Within a few months of moving to Cannondale, Elizabeth met Kate Musto. Even though they appeared to have little in common, Elizabeth instantly liked her. She was quick, funny, and upbeat. She always seemed a bit frazzled. The two women were put together in a mothers’ social circle that was part of the Cannondale Newcomers Group.
It was made up of twelve moms, and the weekly gathering offered them an opportunity to spend time with women going through the same infant-related experiences. Elizabeth had just given birth to her second child, Alice, and Kate to her third child, Madeline. The two women originally met at Svelte, a local trendy dress shop, a few weeks before the group started. Madeline had started screeching at the checkout. Kate was second in line. Elizabeth offered to help, and she and Kate tried to soothe the baby.
“I’m not leaving without this dress,” Kate had said. “I have to go out tonight, and I’m still wearing maternity clothes. Nothing else fits.” Kate started to push the stroller back and forth in a manic way that looked more agitating to the baby than soothing.
“Maddy, you are just going to have to wait today,” she’d said. “Babies are so unpredictable.”
Once Kate signed the receipt, she turned quickly and, holding the bag like a trophy, waved at Elizabeth.
“Mission accomplished!” she cheerfully said as Madeline wailed.
Kate had scurried for the exit, and in doing so, bumped into a table that was filled with hanging costume jewelry. She was out the door before the necklaces and bracelets crashed to the floor.
The first mothers’ social gathering was at Karen Whitney’s home. She was the President of the Cannondale Newcomers Group as well as the lady in charge of playgroups. She was polite to a fault but equally rigid and compulsively organized. On the day of the first meeting, petite, red-haired Karen—wearing crisp khakis and a matching fitted polo—met the women at her front door. She lived in a new mini-McMansion on a cul-de-sac.
The home was narrow with multiple rooflines that shot into the sky. It was painfully perfect, a sort of Barbie Dream House but colored in a more-fashionable beige shade with saffron shutters. The grounds were excessively manicured. Not even a leaf was out of place.
The interior is going to be perfectly ordered, Elizabeth thought as she lifted Alice from her car seat.
“Hi, ladies,” Karen cooed. “What adorable infants!” Karen was friendly but all business. As the mothers struggled into her home with their babies and brimming designer baby bags, she placed a thick handout in their free hands.
“Now don’t forget to remove your shoes,” she said. “I don’t want anything tracked inside.”
Karen directed the women to a finished basement decorated in a tasteful version of Ralph Lauren’s signature cottage-chic style. The walls and slip-covered furniture were ivory, the wool wall-to-wall carpeting was tan, navy pillows with tan piping dotted the upholstery, and the tables and cabinets were stained dark. Toys were neatly stored in labeled, dark wicker baskets.
Karen’s children were older, and she had trademark I-spend-a small-fortune-to-have-my-family-professionally-photographed photos lining the walls. Hung were photographer Richard W. Scott-signed images, which Karen had blown up into huge poster-size photos. There was radiant Karen tossing a smiling toddler in the air. There was her husband, Gary, lying on a blanket with a sleeping infant under his arm. There were their four kids—age two, three, four, and five—walking in a line atop a stone wall, arms outstretched to keep from falling.
This particular photographer was insanely expensive. Additionally—and most comically—he chose photo framing and placement in each of his clients’ homes per a written contract. He charged $350 an hour on top of the thousands of dollars necessary for the photography session itself.
As the women in the baby group made small talk, Karen asked them to arrange in a circle on the floor. The group was a mix of personalities and ages, and the anxiety level in some women appeared to be high given that they were strangers and that the babies were in various moods.
Rather than letting the conversations progress naturally, Karen instructed the women to go around the circle and share a bit about themselves with the group. Up next on the itinerary, she explained, would be a review of the thick handout, which was a compilation of local infant-related resources: pediatricians, preschools, and kid-friendly restaurants.
Elizabeth wondered how quickly Karen would be interrupted by babies needing to eat or be changed and soothed away from the others.
How old are her kids now? she wondered. Has she completely forgotten what a newborn is like?
Just as Karen, who had decided to share first, was telling the group about her impressive former career as a trial attorney, a late arrival appeared.
Kate Musto had let herself in and was starting down the stairs with Madeline. Standing at almost six feet tall, she had to bend slightly to see into the low-set room and stumbled down the last two steps. Her bulky baby bag swung forward, and she nearly dropped Madeline. Completely embarrassed, Kate made a joke about her entrance.
Then she saw Elizabeth.
“You must think I’m a complete mess,” she said. “First you see me with my baby screaming uncontrollably in Svelte while I buy a dress for myself, and now you see me almost drop my baby on her head.” Kate retold the Svelte story with funny exaggerations to the room. She had every mother—even uptight Karen—laughing hysterically.
“Did you realize you bumped into a table on the way out and toppled all of the store’s costume jewelry?” Elizabeth asked.
“Well, I thought I did, but I was too afraid to look back,” said Kate. “Now I’m really glad I didn’t. Those salesgirls must hate me.”
Before long, everyone was recounting their most humiliating stories since childbirth.
Hannah forgot to wear breast pads to a dinner with her male boss and unknowingly started leaking through a white blouse. “I wondered why he kept averting his eyes,” she said. “I thought he found my huge rack embarrassing. No such luck. I was leaking like a cow.”
Susan started crying uncontrollably in Target after forgetting to pack diapers in her baby bag. “It didn’t dawn on me that they sell them in the store,” she said. “I was just so frustrated and so exhausted. An outing, planned for weeks, could be ruined because you forgot to pack an extra bottle or pacifier or diaper.”
Monica couldn’t get her pricey imported stroller to close during a rainstorm. “It was one of those days when nothing was going right,” she said. “Natalie was fussy and had been up most of the night. I was exhausted. As we were leaving the Cannondale Library, which was closing, it started to pour. So I’m walking and trying to keep Natalie dry by holding an umbrella over her in one hand and pushing her stroller—whose wheels were catching, by the way—with my other hand. Once I get to our car and Natalie is safely buckled in, I turn to collapse the stroller. It won’t fold.
“I think about leaving it open and stuffing it into the Mercedes, but then remember the car is full with a Pack ‘n Play, a portable swing, and a Tummy Time pillow and mat we used for last weekend’s overnight. So I picked up the stroller and threw it, hoping the impact would close it. It didn’t. I tried again. No luck. I decide to abandon it and turned to get into our car. That’s when I see the head of the library’s children’s department staring at me. I explained why I was throwing the stroller, but she just stared at me like I was crazy. It was mortifying.”
Elizabeth shared her first running post-birth story. “Six weeks after Alexis was born, I was so psyched to get back to running,” she said. “As parenting magazines suggest, I wore a maxi pad just in case there was a little leakage. By the time I’d run less than an eighth of a mile, my pad was soaked through. I was so mad that I ran into the woods and threw it out. I was determined to get a run in and, luckily, didn’t see anyone the rest of the way.”
For the next two months, the group met once a week in each others’ homes, in coffee shops, and at the library. Soon they branched out and gathered at places like Bridgeport’s Beardsley Zoo and Norwalk’s Stepping Stones Museum for Children. The mothers enjoyed watching their babies’ eyes brighten at the sight of animals and the activity of older kids. A ladies’ night out was inevitable. Hadley Sayers suggested it during one of the gatherings.
“Brilliant idea,” they all replied.
After the women debated and then voted down the idea of including Karen, an Evite titled “A Night on the Town” was sent out. On the assigned date, Elizabeth and Hadley were ensconced in a large booth at Poquitos, a lively tapas restaurant. As they sipped sangria and waited for the others to arrive, they saw Kate enter the restaurant.
“She looks upset,” Hadley commented. Elizabeth noted Kate’s expression, too. Something appeared to be very wrong.
“I’m furious,” Kate blurted as she settled into the booth next to Elizabeth. “Lorenzo made me fuck him in the mudroom. He grabbed me as I was trying to leave the house and wouldn’t let go. The kids were in the playroom. Thank God for the baby gate.”
Elizabeth and Hadley’s eyes widened and they became speechless. Kate continued.
Apparently, Lorenzo made Kate have sex with him every night. On the few nights she went out with her friends, it had to happen before she left as an unspoken form of punishment for leaving him alone to watch the children. It always took place in a location that made Kate feel compromised. The powder room, the hall closet, the laundry room—all with their kids feet away. It was humiliating. If she didn’t sleep with him every night, he threatened to cheat on her.
“I’ll get it somewhere else,” he’d tell her. “You are my wife.”
Kate called the waitress over and ordered a pomegranate martini. Having just been raped by her husband, it was obvious she needed to talk and drink.
Prior to that night, Elizabeth assumed Kate was basically happy with Lorenzo. She’d grumbled about some of the things that most wives do, but it didn’t seem indicative of a larger problem. It was obvious that Kate was responsible for the majority of parenting duties, but she seemed to embrace it.
As a couple, Kate and Lorenzo shared a background, and both had an obvious desire to rise above their origins. They had both grown up in the largely blue-collar town of Waterford. Living in affluent Cannondale and running in the circles that they did, Lorenzo and Kate were self-conscious about a past where they spent summers at the town pool, attended low-rate public schools, and never traveled farther than the state line. Also, and perhaps most damning given the well-educated group the Mustos were trying to pierce, Lorenzo had dropped out of high school. During baby group gatherings, Elizabeth witnessed Kate masterfully skirt questions about their upbringing and his lack of a college education.
Lorenzo was fifteen years older than Kate. They met just after Kate graduated from Roger Williams University with a degree in culinary arts. At the time, Lorenzo was running his uncle’s septic business, which he later took over. Soon after, he acquired the competing septic businesses in the area. Kate was working at an entry position for a catering firm. Lorenzo courted Kate hard, and their relationship developed quickly. He took her out to dinner regularly, bought her lavish flower arrangements weekly, and eventually paid for an apartment so she could move out of her grandmother’s home.
“I was raised by my grandmother,” Kate told Elizabeth. “She was sweet but a drinker. She started every morning with breakfast: eggs and a Bloody Mary. It was hard for me to move back home after college. Her drinking had gotten worse. Lorenzo took me away from her.”
Kate explained how happy they had been early in their relationship. “When we were dating, I would make elaborate dinners, and then we would go out to meet our friends in bars,” she said. “We were having so much fun. We had great sex. It was never forced then.
“And I still love the way he proposed to me,” she added through sniffles. On Kate’s twenty-third birthday, Lorenzo bought her a BMW convertible. He had it custom painted to match her green eyes. In the glove compartment was an emerald-cut four-carat diamond ring.
“I said ‘yes’ without even thinking,” Kate said. “I was so young. I had no parents and no one else to trust. Lorenzo swept me off my feet.” Kate twisted her large diamond ring. When it caught the light, its flawless quality made it glow like a beacon. With a large sigh, she went on to explain how the relationship changed after their first baby was born.
“Lorenzo said he wanted kids, but he didn’t realize how much our lives would change,” she said. “I adapted to the new life Lorenzo Jr. and our other kids brought with them, but Lorenzo still operates like he doesn’t have children. It’s all about him. I’ve threatened divorce, but he said he’ll fight me to the death over custody rights.”
“I’m so sorry to dump all of this on you two,” Kate said, starting to cry again. “I try to keep it all in and hold myself together. Lorenzo would kill me if he knew I was telling you all this.” Then Kate excused herself to go to the bathroom and wash her face.
“I want to tell her to leave him but don’t know her well enough to say it,” said Hadley. “Why does she stay with him?”
Elizabeth knew why Kate stayed. Her parents were dead. She had no siblings. All she had were her kids and Lorenzo. Kate’s upbringing had been filled with uncertainties, in large part because a drunk raised her. Now, she was married to a guy who kept her equally off-balance. The only certainty Kate presently had was that her likely cheating husband would fuck her every night.