by Gwen Cooper
Looking at herself in the dress in front of the store’s three-way mirror, Laura had felt transformed. Her pale skin looked creamy and rose-tinged next to the soft peach of the dress, and her hair gleamed against the delicate fabric like jewels in a velvet case. She didn’t look like a lawyer with 150 pages of contracts to read through that night before returning to work in the morning, trudging to the subway with a shoulder bag so heavy that she was already developing back problems. She looked like someone who went whirling across polished floors before collapsing gracefully into a delicate chair with a glass of champagne and perhaps the smallest finger sandwich for refreshment.
“You should buy it,” said Josh’s voice, behind her.
“Are you crazy?” Laura whirled to face him. “Do you know how expensive …?” But her protest trailed off when she saw Josh’s face.
He looked at her as if seeing some version of herself she hadn’t met. It was a look Laura had seen sometimes on Mr. Mandelbaum’s face as he’d watched Mrs. Mandelbaum do the simplest things, like stand on her toes to pull a book from a high shelf, or pour boiling water from a kettle into a teacup. It was a half smile, stronger in the eyes than it was around the mouth. And even though Laura was very young when she’d seen it, even then she’d thought it was a smile that contained a lifetime of books and teacups, of sleepless nights next to a feverish son’s bedside and clasped hands years later at that same son’s graduation, months when the checkbook refused to balance and years of holiday dinners that were festive nonetheless. But, always, there had been this. This room. This woman.
“Marry me,” Josh said. “Will you marry me?”
He reached out to take her hand, but Laura took an instinctive step back. “Are you serious?” She felt perspiration collect beneath her arms and thought, Well, now I guess I have to buy this dress. “Do we even know each other well enough to get married?”
“I know how I feel,” Josh replied. “This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”
His voice was firm, his eyes clear as they looked into her own. He really has been thinking about it, Laura realized. A wisp of an idea curled around the edges of thought: That you never knew, truly could never know, what another person was thinking. And yet what was love if not the possibility—the promise, even—of perfect understanding?
“I’ve never been this happy with anybody else,” Josh continued, “and I can’t imagine ever being this happy with anybody else. Can you?” His hand remained outstretched. “If you can, then I have nothing else to say.”
Laura had always known that the world was made up of two types of people. There were those, like Josh (and Sarah, for that matter), who felt that life existed to be enjoyed for its own sake. It wasn’t that such people were necessarily irresponsible (Laura again thought of Sarah), but that the point of the responsibility and hard work and worrying over bills and all the rest of it was so that, in the end, you could enjoy your life. If all those things didn’t get you to the joy, then all those things didn’t matter.
And then there were those who knew that life was something to be battled and survived. If you were very careful, and if you worked very hard, you could get through it without anything truly terrible happening to you. That was the most it was reasonable to hope for.
Laura was the second type of person, but she hadn’t always been. She had been happy these few months of dating Josh, had remembered what it had felt like when she was young and any small thing—like the promise of visiting the Mandelbaums and spending long, uninterrupted hours with Honey the cat purring in her lap—had made ordinary days alive with the promise of joy to come. But she’d never really expected it to last. She’d been shoring up the happy days against the inevitable time when all she’d have left of them was the memory of what it had felt like, and the reality of struggling forward regardless.
Laura felt a stab of guilt now at the thought of saddling Josh with somebody like her for the rest of his life. But the thought, the half-suggested promise that maybe, just maybe, she could get it back somehow—that the silly songs Sarah had always listened to and sung about love and happiness and all the rest of it could be true, not just for a moment, but forever—was too much for her.
“Yes,” she’d said. She let Josh take her hand, and as he pulled her into his arms she repeated against his ear, “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
Sarah had finally met Josh, not long after their engagement, over lunch in a small East Village sandwich place. If the suddenness of their courtship had alarmed her, she’d hidden it well. She and Josh had talked music for a solid hour, and Sarah’s eyes shone in a way Laura hadn’t seen in years. For the span of that hour, Laura had seen the Sarah she remembered from childhood, the Sarah who spoke confidently and had interesting things to say. Not the Sarah of recent years, who chattered at Laura so relentlessly that calling her or going to visit felt like being taken hostage. After so many years of keeping her distance, Laura would think resentfully, it hardly seemed fair.
She had worried what Josh would think when he saw how strained her relationship with Sarah was. (Because how could anyone fail to notice how uncomfortable they were in each other’s presence?) Would he think there was something wrong with Laura? Reconsider the wisdom of entangling himself with someone whose family wasn’t as healthy as his own?
But Josh had been enthralled. “Your mom is the best,” he’d enthused afterward. “You have no idea how lucky you were, growing up with a mother who knew so much about music and cared about so many things.”
Laura had always imagined that someday, at some hazy point in the future, after she and her mother had forgiven each other for all the unforgiven things that stood between them, they would sit in Sarah’s apartment and talk across the battered kitchen table about Josh. Laura would say how falling for him had reminded her of the community pools Sarah had taken her to in the summers of her childhood, when Laura would allow herself to fall backward into the water and sink weightlessly to the bottom, the circle of sunlight reflected on the water’s surface above her expanding as she sank. That was how love felt, like sinking into light.
Sarah would smile ruefully and say something like, That’s just how it was with your father and me. And then Sarah would tell her what had gone wrong with Laura’s father. She had wanted Sarah to offer some tangible explanation that could be logically applied to Laura’s relationship with Josh, so Laura could say, Well, that’s something that would never happen to us. Sarah used to say that Laura tried to wear logic like an armor, but Laura knew that everything that had gone wrong for Sarah, and therefore for Laura, had been the result of bad logic, a willful ignorance of the basic laws of cause and effect.
She’d thought about having a discussion like this with Sarah, but whenever she’d tried opening her mouth to begin it, it had seemed to her that the inevitable pain and exhaustion, the excruciating dredging-up of things long dormant (what an attorney might call the “opportunity cost”), couldn’t possibly be worth it. Someday, perhaps, the right moment would present itself naturally.
Except that now, of course, that moment would never come.
Still, it was of some comfort to Laura that her mother had lived long enough to see her wedding. She and Josh had been married on a Thursday morning in the middle of September, in a Tribeca restaurant with only a handful of friends and family looking on. Laura was grateful they’d kept things small, as she wasn’t sure who she would have invited beyond a few co-workers. Perry in his suit and yarmulke, properly restrained and joyful for the occasion, had made her think of Mr. Mandelbaum. How he would have loved to have been at her wedding! My little ketsele a grown-up lady! he would have said.
Sarah, now forty-nine, had been as beautiful as Laura had ever seen her, still tall and elegantly slim, the lilac silk dress she wore turning her eyes a vivid shade of indigo. Laura and Josh had both been walked down the aisle by their parents, in the Jewish tradition. While they were waiting for their cue, Sarah had pulled Laura’s arm through her own.
Laura could feel it tremble. Sarah looked as though she were about to say something, but instead she looked down at Laura’s bouquet.
“I carried lilies at my wedding, too,” was all she said.
Laura heard the sound of the TV from the living room as she pushed open the door of the apartment she shared with Josh, carefully hanging her coat and stowing her bag in the front-hall closet. A bit farther down the hall, she spied Prudence. Although she was lying down, the cat’s entire body was a coil of tension. She leapt up when Laura entered, took a few steps toward her, and then, seeming uncertain, turned and started back in the direction of the living room. Laura paused to wonder at this, even as she went into the kitchen to pour the two glasses of red wine she brought into the living room where Josh sat watching the TV with fixed attention.
“Sorry it was such a late night again,” she said, dropping a kiss on his cheek and handing him a glass. “How was your day?”
Josh clicked off the television and turned to face her. Something about the abrupt silence and Josh’s expression sent a flicker of panic darting through Laura’s stomach.
“Not so great.” Josh took a deep breath and exhaled loudly through his nose. “I lost my job.”
6
Prudence
THE NEWSPAPER JOSH DROPPED ONTO THE KITCHEN FLOOR HAS turned vicious. At first I only darted into its folds to make sure there weren’t any rats or snakes trying to hide inside it (when I lived outside, I noticed them nesting in old newspapers all the time). But now it’s trying to fold itself completely over me, even when I roll onto my back and kick at it with my hind legs. So I stand, crouch down with my tail straight out for balance, and take a flying leap onto it—to show it that I’m boss. It sees how much stronger I am and slides all the way into the kitchen wall as it tries to get away, taking me along with it. But I refuse to give up the fight so easily.
The newspaper stops moving once we both hit the wall, knowing that it’s been beaten. Triumphantly, I tear a few pieces off with my teeth. Josh and Laura, who are eating breakfast at the kitchen table, are so relieved to see my victory over the newspaper—and to know for sure that there are no rats or mice or snakes hiding in it—that they burst out laughing. I return to my post by the table, rubbing my head against it and also the chair legs, so that anything else (like a rat or another vicious newspaper) that tries to get in here will know this territory is protected by a cat. Josh reaches down with one hand to pat my head, but I quickly pull back from his fingers, wrinkling my nose with distaste. He sighs and goes back to eating his breakfast.
Even though it’s a Thursday, Josh isn’t wearing his work clothes or shiny black feet-shoes. That’s because the humans at his office won’t let him go there to do work anymore. Now Josh is “working from home,” although mostly what he does is talk on the phone and exercise his fingers on the cat bed in Home Office. (Is this what humans think “working” is?) Ever since this past Friday, when Josh told Laura he lost his job, Laura has been feeding me my breakfast in the kitchen. Josh says it’s too hard to concentrate on his “work” with the smell of cat food drifting in from my room next door. Obviously, Josh doesn’t know half of all the ways his suddenly being home inconveniences me.
I was nervous at first about eating my breakfast where Josh and Laura eat theirs, because of what happened that night of the Seder dinner. But it turns out that it isn’t so bad. I’ve learned that if I gently remind them—by standing next to the kitchen counter and meowing—to let me have little bits of milk or eggs or the cheese they melt on top of bread in the toaster, I’m more likely to get to try new things. Sarah says my meows are irresistible. Actually, what she says is that some cats have meows that are almost musical, but I, sadly, am not one of them. I have a voice like a Lower East Side fishmonger, according to Sarah, and nobody can listen to that for too long before giving in. I think Sarah was afraid I would be offended whenever she called me a fishmonger, because she would always scoop me up in her arms and kiss my nose and say, Don’t worry, Prudence. I love your lovely atonal meows. I don’t know why she thought I’d be insulted, though. I’m not exactly sure what a fishmonger is, but it sounds like a wonderful thing to be.
Josh goes over to the counter now to get some more coffee, and when I meow at him he also pours a little of his coffee cream into my Prudence-bowl to mix with my breakfast. Just as I suspected would happen, Laura hardly mixes any of my old food in anymore with the “organic” food Josh buys for me. But I’m not as nervous about eating as I was that first week, and mixing the “organic” food with coffee cream makes it taste much better. Still, I use all the toes on my right paw to tilt my Prudence-bowl and spill just a little cream onto the blue rubber mat with all the cat drawings, because I hate that stupid thing.
Josh returns to the table and sits down again across from Laura, who drinks her coffee black with no cream or even sugar. I follow and rub my head against his ankle, as a reward for good behavior, and note with satisfaction that along with my scent I’ve left a few strands of my fur on the bottom of his jean leg.
“So what’s on the agenda for today?” Laura asks him.
“The usual,” Josh replies. “Phone calls, emails. And I guess it’s time for me to break the news to Abe and Zelda.”
Laura makes a sympathy-face. “Yikes.”
Josh shrugs. “I don’t think it’ll be so bad. I’ve been working since I was fifteen, and this is the first job I’ve ever lost. They’ll probably tell me I was overdue.” He sips from his coffee mug. “And I have a call with that headhunter who tried to recruit me a couple years back.”
Sarah and Anise used to talk about losing jobs. Back in The Old Days, they had something called Day Jobs, which was where they worked to get money in between doing something else called Gigs. Sarah had lots of Day Jobs, like selling fruit at a farmer’s market that traveled all over the city and made Sarah show up for work before the sun was even up, which was especially hard when Sarah’d had a Gig that lasted all night. She also waited for tables and clerked at a record store. Anise only had one Day Job, as a bartender, but she ended up having to do that same job in lots of different places. The reason they changed Day Jobs so much was because sometimes Gigs happened at the same time as Day Jobs, and if they had to choose which one to go to, Sarah and Anise always picked Gigs—even though lots of times Gigs didn’t even pay them. That’s why Sarah and Anise were Flat Broke almost all the time. Sarah finally stopped doing Day Jobs and Gigs when Laura was three and Sarah’s husband went away. That’s when she knew she really had to get serious, so she opened her own record store. By then, Anise was famous and getting Gigs all the time. She didn’t have to worry about Day Jobs after that.
It sounded like Sarah and Anise spent more time losing jobs than keeping them, so if it’s true that this is the first time Josh ever lost a job then he really has been lucky.
Laura reaches across the table to take Josh’s hand, and even though there’s a slight crease in her forehead from tension, she smiles. “Something’ll turn up,” she says softly.
“I’m not worried.” Josh is built with eyes that are turned just a little bit down and a mouth that’s turned just a little bit up, so it always looks like he’s right on the verge of being happy and also right on the verge of being sad. Now he turns the corners of his mouth all the way up until he’s smiling. But his eyes don’t smile at all.
As soon as I saw Josh last Friday, I knew that something unusual and bad had happened to him. I was napping on the cat bed in Home Office when he came home from work (inconsiderately) early. He noticed me there when he walked upstairs, and came over like he was going to shoo me off like he always does, but then he seemed to change his mind. He didn’t smell sweaty, exactly, but he smelled like he had been sweating more than he usually does—not exercise-sweaty, but scared-sweaty. He also smelled like he’d stopped somewhere before coming home for a few gulps of the evil-smelling liquid that Laura and Josh keep on a special cart in the dining room. After he left Home Office—withou
t even turning the light off the way he normally does on his way out—he went downstairs, and I heard the sound of the TV going on.
I didn’t know yet what terrible thing had happened to Josh. But the smell of something terrible having happened made me nervous. Then I thought about Laura, who was going to walk right into the apartment after work without knowing she should be on her guard. Against my better judgment (because Laura and I aren’t exactly friends after that horrible holiday dinner), I decided to wait downstairs and try to warn her. That’s what Sarah would want me to do. After all, Sarah loves Laura almost as much as she loves me.
But Josh ended up telling Laura right away what had happened, before I got a chance to convince her to approach him cautiously. He said that magazine companies everywhere were losing money, and when that happens the first thing they do is get rid of the people who work in marketing. Josh said they gutted his entire staff, which is horrible! I once saw a TV show about a human gutting a fish he caught. First he cut the fish open right up the middle, and then he pulled out all its insides and threw what was left into a big container. And even though watching that made me hungry for fish (I wish I had some fish right now), hearing that Josh’s office did the same thing to humans made all my fur stand straight up. How evil the humans at Josh’s office must be! It sounded like Josh was lucky to escape that place with his life, and it made me understand why he looked and smelled so awful when he got home. If I saw a thing like that with my own eyes, I don’t think I’d be able to sleep for at least a month.
I expected that Laura would throw her arms around Josh like in TV movies, and say something like, Thank God you’re okay! Instead, a crease appeared between her eyebrows. When she finally did put her arms around him, she was gentler than I would have thought she’d be (seeing what a narrow escape Josh had) and she said, “I’m so sorry, honey.”