I file to Moira around twelve. Just as I hit send on the IM notifying her that the post is ready, Peter bursts through the door, sweat dripping through his once-starched white shirt. His tie has been loosened to the point that it’s almost falling off his neck.
“What happened to you?” I ask, gasping. Peter not only never loses his temper, he also never looks this undone.
“The F stopped running at York Street and I had to walk the rest of the way in this fucking ninety-degree heat.”
“Jesus, Peter, why didn’t you take a cab?”
“Jesus, Alex, what’s wrong with you? I’m not here to talk about how I got home. I’m here to find out why the fuck you were on TV this morning and why you’ve been acting like a total lunatic all week.” He’s so angry that he’s breathing hard, and his shoulders are moving up and down in a jerky, uneven way, as if controlled by a drunken puppeteer.
“It’s a long story,” I say, shifting uneasily on the couch and trying to look away. “But you should already know part of it.”
“It had better be a long story. Why don’t you start from the beginning,” Peter says, taking his tie off completely and sitting down right next to me so I can’t avoid his face.
“Have you heard of the Genius Mom?” Even though Peter’s furious with me, it’s a relief to finally have the chance to tell him the whole sordid tale. He’s looking less angry now, more expectant.
“That lady with the quadruplets? Who had that crazy op-ed in the New York Times that all the moms in my office got pissed off about?”
“That’s the one. Well, on Tuesday someone sent me a video of one of her daughters snorting a ton of coke. And I published it. So that’s why I was on the Today show. To talk about it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I was furious at you,” I say, looking him right in the eyes.
“What are you even talking about?” He looks thoroughly confused now and a little agitated—his mouth’s hanging slightly open, and I can tell he’s anxious to hear the explanation.
“You left your Omnitown report on the kitchen table. I read it.” I try to say this as calmly as possible. I want to seem cool and collected—the superior ice queen that I’ve never been able to be.
I watch his face as he processes this information. It falls almost immediately. “Where do you get off reading that report? It’s confidential information. I could be fired if my bosses ever discovered that you saw a single page.” He’s so soaked with rage at this point that I can almost see it dripping from him. So much for keeping the frosty upper hand. I fire back at him.
“What, so your job is so much more important than mine that you don’t care that I could be laid off tomorrow? How could you not warn me! I published that video in part because I needed the page views so that I wouldn’t get canned!”
“I don’t think my job is more important than yours, but yours certainly isn’t more important than mine,” Peter says bitterly. “You’re not the one with college loans that you’ll be paying off for the next decade.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask him defensively.
“You could always find something else to do for work. And maybe you should. Publishing this Genius Mom shit is beneath you.” Peter leans back into the couch. I can tell he thinks he landed a harsh blow.
“And how would I support myself in the meantime? You know my mom can’t help me out anymore.” I want to scream that his principles can’t pay our rent, but before I can say that he replies.
“I would be happy to support you while you get back on your feet,” Peter says with a sniff.
“Oh, so with your big fancy job you can support your good little homemaking lady. I just knew you’d be on your moral high horse about this,” I say as I stand up, ready to launch into my own self-righteous tirade. “Where do you get off judging me about where I decide to work? You work in finance, for God’s sakes, not exactly the most morally impressive career. Who are you to tell me what’s wrong or what’s right when it comes to my job? My publishing that video might be bad for one family, but what you do almost bankrupted the country!”
Peter’s eyes become bloodshot and the usually delicate vein running along the left side of his forehead begins to pulsate. “Don’t you dare try to turn this around on me. What do you even care about the banking industry? You fell asleep halfway through Inside Job! Telling you anything about my report would have been illegal. I haven’t done anything wrong here.”
I snort with what I hope is an appropriate level of derision. “Nothing wrong? You care about holding on to that stupid Polydrafter job more than you care about our relationship.”
“Oh, because your job hasn’t caused you to lose any kind of perspective at all,” Peter sneers. “You seem to have forgotten the real me in your obsession with this website and your fake virtual drama. It doesn’t take a psychologist to see that you’re avoiding dealing with your dad’s death by immersing yourself in this frivolous bullshit.”
“How dare you bring my dad into this!” This is the most hurtful thing Peter’s ever said to me, in part because I know there’s a kernel of fact in his assessment. My shoulders droop and I feel like my chest is caving in.
“Because it’s true, Alex, and you know it. You’ve turned me into some two-dimensional heavy who doesn’t support or understand you. You’re not letting me in at all. You’re sneaking around, reading papers that don’t belong to you. All that’s real to you these days is what goes on the Internet and what happens in your crazy-ass skull.”
I open my mouth to try to argue with Peter, but I know that he’s right. I’ve been treating my entire life lately like some elaborate game of cat and mouse, searching for some jerk who says mean things about me, obsessing over some girl I’ve never met. My real life—the life with Peter and my mom and Jane—is happening without me, and I’ve been too self-absorbed to notice it.
My self-righteousness deflates and I hang my head. “I’m so sorry.”
Peter sighs. “It’s too late now, Alex. This week has been bad, but if I’m honest this job has changed you. You’ve become more insular and weird and selfish over the past couple months. I thought you were figuring it out, but now it seems like this version of you is here to stay.”
“It’s not! I swear, I’ll go back to the girl I used to be.” I’m crying now, huge ugly sobs replete with a snot avalanche. Usually when I cry Peter will rush to comfort me, but not today. He sits on the couch and stares off into the bedroom before abruptly getting up and moving toward his closet.
“I need some space,” he says, shoving his work clothes into a gym bag. “I’m going to spend the night at Doug’s.” Doug is his buddy from work who once called me a ballbuster and didn’t mean it as a compliment. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
I know I’m not in a position to argue with Peter. He’s right—I’ve taken him completely for granted. But I still manage to say quietly, “Please don’t go.”
“I have to. I need to think about everything, and you need to figure out what you want.”
“What do you mean, ‘what I want’?” I say, still sniffling. “I know what I want. I want to be with you!”
“I don’t mean about us. This person I’ve been living with since you started working at Chick Habit isn’t you. You need to figure out how to be yourself again.”
Peter finishes packing up his things. I watch his back muscles tense as he changes into a fresh shirt. I don’t have the heart to tell him what my new fear is: that this is me now, and that there’s no going back.
Peter doesn’t say anything else before he leaves. Though I don’t think he means to, he slams the door behind him.
After Peter’s left, the silence in our empty apartment is oppressive. I know what I should be doing right now, which is going back to Chick Habit and marching roughshod through my day like a zombie stomping down a village square. But I can’t bring myself to go back to the computer. I’m too sad and shocked. I would call Jane
, but she’s had enough of this for one week and would be furious at me for screwing things up with Peter anyway.
I look down at my iPhone, which is sitting next to me like a tiny electronic companion. It’s blinking furiously with new e-mail messages. I click on a few at random, all from strange names that I’ve never seen before.
Sent at 11:45: “You should kill yourself.”
Sent at 11:46: “You’re a terrible person.”
Sent at 11:47: “You should be thrown in jail.”
Sent at 11:48: “Girl, I’m just being honest with you. You need a nose job. I know a great plastic surgeon.”
I decide I need to talk to the one person who is genetically hardwired to provide me with solace. I start dialing the 860 of my mom’s cell phone number, hoping that she’s taking an early lunch and can talk to me. The phone rings five times, and I’m about to end the call when I hear her worried voice on the other end.
“Alex?”
“Mommy?” I sniffle. I can hear the quaver in my voice.
“Alex, what’s wrong? Have you been crying? Why haven’t I heard from you?”
“P-P-Peter and I just had a huge fight and I posted this mean video and I might lose my job and—and—and—” I dissolve into tears.
“Slow down, puffin. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but it can’t possibly be all that bad.”
I explain the whole thing to her, in an abbreviated, snot-filled, heaving kind of way. I don’t think she fully understands the stuff about the hate blogger—she can barely use e-mail and only goes online to research stuff for her classes. She definitely doesn’t get the impact of the Today show, since she hasn’t owned a television since after the Watergate hearings. As a pop culture lover since birth, I think I chose my friends as a kid solely based on how much cable I could mooch off of them. My mom has heard of Darleen West, though, because some of her students’ parents were annoying West acolytes.
“Let’s separate the Peter thing from Chick Habit issues,” my mom says after I vomit out the story to her, as if they were still two separate problems and not a knotty, intertwined disaster. “It sounds like you were just doing your job for Chick Habit, but I can understand why it makes you feel so terrible. But what’s done is done. You can’t take it back.”
I sniffle an assent.
“Why don’t you start looking for another job if Chick Habit is making you so miserable? Something that’s maybe a little deeper?”
“Do you know what the market’s like out there right now in media? It’s not like new jobs are just growing on trees, especially now that I’ve possibly humiliated myself on national television and put an innocent kid’s life in danger.”
“But you’re getting death threats, too. How seriously can you take these messages from nutty strangers?”
This reminds me of what BTCH said about Dad, and even though I didn’t want to bother Mom with it, I’m feeling so fragile I can’t help myself. “Did Daddy have some secret life we didn’t know about?”
“What do you mean, a ‘secret life’?” She sounds puzzled and a little sarcastic.
“Ummm, I mean, like, did you ever find out after he died . . . that he like . . .”
“That he like what?” she says.
“Like, did stuff . . . away from us, that was bad?”
“Use your words, Alex,” my mom says, which is something she used to tell me when I was little.
“This crazy person on the Internet said that Dad was a secret drug addict!” I nearly shout.
Mom starts laughing so hard she can barely breathe. “Your father? Drugs? Alex, your dad wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t out cruising Hartford for illegal substances in his spare time.”
“How do you know for sure?” I ask this timidly, seeking reassurance.
“Al, when you’ve been married for thirty years, you’ll understand. Besides, your dad and I worked together and lived together—I saw him almost every waking hour of every day. Unless he cloned himself, I’m pretty sure this terrible person is just baiting you.”
“Aren’t you worried that she’s trying to impugn Daddy?”
“Not really.” Mom laughs. “It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in ages.”
“How can you say that?” I can’t believe she’s not taking this more seriously. She must think my life is one big creative lark, like I’m some acerbic girl Friday from one of the thirties romantic comedies she holds so dear. But I’m not Rosalind Russell tripping down the city streets in spectator heels.
“Because I have some perspective, puffin. I know who your father was, and some stranger can’t take that away from me. And hey, your dad’s dead—it’s not like he’s going to be hurt by this if this nutter decides to go public with this information.”
“I guess.” I’m starting to feel disoriented, like I’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.
“This situation is not so horrible. You could look for something in another field, if Chick Habit is really that bad. You could even temp for a while. You’re such a smart girl, Al, and you’re so young, and life’s so short. You can do whatever makes you happy.”
I bite my lip and go silent. Somehow her sensible words break through where Jane’s and Peter’s could not. The foundation of my swirling week has now crumbled, and saving my job suddenly seems like a really shabby excuse for my behavior. Happiness—mine or anyone else’s—hasn’t been at the root of the whole Becky West/hate blogger fiasco. It’s been all about that fleeting costume jewelry: notoriety, posturing, and success.
“I don’t know what will make me happy.” I start crying, because it’s true. I still love Peter and hope to salvage our relationship, and even though he makes life better, he’s not responsible for my happiness. Chick Habit, as stressful as it is, was a delight at first, before the traffic pressure started raining down. Now it’s just a source of anxiety and dismay.
“I don’t even know if I want to be a writer anymore,” I add through the tears. I’m afraid that having a job like this is the only route to being a working writer these days, and I don’t know that I can take it for the long haul.
I always try not to break down in front of my mom. I want to be strong for her, to give her one less thing to worry about. She was so proud of me when I got the job at Chick Habit, and I hate that I might be disappointing her or puncturing her image of me as confident and flourishing. But somehow, with our voices traveling in the ether, I say things I wouldn’t be bold enough to say to her face—maybe shouldn’t say at all. She’s hasn’t responded for at least a minute, and I’m worried that she’s crushed because I’m so upset.
“Mom? Are you still there?”
“I’m still here, honey, I’m just thinking,” she says in a smooth, deliberate way. “I never wanted you to feel forced into a life that you don’t want. The last thing I wanted was for you to end up like me, with your true passion deteriorating in a drawer somewhere, and now I’m afraid I’ve pushed you into this mess.”
“But how do I know if this is the right way to my true passion?” I thought the Chick Habit job could lead to something better but now it feels like a dead end.
“I can’t answer that for you,” she tells me. Damn it. “You need to sit with yourself—without the thousand distractions it sounds like you have—and figure out what it is that you want. I’m so, so sorry if my example has made it harder for you to know what that is.”
Now I go silent. I thought my mom would have an easy, soothing answer for me. But now I realize that was a foolish expectation. I have to take responsibility for my own choices. This isn’t, exactly, about publishing the Becky West video or its consequences. It’s about slowly stumbling down my own path, which unfortunately doesn’t happen in a twenty-four-hour news cycle.
At least the hugeness of this thought has caused me to stop crying.
“Alex?”
“Yee-aah?” I say haltingly, trying to pull back the last of my tears.
“Are you going to be okay, baby?
What about Peter?” My mom really does love Peter and considers him part of the family at this point, and I can hear the worry in her voice when she says his name, like it’s slipping through her fingers.
“I’m just as confused about Peter as I am about my work. I want him back but I don’t understand why he didn’t tell me that I might lose my job.” The whine is starting to creep back behind my sentences.
“Do you want my advice?” she asks gently.
“Yes.” I try to say this crisply, to iron out that whine.
“I think you were a real dummy to read his report.” “Dummy” is the word my mom reserves for waiters who screw up her order and politicians who cheat on their wives.
“Mom!”
“It wasn’t your business. You think I’m a pretty good judge of character, right?”
“Yes.” It’s true—after decades of teaching, my mom can read the faces of her students on the first day and tell whether each one is going to be a disaster or a delight. I used to find this trait infuriating. When she would tell me that the parents of a new acquaintance had “cruel expressions,” and that I should watch out for their child, I would tell her she had no idea what she was talking about. But invariably that kid would end up snubbing me in some dramatic way/getting heavily into drugs/becoming an arsonist.
“Peter has a good face and a good heart. I know you think he betrayed you, but you have to understand how that report put him in an impossible position. And remember that the company hasn’t been sold yet.” I smile ruefully—her listening comprehension is better than my reading comprehension. “Maybe he would have told you when it was really happening. You never know. Right now it’s just classified information about a potential sale. It wouldn’t have been worth upsetting you if it turns out that the sale doesn’t go through, right?”
“Yes.” I sigh, conceding to her reasonable explanation.
“Okay,” she says. “Listen, my lunch hour is almost over and I have to get back to the kids. But I can be late if you need me. Are you going to be all right?”
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