There Will Be Lobster

by Sara Arnell

  “You know he’s at an interview,” I was quietly told by someone when I walked through the office and dropped a piece of paper on a vacant desk chair.

  “I know,” I said. “We talked about it. He’s looking. Anyone else?”

  “Everyone. Everyone is just looking to see what else is out there…to have a plan B.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “These are uncertain times.”

  “What did you do last night?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

  “I worked on my résumé.”

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that the team was coming to work only until they found something more certain, and I couldn’t blame them. Life at the office had become nothing more than a series of nos to everyday questions and requests that should have been easy yesses.

  “No, we can’t hire anyone right now.”

  “No, there are no bonuses this year.”

  “No, that chair will have to do.”

  “No, we can’t spend any more.”

  “No, that costs too much.”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “No. We can’t right now.”

  “No.”

  “Um…no.”

  “No.”

  I looked at my schedule and planned a few days off, which seemed the opposite of what I should be doing, but I needed time to think, away from the problems and predicaments at work. Someone at the office said that if I was afraid to take a few days off because I was so worried things would tank, then we should just hang it up now.

  “No,” I said, “that’s a good point.”

  I saw a quote from Rumi on Pinterest. It said, “Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor.” Yes, I said to myself. I need to look on the bright side a little more.

  But nothing seemed as if it was leading me down a path toward my ultimate benefit. Spending time with my daughter as she was finishing up her senior year and making plans for college in the fall was becoming its own problem. I wanted to be happy for her, but I was too unhappy for myself. Every trip to the grocery store had an element of finality to it: This could be the last time we food shop together. The movie we watched over the weekend: This could be the last time we laugh and eat popcorn together. A drive to the city: This is ending soon. I wanted to turn back the clock to when things seemed better, easier and less desperate.

  “Remember the nineties?” I asked wistfully during a morning staff meeting.

  “Remember when clients and agencies both had budgets? I heard a story about a client who was told that the photo shoot for their new ad campaign needed to happen in Paris, France, because Paris was the City of Light. The entire shoot was done indoors, in a lit photo studio. It could have been in any studio, anywhere in the world. No one cared. There was money to burn. You could easily win business from big agencies by being more creative, or more integrated, or more of anything they weren’t. The internet was new. It was alternative! Those days are gone. Nothing’s the same. Nothing’s as straightforward or easy as it used to be. This is new territory, and our resources are slimmer than ever. I’m driving in tomorrow with some chairs from my house so we can set up an area in the office for a photo shoot. We need a good portrait of the leadership team. One of the account people has a camera we can borrow. And one of the creatives is going to be the photographer. We can retouch it in house. Wear all black. Let’s look serious. Like we mean business.”

  “Why are you bringing in chairs from home?” someone asked.

  “Because we need some variety,” I said. “I don’t want us all sitting on knock-off Knoll furniture.”

  “Let’s take a few shots, please,” said one of the creative directors, laughing. I want to be able to Photoshop the best pictures of my head and body together.”

  I wondered if we, too, were just Frankensteining ourselves back to life.

  An email popped up in my inbox while I was sitting at home after a day at work, catching up on The Real Housewives. It was from our biggest client. They wanted to know if I could meet them in the morning for breakfast. I knew what this was going to be about. You can always tell when clients are about to fire you. They cancel meetings. They postpone work and push due dates forward, saying things like, “We want to re-brief you, so don’t spend any more time on this.” They don’t return phone calls as quickly as they used to. Their tone changes. Less chatty. More serious. Slightly nervous. All business. And they email you at night asking for breakfast early the next morning.

  “No problem,” I emailed back. “Let me know when and where.”

  I sent a note to my team to tell them what was happening and that I’d be in the office after this meeting.

  “Do you know what it’s about?” someone replied to the email.

  “I can probably guess,” I wrote, knowing our key client contact was on the way out of the job and that when someone new on the client side comes in, making a change in the ad agency is almost inevitable. This was the second client that was undergoing their own internal upheaval. It was like the perfect storm. I felt deadly forces from all directions merging to create singular, unparalleled turbulence.

  The office was quiet when I arrived late morning. Everyone was waiting for me to get back from the breakfast meeting. I walked in and made eye contact with our head of strategy. I signaled him to follow me into my office.

  “You want the door closed, I assume,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t look happy.”

  “I don’t have good news. The account is being put up for review. We can defend it, if we choose. This is the second big piece of business we could lose within a matter of months. Without both of them, we don’t have enough monthly income to keep the lights on. Basically, our future for the next several months could look like this:

  We agree to work on the two big pitches and try to keep our top two accounts. The teams really need to bring new thinking, which I have no doubt will happen.

  We work on getting new business to replace them, in case we lose. Keeping these clients is a long shot—we have new direct reports who obviously want to bring in their own team and make their own mark. We’re being allowed to defend the accounts as a courtesy, which means we better come up with something undeniably good. This is the feeling I have from both clients. If we succeed in replacing these two pieces of business at the same revenue levels, this will bring us back to zero.

  At the same time, we need teams working on getting additional business so we can grow.

  We can’t hire more help. We can’t support our talent.

  There aren’t enough hours in the day, cups of coffee, stale conference room bagels, or ropes long enough to pull us up and put us back on top.” I stopped when I heard myself digressing. I noticed that my strategic plan forward had quickly devolved into hopelessness and resignation. His concerned expression brought me back to the reality of the situation.

  It was finally all becoming clear to me. I was walking the walk at the office. I was talking the talk of we’re in this together; let’s get this done; we can do it; we’ve done it before, interspersed with team lunches and popping open bottles of wine at 5:00 p.m. that weren’t replacements for a shifting industry and business exodus. They were just vestiges of another time—facades of fun and frivolity that I had no business assuming anymore.

  I could not fix things.

  “I know we’re so close to winning a bunch of new business,” I started again, “yet we’re so far. There are no contracts out for signature. We’re still in the talking phase, and you know how long it usually takes to move past that. We’re the ones under pressure, not the clients. We can’t force them to meet our timeline. They just won’t. And I feel like a bottom-feeder. We’re picking up accounts we wouldn’t have even considered not that long ago. But beggars can’t be choosers. Also, my daughter is leaving for college in a few month
s. I’m a mess; there, I said it. This has been harder than I ever thought it would be. The thought of her leaving, of me in the house, all alone. I can’t have another lunch or drinks meeting or dinner that goes nowhere. I’m getting fucking huge. My clothes don’t fit right. There’s always a button I can’t close. I can show you. My pants are open now. I’ve thrown out half my clothes in depression-driven fits. It’s called ‘rage cleaning.’ Listen, when you go out at the top—before the walls come crumbling down or some young, two-person team that split from a big agency to open their own shop pulls away all your business for a quarter of the amount—you’re always the champ, right? We still have our reputations intact, and our self-esteem hasn’t been dredged out of us yet, right?”

  I wondered if I was the only one who didn’t see this coming.

  I wondered if the decision to elevate me to CEO felt as weird to them as to industry commenters.

  I wondered when they realized that I wasn’t the bright and shiny face of a new beginning.

  “I’m sorry to dump this on you,” I continued. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking—those days off really helped me solidify my thoughts—and I’ve come to a decision, which makes sense after today’s meeting. I think the brave thing to do is not hold on by our teeth. We need to recognize the difficulties we face. I don’t want to spew false hope or worse, have my head in the sand. We all have families to support and careers to nurture. Sometimes the best path forward is to just stop.”

  The next day was, mercifully, Saturday. I couldn’t wait to stay in bed late into the morning and weep, calling for my dead grandfather to help. I longed to tuck under the covers and hide—disappear from what my life had become. What would my grandfather want me to do now? I was entering a downward spiral. I couldn’t see anything in my life that was going the way I wanted it to go. I lay there waiting for the curtains to move or an ethereal breeze to ripple the sheets. If I felt any pressure to do something, to be productive, it was to make him proud. In death as in life. He would want me to work harder, I thought. He worked hard all his life. He would want me to have friends and be happy. He would want me to take care of myself and be healthy. He always attributed “clean living” to his successes. I was too dirty for him, I thought. This is why he doesn’t give me a sign that he’s here for me. My life was filthy with compromise, self-loathing, and pity. I knew that he would hate to see me this way, as a failure. I apologized to him and rolled over, becoming invisible under the covers.

  I enveloped myself in a shroud of sheets and thought about the day he died. I was pregnant with my first child. I had recorded her heartbeat when I went to the obstetrician for a check-up. I wanted him to hear his great-granddaughter, to meet her. I took the recording to him. He was in the hospital, folded into his own sheets like something already half-disappeared. He cried and nodded at me as he listened to the heartbeat. “Yes, this is good,” he seemed to say. He stopped breathing shortly after that. I was holding his hand when he passed. His eyes were open, and it seemed like he was looking at something. I hoped his parents were waving to him to come join them. I pulled back my own sheets that were now wet with my tears, sat up, and screamed:

  “Grandpa, I need you!”

  Chapter 6

  The Cautionary Tail

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being irresponsible, negligent, aloof, and that I could have cared with more intensity and acted with more urgency. I was letting my life get away from me and couldn’t muster up the energy to take charge. I remembered this feeling well. It was familiar to me. It nagged at me. I had a habit of being so emotionally distant in order to keep it together and not burst into tears at a moment’s notice, that I was actually out of touch. This is why my cat died, I remembered. Or no, I finally admitted to myself, this is how I killed my cat, Cooper.

  I found my cat’s tail in the middle of the driveway. The rest of the cat was missing.

  I took the bloody stump and wrapped it in aluminum foil. Cooper was an outdoor cat so I thought I might find her hiding somewhere in the yard, near the barn where she lived. Scared. Tailless. Maybe it can be reconnected, I thought. I put the tail in the refrigerator—in the back, so my daughter wouldn’t see it and pull it out of the fridge, thinking it was a snack.

  I walked around the yard calling for Cooper. He was a calico we’d gotten from a farm in upstate New York. The farm was next to the cemetery where my grandfather was buried. I imagined that the soil connected them somehow. I knew that was really a stretch, a wild excuse. I just wanted a cat and wouldn’t let myself admit it. I didn’t think I deserved to have something else that needed my care. Turned out I was right. The cat was missing and the severed tail was found in the driveway. I searched for her until my daughter came home from school.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Cooper is missing.”

  “How do you know? Maybe she’s just hiding somewhere.”

  “No. I think something happened.”

  “Why? You’re scaring me.”

  “I have her tail in the refrigerator. I found it in the driveway.”

  “Let me see it,” she said.

  I opened the foil to reveal it to her. Tears flowed. She’s probably dead, I worried.

  I told my daughter there was hope and that we might find her. We went outside and searched the perimeter of the house, moving in opposite directions. There was no sign of her. I was glad that we didn’t find her body lying in the lawn or at the edge of the woods that surrounded the house. I didn’t know what I’d do. I had a shovel with me to scoop her up if we found her, but then what?

  I reminded my daughter where the tail was in the refrigerator and told her not to open it up. I told her I’d keep it there for bit, just in case.

  “We have Cooper’s tail, so we actually still have a cat,” I told her optimistically.

  She cried and went to her room. I scolded myself for trying to console my daughter on the loss of her cat by pointing out that the wrapped-up bloody tail was a stand-in for our pet.

  “Sorry,” I called out after her. She didn’t respond.

  I had made the cat live outside, in the barn, because that was the most I could manage. And now all I had left was another reminder that I was negligent, dangerously careless. I couldn’t trust myself.

  Three days later, however, Cooper miraculously walked into the driveway like nothing had happened, like she didn’t have a gaping hole in her backside. Three days, I thought. She was resurrected. She was from sacred soil, I reminded myself. I grabbed the tail from the refrigerator, placed the cat into her carrier, and drove directly to the animal hospital. “You won’t believe what happened,” I said to the vet as I handed him the wrapped-up tail.

  “It’s not like a finger,” he said. “We’ll dispose of it for you, if that’s OK.”

  “Sure,” I said. I was happy to get it out of the house.

  “She’s been missing for three days,” I told the vet.

  “She looks good. She’s going to be fine, albeit tailless.”

  “Three days,” I repeated. I wanted him to pick up on the significance of this. I wanted him to recognize the possibility of resurrection.

  “It’s weird,” he said, ignoring my vague hints. “I don’t see any marks on her that would tell us how the tail got pulled off. The wound is clean. It’s like it just fell off her body.”

  “Weird.” I nodded. I caught myself lost in thought, pondering the idea of the cat being resurrected and having something do to with my grandfather’s spirit—something to do with a sharing of soil. I was fairly sure that this was a sign. It was more than a breeze or the ruffle of curtains. It had to be a message, I thought. I knew I needed to keep this to myself. I imagined any conversation on the topic of Cooper’s resurrection would not be received well by my daughter or anyone else. On one hand, I knew this was an out-there, crazy though
t. The cat was injured by someone or something and was hurt and hiding for three days until she found her way home. On the other hand, I was desperate and needed the possibility that greater forces had been involved. I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) shake the feeling that a miracle had happened. It gave me chills. It gave me hope.

  Cooper went back to the barn. I still didn’t bring her into the house, even after all she’d gone through. I locked her in the barn at dusk. It was safer than being outside at night. I felt like I was finally being responsible. I felt like I had figured it out. But in reality, I had a tailless cat locked in my barn at night because I couldn’t bring myself to relocate her to the house.

  “Move her into the house,” my sister said.

  “She’s an outdoor cat,” I emphasized. I didn’t tell her about the three days, the sacred soil, or that I was actually scared of having a cat that had come back from the dead walking around my house.

  “She’s injured. She needs love.”

  “I know how she feels.”

  “Your tail wasn’t found in the driveway.”

  “No, but it’s between my legs. I’ll bring her inside,” I lied.

  Soon after this, Cooper got out of the barn one night, and we never saw her again.

  Chapter 7

  Goodbye to All This

  When the news broke that my role as CEO was coming to an end and the ad agency was closing, I was out of the office with my daughter, visiting the college that she would be attending. We were tromping through buildings and classrooms and a wide-open field at the edge of a Vermont campus known to students as the End of the World. The agency receptionist emailed me that a reporter was buzzing the front door, asking to come in and speak with me.