THE FIRST TIME I saw Mrs. Maretto I thought she must be a new student, not a teacher. If she was a student, she’d be homecoming queen for sure. She’d be the most popular girl in the entire school.
And her clothes. Everything was always perfect, not just for some special occasion, but just every day. Later on, after I got to know her, she taught me that’s an important trick all the newswomen know. You dress every day like you might be going to the White House. Because you never know who might be watching you. You never know when your big chance might come along, so you’ve always got to be ready.
Say she was wearing a peach-colored dress with little purple specks on it. You knew she’d have purple earrings on. Her shoes might be tan, but she’d have little peach-colored bows on them, or her stockings would have this pale, pale peach-colored tint. And if you looked close you’d see that instead of regular eyeliner, it was purple.
I never would’ve dared speak to her. But then she came into our health class and explained how she was going to be interviewing kids for this TV special she was taping, and she needed some volunteers to work with her. I wouldn’t have thought of it if they were looking for someone that had to be smart or pretty or anything, but they said they wanted just regular kids. It didn’t matter who you were. And I guess I figured it would be nice to just hang around her a little, maybe. I never dreamed we’d get to be friends like that. I figured someone like her would have a jillion friends.
Who she reminded me of was Princess Diana. Or that girl in Wilson Phillips, the skinny one. She had this certain way of pulling on her earrings when she was thinking about something. Or when she’d sit down, instead of crossing her legs like most people would do, or just sitting there like a total jerk, forgetting about whether anybody could see your underwear, like I might do, she always crossed her ankles.
You wouldn’t believe all the things she knew. Like did you know, when you put on makeup under your eyes, to cover up the circles, you always want to apply it in an upwards direction? “Just because we’re young doesn’t mean it’s too soon to start fighting gravity,” she told me.
Never cut your cuticles, or they grow back twice as thick as before. That was another one. There’s no such thing as drinking too much water. Keep a pack of Tic Tacs in your purse wherever you go. Whenever you have any doubt about your breath, pop one in. She was the one who told me I should bleach my freckles. I never would’ve thought of that. She even got me doing these exercises, to uncross my eyes.
“This is great,” she said, when I signed up to be in her video. She said she’d be working pretty close with this group for the next couple months and it would be good to have someone she could share some girl talk with.
I told her I never did anything like this before. She was so nice. She told me that was fine, at least I wouldn’t have any bad habits. She said she’d teach me everything she knew, like a big sister. She had this perfume on. In the end she gave me my own bottle, I loved the smell so much. Pavlova. They named it for a famous ballerina.
Of course I heard about Larry right away. For one thing, you couldn’t miss her ring. It was such a big diamond. Plus she kept their wedding picture on her desk.
And in the beginning she was always saying how great everything was. How lucky she was, what a romantic guy she married, how he was always bringing her flowers and presents and stuff. One time he surprised her over the weekend with a whole bedroom set. Another time it was a sheepskin cover for the driver’s seat in her car. Or they would’ve gone away to Atlantic City for the weekend. Or to some real romantic hotel in the mountains with a heart-shaped bathtub. They seemed like the perfect couple.
The only other people in the video were Jimmy and Russell. And they were always such total washouts. I mean, they’d show up stoned, or one of them would walk in and say something really dirty about some girl he was with over at Little Paradise Beach the night before. They’d slump into their chairs with their hands on their, you know, between their legs. There was Mrs. Maretto, acting like she was having lunch with a couple of senators, only it was Russell Hines and Jimmy Emmet sitting there instead, scratching themselves. But she always did what she told me. She acted like you never knew who might come in, who might be watching that might make a difference.
This video we were working on. The idea was to take some kids, meaning us, and get to know us and our inner feelings and stuff. So a big part of the time she wasn’t filming us or anything, because like she explained, first we had to really get to know each other, get to be friends. So this one day she invited me to come along with her to her aerobics class, just Mrs. Maretto and me. She let me wear this extra sweatsuit of hers that she said was too big for her, and took me into the special locker room in her health club and everything. We took our showers side by side, which made me feel kind of weird on account of how she was so skinny and I’m such a total mess. I held my stomach in, but still.
After the shower, we went in the sauna together, and then she brought me in this hot tub where you sit naked, just letting the water swirl over you. I’d never been at a place like this before.
All of a sudden I look over at Mrs. Maretto, and she’s crying. “Larry doesn’t understand why my work is so important to me,” she says. “I could never explain my career to him. I come home from a day like this, where we’ve done all this great talking, and I got such terrific footage. And he doesn’t even ask me how it’s going.”
Well I didn’t know what to do. Right in the middle of the hot tub, seeing Mrs. Maretto crying like that. She wasn’t going crazy or anything. I mean, she splashed some water on her face right away and that looked like the end of it. But after, in her car, driving me back to my house, it was like she became a different person. She starts telling me all sorts of stuff. How he never wants to party and go to clubs anymore. He just wants to stay home and watch TV. How he wants to have kids and she’s still on the pill but she can’t tell him because he says it’s time to start a family, and Joan Lunden has kids but look how fat she got for a while there, and besides, she was already famous when she got pregnant, so were Jane Pauley and Deborah Norville. Nobody has kids first.
I didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t have to say anything, she just kept talking. How it was all a big mistake, getting married. She didn’t know it would be like this. They used to have a lot of fun, but now she just felt like this old married couple, that their life was behind them. He wants her to be home. But if she’s ever going to get ahead, now’s the time she has to really hustle. She’s in a very competitive business and you can’t afford to lose time, when you’re twenty-five years old, and you’re still just doing cable. And how this video project was supposed to be her big chance, but the boys are such losers she’ll never be able to make anything of it, and even if she did, what difference would that make, because Larry would never leave his folks’ restaurant, even if NBC called up and offered her “The Sunrise Report.” You don’t know it, she says to me, but right now is the best time in your life. It won’t ever be any better than it is right now, when everything’s still ahead of you. Which made me kind of sad myself because how it was right then was not very great. But also, I felt so, you know, special. That she’d be telling me this stuff. That she would talk to me like that, you know. Just like a couple of girlfriends. I would’ve done anything for her after that.