If You Could See What I See

by Cathy Lamb

  “Hello, everyone.” I stood on top of a chair to address all of the employees of Lace, Satin, and Baubles.

  “Hello, Meggie . . . hi, Megs . . . hi, honey.”

  “First.” I smiled. “I want to tell you all again that I’m so glad to be back at Lace, Satin, and Baubles.”

  They cheered. They clapped and hollered.

  I choked back a rock, which seemed to have lodged itself in my throat. I could not even speak for a minute. Beside me, Lacey clapped, while Tory stood still and uptight on my other side. I could feel her withering anger. As she told me when I worked here before, “They love you, hate me. You’re the angel, I’m the devil. Angels are so dull, though. Devils go out and play.”

  “Thank you for working here. Thank you for your creativity and your dedication, your loyalty to my grandma and to the company. Thank you for building a company we can all be proud of. We don’t simply sell lingerie. We sell beauty. We sell dreams to women. We sell products that make them feel better, prettier, stronger, more powerful. We sell lingerie so women can get out there and write the stories of their lives and look awesome doing it and, at night, or during the day”—I grinned—“they can feel happy and confident when they’re with whomever they wish to be with in their negligees and thongs.”

  They laughed.

  “On another note, and unfortunately, after looking over our books, our numbers, and our projected numbers, I don’t have good news for you. I want to be honest and up-front. You’ve been loyal to us, I want to be loyal to you and to your families.”

  Fear, I could feel it. It rolled at me in electric waves. What I said wasn’t a surprise to them, but once the truth is out in the open, their fears become their reality. “As you know, the economy has about collapsed. People don’t have money for much of anything, and our higher-end lingerie has taken a hit.”

  I did not say that the company had made mistakes, too, because I did not want to place blame on Grandma, Tory, or Lacey. But we had. Mistakes in advertising and marketing and sales. Mistakes on our website. Mistakes in our catalog. Mistakes in how money was spent, and not spent. Mistakes in products that shouldn’t have been out there at all. Mistakes in employee costs.

  I was working to fix all of the mistakes, but it was easier to blame the economy at the moment.

  “I’m sorry for what I have to tell you next, I truly am. As you probably know, we’re struggling. We’ve been struggling for some time. We will have to shut down within the year if we don’t get our sales numbers up.” Okay, that was a little lie. I didn’t see how we could stay open for six months without a few miracles.

  I heard the collective gasp. I saw people’s hands flying to their faces. I saw them slump and lose color.

  Lance with the dented head from Afghanistan studied the ceiling, grim.

  The Petrelli sisters looked grave, too. I knew, without a doubt, that they were concerned about all the other employees, the business itself and Grandma, and not themselves.

  Maritza, Juanita, and Valeria exchanged worried glasses, and they wrung their hands. They were thinking of their children. Lele and Tinsu’s eyes became wider, as if they couldn’t believe what I was saying. Lele said, “But I like working here!” as if that would change anything. That thought was echoed by many people.

  “We don’t want to close. As you know, my grandma started this company sewing nightgowns in her room in a boarding house after she picked strawberries all day when she was sixteen. We love the company. It will break my grandma’s heart if we close. It is not the goal.” I bent my head for a second, gathered my thoughts. “However, if some of you want to apply immediately for other jobs, I understand. Please do. We will give you the highest recommendations. I understand if you leave. You have your families to think of first. We have always been a family-centered company and we always will be, but family centered means that we know your family comes first.”

  When I finished, it was quiet. Absolutely silent. No one even seemed to breathe. You could not hear a pin drop, and there were many pins at Lace, Satin, and Baubles.

  “I’m staying,” Maritza said. Her sisters said they were staying, too.

  Abigail Chen raised her hand. “I’m staying, Meggie.”

  “I’m staying, too, Meggie. I’ll see it through,” Delia Latrouelle said. Her sisters—Gloria, Sharon, Toni, and Beatrice—nodded beside her.

  “Me too, Meggie. I’ve been here for decades,” Edith Petrelli said. “I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

  “Your grandma hired me. I will stay with her until the end,” Tinsu said. She is one of our top seamstresses. “I am loyal to her and to you ladies.”

  Lele said, “Me too.” I hoped Dessert Friday was this Friday. We needed it.

  “When Bryson was born ten weeks early and I stayed with him for weeks at the hospital, you all came to visit and you kept paying me,” our custodian/handyman/gardener/electrician Eric Luduvic said. “I’m in, Meggie.”

  “When my partner died, your whole family came to the funeral. Your grandma wouldn’t let me work for a month so I could get my head on straight,” Tom Zillnerson, our marketing manager, said. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll help.”

  I saw Lacey sway beside me. She looked pale. I saw Tory watching Lacey.

  I didn’t cry. But I felt like crying. “Thank you.” I ignored the waver in my voice. “Thank you.”

  “How do we fix this, Meggie?” Beatrice asked.

  I took a deep breath. “That’s where you come in.”

  I told them I wanted their ideas. To come and talk to me, to write me an e-mail, to draw me a picture of a new product. “Think creatively, go out on a limb in terms of design, production, manufacturing. Think critically. What can we cut? What can we do different? Where is the waste? Talk about it among yourselves and tell me. Tell Tory, tell Lacey. People, this isn’t going to be pretty. We’re all going to take salary cuts, including Tory, Lacey, and me. In fact, percentage wise the three of us have agreed to take the highest cuts, as we feel responsible, but I promise that if we do survive, I’ll make it up to you.”

  They nodded at me.

  I felt the fear, but I felt the strength, too.

  Tory’s voice broke through. “Here we go! Quick, everybody, clear your butts out of the way. Lacey’s gonna toss her cookies again and she needs a line to the bathroom or it’s gonna get gross.”

  Lacey waved, hand over mouth, then darted out. They cleared a line quick, quick, quick.

  We needed to turn this company around quick, quick, quick, too.

  “Grandma, I want to talk to you about something.”

  “Then speak.”

  We were out on her front porch that evening, each in a rocking chair. She was in a classic turquoise-colored dress. The baubles: blue aquamarines. She and I had finished dinner: chicken cordon bleu, salad with walnuts and cranberries, and hot bread. I ate the pumpkin cheesecake before dinner, then a beer, then dinner.

  “Meggie, quit drumming your fingers.” She put her cigar down and picked up her whiskey shot glass. “You’re irritating me.”

  I stopped drumming my fingers. “I don’t want to irritate you, Grandma. With that fiery temper of yours, no telling what you’ll do.”

  “Your clothes are irritating me, too. I can hardly think through your decrepit fashion sense.”

  I was in a white T-shirt and jeans. The jeans had holes in the knees.

  “I sent you new clothes.” She sipped her whiskey. “Yet you persist in looking like a hobo.”

  I leaned forward and told her, so gently, my idea.

  She said, “Hell, no, what the hell are you thinking, you hellish granddaughter?”

  “Your story is important, your history is important. You’re inspiring, Grandma, you’ve overcome so much.”

  “I’ve overcome far more than you could ever guess at.” She blinked, and I could tell she was surprised she’d said that. I was surprised, too.

  We sat in silence as she puffed on her cigar, took another sip of whi
skey. She never throws it back, says it’s a waste of whiskey.

  “I can’t speak of it.” Her luminescent eyes filled with tears. “And I won’t.”

  “Why?”

  We sat in silence again. It thrummed with her agitation, the cigar smoke floating off into the wind.

  “You remember the story I told you about Ireland, sliding down the curve of the rainbow with the dancing leprechaun and then coming to America on the back of an owl?”

  “Yes.”

  She dropped her shot glass down with too much force, then pierced me with those green eyes of hers, so sharp, so tough. “The rainbow was a slide into despair and death. The leprechaun was a dangerous and evil man who left scars on me for life, and the owl represents how I wanted to fly away from the cataclysmic disaster that came next.”

  I nodded and tried to control my shock.

  “Do you want me to tell that story, Meggie? What about the fire, should I include that, too?” She leaned forward, her brogue so thick. “Do you think you could handle that part?”

  I thought of all she’d accomplished. I thought of where she’d come from. I thought of what she’d hidden, how she’d made a life for herself here through grit, determination, and sheer will. She built a company from nothing. She built it out of desperation and fear. She was an inspiration. Her past would inspire others to overcome their own rainbows, leprechauns, and owls.

  “Yes, Grandma, I do.”

  She slammed her whiskey shot glass down and actually threw her cigar, from Cuba no less, over the railing.

  She glared at me. “Hellish granddaughter.”

  My mother calls Lacey’s father “Sperm Donor Number One.”

  She calls my father “Sperm Donor Number Two.”

  She decided in her early twenties she wanted children but no husband. “Why have a man hanging around your whole life? What if you want a new one? What if you get sick of him? What if he tries to tell you what to do? What if he’s mean? What if you make a mistake but can’t divorce because of the kids? You’re stuck. All problems.

  “I like a man who acts like a man. Strong. Chivalrous. Protective. I like the testosterone and the machismo. But basically I like them for entertainment and amusement only. I do not like them to be involved in my real life. That, I can handle on my own and I do not need, or want, their input.”

  We have never met our fathers.

  They don’t even know they have daughters. They were one-night stands, carefully calculated to match my mother’s ovulation cycle. She says she knows nothing about them beyond that. All she will say about them is that they were chosen for their handsomeness, their kindness, their intellect, and humor. How she figured all that out in one night is beyond me.

  Did I miss having a dad, off and on? Yes. But I had The Irishman. He was my dad. So there were Sperm Donors Number One and Two out there somewhere in the world. So what?

  I had a dad. I had The Irishman.

  I still missed him.

  I didn’t need to know more, did I?

  Did I?

  “I’m glad you’re back, Meggie.”

  “Me too, Lacey.”

  Lacey and I sat on her porch swing on Thursday evening. I’d had dinner with her and her husband, Matt, my niece, Cassidy, who is seventeen, and my nephews Hayden, who is sixteen, and Regan, who is fifteen. They hugged me hard when I came in.

  I brought Cassidy a coffee table book on knitting, which she squealed about in delight and hugged close to her. She brought it to dinner and barely looked up.

  I brought Hayden a book on the history and clothes of Coco Chanel. He loved it.

  And I brought Regan a sob story book about the animals in Africa and their endangered habitats. He cried, but he loved it, too.

  Matt and the kids were cleaning up inside. I could hear them laughing and fighting with one another. Lacey’s house was blue on the outside and sky blue, light green, and lemon yellow on the inside. She loved color. She had lots of durable, soft furniture; framed art that her kids had done; a huge kitchen with a table in the middle of it; and a bunch of pets wandering all over. It was a happy home.

  “How are you doing, Meggie?”

  “Fine.”

  “No, be honest. How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine, Lacey. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay. I’m here.”

  “How are you feeling, pregnant momma?”

  “Exhausted. All the time. And mad. I caught Cassidy naked with her boyfriend, Cody, in the back of our camper trailer. I found them because the whole thing was rocking in the driveway, like a ship on a stormy sea. Damn that wild thing.”

  Cassidy Brianna is, in Lacey’s words, “the daughter from Hades. Her father is Lucifer. Her mother is Cruella De Ville. She landed on my doorstep. I couldn’t have given birth to her.”

  Cassidy is my middle name. Brianna is my mother’s name.

  Cassidy has a boyfriend named Cody, who is also seventeen. She is having sex with that boyfriend. When Lacey found out, she yelled, she raged, then she grounded her “for forever, you reckless, nonthinking hormonal gnat!”

  Matt about passed out when he found out, and wasn’t much help. Lacey said he literally clutched his chest when she told him. Cassidy’s still a tiny, helpless baby girl with ribbons in her hair in his mind, and he hardly knew what to do when he found out his baby was cavorting around naked with a male.

  The grounding and yelling didn’t help. Cassidy snuck out in the middle of the night. They put a lock on her door so she couldn’t get out. She climbed out her window and scrambled down the oak tree. She and Cody had a naked tumble in Cody’s car in the parking lot at school. Lacey found out because a friend of hers told her. The police picked up Cassidy and Cody and gave them a ticket for indecent exposure/curfew violations when they were naked in a park at three in the morning playing Adam and Eve.

  Cassidy occasionally smokes pot and drinks screwdrivers. My sister found this out when she took a sip out of Cassidy’s water bottle by accident. She thought the kid was drinking orange juice.

  Cassidy’s tall with long red hair, a crooked but huge smile and dark brown, happy eyes. She is Lacey’s mini-me. She is kind and funny and loves her family. She brings my sister breakfast in bed on Saturday mornings, complete with a flower. She loves to cook elaborate dinners, and sew, quilt, and knit, which she had to learn from my mother, as my sister and I know nothing about that stuff.

  She recently made me an embroidered pillow with flowers that said, “I love you, Aunt Meggie.”

  Cassidy’s on birth control. As Lacey said, “She’s going to do it. I don’t want to be a grandma. I am facing the doom of my reality.”

  Cassidy is exactly like the other women in our family: hell on high heels.

  Only I don’t wear high heels anymore.

  I wear tennis shoes.

  Not the fashionable sort, either.

  “These teen years are killing me.” Lacey grabbed my hand as we swung. “Sometimes I feel like problems are simply not solvable. You have to wait them out. Or maybe accept that things aren’t going to change. Or that it’s completely out of your hands.”

  “So, so true.”

  “Not that I’m giving up on trying to control Cassidy! She is turning my hair white.” We heard Cassidy laugh. “She needs a chastity belt. She needs to be a nun.”

  “She reminds me of Tory at the same age.”

  “Arghhh. You are so right. She’s a Tory, all over again.”

  “Does Tory see the kids often?”

  “No. She doesn’t like kids.” I could tell that hurt Lacey like a sword to her heart.

  “Do you invite her over? Does she feel welcome?”

  Her lips tightened. “I have, and then we get in a fight and she doesn’t come. The kids see her when Mom and Grandma are here, too.”

  What a dynamic. What a mess.

  “I love you, Meggie.”

  “Love you, too, Lacey.” Cassidy laughed again in the kitchen. “Good luck find
ing that chastity belt.”

  I love to walk at night when it’s inky dark and completely quiet.

  On Wednesday, I returned home from work after ten. I was jittery and stressed, the fear of failure wrapped around me like a straitjacket. I headed out wearing my ripped University of Oregon sweatshirt and my blue baggy sweats. It was a clear, cool night, the moon a white and gray beacon. I heard a car approaching but didn’t think anything of it until it slowed.

  I happened to be on a stretch where the houses were far apart, but I didn’t walk faster. I did nothing different. I didn’t reach for my cell phone. I didn’t try to run. I think that’s what depression does to you. It makes you inactive within your own life. Your brain works as if it has sadness flowing like a stream through it. You become eerily unafraid. Probably because you’re not sure you care about your future. Not a good place to be.

  The car stopped beside me. I imagined a creepy person, a hatchet murderer. I turned to face my soon-to-be torturer.

  “Hello, Meggie.”

  Man’s voice. Low . . . rumbly . . . and there was the man who was so much trouble.

  “Hi, Blake.” I noticed he was in an SUV, not his truck.

  “How about if you get in my car with me?”

  I told myself to speak. He looked delicious. Blond and smiling. “Thank you, no. I’m fine.” I might not be able to control my hands around you. “I’m taking a night walk.”

  “I can see that, night walker, but it’s not safe, so I’m going to drive you home.”

  I would like you to be the driver in my bed. I’m glad I did not say that out loud. “It’s not that far.”

  “It’s too far for this time of night. Come on in.”

  I would like you to come on in me.

  He got out of his SUV, walked around, and opened the door. He was wearing a gray suit and tie, so civilized, but behind the civilization was that tough look. I love when men look like men. Not primped and pretty, but harder edged and manly. The kind of man who oozes protective masculinity, ready to fight for you if he has to.

  “Climb aboard.”