“Hey, Claire, can I stop by later and snag a few of Augie’s Ritalin?” asked Sunny Bang.
They were at summer-school drop-off, and the kids who qualified for the program—kids who either needed extra help or could benefit from some genius-type enrichment—were already inside the school. A few of the moms always hung around at the bottom of the concrete steps to chat, and today Lucy was one of them.
“What?” asked Claire.
“Just five. I have to do my taxes and you know I can’t focus.”
“It’s July.”
“I got an extension. Please. Three, even; three would probably be enough.”
“Are you being serious right now?”
“Yes,” said Sunny Bang. “At least, I thought I was.”
Claire folded her arms across her chest and said, “The answer is no.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because I’m not going to let you borrow and consume my teenage son’s prescription medication.”
“Oh.”
“There is a cop right over there.”
There was a Beekman cop, sitting in his police car out in the parking lot in front of the school, drinking coffee and doing paperwork. Ever since Sandy Hook, the local cops had spent their downtime near the school, parked in plain sight.
“This is not a crime. It is one mother asking to borrow something from another mother at drop-off,” said Sunny Bang. Then she said loudly, in the direction of the police car, “I would also like to stop by your home to pick up any fall hand-me-downs you might have lying around.”
“I’m going to pretend we never had this conversation,” said Claire.
“She’s a little uptight today,” said Sunny Bang after Claire got into her minivan and drove off. “I should have just made an excuse to go over there and palmed a few.”
“What do you need Ritalin for?” Lucy asked.
“What don’t I need it for?” Sunny Bang said. “I take one, I can do two weeks’ worth of bullshit mommy tasks in a single day. I’m like a whirlwind. Totally focused and totally energized. And Augie’s got the good stuff. It’s slow release. It lasts for twelve hours, and you don’t feel like eating for two days.”
“That sounds a lot like speed,” said Lucy.
“It’s better than speed,” said Sunny Bang. “I can’t wait until Tobias is old enough to get a prescription that I won’t ever let him use.”
Sunny Bang was one of only three Asian American women who lived full-time in Beekman, and it was a sad fact of their lives that they were all mistaken for one another again and again and again. They were addressed by the wrong name in the grocery store, at the club pool, at school functions, at Christmas parties, in parking lots, and at the farmers’ market. It took the average new Beekmanite sixteen months to be able to reliably tell them apart, and a few of the more disengaged husbands never did manage it. Andrew Callahan was always trying to cover for himself by saying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Don’t get mad at me, Sunny, I used to only date Asian women!”
“How was your weekend?” Sunny asked.
“Honestly?” said Lucy. “It was weird.”
“How so?”
“These old friends of ours from Brooklyn came by for dinner Saturday night. They told us they have an open marriage. We spent the whole night talking about it.”
“Were they trying to get you to”—and here Sunny did a hand motion to indicate sex—“with them?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lucy. “God, I hope not. That thought never even entered my mind.”
“I bet they were,” said Sunny Bang. “I bet they were just trying to feel you out.”
“Well, if they were, it didn’t work.”
“Maybe that’s what all those idiots are doing in Brooklyn. Having sex with each other’s spouses. Otherwise, why would you still live there? Why would you live in Brooklyn when you could live here?”
This was a common refrain for the residents of Beekman. How come I never heard about this place before? How come everyone doesn’t want to live here? They hadn’t just fled the city because they couldn’t afford it anymore, although that was true for a lot of them. They hadn’t been forced to do that dreaded thing, move to the suburbs. Beekman wasn’t the suburbs. It wasn’t Dobbs Ferry, it wasn’t Mamaroneck, it wasn’t New Jersey, it wasn’t Connecticut. Every house was on at least two acres of land, you could commute into Grand Central on Metro-North, and yet there was not a Wall Street asshole in sight—how was that possible? It was twenty-five minutes to the nearest Starbucks. And nobody went to Starbucks! Starbucks had become a thing of the past, like a rotary phone or a VCR. Beekman attracted the kind of people who didn’t want shopping malls or Starbucks or a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality, and they’d found it. They had found someplace they believed, truly believed, to be inestimably better.
*
“That was weird, the other night,” Lucy said to Owen.
They were in the living room, sitting on the couch. Lucy’s feet were tucked under Owen’s legs.
“You mean when we woke up and Wyatt was standing at the foot of the bed staring at us?”
“Well, yes, that was weird, but I’m talking about the conversation with Thom and Victoria.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Do you think they were hitting on us?”
“Thom and Victoria?”
“I told Sunny Bang about it and she thought maybe they were trying to swing with us or something.”
Owen started to laugh. “Like the four of us all together in one big pile, or like tradesies?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucy. “It’s just strange that they told us about it, that’s all, don’t you think?”
“If we ever did something like that, rule number one would be we tell no one.”
“Rule number two,” said Lucy, “would be no falling in love.”
“I think we should write these down,” Owen joked. “Let me go get a pen.”
Owen headed to the kitchen.
“Rule number one: No one can ever know,” Lucy called to him.
“No one!” Owen yelled. “I’m with you on that.”
“There is no Fight Club!”
“There is no Fight Club!”
Owen came back into the living room carrying a legal pad and an orange Sharpie.
“Rule number two: No falling in love,” said Lucy.
“I’m writing it down,” said Owen.
“And underline it.”
“Rule number three: Condoms at all times,” said Owen.
“We should buy a huge box of condoms at Sam’s Club, so many that they’re impossible to count so neither of us would know how much sex the other person was having.”
“We’re not buying Sam’s Club condoms,” said Owen. “Their trash bags don’t even work.”
“I know you hate it when I buy those bags, but they are practically free and you get a million of them.”
“Just, sidebar, and for the millionth time, could you please stop buying those trash bags?”
“Okay,” said Lucy. She sighed a big sigh. “It will be painful, but I’ll stop.”
“Rule number four: No Sam’s Club trash bags or condoms,” Owen said.
“Rule number five: Whoever breaks rule number one, two, three, or four wins full custody of Wyatt.”
“That’s awful,” said Owen.
“He’s been driving me nuts all afternoon.”