The Seven Day Switch: A Novel, page 25
“Is it maybe because that way you wouldn’t have to share Seth anymore?” she asks me in a furious voice.
My jaw positively falls off my face. “What are you even talking about?” I ask her.
“Ok, sure, time to play stupid.” She takes a chug from her glass. “There’s no need, though, to act like a clueless idiot anymore.”
“I’m not a clueless idiot!” I insist.
“Nope, you really aren’t. You’re a freaking evil genius. How long have you been after Seth, exactly?” she asks me. “A month? Six months? The entire time you’ve lived here?”
“What? No!” I say. “I don’t know what you mean. I met him for real the day we body swapped. Until then I just knew he was your husband.”
“Was that all you needed to know for him to be desirable, then?” she asks.
“He’s not desirable!” I exclaim. Then I hear what I’ve said. “I mean, I’m sure he’s great, if you’re married to him, but I’m not into that. I’m married to Hugh. I love Hugh. You know that.”
“Hugh, who moves heaven and earth to give you the perfect life,” Wendy tells me. “Hugh, who takes the kids outside when I so much as give him a long look, who cleans up after dinner every single night, even if it’s takeout, and does bedtime with the girls and makes enough money that you don’t have to work. That’s the guy you want to cheat on.”
“I don’t want to cheat on anyone! I love Hugh,” I say, starting to feel panicky. I mean, I can’t just fake apologize my way out of this, whatever this is. It would be like an admission, when I haven’t done anything wrong and don’t want to. “I have no idea what this is about, but let me say it again: this week has been like an abject lesson in how lucky I am to have a great partner. I’ll admit that we haven’t been in a crazy romantic place in our marriage lately, but as soon as we swap back, I’m going to grab on to him and never let go.” I pause for a second. “And also, I’m sick of telling you this: I do work. Why do you keep insisting I don’t work?” I stare at her, mystified. I thought she was starting to understand. I thought we understood each other. “What is going on with you, Wendy? Is everything ok?”
She crosses her arms and leans back angrily. “I’m just sick of being you, talking to you, having you in my life at every turn. You’ve made a mess of everything. When we swap again, I’m going to have to deal with an awkward situation at my office that could cause the entire partnership to go to pieces. Plus, I won’t be able to find the fucking flour!” she shouts.
“Wendy!” I hiss at her. “Stop this. You’re acting crazy, and you’re going to wake up the kids!”
She lowers her voice, and when she does, her words drip with ice. “You’re right. I’ll stop shouting. Just know this: Seth thinks he ran into Celeste yesterday at the Water’s Edge Bar. And he seemed to think he knew her fairly well. He seemed to think there was something started between the two of you, and it was something he was ready to take to the next level after half a glass of IPA yesterday.”
I gasp. I’ve barely gotten my jaw off the floor, and there it goes again.
“If you’ve been flirting with Davis to break me and Seth up, that is a seriously shitty and maniacal thing to do. Even if you’ve been flirting with Seth, that’s horrible enough. The other night, when we met up for drinks, it seemed like you were finally starting to get me, a little bit. Like you were trying to help. It seemed like you were starting to think of me as a friend and care what happened in my life.” Wendy’s voice cracks, and I see that under these crazy allegations and anger is a woman whose life has completely fallen to pieces. A woman with no idea how to pick them up.
“I am doing that!” I insist. “I have been trying to help, and I do care what happens in your life! Look, I’m sorry if I have been flirting with Davis just a little. He’s an amazing guy, he’s fun to look at, and yeah, ok, marriage with Hugh is stale at the moment—though as soon as I get my body back, I am going to change that, because like I said—he is my whole world. And yes, I’ve been hard on Seth, but all in the spirit of trying to help you. Genuinely help you. I thought you’d have an easier time baking if I organized your pantry. I thought Davis might give Seth the extra motivation he needs to step up, you know, the way a little competition can motivate. That’s what you’re always saying about softball, right?
“But I didn’t know Seth would be unfaithful. I didn’t know things with Davis could cause a work problem. I thought of it as kind of a fun, harmless thing.” My voice is pleading.
“You brought Davis to meet my son!” she says in this weird half yell, half whisper that is actually more unnerving than just a shout. “They liked each other and talked about nerd books. That’s not harmless. That’s a thing.”
I open my mouth to defend myself, but she’s right. I’ve made this into a terrible mess. “I’m sorry. I see that now. I didn’t think it through,” I say.
Wendy shakes her head in disgust. “You and your apologies,” she says. “Look me in the eyes and apologize for hitting on Seth, why don’t you?”
“I can’t do that, because I would never hit on someone else’s husband,” I insist. “And because I would never be unfaithful to mine. Think it through, Wendy. Besides, if someone did hit on Seth, it wouldn’t have any effect unless your husband was already open to cheating. Your issue here . . . it’s not with me.”
For a second I think she’s hearing me. Her shoulders sink; her anger seems to crumple up inside her. But then, as if her whole life depends on it, she turns on me again. “Really?” she says snidely. “Really? Because it sure seems to me like my life was fine before you came around and stole it from me.”
And that’s it. That’s all I can take. I look at her, dead serious, and open the pantry door. I’m fed up. I’ve been an idiot, but I’ve apologized for it. I’m not going to apologize anymore. “Your life was not fine,” I say as I step into the opening. “Your life just plain sucked. The only thing that’s different now is that you finally know that.”
WENDY
She leaves me in that pantry, so angry I can barely see. That stupid, color-coordinated, date-organized, perfectly labeled pantry, where I will never be able to find anything again. I scream in fury, swipe my hand over a row of pottery canisters I haven’t seen since my bridal shower, and see them go flying across the wall, crashing, flour and sugar and . . . I don’t know; I can’t read the label through my tears. Porcelain going everywhere. For a few moments I can hardly breathe from the explosion of flour particles, and I cough and sputter and wipe my face. My clothes are covered in white, and I feel like such an idiot—I’ve made a bad situation worse. Times a million.
I brush off the legs of Celeste’s sloppiest stretch pants and unzip the matching jacket I wore out in the morning’s chill, then shake it out right there on the floor. After all, it will be me who has to clean it out tomorrow, if everything goes the way we think it will. Me who has to clean up this mess I made. If I possibly can.
Then I walk out of the pantry, into the bright light of day. The kitchen is empty, thank god. I close the pantry door tightly and leave the way I came, through the kitchen door, a trail of white footsteps following behind. Out in the yard, I try to push away new tears and gasp deep breaths to calm myself down, but there’s no way Hugh—every bit as caring as his wife—is going to miss the state I’m in, and soon wet tracks are running through the flour dust on my face. I walk into Celeste’s house with gritted teeth, slip off my dusty shoes, and pad upstairs to the shower. On the way I pass all three kids, who stare at me but don’t dare speak, and Hugh, who says, “Celeste! What on earth happened to you?”
I don’t answer; I can’t. I just push past him to the bathroom and close the door. “I’ll explain it all later,” I say to him after a moment, when I hear him follow me to the door. “Don’t worry. Please. Just . . . can you cover for me with the kids? I don’t want them to know how upset I am. I don’t want them to be scared.”
Hugh’s voice rings through the door clear and true. “Of course, honey. Of course. Do you want me to take the boys to the science fair on my own?”
The science fair. For which I purchased fifty green ribbons from the awards store that read Star Participant! Because that was the absolute least I could do for Celeste.
“That would be amazing,” I say, truly meaning it. “I packed a bag by the door—be sure to give it to Dr. Randall for me, would you?” Here’s a man who may not notice that I changed his wife’s hair and made over her brows and put on lipstick for the first time in eleven years, but he knows that his son has a science fair today, and he was already planning to attend. Hell, he’s awake, and we all know that’s not the case with the man of my house. Goddamn Celeste. Why did she get so lucky? And why did I wreck everything between us to make her pay for it?
I’ve acted like such an idiot. There is no universe where I could truly, in my right mind, think she would come between Seth and me. Now that I’ve had my tantrum, no better than that of a three-year-old, I can see that the only thing Celeste did wrong was to be there when I was hurting.
Well, that and the pantry overkill.
“Wait, Hugh,” I call. Already the thickness of my voice is fading, I am breathing again, and the fog that has surrounded me since yesterday is starting to lift.
“What’s up, babe?”
“I know this is odd, but can you and the kids go straight from the fair to meet me someplace at noon? There’s someone I want to support. Someone who is doing something really hard today, and she’s done some very kind things for me lately.”
“Sure . . . ,” he says, his voice questioning.
“I know I’m acting crazy. I can explain everything, and I will. But not right now.”
“Of course,” he says, without so much as a pause. “Whatever you need. Celeste, I don’t know what’s been going on this week, but I do know I love you, no matter what. When you’re ready to talk, I hope it’s me you talk to. Got that?”
Those loving words, offered so freely, twist the knife. I nod silently, and then, thinking of what Celeste would need me to say, what she would do for me in my shoes, I say, “I love you too. No matter what.”
“Okeydoke!” he replies, happiness forced over the top of worry. “I’ll see you in a couple hours. Take your time and use the fancy face mask; we are good to go.”
“You’re the best,” I say. God dammit, he really is the best. He’s the unicorn, maybe. But I’ve been an absolute toad.
The shower makes me feel better. I start to get my wits again. This is my life now, postknowing, a seesaw of tantrums and acceptance, one that I would very much like to get off. I try some deep breathing and remind myself as best I can the mantra I teach my clients after a major setback: Every minute that passes, I get further from the moment Seth tried to cheat on me. Every hour that goes by, it’ll hurt less. In a couple of months . . . ok, maybe a year, it will all be a fuzzy memory, something I can’t really believe ever happened. Kind of like this entire switcheroo in the first place.
Until he does it again.
Of course, the next time Seth tries to cheat, it won’t be with Celeste. It won’t be with someone who would tell me what happened—that’s for darn sure. My heart sinks back down the teeter-totter until it hits the ground. The next time may, just twenty-some hours later, have already happened.
Is Seth a serial philanderer? I finally allow myself to wonder. My first thought is that I can’t imagine when he’d have the time. My second thought is that I don’t actually know where he goes or what he does all day. I’m in the city working. He’s in the city making art. Except there is no art to show for it, no gallery shows coming up, and not even a big materials purchase in a few months, come to think of it.
And then there’s the new sofa in his studio.
It’s for naps, I remind myself firmly. I’m drying Celeste’s hair so vigorously right now it might fall out, so I stop, go over her curls with a wide-tooth comb, put in the new gel that makes it so amazingly shiny, and style it to perfection. Celeste looks so, so much better than when I got her. Just that tiny bit of care, a clean face at night, a nice new lip color, and some well-applied wax, but most of all a week straight of sleeping all the way through the night. Maybe that’s all that Seth responded to—surprise at the instant makeover. Just a weird, complicated impulse—maybe not even so different from what I’ve occasionally felt toward Davis. A moment you let down your guard and something strange creeps in that’s not welcome at all. It could happen to anyone. Seth just got very unlucky in the way that it happened to him.
Seth and I both.
Now the question is, How much more bad “luck” do I intend to put up with?
Celeste’s words echo in my mind, and for one self-indulgent moment I imagine keeping up the argument with her. It would be so, so nice to keep pretending my beef is with her. As long as I keep duking it out with Celeste, fighting her tooth and nail on every front, turning my problems around on her, and blaming her for all the things that aren’t working in my life, nothing has to change. We can drink the sangria, switch bodies back, and pretend this whole thing never, ever happened. Never talk again.
But that’s just not what I want.
I pull on a loose T-shirt dress that hangs just right on Celeste, gives her a waist instead of flaring out too high and making her look like a walking triangle. The bright blue looks perfect with her hair. I just hope when she sees herself looking like this, with her family and my family together, it plants a tiny seed of forgiveness in her mind. I hope she can see through that side of me that lost it over flour canisters to that part of her—the patience, the compassion, the understanding—that has changed me for the better.
I hope she can realize that becoming Celeste is the best terrible thing that’s ever happened to me.
CHAPTER 20
CELESTE
Too angry to tiptoe around the bedroom, I stomp around, determined to wake Seth, that stupid so-and-so. If I had time, I’d throw a bucket of ice water over his head. As though he can read my mind, he glares at me and puts a pillow over his head, so I turn on my phone at top volume to Broadway hits. Then, singing along as loudly as possible, I put on Wendy’s stretchiest pantsuit over a feminine draped top that still had its tags and add sophisticated, if low-heeled, black shoes. I forgo the enormous resin statement jewelry in favor of a long silver necklace with two little silver charms, one etched with Bridget’s name and one with Linus’s. To look at me, you’d have no idea I’m absolutely terrified about this speech.
Satisfied that Wendy looks both professional and feminine—it is a women’s expo, after all—I go downstairs, make the kids truly outstanding blueberry-banana pancakes without mussing so much as a hair, and get them started on their new list of Saturday-morning chores. They know the new weekend deal: those children who have done their work when I get home will get rides to the movies and the comic book shop respectively, and those who haven’t will just get more chores. And now that I’ve been around for almost a week, they know I mean it.
Then I grab Wendy’s briefcase, preloaded with her laptop and the vital slides on Productivity in Practice and Purpose, which she sent me earlier in the week in that Wendy’s-prepared-for-every-eventuality kind of way, and take myself to the massive convention center set where I’m about to have someone else’s big moment. Because as mad as I may be with her right now, I am even madder at Seth. And I will be great goddarned (sorry, Jesus) if I don’t set this infuriating woman up for a lifetime of success so she can leave that guy the minute she gets up the nerve.
The place is crawling with other Wendys. Trim businesswomen clad in head-to-toe stretch wool or ponte, holding their free tote bags under their arms with a printed event schedule and phone in each hand respectively. It reminds me of when we had our college-internship fair, and we all dressed as fancily as we possibly could for malnourished college students and clutched for dear life three copies of our résumés on thick white paper given to us by our career counselors. So much nervous milling. So many people trying to get where they are not, all at the same time, without ever breaking away from the group.
And there are so, so many people.
Trying to hide my panic, I check and recheck the schedule myself. I am set to give the keynote over a tea service in the grand ballroom. A local newscaster will introduce Davis, and Davis will introduce me. Then I will speak for an entire hour on the subject of Purpose. I mean, if that’s not ironic, I’m not sure what is.
I head to the ballroom. To my great relief, Davis is there, and he pats a spot next to him at a large banquet table on the dais.
“Wow,” he says, taking in Wendy’s softer look. “Have you changed your hair?”
“Do you like it?” I answer back.
He eyes me strangely, and I remember I just apologized to Wendy three hours ago for flirting with him. “You look great as usual,” he deflects. “Are you ready for this?” he asks.
“As ready as I can be,” I lie. He doesn’t know I only had time to skim the speech—that I’ll be reading it line for line out there off the PowerPoint prompter. “Are you?”
“I’m excited,” he says. “Just think, when we joined our coaching practices, there were fewer than fifty women-owned businesses in the entire city—fewer still Black-owned ones. Now look around at this place. It’s teeming with a diverse group of entrepreneurs and executives. The playing field is changing day by day.”
The expression makes something pop into my mind, and I chase it down. Of course. The playing field. Tomorrow is the girls’ first competitive game of the season. Zoey has been blowing up my phone about her nerves, while Bridget is impatient for the day and can’t focus on much of anything else.
After this, it all comes down to the sangria. If it works tonight, I’ll be myself again. That’s what I want. I want my soft, out-of-shape body back. I want the mouth that can’t eat spicy food and the stomach that can’t do a sit-up and the life with no crushes and no accolades and no answer when I’m asked what I do for a living.
