‘I’ve never seen you like this, Mom. So damned content.’
‘So, you see? Nothing to worry about. Go to camp. Enjoy.’
In her heart, she forgave Ann. Forgave everything. Show the bastards no mercy, she told herself, thinking of Oliver and all the rest of those cock heads.
As if to celebrate her newly perceived freedom, she bought herself a vibrator. It had a penis shape and wide ridges like corduroy along its shaft. The idea of it was almost as delicious as its effect on her private parts, which proved a revelation of pleasure as waves of orgasmic crescendos invaded her senses. Sometime in the middle of the day, she would announce to herself, Time for happy hour, and would go up to her room and proceed to use her cock toy, as she called it. It was better than Oliver had ever been.
‘You beautiful little technological miracle,’ she would whisper to it when it had done particularly yeoman service. Who needs them?
The high was accelerated by the deepening of spring. The trees along the circle were in full blossom and the view of the park and the Calvert Street Bridge in their spring wardrobe was magnificent. As for Oliver, he was hardly a bother. More like a rodent who was never seen although the evidence of him could not be missed. Sometimes at night she heard him puttering in his workroom, and if she awakened early, she heard him leave the house. As far as she was concerned, he was no longer part of her life.
But she could not shake the idea that somehow his presence had intruded itself in her room. She had learned recently to trust her instincts, to act according to a deep, unrealized, and unarticulated intelligence. It wasn’t anything she could pin down with surety. She had carefully inspected the room and her closets, looked under the beds, even into her shoes. At night, when she could not sleep, she reviewed in her mind this feeling, even tried to dismiss it. But it lingered, pervasive and intuitive.
During the day, dutifully, in addition to running her business, she went about the chores of preparing the children for camp. Eve was to be a counselor in training, which mollified her somewhat, in that it represented a euphemism for privileged camper. This meant greater freedom.
‘Just be careful, Eve. We don’t need any problems with you. Not now.’
‘I’m cool,’ Eve replied. Mother and daughter understood each other. Josh gave her little trouble. His life revolved around basketball and school. She wondered how she could be so negative toward males and still love her son.
But success bred its own problems and Barbara discovered the meaning of cash flow. She had agreed in the separation agreement not to use any household money for her business. It hadn’t made much sense, but she did get her suppliers, the various food markets and wholesalers, to bill her with separate invoices, as Thurmont had instructed.
She wasn’t the best bookkeeper in the world, but she reassured herself that all she had to do was add up the invoices for the purchases, then add up the bills to her customers, and the difference would be, she hoped, profit. She made simultaneous shocking discoveries. Her customers paid her very slowly and since she was so anxious for the business, she did not press them. But her suppliers demanded payment at shorter intervals. To keep herself afloat, she had borrowed from the household money.
‘Nobody taught me anything about business, Thurmont,’ she protested when he rebuked her.
‘Tell that to the man you buy your meat from.’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘He cut me off.’ The memory fueled her indignation. ‘If I hadn’t been a woman, things would have been different. He had no confidence. I showed him my bills to customers. He sneered at me. "That’s your problem, lady," he said. It was the "lady" that galled me and I threw a handful of chopped meat at him.’
‘That was good business.’
‘It gets worse.’ She felt the anger solidify into a hard ball in her stomach. ‘He told me that women shouldn’t be in business. They’re too emotional. Then he nearly struck me with his cleaver.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t quite mean that. He swung his cleaver hard into the wooden counter. But I knew what he meant. He wished it were me. The bastard.’
‘You went too fast,’ Thurmont told her. ‘Your business isn’t really relevant to the case. In fact, your success hurts the case.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She was sarcastic.
‘What about the other household bills?’ he asked.
‘I’m behind on the gas bill, the electric bill, and the telephone bill. Two months each. They’re getting a little persnickety, but they apparently haven’t talked to Oliver yet.’ She looked at him and frowned. ‘Why don’t you lend me a few thousand? You’ll get it back in spades.’
‘He’s already behind three months with me.’
‘I’ve seen your bills, Thurmont. He sends me notes with Xerox copies attached.’
‘I sell time, Barbara. Every time you come up here for one of your sessions, it costs. Two hundred an hour. It works by a clock. You knew that from the beginning. I keep telling you not to keep running up here every time you’ve got a problem.’
‘You’re supposed to keep me out of trouble.’
‘I’m a divorce lawyer, not a business consultant. I keep telling you to get payment on delivery.’
That doesn’t help me now.’
She went to a bank to borrow money. The loan officer was a woman and that made Barbara immediately hopeful.
‘All I need is five thousand. No big deal.’ She explained her business problems and her current domestic difficulties.
‘What sort of collateral have you?’ the loan officer asked pleasantly. She was an intense woman who chainsmoked.
‘Collateral?’ She had only a vague idea of what the term meant.
‘Like stock, bonds. Your house.’
‘My house? We own it jointly. That’s why we’re having difficulties. You see I’m asking for – ’ She interrupted herself, feeling foolish. She seemed to be deliberately looking for allies. But she could see from the woman’s indifferent expression that she had not been able to transfer her outrage.
‘It’s the litigation that scares us,’ the loan officer explained.
‘I thought they had changed the laws to give women a break.’
‘They have… but you see—’
‘That’s bullshit,’ she said, getting up and walking out. She wondered if the loan officer also felt she was too emotional. Oliver, that bastard, she thought, has crippled me. The idea only made her more determined and she tried two other banks. One loan officer, a man, offered to take her out for a drink.
‘You mean if you fuck me, I’ll get the money,’ she said, raising her voice so that others within earshot might hear her. She returned home shaking, mortified. Then she called up her customers and pleaded for the money. Her heart was in her mouth and her voice ragged and tremulous.
‘We get paid slowly, too,’ the Thai ambassador’s wife told her indignantly. ‘It takes a long time from overseas. You must understand that, dear.’
She swallowed hard and tamped down her anger to avoid a confrontation. It wasn’t at all like what she’d thought it would be. She worked so hard to make her products perfect, artistic creations, something of which she could be proud. She hadn’t expected such indifference when it came to payment.
At night, she had imaginary conversations with Oliver.
‘I told you it was a jungle out there,’ Oliver confirmed in her imagination. ‘Dog eat dog. I tried to protect you from that.’
‘You should have tried to teach me how to protect myself.’
‘That wouldn’t have been manly. You agreed to love, honor, and obey. That meant to oblige me sexually, take my advice, and give me none of your lip.’ His voice seemed to come from a wind tunnel.