enough, she’d had the misfortune to be conceived during her mother’s infatuation with Russian film and literature. In the Cold War, too, thank you, Mom. Thank goodness for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  At least she’d married a sensible Mr. Peterson, and could thus become Kat Peterson, graphic designer and very reasonable woman, thank you.

  The other siblings had been victim of Mirabelle’s consistency in her naming convention. Anyway, her mother loved talking about their names, when anyone asked, and someone always did.

  Katya fires up the skillet for the stir-fry, as Kit winds down her story and flounces from the room, probably to get out her laptop and start instant messaging, or maybe she would just text from her phone. The girl has the most agile th
umbs of any grade-schooler she’s seen.

  The phone rings, and everyone ignores it. The kids all have their own phones, so no one ever calls the house phone looking for them. Charles had already left a message, and Katya doesn’t care to talk to him anyway. Clients will have to wait just a bit longer, as she is stir-frying dinner and doesn’t want to burn it.

  Her answering machine kicks on: You’ve reached Kat’s Cradle Design and the home of the Petersons. Please leave a message after the tone.”

  “Katya? It’s Mom, listen I just got a strange message here for you. Someone named Tom Petrocelli? Didn’t you used to see him in high school? He says, it’s the craziest thing, that he thought he saw you drive by his house today…”

  Katya is cemented to her kitchen floor and burns her baby corn.

  The boys are upstairs, supposedly asleep, and probably listening to their iPods under the covers, and Kit is all tucked into her fairy-princess canopy bed with the lavender-dragonfly motif.

  Charles said he’d left some files of his at the office, and he’s gone off to get them. That leaves Katya alone in the sunken family room with the flat-screen television and a bottle of Shiraz. This night she’s watching Sex and the City, at turns jealous of these New York single gals, feeling superior because she’s already got a husband, thank you, and unnerved by how much Kit already resembles these so-called grown-ups. Just the other day, Katya spotted her pretending to smoke a cigarette, using a colored pencil as a prop. She had walked past her room, and Kit was lounging in her bean bag chair, laughing on the phone with whomever. Her legs were stretched out in front of her, and she was wearing only her little girl underwear and a tank top, sprigged with pink roses. But something about her pose was alarmingly adult, and Katya did not like the practiced way she sucked on the end of that pencil, blowing out imaginary plumes of smoke. Then in a moment, Kit had tossed the pencil away and curled her legs underneath her, and just like that, she was a little girl again.

  Katya refills her wineglass, leaving the bottle on the oak end table next to her. She sighs along with that inner unspooling she always feels with the aid of a little wine, or if she hasn’t been to the store, some of Charles’s beer. Mira probably achieves this state of deep relaxation with meditation or something, but whatever genes she had to help her feel happy and carefree, despite the ugly mess that is life, didn’t make it into the Katya zygote.

  She hears Charles’s heavy feet come in through the front door. He must have had to hunt for those files because he’s been gone an hour and a half, and the drive is only twenty minutes. Katya suspects—no, believes with a cold, tomblike certainty—that his long absence has something to do with Tara.

  He clumps down into the family room, and Katya notes—but at the moment does not much care—that he has tracked in leaves and grass clippings onto her ivory carpet.

  “Hitting the wine already?” he asks, not looking at her, as he pages through the Caller ID on their home phone.

  “I’m not hitting it. I’m having a glass to relax. I had a hard day.”

  “Every day is a hard day,” he answers, without emotion, and walks back up the three steps to the main floor of the house. “I’m going to bed,” he calls over his shoulder.

  Katya gives herself another refill as the credits roll on Sex and the City. Every day is a hard day. What of it?

  CHAPTER 3

  Ivan

  IVAN LIES NAKED AND SPREAD-EAGLED ON HIS SOUR-SMELLING, threadbare sheets—sadly, unfortunately, and pathetically alone. He suffered a critical loss of energy midway through his getting-dressed routine—a core meltdown, even—and thus he finds himself staring at the ceiling, thinking of the Elephant People who live upstairs.

  The upstairs neighbors on a several-times-daily basis create a mysterious havoc on their floor, his ceiling, and when Van finds himself too burdened by the tedium of his lonely life, he tries to puzzle out the source of the aural emanations.

  Jogging? How heavy would they have to be, to rattle the massive change jar on his dresser, which is half-filled with pennies and must weigh a metric ton by now? And who jogs at 4 A.M.? Likewise went his theory that they dropped free weights on the floor every day. Also, the thuds sometimes come in clusters: thudthudthudBAM. How many weights could they be dropping?

  Sex? What kind of sex could they be having to cause such non-rhythmic, galumphing wallops on the floor?

  Sex makes Van think of Barbara, and the sex she’s probably having with someone else, someone hipper and more fun, someone who might cheat on her or ruin her credit, but still is mysteriously preferable to Van.

  All men, it seems, are mysteriously preferable to Van.

  He finally grows disgusted enough with the stench of his sheets to roll himself up and resume getting dressed for a day listening to high-school freshmen butcher Sousa marches on rented or borrowed trumpets.

  Then he will have the distinct pleasure of coaxing his rattly VW three hours up the highway to his mother’s place in Charlevoix, where he’ll sleep in his childhood room, where he never got laid either, and attend the anniversary party, where he’ll endure his older sister’s varnished domesticity and his younger sister’s bragging about her parties and her dates. Oh, and give a toast, which Van can’t believe he agreed to do. But refusing Katya is like holding back a tidal wave with the flat of your hand. “You write songs,” she’d said. “You’re good with words.”

  It would have been grand to squire Barbara around at the party. She’s far and away the most beautiful woman he’s ever dated, with her cascading auburn hair—the lyricist inside him berates him for the cliché, but hell, it does cascade—and eyes so verdant green they’re like a…All Van can think of is “golf course.” No wonder no one wants to record his songs.

  Van pulls on his boxer shorts, which have a stain of mysterious origin, but he doesn’t care, because no one will see them, except maybe paramedics if he gets run over by a semi on the way to school, but even then he can’t muster enough concern to find a different pair.

  His phone rings, and Van doesn’t even flick his eyes toward the Caller ID. No one worth speaking to would call him on his way to Death March High, as he’s taken to thinking of his place of employment. It’s actually named Dexter Milford High, after some illustrious graduate of generations before who isolated some kind of chemical. It was probably Agent Orange, thinks Van ruefully, and the thought brings a twisted smile to his lips.

  He’ll get his enjoyment where he can.

  The answering machine kicks on at last, and rather than the robotic faux-human voice offering him a lower interest rate, he hears Jenny. “Hi, Van. Wondering what you’re doing tonight, if you wanted to watch a movie or get a pizza. Anyway, call me if you’re free.”

  Van knots his tie. Making fun of an action flick with Jenny and a Pizza Hut Cheese Lover’s sounds infinitely more fun, but family obligations beckon. A year ago, he would have high-fived Jenny as she whizzed to the staff lounge between her classes of high-school French, but then she’d gotten a new job at a fancy magnet school with an emphasis on liberal education and college prep.

  Van dearly missed those times they graded papers together in the school lounge on their brief lunch breaks, cracking up at his students’ freshman essays, and her students’ mangled French.

  Ah well, he thinks to himself, grabbing his blazer with patches on the elbows—not to look professorial, but out of an actual need to cover worn sleeves—as Jenny would say: C’est la vie.

  CHAPTER 4

  Irina

  “SHIT.”

  Irina yanks on her pants zipper and yanks again. The third yank rips the zipper right off her pants, the momentum sending her backward onto the Vegas hotel bedspread.

  “Shit!” she cries, clenching her teeth. She whips the zipper overhand across the room like a major league pitcher.

  “It’s just a zipper.” Darius props her back up and starts rubbing her shoulders from behind, sitting next to her on the bed. He leans in and flicks her earlobe with his ton
gue.

  Irina shoves him hard over. “Not now.” She adds to herself, We’ve gotten ourselves in enough trouble already.

  Darius sits himself back up. “Why don’t you take a nap and rest a bit. I’ll take a shower and maybe we’ll both be feeling”—he raises his eyebrows—“refreshed.”

  Irina rolls over and burrows into the sheets, which still smell like sex and sweat. She wiggles out of the jeans and kicks them onto the floor. Could she be showing already? It can’t be from overeating. Ever since her wedding—if you could call it that—she hasn’t eaten a thing.

  Her cell phone chimes for a new message. It’s a picture from C. J., flashing her midriff, a guy’s puckering lips in the frame near her navel, his face out of frame. The message says, “at aftershock, miss u, r.u. havin fun.”

  Aftershock, the club back home where all her friends are dancing and hooking up and enjoying the fact they don’t have a care in the world.

  Is she having fun? Oh, yeah. A freakin’ blast.

  She puts a hand over her belly. She shouldn’t have waited so long to get to a clinic, she thinks. She shouldn’t have dithered and pondered, she shouldn’t have fondled those tiny pink socks at Baby Gap. In her indecision, along comes Darius and like Newton’s Laws, he goes to work on her. An object at rest tends to stay at rest until an overeager wannabe daddy rushes you to some cheesy Vegas chapel.

  Out the expansive picture window, she can see down to the pool, where svelte, nonpregnant honeymooners are roasting themselves in fine form.

  Weeks ago, before her missed period, she would have loved this vacation, Irina thinks: a week of eating, drinking, gambling, and sex? Sign me up. But Darius had been so hot and cold before now. She’d never have pegged him for the daddy type, or she wouldn’t have slept with him in the first place. She once watched an old boyfriend change his nephew’s diaper, and she could never bring herself to have sex with him again.