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think for the first time in Victoria’s life, she’s thinner than you. And you can’t stand it!’ They’re quite competitive, you know.”
    â€œBut…is she sick, or—”
    â€œNo, no, no, you know, girls gain and lose weight all the time. Victoria’s twenty-four and pulling herself together, and Fiona is jealous, clearly.”
    I decided not to touch this with a thirty-three-and-a-half-foot pole.
    â€œAnd how is your husband’s health?” I asked, changing the subject. Watts had had a mini stroke a year before and I recalled Lila phoning us not from his hospital bed but from Swifty’s, where she stuck to her dinner plans with friends. Nice.
    â€œFine, fine, you know. He’s pushing eighty, so…”
    â€œMommy?” I head Violet’s groggy cry from the other room. I leaped up and went to the makeshift nursery to scoop her into my arms. “Guess who’s here?” (Lila insisted Violet call her Lila.) “Lila! Lila’s here! Say hello to Lila, sweetheart!”
    But Violet burst into tears.
    â€œOh dear,” said Lila. “A lot of crying—”
    Which was normal since she’d just woken from a nap and was, ya know,
two.
    â€œSorry,” I apologized. “She’s still a little out of it.”
    Violet screamed and shook her little body in thrash mode.
    â€œShhhh, sweets, Lila is here! Look! Lila’s here to see you!”
    â€œAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”
    I began to sweat as if Violet’s cries were somehow a reflection on me.
    â€œI probably should go, then,” Lila said, rising to grab her quilted handbag.
    â€œSorry—she just…she just woke and up and gets a little—”
    â€œWAHHHHHHHH!!!!”
    â€œWell, all right then, I’ll see you this weekend. Hopefully she’ll be in a better mood!” she said, opening the door. And with that she was gone, leaving us in her Ferragamo-wearing Roadrunner wake.

Six
    â€œHappy Hour”—what a myth. Five to eight P.M., the time many yuppies are happily clinking glasses in bars dotting the map of Manhattan, is what I call “Suicide Hour,” when I am so utterly exhausted I want to collapse, and it’s still at least four hours until my husband comes home. I watch horrible soul-slurping shows like
Access Hollywood
and then being curious about Angelina Jolie’s wild lovemaking in the Congo makes me want to kill myself even more.
    Violet, my little scrumptious love, who can do no wrong in my eyes, crumbles into a fussy munchkin and I try to keep her busy with books, but after five or six I feel so tired I ultimately cop out guiltily and pop in a kiddie DVD, i.e., baby crack.
    But that night, after an interminable day of unpacking boxes and nearly hanging myself with the very “ropes” Bee and Maggie had shown me as I Googled every nursery school in the neighb, I tucked Violet into her makeshift folding bed, sang her to sleep with soft rounds of “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and was so excited I could hardly wait. My best girlfriend in the whole wide world, the spoonful of honey that made the medicine of my move go down, was coming over, and for the first time in about a month I got a sitter so I could go out to a civilized dinner and catch up with the only sister I’d ever known.
    I met Leigh Briggs my first day of college. She was carrying a huge ficus tree, soil spilling out onto the flat stone path under a Gothic arch of our dorm. Leigh is my total übershrink/sage/partner in crime. She instantly struck me as a 1940s starlet. We bonded over boys, movies, and chowing, becoming pretty much add-water-and-stir insta-pals. She always offered wise (and sometimes old-fashioned) kernels of wisdom and was a true “lady,” like a stylish dame from yesteryear, but with a gutter mouth. To outsiders, she was mannered and proper but sharply brilliant underneath all the immaculate beauty of classic clothes and