My name is Teddi Bayer . Not as bad as, say, Candi Kane, but still. . .

No biggie, you think? Then picture this:  a newspaper ad for Bayer Furniture the Sunday after I was born. There I am, naked except for a big bow around my neck, superimposed on a bed of teddy bears. Below me are the words In celebration of the birth of OUR little Teddi, buy a couch this week and get a free teddy bear! better still, buy a BED and make one of your own!

Fast forward twelve years and imagine a raucous bunch of adolescent boys trying to cop a feel of my mosquito-bite-breasts to see if I’m “stuffed.”

And my parents expected me to turn out normal?

Somehow, despite my name and my genes, for thirty-six years I’ve managed to defy the odds. That is, until today, when, to show that they are team players and can embrace a common goal, my entire family – and that includes my too-good-looking-for-his-own good husband, Rio - came together to make sure that I go smack, stark-raving, way-over-the-edge mad.

You think I’m exaggerating, right? Well then, let’s take them one by one, shall we? First there’s my mother, who called me in every aisle of Waldbaums this morning to tell me what food I should not buy for our big family dinner tonight. Every single aisle, where she somehow knew as I was reaching for it, just what item I was putting into my cart. My best guess is that it’s all the shock treatments she’s had. They’ve no doubt given her this incredible psychic power. And is she saving the world with it?

No, she’s just driving me nuts.

Witness:

 “How much chopped liver are you buying for your father,” she asked when she called me at the deli counter at the moment I was ordering it. “You always buy too much.”

I might have been a tad snippy when I told her, “Only half a pound,” and added, “Is that all right with you?”

Of course, she was snippy right back.“Half a pound? That’ll never be enough. Not that I would ever tell you what to buy.” She said this as if she hadn’t told me to get the challah, not the Italian bread in the bread aisle, not to buy the plums because knowing me they were bound to be too soft, and to resist the cheap mints in the bulk food aisle I always get instead of the exact-same-for-a-higher-price ones in the gourmet section.   “You’re a grown woman. You have a mind of your own. You should do what you want.”  She pauses, maybe to take a drag of her cigarette, and then continues. “Of course, I haven’t lived with your father for more years than you’ve been alive without learning something. I thought I could help, but I see I was wrong. I’ll never make another suggestion.”

Yeah, if only. “Mom, you’ve helped,” I told her, searching the glass cases for some arsenic in cream sauce, which, if I’d had it for lunch, might have spared me the dinner party from the dark side I knew was to come. “You’re always a help.”

“Well,” she said, “all I’ve ever wanted is for you and David to be happy.”   

I told her we are happy. My older brother David is, anyway. Of course, he is a thousand miles south of New York, basking in the Carribean sun and enjoying life without a phone, or so he tells us. Not that it matters. I know the drill. “David and I are both happy.”

“Happy? Of course you’re happy. Did you lose a child?”

This is why we cut my mother plenty of slack. Yes, it was almost thirty-five years ago, and yes, the rest of the family thinks that little Markie’s death has become a weapon with which she bludgeons us regularly. Still, I don’t know that I’d be any better. Gives me the chills just thinking about it. 

I told her I was thankful I hadn’t, which satisfied her, and she moved on to critiquing my wardrobe until I crinkled a package of rice crackers near the phone and shouted that I was losing her. Before you feel too sorry for her, know that she called me back once I was in the car and asked if I’d gotten her favorite French Vanilla creamer – which amazingly I had actually remembered – and told me now she uses the low-fat kind. Zipped rain slicker back up, grabbed child out of safety seat, ran back through the puddles. But, not being a dummy, didn’t return the regular so that when she hated the low fat I’d have the right one on hand.

Of course, that’s not nearly enough to drive anyone over the edge, so throw in my three kids. Today Dana, my oldest at eleven, had to stay after school, only she forgot to tell me so I wasn’t home for Jesse when he got here. And Jesse, who’s nine-going-on-six when he isn’t nine-going-on-forty, forgot to tell me he was supposed to bring cupcakes for some bake sale at school and brought home a rather nasty note from his teacher about responsibility – presumably his. And post food-shop-from-hell, Alyssa, our little Princess Cupcake at nearly five, announced she couldn’t hold it in until we got home. My car will probably never smell quite the same.

But you’re still skeptical. You don’t believe it’s a plot, do you? Then add my neighbor’s husband, who, while not technically related to me, is like a brother-in-law, since Bobbie and I are as close as sisters could be. Tonight he up and left her and the kids. I am fully aware that this is not my tragedy, but hers. And I swear that I was there for her. I held her, I cried with her. In fact, I think I took it worse than she did because it was more of a surprise to me.  But I’m claiming it as part of the plot to speed me over the edge because it opened a box of fears that I have managed to keep locked since the day that Rio and I got married – that someday, somewhere down the line, Rio would realize he didn’t love me and climb into the candy apple red Corvette I brought to the marriage and drive off into the sunset without me.

Anyway, back to Mike and Bobbie, who showed me a drawerful of sex toys which didn’t save her marriage, and told me, ”Mike’s screwing a hypnotherapist. In fact, they’ve been screwing around for centuries – in other lives, or so he says.”

“Other lives?” I am sure my eyes were like saucers, but this stuff was really hard to believe. I mean, yes, Mike’s into all sorts of natural supplements and he thinks that gingko biloba actually staves off Alzheimer’s, but the man’s a chiropractor. They all believe in that stuff. But they don’t all go off to find alternative universes.  “Since when does Mike believe in past lives?” I asked her.

What was her answer? “Since he needs an excuse for screwing around in this one.”

She claims she’s less upset about his infidelity than the problem of who will adjust her. “I mean,” she said as she cried in my arms, “that man knows how to stop my migraines. He knows how to get rid of the pain that runs down my leg. Who’s going to get rid of the pain in my ass?”       

All I could do was hug my very best friend tightly and tell her the honest truth – that it looked like he was already gone.

I know, I know. You’re thinking that I’m taking all this too personally. But then, you don’t know about my father, who has been leading my husband to believe that one day he’ll be running Bayer Furniture, and who chose tonight to tell him that at seventy, he still has no plans to retire. I think he takes a perverse pleasure in screwing Rio because, in addition to screwing his daughter, he feels that Rio screwed him by not converting, as he promised he would.

Which brings us, finally, to my husband Rio, who actually believed that tonight’s dinner was going to change everything and that my father was suddenly going to see the light and bankroll a Bayer Furniture Clearance Center for Rio to run. And now that that boat has sailed, he is standing in the doorway to our bedroom on the fence about whether to blame me or have sex with me. This despite the black negligee I’ve got on – a nightgown, I might add, which my mother gave me two years ago, telling me it would stop Rio from even thinking about cheating.

You’ll remember I locked that fear in a box before today. Now I’ll worry about it every night for the rest of my life, along with the greatest of my fears – that some day, just like Mom, I’ll have a second home at the South Winds Psychiatric Center. And that I’ll have a phone set aside exclusively for me there just like the one reserved for her, which is pre-programmed with dial-direct connections to her favorite florist and the local Chinese restaurant which delivers Moo Shu Pork at the touch of a button. And that I will have sheets stored for me just like the 300-count ones kept in a locked hospital closet for my mother. (Only mine, of course, will be seconds from TJ Maxx.)

And then, like me, my poor sweet children will be done for – left to manage without consistent and unconditional love, needing always to walk that thin line, showing love without demanding it in return – or risk pushing their fragile mother over the edge.

And as long as I’m being morbid, I may as well go the final step, and acknowledge that worse still, they’ll have to live out their lives with the Sword of Psychosis hanging over their heads, always wondering when the men in the little white coats will be coming for them.

Boy, your mood sure can change when you think about being institutionalized or abandoned. Now I’m not any surer than Rio that I’m up for making love. Still, there he is, standing in the doorway, framed by the light like some kind of god. His hair is black, full. It still curls down onto his forehead the way it did the first time I saw him. His chest and shoulders still dwarf his waist and hips. He’s the kind of man who walks with his shoulders – a lion’s gait, always on the prowl. There’s a rhythm to it, and it mesmerized me from the start. It is too dark to do more than imagine the small tuft of dark curls that escapes the ‘v’ of his shirt, but if I close my eyes I have no trouble seeing it clear as day. Unfortunately when I open them, he is still standing in the same spot, still unable to decide if he’s interested in what I’m offering.

Finally he speaks: “I take it Bobbie’s still alive?” Translated this means: how could you leave me to deal with your parents on the most important night of my life to gab with your girlfriend?

I remind him that my girlfriend’s husband just left her and that she was really upset. We both were. I don’t go into the thing about how divorce is one of the three most traumatic things that can happen in your life, because I’m not sure it’s three and because he wouldn’t care anyway. “What was I supposed to do?”

In the dark I can barely make out a grimace. The last thing I want to do is fight with him, but he isn’t being fair.

“Didn’t she come running when my mother tried to commit suicide?” I ask.

He crosses his arms across his chest, unmoved. “Which time?”

Several, I suppose, but while it means the world to me, I realize it would be wise to remind him of something he cares about more. “How about when Alyssa had that fever and you were off hunting little defenseless deer and I had to rush her to the hospital and Bobbie was here for the whole weekend watching Dana and Jess?” I should have left out the dig about the defenseless deer. I’m not sure he even heard the rest. Anyway, I make a stab at another time Bobbie saved the day. “How about when she climbed on the roof to adjust the Direct TV thingy so you wouldn’t have to miss the Indy 5000 or whatever it is?” Surely he cared about that.

Only he says she didn’t do that. “You did, Teddi. You don’t remember that?” Me? I hate heights. Maybe I blocked the memory. When I hesitate, he throws up his hands. “You got brain damage or something? You remember anything anymore?”

His words hang in the air like we’ve had this conversation a hundred times before. Maybe we did once or twice. Or a couple dozen. Who’s counting?

“Sorry,” he says after a while, sitting down on the bed and slipping out of his Italian loafers. “ I didn’t mean anything by that. At least I saw that you picked up my good suit at the cleaners, finally.”

“Your suit?” I guess I don’t hear exactly what he’s saying, because I’m thinking that I’ve forgotten it yet again, despite how many times he’s reminded me. “I–“

”What? They couldn’t get the freakin’ stain out?” He’s halfway off the bed, running to check.

“It’s fine,” I say, trying to regulate my breathing because the fact is that I have no recollection of stopping at the cleaners, picking up his suit, hanging it in his closet. Does that make twice this week, or three times, that I’ve lost some moments in time?

He stands beside the bed, ready to head for the closet. “And they fixed that little tear?”

I don’t answer because I only vaguely remember a tear. He complains about not being able to buy yet another new suit and asks if I bothered to tell the tailor.

I tell him that I think I hear Alyssa and we both strain at the silence. Finally I ask how it went with my father.

He shrugs. Same old, same old, his body says.

He lifts my chin. “You okay?”

I assure him I’m fine, and because I’ve had so much practice lately, I lie convincingly.

“Hmm,” he says, plumping up the pillows. ‘Hard to believe Mike really got up the balls to leave your little friend, huh?”

“I guess you just never know about people,” I whisper, as if saying it out loud will make it worse. I move over to make room for him and the strap to my nightgown rolls down my arm. “Isn’t it awful?”

What I want to say is that any man who leaves his wife should rot in hell, but I am saving that for a time when I feel I am on firmer ground.

Rio lets out a breath that’s half a laugh and sits on he edge of the bed. “Teddi, I’m not touching that one with a sharp stick.”

“You don’t think it’s awful?” I ask, and at this point I push the nightgown strap back up where it belongs because there are Godiva chocolates sitting on the night stand and they have begun their siren song and if I reach for them with the strap across my arm it will cut off my circulation. Hey, before you criticize me, may I remind you that it is a well-known fact that a crisis is not the right time to start a diet.

“Okay. I’ll play,” he says. “Let’s say I say ‘Mike would have to be nutzo to leave Bobbie.’ What’s your first thought, Teddi?” He watches me struggle to answer without outright lying . “You’re off thinking that I’ve got a thing for her, right?”

My answer is a shrug. What man wouldn’t have a thing for Bobbie, with that flat stomach and those perky little breasts,  which have no stretch marks even though the woman had twins? How do some women get away with that? This morning I would have felt the usual stab of jealousy, but tonight is a whole new ball game.

“But, if I take Mike’s side and say your friend is a selfish, spoiled little you-know-what who’d gnaw the hand that fed her if she was hungry enough, you’ll decide that next I’m leaving you, right?”

Well, the thought has crossed my mind . . . only a million times in the last ten minutes. The truth is that the first time I saw Rio, I lost my ability to speak, to breathe. My first thought was that he had a John Travolta sexy smile, but let me tell you, God was only practicing on J.T. When He got it right, He created Rio. Of course, that was twelve years ago, and John Travolta surprised us all by proving to be a fine wine . . . Don’t get me wrong, Rio hasn’t exactly gone to pot, but where John Travolta has somehow managed to evolve from Vinny Barbarino to expensive champagne, Rio has only made it as far as Corona with lime.

I don’t know what made me say that. I don’t even like beer – with lime or without. And Rio is still handsomer than John Travolta – then or now.

“So what’s your plan in that sexy little negligee, Ted? You figuring we can screw each other’s brains out, so you can be sure I’m really here, and really staying? That about sum it up?” He looks smugly at me while I squirm.

I tell him that  I probably would not have put it exactly that way. What I want to say is that he is a hundred percent wrong when we both know damn well that he is a hundred percent right. Always two steps ahead of me. That’s Rio. He sees through me like a plate glass window, knows my thoughts before I even have them.

“You can wrap it in any fancy words you want,” he tells me as he unbuttons his shirt and pulls it off, throwing  it toward the bench at the foot of the bed and stretching out next to me. “You wanna make me glad to be here, don’t let me stop you.”

Well, I was asking for it, wasn’t I, all dolled up in a black negligee? I run my hand down his bare chest, his curls reaching out to capture my fingers, but all I can think about is Bobbie and Mike and how a wife can just not know. “Look, could you just tell me that our marriage is nothing like theirs?” I ask. He leans toward me, nibbling at my neck while he works the strap of my nightgown down my arm. “I mean–“

”No, it’s nothing like theirs,” he agrees, freeing one breast from behind the black lace trap I’ve set.

 “And we’re happy, right? I mean you are, aren’t you?” I ask, wanting to hear him say it, hear him promise.

“I’m getting happy,” he mumbles against my midriff as he tries to pull my gown down over my hips. I raise myself, trying to make it easier, but he’s already moving on, leaving the nightgown puddled at my waist while his hands play over me like an instrument he knows well, an instrument on which he is merely practicing his scales. “Happier . . . ”

After a few minutes he stops. “What?” I ask, shifting and grinding my bottom into the bed. “Why are you stopping?”

Raising himself up on one elbow, he lazily runs his finger up and down my arm. Finally he speaks. “So your father and I talked. And he thinks buying the building next door for the outlet center is a good idea.”

“I thought he was against it,” I say, telling myself it’s only the cool May night that chills me, and not fear, not foreboding. “And besides, we’re doing fine the way we are, aren’t we? Don’t we have this wonderful house, these great kids and–“

”–a father- in-law who looks at his watch every time I take a crap. I need to get out of there, Teddi. Can’t you understand that? Even felons get time off for good behavior. When do I get my time off?”

I understand what he’s saying, but at this point it’s simply a matter of patience. “My father is seventy years old, Rio. Boca is calling his name louder and louder every day. A year, two, maybe, and Bayer Furniture will be yours. You’ll be able to–“

”Right,” he says without enthusiasm. “Next year. And what if in the meantime that brother of yours comes home?”

“And what if the earth stops turning? Now you sound like my mother, Rio. David isn’t coming home.”

Rio runs his fingers through his hair the way he always does when he’s frustrated.

“It’s a great business opportunity, but your father hasn’t got any vision. It’s like he’s got cataracts of the brain or something.”

“If it’s such a good investment, maybe you and my father should explain to the bank –“

”What? You think they’ll just hand us over half a mil with no collateral? You live in this dream world, Teddi, but just because you got born with one of those silver spoons, it doesn’t mean it’s so easy for the rest of us, you know. You want to start a business with Bobbie and poof, a couple weeks later you two are painting furniture and selling it in Cold Spring Harbor. The rest of us, us normal people, aren’t so lucky.”

Luck , my father always says, is the residue of hard work. So is my business with Bobbie, but Rio doesn’t want to hear that. So instead I suggest that we consider taking all the money we are planning to spend on the kids Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and roll it into Rio’s shot at being his own boss.

You’re thinking that’s a pretty gutsy, generous thing for me to do, and I’d love to leave you with that impression, but I know my husband. His favorite game is I can’t because . . .  Just watch him.

“Oh, that’d be great,” he says like he’s reading from my script. “I can just see working with your father everyday if I didn’t get his kids mitvahed.” It’s not a word, but since it isn’t happening anyway, I let it go.

“He’d get over it,” I say. My mother is another story, but again, it isn’t happening and I know it and he knows it.

“He’d take it out on me every day for the rest of my life. And he’d cut us out of his will. And the kids.”

“I’m not saying it would be easy.”

“If he’d only retire,” he says.

I murmur my agreement.

“Or, we could put up the house.”

I didn’t see that coming. I thought this was a simple whining session and my job was to sympathize and stroke him through it. He takes advantage of my momentary speechlessness to tell me that the building is going for a song. “By the time we have to pay for college we’ll be raking it in faster than we can count it. If we – “

College, I remind him, is right around the corner.

“You’re right,” he says, flipping onto his back and putting his hands behind his head. “Forget it.”

And we lie there for a few minutes in the semi-darkness, the security lights out back giving the room an unnatural glow. I make a few tentative movements, test the waters by skimming his chest with my hand, but he doesn’t respond.

My mind wanders to Bobbie, lying alone in a king-size bed, so I start raining kisses on Rio’s chest, working my way down lower and lower. Above me somewhere, he sighs. Is that a contented, this is the life kind of sigh I hear, or is it asking is this going to take all night?

After a while, during which it seems nothing I do even remotely excites him, Rio comes to life. He flips me onto my back and teases my nipple with his teeth. He runs his hands down my belly and his fingers wind their way inside me until I am slick and ready and arching against his hand.

I am so close to there, to home, to safety. I push myself against his hand, offering myself up to him, straining, lifting myself from the mattress, cooing, my fists gripping the coverlet on the bed, my neck arching, my breathing loud enough to embarrass me,  on the threshold of not caring who hears me.

Only he doesn’t enter me. Instead he props himself up on an elbow and when he should be telling me how beautiful I am, how rich and full I make his life, he folds his pillow in half and leans against it.

“What?” I ask, reaching out for him, wondering where the bliss has gone. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says, and his body seems to relax. I fight to control my breathing, to come down from the cloud I was lost in, and as soon as my heart begins to beat regularly he seeks me out once more, only to hesitate yet again as soon as my breathing betrays me.

And now I’m wise to his game and I have had enough of it. I sit up, jumping away from his touch and hugging a pillow to my chest and ask him point blank, “Are you trying to drive me crazy? Is that it?”

He runs one finger up my spine until it reaches my hair. He sits up behind me, trying to win me over by kissing my shoulders, my neck, reaching over and using his tongue to play with my ear. But I refuse to be so easily won. “Am I driving you crazy?” he asks, knowing that despite my protests I am putty in his hands, always was, probably always will be.

I nod, stretching my neck back in search of his mouth. He swears I am the only woman with a g-spot that can be fondled in public, and he lifts my hair, licks the back of my neck and blows softly on my skin.

“Am I?” he demands, his voice low, his manhood pressing against my hip.

“Yes,” I admit, slipping down flat on the bed, trying to pull him into position above me. “Stark raving mad.”

He says I haven’t seen anything yet, and slips down my body until his face is buried between my legs and his tongue is doing things I swear no man has ever done to any woman before. And he keeps at it even after I think I can’t bear it anymore, after I’ve come and come again and am calling out so loudly that he has to put his hands over my mouth so that I don’t wake the kids.

When it’s over, and we’re lying satiated and sticky and our breaths have evened out, he begins to punch the pillows as if there is no place in the bed that he can get comfortable.

“You okay?” I ask him, realizing that I am the only one who has been satisfied, that, as they say, it’s all been about me. “Do you want –“ I don’t know what I’m offering, I am barely awake, barely able to move my mouth, never mind my limbs.

“I’m good,” he says. Only he isn’t, and I’m not so stupid that I think his misery has anything to do with sex. 

“Maybe I could talk to my father,” I offer as he massacres our best down pillows.

“I told you to forget it, Teddi.” His voice is dreamy, disconnected.

“But–“

”Forget about it,” he says and I can tell his lips are tight and it isn’t easy for him to push the words out. He settles himself behind me, spooning. “Oh, yeah. Did you wash my camos for tomorrow?” he asks, referring to the army camouflage fatigues he wears for paint balling. “I gotta leave first thing in the morning.”

“Angelina did the wash yesterday,” I say, not sure if I actually saw the stupid green clothes that signal a weekend away. “They must be in the basket in the laundry room.”

“Thank God for Angelina,” he says, sleep dulling his voice.  It’s a sentiment I’ve uttered a thousand times since I was a little girl and she came to live with us and take care of my mother’s house and family. Now, once a week, she does the same for me. It lets me, once a week, leave the house without Alyssa’s three favorite li’l bratz, a backpack full of Beanie Babies and, of course, Alyssa. It lets me shop for bras without Jesse tagging along and trying all the 38DD bras on his head like yarmulkes. And it lets me listen to the oldies station in the car instead of Dana’s Limp Bizkit CD.

And sometimes at the end of the day we sit together at my kitchen table, the way we did at my mother’s, and I tell her about my fears and hopes and dreams and she tells me about her wishes for me and by the time she leaves we have conquered the worst of my demons.

Rio’s arm snakes around my middle. “You got the gift for my mother, right?”

“Mmm,” I say, waiting for his breathing to even out. When I am sure he is asleep I let out the sigh I am holding.

It comes out ragged, and when I touch my chest, I can feel my heart beating frantically. It was the incredible sex, I tell myself. Not my forgetting one silly gift.  Everyone forgets things, I tell myself. I am a busy woman with three children to take care of. There are bound to be a few things that slip through the cracks. The fact that I’ve forgotten Theresa’s present is probably that covert hostility my mother is always accusing me of. Indirect sabotage.

So what if I also forgot the graph paper Jesse asked me for again and the Beanie Baby I promised Alyssa? So what if I don’t remember picking up Rio’s suit. It’s in the closest, isn’t it? Isn’t that what counts?

So what if I forget a thing or two? I never claimed to have great organizational skills.

So forget the idea that I am becoming my mother because a thing or two slipped my mind.