The Ramblers

by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

  Through the fog of her tears, she watches it all mix together. A thick pulpy froth, mauvy-green swirls. Rogue blackberry seeds dot the glass. Half-consciously, she reaches for the handle of the pitcher, yanks it off its electric base. Wide-eyed, she’s hypnotized by the mad spinning of metal blades, and she throws the pitcher. She throws it with a force she didn’t know she had, hurtling the precious and pricey Vitamix, the item she researched so carefully before purchasing, across the kitchen. It snaps against the gleaming white wall.

  The glass shatters. Shards fly everywhere. Lumpy liquid splatters like angry art and snakes quietly toward the floor.

  Smith stands frozen in place, her bare feet wreathed in shimmering glass, wondering what the hell’s happening to her.

  9:55AM

  “We did not send you to Yale to become a housekeeper.”

  The doorman at the Beresford recognizes Smith and waves her in. Over the years, she’s worked with many clients in this gorgeous prewar building and this continues to be a perk of her job: spending time in some of the most exquisite apartments in Manhattan.

  In the elevator, she presses fifteen, pops two Advil, and wills her head to stop throbbing. On the walk here, she stopped at a newsstand, bought one of those little plastic pill packages and also a vacuous tabloid featuring makeup-free celebrities on the cover. She doesn’t usually buy or read this garbage, but today she has a pass.

  Despite the epic hangover and the Asad baby bomb and her alarming kitchen outburst, Smith feels it, the tickle of anticipation and excitement that comes before she meets a new client, a continual reminder that she in fact loves what she does, that her work is meaningful. It’s not just about organization. Yes, she takes great pleasure in the physical act of sifting and sorting, it’s always brought her immense satisfaction, but it’s really about people she meets, about helping them. And it heartens her that as truly awful as this morning’s been, as tempted as she was to cancel and clear her day, she’s happy to be in this elevator, to have this opportunity to get outside of herself. If she can’t have order in her own life at the moment, at least she can help her client.

  Her phone dings in her bag and her first thought is: Tate? But no, it’s a new e-mail from her father. This is never a good thing. She reads his words, ever economical, words laced with a subtle cruelty she’s come to expect from the man. Resentment spikes swiftly inside her.

  Your mother informs me that you’ve ruined your bridesmaid dress. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but for the sake of this family, please pull yourself together for this weekend. We love you, Smith, but you must stop acting like a child. Please.

  Leave it to Thatcher to make a bad situation worse. His judgment and disapproval are as familiar to her as the Upper West Side. He wanted her to play soccer in school, but she ran cross-country. He wanted her to follow in his footsteps and go to Princeton, but she “rebelled” and chose Yale. With her impeccable undergraduate grades, she was supposed to follow him into the business world, but she dared to consider a professional path that might actually make her happy. Imagine that.

  Her choice of career continues to be a sore spot, a nasty thorn. His hurtful words still ring in her ear, an awful, belittling anthem. We did not send you to Yale to become a housekeeper. I’m not sure why you insist upon doing this to us. His condescension has persisted despite her periodic efforts to convince him (and herself ) of the importance of what she does. Even the name of her organization consulting company—The Order of Things, a reference to Foucault’s 1966 book of the same name—was conceived with him in mind, a transparent attempt to impress him, to lend some ivory-tower heft to her admittedly noncerebral work.

  She didn’t want to take his money to start her business. She wanted more than anything to refuse it, to do it entirely on her own, but she needed his help. He loves to remind her that he got her started. He loves to point to the investment as evidence of his affection, his support. But she knows better. Love is far more complicated than writing a check.

  Smith puts her phone away and Thatcher out of her mind and walks down the hall to apartment 15BC. She pauses briefly before ringing the bell. At first, there is no answer, but she notices that the door is cracked open. She slips in. The apartment is quiet but for the hum of a dishwasher in the distance. Smith drops her bag to the white marble floor, kicks off her shoes by the door.

  “Hello?” Smith calls out.

  A petite woman in yoga pants appears. She is fresh faced and smiling, her blond hair cropped short. She holds out her hand and Smith shakes it.

  “I’m Adelaide,” she says. “So nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” Smith says, taking a look around. The apartment appears tidy, but many do. The real work is most often hidden away, tucked behind closed doors.

  “I must apologize in advance for the state of this place. I haven’t stayed on top of things, particularly recently.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Smith says.

  “I’ve gathered all of his things here in the bedroom,” Adelaide says, leading Smith through an open door. “I heard about you from my mother. I think she knows your mother?”

  “Entirely possible. My mother seems to know the world. Did you grow up here too?”

  “On the Upper East. Went to Horace Mann. You?”

  “Brearley,” Smith says. “What year were you? I had some friends at Horace Mann.”

  “Nineteen ninety-seven,” Adelaide says.

  “Me too. Where’d you go for college?”

  “Wesleyan,” Adelaide says. “That’s where I met Rupert. Sophomore year. We were babies, but it all worked out. Fourteen years. Three boys.”

  Adelaide reaches for a photograph on the dresser, hands it to Smith. Three blond boys plopped in green grass. Pale blue eyes. Matching smiles.

  “I wouldn’t give up on having my girl,” Adelaide says, looking down. “We agreed to try one more time right before he got diagnosed. They are wild, my little guys, but they keep me on my toes and they are getting me through this. They are so unbelievably strong. I wish I could bottle their strength. They are holding it together far better than their mother. My hope is that if I go through some of his things and put them away, I’ll feel somewhat better. I owe it to them to start coming out of this.”

  “You’ll get there,” Smith says. “It’s a process.”

  When Smith first started her business, these were the situations that tripped her up most. She was skilled at creating order, but how was she supposed to respond to moments of vulnerability like this? What was she supposed to say? She learned, though, and it took some time, that there was no right thing to say, that more often than not, her clients just wanted to be heard.

  “I’m so sorry. For your loss.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Adelaide says, a hint of a smile crossing her face. “It always strikes me as funny when people say that—‘your loss’—and trust me, that’s what everyone says, but it’s as if I’ve misplaced my husband, as if it’s just a matter of looking around. I’m not sure there’s a better word. Anyway, given everything, the boys are doing remarkably well. They haven’t missed a beat at school. They’re keeping up with sports and their friends. It’s truly inspiring, and if not for them, I would never be hosting Thanksgiving. I didn’t even do this when Rupert was alive. I’m your prototypical city takeout queen and I’ve avoided hosting holidays like the plague, but suddenly I have this urge to invite people here. I’m probably overcompensating. I don’t know.”

  “How old are they? Your boys?”

  “Six, eight, ten. We stair-stepped them. All my husband’s idea. He didn’t want to space them out too much because he wanted us to ‘get our life back’ while we were still young. He was always this big adventurer—climbing mountains and rafting down rapids. We always planned to go to Costa Rica for our fifteenth wedding anniversary. I’m thinking it would still be nice to go, to take the boys in a few years.”

  “You should,” Smith says, but she’s snagged on the fact that t
his woman is her age and she has had an entire family—a husband and three children—and, yes, she’s young by New York City standards to have done this, but still.

  Adelaide holds up a tuxedo jacket now. “He wore this to our wedding,” she says, and Smith can almost feel the woman’s nostalgia. “Wouldn’t it be something, if the boys each wore this tux to get married? This same tuxedo that their dad wore when he married me? Is that a crazy thought? I keep doing this to myself, flashing forward to the big days, the graduations and the wedding days, and the fact that he won’t be there just kills me.”

  Adelaide’s face relaxes into a wondrous smile before the tears come.

  “That would be incredible, Adelaide, if they wore this tux. We’ll have it dry-cleaned and preserved and tuck it away in a special place.”

  A place where she cannot see it, or touch it, or sniff it, or cry on it. Over the years, Smith has come to appreciate how much of this process ends up being about thoughtful separation, about fashioning distance between people and things, people and the past. About moving things to their optimal resting places—whether a closet, a corner or Goodwill.

  Adelaide hands Smith the tuxedo and turns her attention to a pile of dress shirts. Smith holds the tux up, scans the swath of black and notices a stain on the lapel. She can’t help herself; she scratches at it with her nail.

  “Wedding cake,” Adelaide says, looking over. “Vanilla buttercream. He was always sloppy in his eating.”

  “My sister’s having vanilla buttercream, too. She started off saying she wanted something low-key like doughnuts, but now she’s picked this six-tier monstrosity. My mother had her heart set on German chocolate, but the bride won out.”

  “Oh, when’s the wedding?”

  “This weekend. At the Waldorf. My parents got married there and now my sister’s getting married there. I think it’s crazy to get married Thanksgiving weekend. It’s like adding a layer of dysfunction to dysfunction and I think it’s presumptuous to hijack a holiday, but it is what it is.”

  Adelaide chuckles. “You like the guy?”

  Smith stands now, drapes the tuxedo on the bed. “I do. He’s really . . . sweet. To be honest, I don’t feel like I know him that well, but he makes my sister happy and they seem well suited. She’s a doctor and he’s this dopey but lovable former jock who’s in finance now and they just kind of work together.”

  “That’s good. I don’t think my sisters ever loved Rup. They never said so, but I could feel it, you know? I think they believed that he tamed me or drained me of my ambition or something, that if I didn’t marry him and have our boys, I would be running Congress or curing cancer,” Adelaide says, cracking her knuckles.

  Smith stares at Adelaide’s ring, the sliver of platinum, the modest but brilliant stone.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Smith says, pointing at the ring. She tries her hardest to stay focused, but it’s hopeless. Her mind wanders to that afternoon eighteen months ago when they were lying in bed and he was holding her hand and he brought it up, not her. Let’s go shopping, he said. She didn’t have to ask what he meant.

  “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with it now,” Adelaide says. “Do I keep it on? Take it off? I suppose if I ever get back out there, I’ll put it away or wear it on a necklace or something. I can’t even fathom that, though.”

  Smith told herself that she’d get out there again right away. That she wasn’t going to be one of those pathetic souls pining away for some lost love, that she was stronger and more practical than that. She was on the other side of thirty and this was, after all, a numbers game. She wasn’t going to meet anyone moping around her apartment in her mint mask and bathrobe. She asked friends to set her up, went on a flurry of dates, most of them horrific, not, in retrospect, because the men were that bad, but because it was simply too soon and she was still trying to figure out what the fuck had happened with Asad. Her head simply wasn’t in the game. She thinks of Tate now, wonders if she’s in any better place, if she’s even ready to have a relationship.

  “I find myself wondering if I’ll get married,” Smith says, out of nowhere. Her embarrassment is swift and acute; what in the world is wrong with her? Has last night compromised her professionalism as well? She’s always careful to elicit confessions but never to give them.

  Adelaide stops what she’s doing and fixes Smith with a stare. “If that’s what you want, what you really want, don’t you think you will?”

  Smith nods. “I don’t know. I came close. I really want kids.”

  Did she really just say this? The kid thing? To a brand-new client? Her face burns as she thinks about last night. Snatches of her conversation with Tate come back. Her disclosure. His response. You made the best decision you could at the time. But was it? “Of course you want kids,” Adelaide says, grinning. “Best thing I ever did.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Smith says. “I’m not quite myself today.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Adelaide says. “I haven’t been myself in months. And it’s kind of refreshing to hear someone else talk. I feel like I’ve been so in my head and I get it, I’m grieving, and I have every right to be focused on myself and my boys, but the world goes on. There are stories other than mine. It’s good to remember this. So, thank you.”

  “Well, I’m glad I could provide a brief detour then,” Smith says, smiling, lifting a stack of shirts and resting it on the bed.

  Adelaide holds up a Chicago Cubs T-shirt. “He wore this the day Charlie was born. I can see him now, sitting in that chair in the corner of the hospital room, biting his lower lip until it was literally bloody, scared shitless about what was to come.”

  “Another keeper,” Smith says. “Another treasure. Okay, so we’ll put everything you know you want to keep here. And then everything you know you want to store here. And then we’ll put everything you want to donate here.”

  They begin emptying the closet and drawers, working in companionable silence.

  “It will happen, Smith. Marriage. Kids. You have time,” Adelaide says abruptly.

  “I know I do,” Smith says, forcing a smile, but does she really know this? She’s read all these awful articles about how much harder it is to find marriageable men in your thirties, how fertility plummets in these years.

  Time. It’s something she thinks about often. Usually as she’s lying in bed at night, alone, staring at the canopy that looms above. Where would she be in a year? Five? Ten? Twenty? Once, it was a fun, frilly exercise, to imagine what the future would hold, but recently she’s felt panicked at the thought that she might grow old alone in the apartment her parents gave her.

  In the room grow piles. Keep. Donate. Trash. Adelaide stretches her arms above her head, something like accomplishment plain on her face. Smith has done little but sit there and talk, and that’s fine. Sometimes this is how it happens. Her role is different every day; today is about being here, a warm body in a room, a reassuring voice.

  Adelaide reaches into the closet and hands Smith more shirts. “I think we can give these away. He never liked them much anyway. I was always trying to spiff him up and he humored me on occasion, but he was a T-shirt guy,” Adelaide says as they pack the dress shirts in cardboard boxes bound for Goodwill.

  “How many people are you expecting for Thanksgiving?” Smith asks.

  “My parents and his. My two sisters and their families. His brother and his family. I’ll do a buffet. It’s going to be a packed house. What about you? Any plans?”

  “My family is gathering at our place in Southampton with the groom’s family. A rehearsal dinner for the rehearsal dinner. Should be interesting.” Smith looks down at her watch and sees that their time’s up. “I’ve got to get going. Off to my sister’s final dress fitting.”

  “I’ll walk you out. Any chance you can come back next week? This was really helpful,” Adelaide says.

  Smith pulls out her phone, ashamed of her broken screen. “How’s next Thursday at ten a.m.?”

  “Perfec
t,” Adelaide says.

  Smith slips out into the hallway and exhales. She made it through the meeting without getting sick or ruining her reputation entirely. Small victories. She checks her phone, feels those pathetic flutters in her stomach.

  Nothing at all from Tate.

  1:15PM

  “Watch where you’re going.”

  The problem with living where you grew up: everything is a memory.

  The problem with being profoundly hungover: everything is depressing.

  Smith makes her way toward midtown, noting all the ways in which the world is a dismal and sinister place. She knows she’s dehydrated and exhausted and rattled by the Asad news, but her self-awareness is no elixir; it still sucks. She’d forgotten just how dreadful it is not to be firing on all cylinders, clear on things. She contemplates making a quick stop at the Apple Store to have her cracked screen looked at, but she’s not up for the swarms of people. Facing a hip young guy at the Genius Bar would be too much.

  “Watch where you’re going, lady,” a haggard-looking woman says. And this angers Smith even though maybe it shouldn’t. She is, after all, stumbling like a zombie through a thicket of people, her eyes fixed on her phone, her mind miles away.

  Oh, and fucking midtown. Predictably, a mess. The crowds are suffocating, swallow her in. She winds her way through floods of blank-faced tourists and holiday shoppers who wield big, colorful bags of stuff they don’t need.

  She arrives early at Bergdorf Goodman. As always, the place bursts with elegant objects. She takes a quick spin through bags and jewelry. The names of the featured designers are familiar, for better or worse, part of her vernacular—Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta and Céline and Goyard. She and her sister and mother have these bags, as do many of her clients. Thousands of dollars for an unremarkable tote just because of the name on it, because of the message it sends. Women swaddled in dark clothes bend over glass cases and all but salivate, drape handbags over their shoulders and pout fishlike into mirrors.