Best Friends & Other Liars Read online

  And it turned out Bert was actually a girl. We discovered this “way too late to change the names” as Leah told me.

  When I got married, I took Bert and Leah kept Ernie. They’re close to nineteen-years-old now and neither of them show any signs of slowing down. They must have amazing genes. Like my Aunt Edna who lived to be a hundred.

  Thoughts of Aunt Edna and subsequently, Mrs. Grover, come to mind, causing tears to spring to my eyes just as my son Jeremy sweeps into the room, spinning a basketball on his finger. He is focused on the ball and nothing else as he glides over to the counter where I am quickly swiping at my tears. As he reaches for a bowl in the cabinet, the basketball drops to the floor and the spell is broken. It’s then he actually notices that I’m in the room. He raises his eyebrow at me as he zeroes in on the glass of wine in my hand.

  “That time of day already?” he asks with his signature teenage smirk.

  I frown at him. “It’s nine-thirty at night, Jeremy.”

  “Never too late to give up alcohol altogether,” he tells me. “It messes with your metabolism and makes it difficult for you to be in optimal shape. Ask Dad, he’ll tell you.”

  My husband is a nutritionist and personal trainer. Actually, he owns his own gym and does very little of the personal training and nutrition consulting anymore, but amongst his employees, and our oldest child, he is seen as something of a guru. They hang on his every word and follow his advice like he’s a god. Little good it does me, his wife. I should be the most svelte, hottest, almost-forty-year old on the planet with a live in expert and all.

  I’m not really fat, per se, but I probably could use a personal trainer to whip me into shape. But I’d rather be slightly chubby than ask Richard for help. Richard would roll his eyes about my food choices and lecture me about how cardio isn’t going to help me lose weight. All while walking around without his shirt on, with his washboard abs and his arms like tree trunks. And our son is turning into a miniature version of him.

  Jeremy is only fifteen, but he works out like a nut, and has massive biceps like his father. I’m pretty sure Richard has him on some sort of supplement—all natural, of course. Jeremy’s goal in life is to be a tri-athlete and to make millions of dollars. He devotes endless hours to working out and training. Which is probably why his grades are terrible.

  “There is nothing wrong with my metabolism, thank you very much,” I retort, sucking in my gut. Jeremy smirks again as he fills the blender with the powder Richard gets for him from the gym and reaches for the milk carton—on the counter where he left it from his last protein shake, less than an hour before. After making the shake, he drops the carton in the same place, presumably for the maid to put away. As he leaves the kitchen, while gulping down his drink, I hear him mutter, “Well, you are on the wrong side of forty…”

  “I’m thirty-nine! That is definitely the right side of forty!”

  At least I am for three more weeks.

  I shudder. Forty is rudely staring me in the face like my mother when I had that hangover after the prom. I drop my gaze and examine my pooching middle, becoming increasingly incensed by Jeremy’s accusations.

  I can’t wait till he hits thirty and all of a sudden he can’t eat and drink whatever he wants.

  Putting the milk back in the fridge, I begin to dream of the day Jeremy apologizes to me for being so judgmental. Unfortunately, the screaming from the living room has escalated and I finally hear a thump. With a heavy sigh, I grab my glass of wine and go investigate.

  When I enter the living room, I see that Samantha and Matthew are sitting side by side on the couch. They have both showered for the night—Samantha’s hair is still wet. They’re in their flannel pajamas and they would look like an advertisement for bubble bath, or tea, or something nice, except for the remote control that they are wrestling with.

  “Give it to me,” Matthew yells, pulling it close to his body. “I had it first!”

  “I was here first,” Samantha counters, yanking it toward her. “I was reading and I don’t want to listen to your craptastic, brain-rotting TV show!”

  Matthew recoils like she has slapped him across the face, and he releases his grip on the remote that Samantha is still holding. This causes her to fall backward on the couch and smack herself in the face with the remote.

  “My nose!” she screams, leaping to her feet and racing into the kitchen, still clutching the remote.

  “This show won an Emmy! It’s not craptastic!” Matthew shouts at her retreating figure.

  “It wasn’t an Emmy for the acting or the writing you twit! It was an Emmy for the make-up!” Samantha fires back. I hear the freezer door opening. She’s getting an ice pack for her nose. In a few minutes she will probably self-diagnose herself with a deviated septum. She reads way too much.

  “How do you even know that?” Matthew yells toward the kitchen. “You never even take your face out of that stupid book long enough to know anything. You’ve been reading that book for years! Shouldn’t you be finished with it yet?”

  Samantha sails back in the room with a bag of frozen peas pressed up against her face. “It’s not the same book, you imbecile,” she mumbles through the packaging.

  “Is that another one of your super smart words you like to use to make the rest of us look stupid?” Matthew asks. He yanks the remote from her hand and turns the volume up on his show to a deafening level.

  His sister stares at him incredulously, her mouth gaping open. “Are you for real? If you don’t know the word imbecile, you really are one.”

  “Enough,” I interject, after watching them volley back and forth. “Everyone go to your rooms. It’s late. Go to bed.” I take a sip of my wine to steel myself against their protests.

  “But I don’t have a TV in my room,” Matthew complains.

  “We’ve been through this, Matthew. You don’t need a TV in your room.”

  “Maybe if you’d pick up a book every once in a while you wouldn’t be so dependent on your precious idiot box,” Samantha parries as she grabs her book from the couch. “Good night, Mummy.” She air kisses my cheeks and then swoops up the stairs, bag of peas still in hand.

  Samantha often acts as if she has been plunked down in the middle of a Victorian novel. At times she speaks in a British accent and uses words like cockney and kibbles. I do my best to ignore it. Her brothers do not. They tease her relentlessly. Which, you would think, would make her stop it, but she doesn’t.

  “Go have tea with the Queen Mum,” Matthew mocks in a high pitched accent as he storms up the stairs behind her. “And titter about how you’ve ruined the evening for the rest of us lowly peasants.”

  “Shut up, Matthew,” she yells before slamming her door.

  “You shut up!” he yells back, sounding like a two-year-old.

  I close my eyes and for a second, I wish that they were actually two-year-olds again.

  I click off the lamp and the TV, and head back into the kitchen. I’m pretty sure I deserve a piece of chocolate now. That is, if the kids haven’t discovered where I’ve hidden it. I slowly open the cabinet that houses the good china, and I am relieved to discover that my bag of chocolate kisses is still stuffed inside Grandma Herman’s soup tureen. I grab three and unwrap one quickly. I pop it in my mouth and moan with pleasure.

  “What the hell is all that noise?” Richard asks, sticking his head into the kitchen. He is shirtless (as usual) and there is sweat glistening all over his muscular chest.

  “The kids. Fighting about something,” I reply while guiltily shoving the remaining pieces of chocolate into the front pocket of my robe. The one thing that Richard abhors more than alcohol is candy. He actually threw out the kids’ Halloween candy the day after Halloween on several occasions. Until I got wise and started hiding it.

  “Well, keep them quiet. I’m on an important phone call,” he says, stomping back downstairs toward the basement room that houses his home office and gym.

  “Looks like you’re working out,”
I mumble to myself as I pull another chocolate out of my pocket and unwrap it. It tastes even better than the first.

  Of course, I know what Richard would say. He would remind me that one of the reasons he is so successful, both in business and his physical fitness, is because he knows how to multitask. He can take a phone call with a client or order a new smoothie maker for his gym, while simultaneously signing checks and doing one-handed push-ups.

  He’s handsome, successful, and brilliant. He’s a real catch. Any woman would consider herself lucky to have him. And that’s probably why I always feel completely adequate around him.

  I stare at the remaining chocolate kiss in my hand, realizing that it is the only kiss of any kind that I’ve had recently—other than Samantha’s “air kisses”.

  I reach back into the soup tureen and grab another handful of kisses before shuffling back upstairs with my wine and chocolate.

  I deserve these kisses for sure.

  LEAH

  It’s nearly ten o’clock and I’m finally mixing the dressing for my dinner salad. It goes without saying that it’s been a crappy day.

  The crappiness started early this morning when I thought I hit the snooze to my alarm, but in actuality, I turned it off. I woke up about three minutes before I had to leave for my train and ended up missing it. Then, not only did I spill coffee on my new cream colored linen pants while getting on the later train, but the website I’ve been working on crashed—when I accidentally opened an email with a virus on my phone, as I raced through the streets of Manhattan trying to get to work at a reasonable hour. My boss spent a half hour reaming me out, and I had to work till almost eight o’clock to fix the bugs. I missed my train home and am only now preparing my dinner. And I didn’t have time for lunch with the bug fixing and all that, so I am absolutely famished. My blood sugar must be like in the teens right now. I’m hangry in the worst way.

  I’ve actually ruined two potential relationships recently because of plummeting blood sugar. Not that I’m actually diabetic or anything like that. (Can you imagine a life without cupcakes? Diabetics can’t have cupcakes, right?)

  The first relationship…well, date, was with a guy who was totally outdoorsy—not my type of guy, really, but I was willing to make an exception because not only was he drop-dead gorgeous, he was an underwear model with a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. Do you know how rich you have to be to have a penthouse in the city? On 5th Avenue?

  He took me hiking, which wouldn’t have been so bad except that was after we went rowing. And biking. And without a romantic picnic at any point in between. I had been trying to hold out and not scarf down my arm when I discovered a squashed (but whole) package of Twinkies at the bottom of my knapsack. Considering I hadn’t used that particular knapsack since college, God knows how old those Twinkies were, but at the moment, I didn’t care. (Also, I believe Twinkies have a shelf life of ninety-nine years or something along those lines.) I felt like I had just done a ninety day stint on Survivor. Or a week long juice cleanse. And I was completely delirious from hunger.

  My date was quite turned off when he found me crouched behind a tree, my head in my knapsack, scarfing down stale Twinkies. When he recovered from the shock of me actually mumbling “Nom, nom, nom,” while I ate, he proceeded to lecture me about the poly-some-saturated oils in them and blah, blah, blah. All I could think about was how much I wanted to marry that package of Twinkies. Needless to say, we never went out again.

  Then right before Labor Day this year, my date with a Wall Street tycoon named David was ruined when our food at the restaurant I had been dying to go to (three Michelin stars, featured in Bon Appetite) took almost two hours to make it to our table. In that time frame, I had five glasses of wine, certain that our food would appear at any moment. The end result was not pretty. Let’s just say, I won’t be dining al fresco in New York City any time soon. In fact, I think the maître d’ sent a mass text out to all his maître d’ friends with my picture and a bold letter caption screaming, “Do not serve this woman—she doesn’t know how to leave her breasts in her shirt”.

  Not that I recall the actual details of the evening as they are a little hazy. However, when David called me the next day and asked if he could have new bras sent to my house because the underwire had been poking through mine the night before, I kinda got a clue as to why we were shuffled out of the restaurant at warp speed and my shirt had been buttoned wrong when I finally got home and fell face first onto the couch.

  So long story short, I get rather unpredictable when I haven’t eaten in like, forever. Despite the fact that I discovered Tootsie Rolls in my coat pocket on my way to the train (I would have stopped to grab something to eat if I wasn’t already just making the train by the skin of my teeth), I’m not in the best of moods. Coupled with my loss of nutrients, my bad day has me on edge.

  I’m grumbling to myself and contemplating working from home tomorrow when my cell phone buzzes on the counter. I pick it up and answer without looking at the screen.

  “Hello,” I snap, praying it’s not my boss.

  “Leah?”

  The voice on the other end of the phone sounds defeated. It’s Vi, of course, and a mixture of concern and triumph courses through my veins.

  Is she calling to tell me that she realizes the error of her ways? That she realizes that she must go on this cruise with me?

  “Hey, what’s up?” I ask, tucking the phone under my ear and cradling it with my shoulder. Waiting for her to answer, I toss the salad with the low-fat dressing. I lick a drop off my finger and recoil. This is what sadness tastes like.

  “I’m calling to grovel,” Vi says, and my pulse quickens.

  She feels guilty! The Caribbean, here we come! And I’ll have the bikini body to boot! I knew eating salad every night this week would pay off—

  “I’ll owe you big time, of course,” Vi continues.

  “I told you, the cruise is my treat. You don’t have to beg your big, bad hubby for money. It’s a gift for your fortieth birthday...you don’t owe me anything.”

  There’s a brief silence on the other end of the phone. “Cruise? What are you talking about? This isn’t about a cruise,” Vi says after a minute or so. She sounds really perplexed.

  She forgot about the cruise? I only asked her yesterday! Or wait, was it the day before? Lack of nutrients has clouded my brain a little. Today is Thursday...yesterday was Wednesday...oh, wait, I told her about the cruise on Tuesday. I didn’t talk to her yesterday? Boy, that’s odd.

  “Are you busy tomorrow night? I need an adult who can drive,” Vi interrupts my thoughts.

  My heart races. “Like as a getaway car?” I suppress a giggle at the thought. “Well, I have a date with some schmuck in marketing, but I can get out of it.”

  Despite my initial disappointment about her forgetting the cruise, I have to admit, my interest is piqued. Vi and I pulled off quite a few stunts in college (mostly revenge on my ex-boyfriends), and they usually involved a getaway car and a look-out person. Until Richard, of course. Richard changed everything. Humph.

  “What? A getaway car? No!” Vi sounds appalled. “I need a reliable adult that can drive Jeremy to basketball practice.”

  “Basketball practice?”

  “Yeah. He has practice tomorrow night and Matthew has practice at the same time. They’re on the opposite ends of town, and I really don’t want to ask my mother. You know how she is. She’ll make it seem like she’s doing me the biggest favor in the world, and then she’ll complain to all her friends that I am the most ungrateful—”

  “What about Richard?” I interrupt.

  Vi sighs. “It’s at seven. Richard always goes out with his trainers on Friday night from seven to ten. They have drinks and talk about their clients. It’s a thing.” She’s trying her hardest not to sound bitter, like her usual martyr-wife self, but she’s not succeeding.

  “So you mean to tell me that you want me to give up my date on a Friday night to shuttle your kids arou
nd to basketball practice—which Jeremy could walk to, by the way—so that your husband, the father of your children, the person who got to at least enjoy making them, can go out for drinks?”

  “You enjoyed shopping for Jeremy’s baby registry,” Vi says hopefully.

  “You’re missing my point, Vi.” I really don’t know how she doesn’t see what’s right in front of her.

  “So you won’t do it?” she asks in a hurt little girl voice.

  “Of course I’ll do it,” I sigh. “I just want to know when you’re gonna call Richard out on his bullshit.”

  “Leah, you really can’t comment on my marriage, you know,” Vi says.

  “I’m not saying anything about your marriage. I’m your best friend and I’m worried about you. Richard has been walking all over you since day one, and you continue to let him do so. I don’t mind helping you out with the kids when you have no other option, but guess what? You have an option this time. Their father.”

  Vi sighs heavily. “Okay. I get it. But I am not in the mood for a confrontation with him over his regular standing Friday night activity. I will do anything you want if you just do this one teensy favor for me.”

  The wheels in my head are turning. “Anything? Anything at all?”

  “Within reason. I will not become a lesbian and marry you,” Vi says with annoyance.

  “Oh please, you are not my type at all,” I snort.

  “That’s right. You like big butts.”

  “Yup. I cannot lie.” We briefly share a chuckle and then I ask again, “But seriously. You’ll do me any favor I ask?”

  “Of course,” Vi replies. “You know that. It goes without saying.”

  “No problem,” I say. “I’ll take Jeremy to practice tomorrow. And any day, in fact.”

  “Thank you,” Vi says, breathing a sigh of relief.

  “You just have to go on the cruise with me.”

  “What? No, Leah! You know I can’t do that!”