How many people on this floor were texting Betsy, the wicked witch is dead? In moments, she’d update her YouTube channel with an Academy Award–like speech. Thank you so much for all your love and support. I could not have taken this courageous stance for my unborn child without the love and support of my other, nicer, colleagues, my family, and most of all, this wonderfully diverse online community.
I had placed all my apples in the basket of my bright, shiny career.
If anyone entered this bathroom, I’d scream.
The bathroom door opened. “Kylie? Are you in here?”
It was Stella.
Perfect. The one person I have abused above all others. And she’s going to be really nice.
At that moment I was suffused with a feeling so intense and foreign that it took me a moment to recognize it. It had been absent from my emotional responses since I first trod these city sidewalks, although in high school it was my constant companion.
Shame.
I remained pathetically still until she pointed out that she could see my shoes. She’d picked them up at the Barney’s sale when a saleswoman had texted me.
“How’d you know where to find me?”
“I know you sneak a cig now and then. Figured you’d be hiding.”
I tossed the butt into the toilet and wiped an errant tear. I would not cry. Mom was the salty gusher. I was Teflon. “I think I’m going to stay in here until everyone goes home.”
Stella giggled. “Okay. But I’ve got your stuff. Human resources sent a box. I wasn’t sure if you wanted the Sex and the City Pez collection, but I packed it anyway.”
“Throw it away. I don’t know who gave it to me.”
“I did.”
I stepped out of the stall. She was holding the dreaded white cardboard box, the “it bag” of the recently fired. It was heaped with the detritus of my career. A mug with a toothless old man that said Smile, a Japanese Zen sand garden, and a dead plant. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “In that case, I love it.”
She handed me the box. “I’m really sorry.”
Sympathy was not my gig. Had she told me that I belonged on the first helicopter to Hades, I could have handled it. Couldn’t she, just this once, for my sake, muster some sarcasm? My voice quivered. “You’re not stuttering.”
She shook her head.
“Why?”
She squinted as if trying to remember. “You don’t scare me anymore. I knew when you came back downstairs that you wouldn’t be my boss.”
“But you defended me to Bob.” I held up the box. “You packed up my dead plant, my stupid mug.”
She tilted her head like a sparrow and did something very strange. She reached her arms around the box and awkwardly hugged me. “Talking to Bob last week, I realized that even though you kinda terrorized me, you also taught me a bunch. Plus, Bob gave me Betsy’s job. So yeah, thanks for that.”
I pulled out of the embrace that had made me incredibly uncomfortable and took the stupid box. Where is a Dumpster when you need one? “You’re welcome. I guess.”
“Before you go, I just want to—” She reached into my box and pulled out a book. For a moment I thought it was the copy of The Art of War by Sun Tzu that I’d loaned her, but it was my mother’s book, Fifty Acts of Kindness. “I read this,” she said.
“Oh.” You and six other people.
“Did you read it?”
I thought about tossing off some comment about how great it was, but what was the point? “I meant to. I skimmed it. I took her to lunch when she did those cable talk shows. I bought her a Stella McCartney handbag. She sold it on eBay and donated the money to Greenpeace.” I’m babbling. Mom had spent our entire lunch talking to the waiter about her goat’s infected nipples. “It’s autographed. Do you want it?”
She tucked it into the box. “You keep it,” she said, opening the bathroom door. “Good luck, Kylie.”
I had to get out of that bathroom and hide from that horrific beam of sunshine. “Thank you.” It was probably the first time I’d ever thanked an assistant.
* * *
Stella’s final “good luck” rang in my ears as I tried to stay busy, running errands in a stunned daze and trying to focus on moving on. Although she didn’t mean it in a sarcastic way, of course, that was the way I heard it, with an underlying hopelessness and sad finality. On my way to the drycleaners, I was feeling so morose that I looked up to make sure there wasn’t a rain cloud hovering above me, like a Charlie Brown cartoon. But there were only buildings containing millions of people who didn’t care about me or my career. I didn’t think I’d ever felt so alone.
I went to an upscale market to load up on baking supplies, knowing this would be the last time I could afford such an indulgence. Once home, I fired up my shiny new oven and called my best friend in the universe, Marcus. He patiently listened while I recounted the last three days. How a punk couple had recognized me in the subway and told me I should be sterilized.
Then there was the dog walker who wanted my autograph. “Sign it World’s Worst Boss,” he had said, laughing when one of his dogs peed on my shoe, telling me it was karma.
Coming upstairs, my doorman had refused a tip for carrying my groceries because he pitied me. “Ah, keep it, please. You’re gonna need every cent living single in a city like this,” he predicted. “The men ain’t exactly gonna be crawling all over you, if you catch my drift.”
As I whined to Marcus, I could hear the hum of blow-dryers in the background. When he’d graduated from college, Cedar Falls had offered little in the way of employment for an openly gay man. Strangely passionate about returning home, he temporarily went to work for his hairdresser aunt. “A gay hairdresser, now that’s a bold move,” he’d said at the time, rather sadly. Luckily, he enjoyed the work.
“If you’re getting famous,” he said, “you might as well work it hard. I wonder if you can get a reality series out of this.”
“I hope she gives birth to an aardvark,” I said, wishing I was in the bustling salon with him, surrounded by chattering women, their perfume clashing with the bleach and shampoo.
“She’d just use it to her advantage. ‘Woman with world’s worst boss gives birth to aardvark child. Details at eleven.’ Maybe an extra toe.”
“Or a tail,” I added. My apartment felt like a very chic morgue.
“Yeah, that’s better. Something long enough so it could sleep in a tree. That would be cool.”
“Did you watch the YouTube video?”
“Oh, honey, everyone did.” He stopped short. “I mean, no. Of course not. That would be wrong.” He waited a few calculated moments. “And I didn’t watch her on The View or GMA.”
“Liar.” I let the end of the word slur, returning to the familiar long vowels of my childhood.
Cedar Falls, North Carolina, population 35,000, had recently experienced a renewal thanks to an explosion of farm-to-table restaurants and wineries. What had been there all along was co-opted by city folk, made more rustic and therefore cool. As Marcus liked to say, “The city folk wanna be country, and the country folk are all about not giving a shit.”
“Keep your head straight,” Marcus snapped.
“How can I? Everyone hates me.”
“Not you. My client. You’re baking, aren’t you?” It wasn’t an innocent question.
I pulled a dozen coconut cupcakes out of the oven. Mango custard was chilling in the Sub-Zero. I would fill the cupcakes using a pastry bag and top them with a fluffy cloud of coconut-cream frosting. Then place them in pink bakery boxes and deliver them to the homeless people on my block. Not because I had some Mother Theresa complex—I just didn’t want to get fat. It was cheaper than therapy. Plus, unlike at the office, homeless people didn’t say, “Oh no, I shouldn’t.”
“What am I going to do? I am going to lose my condo.” In the late afternoon sun, the dark wood floors shone with the luster of a purebred horse, which I could have bought for what it cost to refinish them. What wa
s I thinking?
“Welcome to the new economy.” Someone told Marcus to get off the phone. He said, “I’m talking to a client!”
“This isn’t the new economy. This is a water-retaining ball of hormones intent on ruining me because I asked her to do her job. I’ll admit—I wasn’t very nice…”
“Not nice?” I could hear Marcus’s raised eyebrows.
“Okay, I was pretty awful, but I was under so much stress. You have to see the whole picture.” God, there was nothing I hated more than making excuses.
“You were intent on sabotaging her because you fear competition,” Marcus said.
“Is that what she’s saying?”
“I think Iyanla said that. Or maybe it was Rachel Ray.”
I groaned, disrobing another cupcake. I’d eaten past the half-dozen mark. “She woke up earlier for those talk shows than she ever did for work.” Piping custard into the scooped-out centers of the cupcakes was utterly consuming. Squeeze, curl, repeat.
“You’re not eating the cupcakes, are you?” Marcus was hissing at his client that the dryer was the coldest it could go, and did she want to be here until August?
Ever since junior high I’d been a stress baker, one of those people who found order in assembling ingredients into something fragrant, homey, and delicious. After my dad had left, I’d baked something every day, which had accounted for my rather ample frame. “I’m running out of homeless people.”
“In New York?”
“I’m not heading into the Tenderloin. I’d rather gain a few than get stabbed.”
“Box everything up, and take it to a women’s shelter. Seriously.”
“That takes care of tomorrow. Now what about the rest of my life?”
“You’re not going to like what I have to say, but you do have to listen. Home is where they have to take you when nobody else will.”
“Is this something off one of your plaques?” Marcus had the most nauseating collection of plaques—homey sayings on pastel-painted wood. The kind of things cluttering up pharmacy walls, bought by women named Marge or Eunice, whose idea of a hot night was a thimble of sherry and drooling over Dan Rather.
“You should work to live, not live to work,” he said.
“You’ve summed up my life with something printed on a coffee mug.”
“A pillow.”
“Here’s one for you. Don’t lose your shit over a pregnant woman.” I was buzzed from the chardonnay that I’d just discovered paired nicely with cupcakes and misery.
“No, wait, it’s coming to me. When you’re being recorded, be decent.”
Wow. I’d fallen below decent. Now that was a sad realization. “Where were you when I needed you?”
“Busy explaining the facts of life to a fifty-eight-year-old housewife who thinks she’s one haircut away from being Jennifer Lawrence. Come home. That’s not a plaque. Well, it probably is, but I don’t own it. Yet.”
I could not share a roof with my mother. She wouldn’t even say, “I told you so.” She’d be open and nonjudgmental, offering lentil stews with organic sweet potato slurry. She’d joyfully introduce me to the offspring of my long-lost avian siblings—Dottie, Spottie, and Lottie—sharing her hilarious chicken anecdotes.
“Can I stay with you?” Marcus was silent, so I added, “Please?”
“Donny has moved back in.” Bam. There it was.
Donny was to love what syphilis was to commitment. His whole life was one pyramid scheme away from being a gay Donald Trump. Obsessed with fame, he talked incessantly about the time he’d bumped into Brad Pitt at the airport or had stood in line next to Simon Cowell at an ATM.
“Oh.” The one drawn-out syllable conveyed disapproval. I didn’t care about slim pickings in a small town. What about standards? I put the butter in the microwave. Peanut butter chunk brownies were next. My thighs swelled at the thought.
If I kept eating like this, I’d be unemployed and fat.
“Don’t start,” Marcus said quietly. He must have gone into the break room. The background noises were distant.
My lips tightened. Donny was a forty-five-year-old in Sean John jeans. He had one of those little triangles of hair under his lip. If those things have a name, I didn’t want to know it. “I can’t take my mother right now.”
“No one can take their mother right now. You don’t have any other options.”
I licked frosting from a spatula. “Thank you for that. How many cats should I get?”
“Lease your condo, store your furniture, and come back for the summer. You need some time off.”
Wow, so easy for someone else to say! Time off? What was that? “No, I don’t. I need an income. I need to get back into the game. I don’t know what to do with time off.”
“Exactly. You need to find out what you do when you don’t work.”
“I sleep.”
“Come home.”
“Those are the two most terrifying words in the English language.” On second thought, they weren’t. “You’re fired” were worse.
50 ACTS OF KINDNESS
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