That's Not a Thing

by Jacqueline Friedland

  “It’s fine. I’ll stay gone until noon.”

  I put the oatmeal in the microwave and press a few buttons. I then take five steps away from the machine, a habit I developed as a kid when my mother convinced me that standing too close to a working microwave could cause sudden death. I almost want to laugh now, thinking of all the ways people try to protect themselves from harm, and then these cruel diseases strike at random, paying no heed to the merits of the person they attack.

  “Yeah, I have to go to my office. I’m theoretically working for the next two weeks, even though they won’t let me see any privileged material anymore, which means I see nothing and do nothing.” The microwave beeps, and I set Wesley’s oatmeal down on the small table in the corner, along with a spoon. “I’m just going to show my face for a minute. I guess I’ll clear out a few things from my office.”

  Wesley pulls his chair into the open spot at the table and picks up the spoon. He looks at me expectantly, like he wonders if I’m going to say more, and it dawns on me that he might not want me to watch him eat.

  “In the meantime,” I add, “excuse me for a sec while I go call Gladys.” I grab my papers and head to the bedroom. I push the door closed behind me as the phone at Aaron’s parents’ house rings. I don’t want Wesley to hear if I start crying.

  “Hello?” I hear Gladys’s loud voice shouting into the phone, the way she always answers a call, like she is surprised the phone has rung at all.

  “Hi, Gladys. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “Meredith? No, of course not.” I can hear her snort on the other end, her morning lark’s pride apparently offended.

  “Listen, we need to talk,” I start, lowering myself onto the corner of the bed, feeling small.

  “I know why you’re calling, sweetie, and let me save you the trouble.” Her tone is not unkind.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, you really got to me yesterday, with your big puppy-dog eyes and your pleas on Aaron’s behalf. So, fine, I fold.”

  “You’re going to tell him?” I ask, relief flooding my limbs.

  “No, of course not.” Gladys is curt. “But I’m going to do the chemo.”

  “Oh.” Well, that’s definitely better than nothing. I know that Aaron would want her to do everything to try to beat this, even if the odds are against her.

  “Well, good,” I say. “Good.” I repeat, processing. “Where? When?”

  “Easy, Fido.” She laughs her big laugh, and I wonder how she can possibly be in such good spirits. “I still don’t want you telling Aaron. We’re clear, yes?”

  “I won’t tell him. But I won’t stop telling you to tell him.” I stand again and walk toward the windows, looking down into Gramercy Park, eight flights below. There are a couple of women pushing strollers along the path, a man walking a poodle.

  “Whatever. That, I can put up with.”

  “When is the treatment? Can I come sit with you?”

  “Oh, honey, that’s sweet. Mitch and I would be delighted for the company, I’m sure. It’s at NYU.”

  I feel a little guilty at the weight of my relief, not because Gladys is getting chemo, but because I don’t have to return to Sloan and relive all those memories of my mom being on what I thought was her deathbed, my dad leaving us, etc. etc.

  “I expect to start next week,” she adds.

  A second wave of relief washes over me as I process what she has said. She is going to get treatment, to take care of herself the way Aaron would want her to.

  “Send me the time when you know it and I’ll meet you guys there, okay?”

  My relationship with Aaron may truly be over, but that won’t stop me from doing right by his mom, from being there for her when she won’t let her son be by her side. I’m doing it for Aaron but also for Gladys—another woman who I thought was going to be my mother-in-law.

  I walk out of my room feeling a little lighter. Even if Gladys’s odds of survival are not generous, at least she isn’t giving up. It reminds me that I shouldn’t give up, either.

  Wesley is no longer in the kitchen but has moved over to the TV, where he’s watching the news, footage of a small brick building on fire, firemen with hoses.

  “You’re just going to watch TV all morning until Lulu gets here?”

  “Yeah, you inspired me with that Jon Favreau movie the other day. I just found another chef movie, with Bradley Cooper.”

  “You’ve never seen Burnt?” I ask in disbelief. I actually walked out of the theater when I went to see it a few years ago with my law school friend Nikki. The smoldering, complicated chef character reminded me too much of Wesley. “Well, no time like the present.” I try to sound upbeat, sorry to see him stuck in front of the TV on a sunny summer day. But at least he will get out for a bit when his cousin arrives. When Aaron will be at the apartment. My stomach sinks at the thought. I wonder if I should leave Aaron a note on the bed or something, but I can’t think what I could write that might do anything other than irritate him.

  I grab my messenger bag and head for the door, forcing myself out before I concoct a reason to be here when Aaron arrives.

  “Off I go to my office, where I’ll be busy not working,” I call lightly over my shoulder to Wesley.

  “Okay. I’ll be just as busy not cooking,” he calls back with a smile. “See ya,” he adds, as he turns back toward the screen, and I feel like he and I have reached a new place. More than a détente. An actual friendship. A shame it will be a finite experience for us both.

  WORK IS AS slow as I expected. Everyone seems to know that I quit in the midst of a tantrum, and I’ve become something of a pariah. Partners look at me with hasty disapproval as I pass them in the hallway and younger associates, whom I might formerly have called peers or colleagues, are shunning me, as though they’re afraid they might catch whatever social conscience has recently infected me. Either that or they’re worried they might tarnish their images by consorting with me. The good news is that, with the exception of Ian and Darren, who I know approve of my decision, there’s not a single person from this office whom I will miss following my departure.

  I settle in at my desk and use the idle time to search for new jobs online. After looking at websites for the ADL, the EPA, the PLI, the ABA, and even the FBI, I feel completely overwhelmed. I don’t have a career dream, some professional goal I’ve always fantasized about achieving, and I hate myself for that lack of passion. Aaron and Lana and even my brother, the tax attorney–math geek, have all known what they wanted to do with their lives since they were kids. All I wanted back then was to be a unicorn. At this point, there is only one stagnant motivational kernel that I can latch on to—one that I’ve always felt, but which, sadly, is useless in its current, amorphous state. My goal is simply to spend my days helping people in one way or another. Or to work as a backup dancer in pop music videos. Since I’ve always been somewhat clumsy and the dancing thing isn’t going to pan out, I try to make a more directed plan for how I will find my next job.

  I open my desk drawer and pull out one of many blank notepads, the empty sheets of paper emphasizing how little I have achieved in my time at this office. I will do better in my next position, find something where I am more than another cog in the wheel, somewhere I can perhaps become essential.

  As I arrange highlighters next to the notepaper, readying to make a chart, some basic method of organizing my thoughts and options, Nicola breezes into the office and snorts when she sees me. “Doing art projects until your two weeks expire?” she snarks.

  “Wow, Heather,” I respond, referencing the ’80s movie in which Winona Rider is the bitchiest of all high school bitches, “nice to see you, too.”

  “Nicola,” she says, confused.

  Of course she wouldn’t get it.

  “Never mind. I’m sure you’ll enjoy having your own office once I’m gone.”

  “I would have, but they’re putting a first-year in here after you go,” she whines at me as she slumps into her chair,
as though she expects me to comfort her.

  “Well, look,” I start, my instinct to console kicking in in spite of myself, “it can’t be any worse than being with me, right?”

  “Ha.” She looks at my almost fondly, her round cheeks turning slightly pink. “So true. Always carrying on about your pro bono case like that’s the only one you ever cared about.” She switches into a high-pitched voice that I presume is meant as an imitation of me, “Asylum, asylum, asylum. All I want to work on is asylum.”

  I have a split second of anger, offense at her taunting, before I have an epiphany. Oh my God. She’s a genius! All I want to work on is asylum. I want to work on asylum cases all the time.

  I tune Nicola out as I turn back to my computer and start searching anew. She makes a few more comments, but when I don’t respond, she leaves the office again. I imagine she is returning to a meeting somewhere else in the building, but who knows. I find website after website dedicated to organizations that help refugees seek asylum in the United States. I don’t think I should be emailing these places from my computer at Harrison, Whittaker, so I just start printing out information on the different opportunities while my heart races with excitement about the possibilities. More than an hour passes, and I amass a pile of twelve different agencies and organizations that I’m going to pursue.

  Liam pops in, his eyeglasses perched crookedly on top of his head, and asks if I want to grab lunch.

  “Nah,” I tell him. “I’m working on a new project. Check it out,” I say, holding up the top sheet from my pile of printouts.

  He reads the page for a moment before regarding me with a proud grimace. While I wait for him to respond, I notice that he’s looking a little thinner, that the Atkins seems to be making a difference after all.

  “Now, this,” he says, looking up with avuncular pride on his alabaster face, “this makes sense for you. I could see you being really happy at a place like this. Not that we won’t miss you here—the sane ones of us, at least.”

  I smile at him as he leaves and then glance at my desk clock. It’s 12:30 p.m. By now, Aaron has probably been to the apartment, gathered what he needed, and left. I want to call him and tell him about my new career goals, the refugee centers I’ve found—the Refugee and Immigrant Fund’s Asylum Support Group, the International Rescue Committee, the Center for Human Rights at Weill Cornell—names that I had seen and glossed over when I was working on Moe’s case because they weren’t completely germane to what I needed at that moment, but now they seem to be everything.

  I may be the ultimate failure in the romance department, but at least I am beginning to feel like there’s hope for getting one aspect of my life back in order.

  I hear my phone vibrating and take it out from my leather tote. My mom. Again. I press IGNORE and toss the phone back into my bag. I know that once we speak, we’ll have to start calling all the wedding vendors to cancel everything. At least this time around I insisted on paying all the deposits with my own money, so I haven’t screwed my parents in that regard. Even so, I’m just not ready yet to begin the excruciating process of dismantling my second romantic future.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  June 2017

  The room where Gladys is receiving her chemo-therapy treatment is at the end of a long hallway swathed in fluorescent light. It’s midday, and I know she’s been here with Mitch since early this morning, completing paperwork and some additional testing.

  I knock lightly and then push the door open cautiously.

  “Hey, sweetie.” Gladys’s face lights up. She’s not lying in a hospital bed, as I expected, but is sitting in a large recliner chair, an IV attached to her arm. Her suede purse is still in her lap, like she might get up and leave at any minute. Mitch is on the patient exam table beside her, resting his back against the wall and balancing an iPad on his lap. Gladys’s red hair is in a cute little pony-tail at the top of her head that makes her look younger than she is, and her makeup is as meticulously applied as ever. I wonder whether this is all a facade, meant to hide the effects of her symptoms, or if she actually feels as good as she looks.

  “Come, sit.” She motions at one of the two chairs against the wall opposite her seat as Mitch hoists himself off the exam table. He gives me a quick kiss on the cheek, and I catch the scent of Liquitex paste, the glue he uses for his architectural models. I imagine him at home, worrying about Gladys and tinkering with his mini-replicas of the Freedom Tower or the Ryugyong Hotel into the wee hours of the morning.

  “I’m going to grab bagels,” he says, looking at me. “An everything with lox and low-fat veggie cream cheese, right?”

  His questions hits me like a full-fingered slap. To think we would have been family, that this tall, soft-spoken man who remembers how I take my bagel would have been a second father to me.

  “Yup. Thanks.” I look away quickly, glancing down at my silver sandals as I force myself to think of Gladys today, not myself. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat while watching poison pump into her veins, but I obviously can’t say as much.

  When Mitch leaves, I lower myself into the black plastic chair across from Gladys. “So, how’s it been going so far?”

  “Fine, now.” She scratches a little at her chest, her manicured nails creating red lines across her freckles and age spots.

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Oh, it was nothing.” She blinks twice in rapid succession, and I can tell there is something she’s not saying.

  “More bad news?” I hold my breath, wondering how her news could get any worse, what that would look like.

  “No, really, it was just an allergic reaction to the first bag of medicine. They switched it out, though, and I’m fine now. Mitch noticed I was getting red welts on my face. All I felt was some heat, itching on the chest. It’s fine,” she repeats.

  The way she keeps looking toward her lap says that really, it’s not fine, that it was frightening, but she doesn’t want to discuss it anymore.

  “So, um, I quit my job?” It comes out as a question, and I realize I’m anxious to know her opinion, worried she’ll be disappointed in me, that I’m not on the same kind of ascending trajectory as her superstar son.

  “I heard.” She smiles as though she’s proud. She doesn’t ask why I haven’t mentioned it sooner. “Aaron was really happy for you.”

  “He told you?”

  “Last night.” She shifts in her seat, like she didn’t mean to bring him into the conversation.

  “I think we’re really finished, Aaron and I,” I say.

  She’s quiet for a moment as she fiddles with the fringe on her navy purse. “It’s hard for him,” she says gently. “His world may simply be too cut-and-dried to allow for the shades of gray that you explored. I asked him what exactly he thought was going to happen when you moved your ex into the room across the hall. Of course the situation spun out of his control. There are worse things in life than kisses, than a little ambiguity, but he didn’t want to hear it.” She sighs. “You’ve betrayed his trust.” She’s not argumentative, just remarking.

  What did he think was going to happen? I suddenly wonder. What possessed Aaron to insist on inviting Wesley into our apartment after I retracted the suggestion? As I pull and stretch the question that Gladys has asked, turning it this way and that, trying to consider what Aaron might have imagined, I suddenly realize that it was a test; the whole crazy living arrangement was engineered by Aaron, and it was a test—a test that I failed. He was already skeptical about my feelings for Wesley back in May, back when he encouraged me to visit Wesley at the restaurant, when he then co-opted my idea about living together. He was giving me an opportunity to prove my commitment to our future, and what I verified instead were my lingering feelings for Wesley. I should have realized that Aaron, a man who always needs to be in control, a man who thinks through his every move, was not relinquishing control of anything by luring Wesley into the apartment. No, he was creating a deliberately constructed experiment, and by j
umping into Wesley’s lap, I proved his hypothesis. Heartbreak is simply a by product of the results he obtained. I want to be angry that he set me up, but I’m the one who failed the test.

  “I guess I’m going to have to live with this outcome for the rest of my life,” I finally answer, as I tilt my head back toward the ceiling and try to prevent too much emotion from slipping forth.

  “Oh, honey,” she says, and I realize how pathetic I must seem, stalking my ex-fiancé’s sick mother and complaining about my failed relationship.

  “You’ll find someone,” she tells me, and I think if she’d been sitting closer to me, she might as well have bumped my chin up with an encouraging nudge of her fist.

  The fact that she believes Aaron really isn’t coming back causes actual physical pain in a part of my body that I can’t pinpoint. I thought I had started moving on to acceptance of my failure, but the disappointment I feel at her words tells me I was still secretly harboring hope. I attempt to let the truth sink in, to bask in the epic proportions of my errors, as Gladys continues talking.

  “It’s obvious that young men like you plenty. You’ll have men banging down your door in no time—you’ll see. You’re what the teenagers call a ‘dick magnet.’”

  “Gladys!” I laugh at her uncharacteristic profanity.

  “What?” Her cheeks pink up as she shrugs, only a little sheepish. “My friend Myrna taught me that. Her daughters, you know.” She waves her hand in the air dismissively. “So, tell me about the job hunt.”

  I force myself to switch gears, to push my sorrow into a different mental corridor, like kicking dirty clothing under the bed to deal with at a later time. I start telling Gladys about the refugee organizations that I’ve been contacting, and she asks a flurry of excited questions.

  Before I know it, Mitch is back in the room with our bagels. I hold mine on my lap, wrapped in its white, waxy paper, as I continue explaining the missions of the different organizations to Gladys and now Mitch, too. The smell of fresh lox and toasted bread reaches my nose and my appetite is back, despite my emotions.