Deception by Leslie Tucker

The day I met Anna went like this. Big friendly smile, “Hi, I’m Anna, can you believe these streets are such a mess?” I opened my mouth but before I could speak she shook her head, patted her protruding belly and chuckled. “I asked Jim how this could have happened since we hadn’t had sex in months and he laughed out loud, said that he’d gotten me from behind while I was asleep.”

It was March 1974, five months before Nixon would resign in disgrace and Mia Farrow’s pixie face was on the first-ever issue of People Magazine. I’d left my job at General Motors Technical Center two days before the birth of my second child, and had been stuck in the house for six weeks of steel gray Michigan winter. I was ecstatic over my beautiful second daughter but had never suspected how quiet a house with a sleeping baby would be, how the hours would drag on for a woman who didn’t knit or bake. I was raring to go, bursting with energy at twenty-six, yet queasy with guilt over feeling lonely and bored while my eight-year-old was at school. I stared out at the muddy, gray landscape from inside our glass storm door and thought, shit, what have I done? 

Anna, the woman who in the following year, would begin a blatant affair with my close friend’s husband, and then shock and disillusion everyone close to her for decades with her tragic behavior with men, was on her way over to meet me. We would become best friends. 

Maybe she saw me standing there, maybe not, but the front door of the harvest gold Dutch colonial directly across the street opened and out she tromped, no boots, seemingly oblivious to the icy slush that covered her bare ankles. Her hand clasped her toddler’s and when she leaned down to zip the hooded pink snowsuit, her gleaming dark hair tumbled over the child like a tent. 

Swaying back and forth, I stood with my bundled-up baby, freezing in the vestibule, gazing out at the dirty snow that had been ploughed into three-foot ridges on either side of the street. March wind howled past the rubber seals on the glass storm door. 

Feeling oddly dislocated at home all day, I reminded myself that the deal offered by GM had been too good to pass up. Women were granted a year’s maternity leave during the glory days of the Detroit automotive industry, the first six weeks with full pay, and the promise of an equal level position when they returned. Feminists like Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett were raising their voices across the airwaves and for the time being, executive decision makers at GM were listening. 

My husband, Bruce and I had decided that we could afford for me to take the full year’s leave and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. I relished the opportunity to spend more time with my older daughter, eight-year-old Lisa.  She’d been born when I was a single college student, before I met Bruce, and was almost four when he adopted her. I’d gone straight from being a full time student with several part time jobs, to a full time, highly paid administrative position at GM. I’d never stayed home with Lisa the way most mothers did then with their first child. 

Anna hoisted her little girl onto her hip and crunched through the wall of snow that was ploughed up on the median. Her smile was a beacon and illuminated my shut-in-mother-of-a-newborn-existence. She was willowy tall with piercing sapphire eyes, mahogany hair and classic features, high cheekbones chiseled into a fair Irish complexion. Her beauty was dazzling, but it was her wide-open demeanor, the shadow of ragged vulnerability around her, that attracted me.  A friend, I thought. She needs a strong friend. Being a strong friend was my specialty. And of course I might want a nearby friend during my maternity leave. 

In junior high, in the early 1960s, my girlfriends called me to whine about how boys they liked didn’t pay enough attention to them. I see now that what I dispensed as common-sense advice was really intolerant judgment over what I considered idiotic teen girl behavior. When Lee complained that Brent didn’t call when he said he would, that she’d waited by the phone for two hours, I’d replied, “Why do you want a guy who sniffs glue to call you anyway?”  And when Gordy didn’t ask Susie to the after-school dance as he’d told her friend he planned to do, I’d blurted, “If he’s too dumb to figure out how cool you are, why do you care about going to a ridiculous dance with him?” Both these girls were short and petite, actually dealt with the emotions of boys “liking” them or not. It was safe for them to call me, a bookish beanpole who towered over everyone in the school, because I was no threat to their romantic aspirations.  I promoted myself to the role of ‘strong smart friend’ in 7th grade when I realized how unlikely it was that any boy would be asking me to any dance, anytime soon. I admit now that I’ve never shaken off that role and that it hasn’t always gone well for me. 

  *** 

The phone rang on a steamy August day in 1977 and Anna was more chipper than usual.  “Could Lisa come over for a couple hours this afternoon and stay with the kids? Jimmy will be napping and I won’t be long.”  This was a first. Yes, Lisa was responsible, almost twelve, and had asked when she could start daytime babysitting. “Sure,” I said, “and I’ll be here if she has any problems.”  

Lisa went across the street at 1:00 and Anna promised she’d be back by 3:00, just a couple errands to do. When Anna hadn’t returned by 4:45, I walked over, checked that Lisa was managing well and went home. At 5:45, I heard Anna peel into her driveway and several moments later she rushed over with Lisa and her two youngsters in tow. She was flushed, breathless when she spoke. 

“I’m so sorry. I had car trouble and had to wait for a tow truck and then for some stupid repair.” I sensed she was lying but had no justification for what I felt and let it go. Why would she make up a story anyway? 

Several months before, my husband Bruce and I had planned a First  Weekend of Summer Barbecue at our house for neighbors, including Anna and her husband Jim. We grilled burgers, beef for half the crowd and hunks of soy product for the rest. I’d been studying the “Diet for a Small Planet” and had adopted the philosophy. Serving soy burgers seemed logical to me, but not to others, and no one touched them. We had stocked a cooler with Stroh’s beer, made potato salad, and asked everyone to bring a dish to share. At the last minute we decided to invite a couple we’d met playing tennis, who lived outside the neighborhood. 

Brent and Linda, a high gloss pair, lit up our ‘save the earth’ crowd. She was petite, a blue-eyed blond sparkler in high-heeled sandals with golden legs in seersucker short shorts. Her presence augmented her husband’s charming, handsome veneer. He told jokes as well as any stand up comedian and played the piano by ear. Show tunes, movie themes, old rock n’ roll ballads, we’d hum a few bars and he’d bang them out. Brent and Linda seemed so in love, so fresh, compared to the rest of us who were worn out, admittedly bored by young children, lawn mowing and endless repairs on old houses. Our shaded, high-value-home neighborhood was located forty-five minutes away from the automobile complexes where some of us worked. Jaws dropped when Brent blew a kiss at Linda as she told the story of how they’d first met. How he’d followed her around at a sorority party at the University of Michigan, how she couldn’t stand him until he took her back to his frat house and played the piano all night, just for her. 

At our neighborhood barbecue, stars were sprayed across the cloudless sky at midnight, maple leaves were rustling, and we’d all had plenty of Stroh’s. No one sitting on our deck noticed that two people were missing from our group. 

I ran inside to the bathroom, found the door locked, tapped on it and heard laughter. I recognized Anna’s voice. “I’ll be out in a minute. I’m feeling a little nauseous. Use the one upstairs, okay?”  I did, and when I came down the party was breaking up. Linda was leading drunken Brent as he wobbled down the driveway and Anna had rejoined Jim. I should have figured it out then, and probably did, but looked the other way. Anna was my lifeline. We confided in each other daily, shared lengthy descriptions of how isolated Anna had felt as the middle, ignored child in her family, how her father often called her by her older sister’s name. How her once adoring husband now ignored her unless he wanted a meal or a blow job. Stretching my wall phone cord to its limit, I admitted the lingering heartbreak of persistent urges to please my hypercritical mother. 

Our proximity to each other was flawless for friendship between trapped mothers of infants. Without Anna, who would I walk the kids to the park with early each morning? Pass my library books on to when I finish them before the due dates? Who would I go on grocery store runs with or scour the sale bins at Minnesota Fabrics and share Butterick Patterns because we wore the same size? Who would be my sidekick at this strange time of life? Yes, I needed Anna. And it gets more disturbing. 

I relished giving Anna surefire advice whenever she asked. I was so fucking sure of myself. 

“I just can’t stand how he treats me. Thinks I’m only good for changing diapers, making him a sandwich to wolf down in front of another football game, or getting him off quickly during a long commercial break.” 

I never knew if Anna was exaggerating or making it up entirely because this behavior was so far from anything I would ever tolerate from my husband. Or had ever tolerated from any man. So I replied.

“This sounds like a cheesy soap opera to me. Why in the world do you do it? Don’t do it. If the kids are napping and he’s watching football, leave the house. Go anywhere. Get yourself out of that servile situation. Yell from the back door as you’re leaving, Few errands, See ya later.”

Anna called Lisa for daytime babysitting three or four times a week that summer and had continuous car trouble. There were far more traffic jams on Woodward than ever before, and Anna ran out of gas often because she couldn’t find time to get the gauge fixed. For Lisa, earning and saving her own babysitting money, working right across the street, was exciting and I relaxed when she stopped complaining about being bored during her baby sister’s naptime. 

Something was exciting Anna too. She had lost fourteen pounds and had begun getting her long hair cut and highlighted at a salon, which we young mothers did not do in those days.  She even wore makeup during the daytime. When I asked about her striking physical improvements she shrugged it off, saying it was time to get the baby weight off and that a new haircut always inspired her. 

Weather permitting, in the evenings, after the girls were in bed, my husband, Bruce often worked on furniture refinishing in our garage, which was detached from our rambling cedar shake house. The garage door was permanently broken in the open position, and I read John Cheever short stories that summer, on our big back deck, which was attached to the house.  It sat about 30 feet from the garage and Bruce and I could yell back and forth if we wanted to. It felt companionable to me to sit out there with him as deck lanterns lit the yard, picket fence and all. 

The evening all hell broke loose, Anna came running up our driveway, sobbing, sped right by where I was sitting, and threw her arms around Bruce’s neck. He patted her back, shrugging, and she immediately turned to me and choked out, “Please Les, may I talk to Bruce alone? I need a man’s opinion on something really important.” What? Was she kidding? I was insulted. I was her confidante, her best friend, and also a fucking feminist. What advice could my husband possibly offer that I couldn’t? And besides, I believed I knew the inside story of Anna’s marriage and Bruce didn’t. Had I been deceiving myself about the role I played in Anna’s life or the role she played in mine? Did I even understand what it meant to deceive someone, to cause someone to believe something that was not true, to gain a personal advantage? Yeah, I did understand.  

Anna’s husband, Jim, was an ambitious finance executive with Ford and an avid golfer, a strident young man on a mission. He had little or no time for his wife and family; and seemed to feel righteous about duplicating the family life his prosperous father had provided when Jim was young. At 5’10” Laura was several inches taller than Jim, lean, lanky and perfectly proportioned.  He often swooped his hand up and down in front of her and blurted out that he had married her so his sons would be tall and that he hoped their kids would get her ravishing facial features and svelte body but would inherit his brains. 

Perhaps Jim thought he was being funny. But it was the late 1970s and women were beginning to embrace the concept of what we now call gender equality. They were going back to school and to work outside the home, full and part time. Jimmy Carter was President and Democrats controlled the House and the Senate. The Susan B. Anthony dollar had just been released. No one we knew thought Jim was funny. And, as Anna had told me the first day we met, he took pride in having what he called “one way sex” with her, from behind, when she was sleeping and finishing quickly when she woke up. He referred to it once at a neighborhood gathering and the men snickered, thinking he was referring to masturbating. I felt nauseated. 

It’s easy to figure out now, isn’t it? The two people who went missing for an hour at our ‘First Weekend of Summer Party ’ were Anna and Brent. Brent was self-employed and had no time constraints. Suddenly, Laura was hiring my daughter, Lisa, for long afternoons, but was mysteriously late coming home time after time. All that car trouble and how flushed and downright tousled she looked when arriving home and running across the street to tell me how sorry she was about being late.

Here’s the part that disturbs me to this day, over forty years later: I knew. I knew Anna was deceiving me, and far worse, I deceived her by playing innocent, acting the role of her sympathetic best friend. Is it possible that I was so bored with my tidy stay-at-home-life that year that I wanted to keep observing her lurid story? Even live it vicariously? I had put the pieces together long before the melodrama in our driveway that night and yet I never confronted Anna, never questioned her behavior. And on weekends, I played tennis with my friend, Linda, Brent’s wife, and continued our close friendship as usual, listening to her wonder why Brent’s business wasn’t doing well. Meanwhile, back on our deck, I listened to Anna complain about how pathetic her marriage was, how helpless she felt having quit her job outright when her first baby was born. 

At that point, caught between two close friends, I realized that my need to be considered a strong woman got out of whack and allowed me to rationalize crooked logic, to believe I could change other people, even improve their lives. Of course I know now that I can’t, yet still, when people blurt out their problems, sometimes when we first meet, my savior psyche kicks into high gear with what I consider to be simple solutions. I must give off some weird vibe that attracts people who are ready to spill their complicated life stories to someone. Anyone. Now, however, unless it is a close friend, I keep my mouth shut. 

One clear morning in 1978 I drove Anna down Southfield Road to a clinic, walked her through a gauntlet of old white men holding gruesome posters and chanting Murder! Murder! Murder! I hooked my arm tight through hers and we tucked our chins down, avoiding the potholes in the asphalt, trudging to the door of the clinic where a nurse stood firm, holding it open. I stayed all day with Laura, who lost more blood than was expected, and took her home late that afternoon. Anna’s husband Jim had known her plans for the day and thanked me that evening when he arrived home, reminding me that neither of them wanted another child. He was particularly stressed at the office, something international, and appreciated not having to miss a day of work to take her himself. His comments upset me beyond anything I could recall in my lifetime. Yet somehow I managed to keep silent. I had recently taken a women’s self-defense class at the community house in our city and had excelled with the punching and kicking. I knew I could do it, sucker punch him in the nose, possibly break it and watch blood pour down his face, onto the starched collar of his expensive shirt. I wanted him to lose more blood than expected, the same day Anna did. 

My comfortable identity as Ms. Strong Pants, the friend who could see anyone through any fucking thing, was disintegrating. My strong pants were on fire with judgment, dismay and disgust, for Anna, and more so, for myself. Of course, all the actors in our passion play were in our late twenties and were not yet experienced in the language of infidelity and the art of deceit, which sadly, often come with age.

All of the prurient behavior by Anna and Brent, as well my arrogance as the self-appointed omniscient observer who spat out bold wisdom, sickens me, even now. Yet I must admit that it was somehow captivating enough for me to keep my front row seat, readily dispensing righteous advice through Anna’s divorce and sudden move to another state, with a different man. Another man she met one night on our back deck.

Leslie Tucker, a former Detroiter, lives on a Carolina mountainside and refuses to divulge its exact location. She is an avid hiker and zip liner, a dedicated yogi, an ACBL Life Master in sanctioned bridge, and enjoys anything requires a helmet. She holds degrees in business and music. Her work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, TINGE Magazine, Hippocampus, Shenandoah Magazine, The Tarnished Anthology, So to Speak:a feminist journal of language and art, The Press 53 Anthologies where her essay “Lies That Bind” won first prize on creative nonfiction and was nominated for a Push Cart Prize. Leslie appreciates your taking the time to read her work