“It’s complicated,” I tell her, “and crowded.”
I cart the leftover “possibly valuable doodads” over to a little second hand shop and try to sell them to the guy in an argyle sweater vest behind the counter. I thought I could save the money I got for hocking my life’s work for a rainy day, or maybe spend it on wine.
“I can’t give you anything for these,” the guy says.
“Nothing?”
He shrugs. “They’re all used or damaged or heavily…played with.”
“But they’re perfectly good toys. This one came straight from Japan.”
“Ship ’em back,” he says. “Have them pay you in yen.”
I box all the toys up and give them to Salvation Army. What a waste. Thousands of dollars of cheap plastic crap and it all ends up in a junk shop.
I’ve also been on my cell phone with Mrs. Straubel for the last half hour, going over details and waiting for her to finish hacking up phlegm. I just told her Christopher and his boyfriend were doing my hair and makeup and she says, “Honey, we can’t have a couple of those wandering around the house, your father-in law will have business partners there.”
“A couple of what?”
“You know. Queers.”
I don’t know what to say to this. People are usually so good at hiding their horribleness.
“Mrs. Straubel,” I say, “I’m sorry but I have to go. We can finish up later.” I hang up the phone because Lana, my downstairs neighbor, is coming up the stairs. I ask her if she wants some tea and she says no thanks, she really has to run. I go pick up Mrs. Biggles from her favorite spot on the couch and snuggle her in my arms. “So you’ll take good care of her?”
“Of course,” Lana says.
“And you already know about her allergies?”
“Yep. No lactose, no wheat.”
“I can’t stand doing this, it’s just Brad’s deathly allergic to cats.”
“I know,” she says, “you told me.”
“Okay then,” I say and kiss Mrs. Biggles on the head. She feels so light in my arms, like she almost isn’t there. “You already have her pillow and her catnip toy?”
“And her ear drops and her flea collar,” Lana says. “I’m so sorry to rush, but I have a job interview. You can come visit us any time you want.”
“That’d be nice,” I say, handing my cat over to the girl from downstairs. “I’ll do that.” Lana takes the cat and gives me a small smile that doesn’t really communicate anything. Then she leaves. With my cat. They’re gone. Mrs. Biggles is gone.
I go from staring out the window to hyperventilating in record time.
“You had to do it,” Ted says on the phone. “Please don’t cry.”
“I’m a bad…bad…bad mother.”
“You’re a good mother. You found Mrs. Biggles a good home.”
“Lana is nice, ri…ri…right?” I try to catch my breath. “You’ve been bowling with her.”
“She’s very nice,” Ted says. “Great overall game scores. I’ll visit Mrs. Biggles, too. She’ll still be in your life, it’ll just be different. The same, but different.”
I thank him and say he should charge me for all these talks; he’s helped more than my therapist has. I tell him I feel better, but I don’t. We get off the phone and I watch television until late at night. I don’t answer any of Brad’s calls.
Eventually, around two in the morning, I load up my car. It’s a total of two boxes. The rest of the things in my apartment will be cleaned out by the maid service Mrs. Keller hired. The walls look stained and dirty, like this was a tenement, not a young, vibrant working girl’s oasis. I grab my purse and sassy working-girl figurine, who I seat-belt in on the front seat next to me. She’s coming with me. I pull out of the driveway, forcibly refusing to think for the last time, and I see Lana’s curtains briefly swish aside. There’s Mrs. Biggles, sitting in the window. I stare at her little outline as I drive away, until my tears blur the picture.
Be strong, be sensible, be smart.
Don’t look back.
My porcelain doll and I drive to Brad’s house on the back roads, since I’ve been drinking enough for the both of us. I get to his house and everything is quiet. Extremely quiet. Central-air-and-controlled-humidity quiet. Mechanical-blinds-and-heated-floor quiet. Like a pristine, sterile vault where women with soul seem loud. I tuck my sassy working girl in a high up cabinet in the kitchen. One Brad never opens.
They throw me a farewell party at work. I’ve always thought that the office farewell party was more of a group spanking machine than anything else. Sort of a last chance for employees to politely insult you or take a swing at your future plans. Why else do it? Because everyone really wants one more piece of sheet cake? Because the person departing forgot to get the phone number of the few people in the office they actually like? No, I think of a farewell party as your final glass-chewing assignment.
“I really expected them to make you a junior VP or something,” Big Trish says, chomping down on a bite of strawberry cake. “I mean, with you marrying into the family and everything, it’s kind of weird they didn’t. Are you going to be like what now? A housewife?” I watch her lips smack together. Who orders a strawberry cake? A person who hates whomever that cake is for, that’s who. I know Big Trish ordered this cake. I think I once told her I hated strawberry ice cream.
“She gets to live the life of leisure now,” Ted says, arms crossed, legs crossed, leaning against the refrigerator and beneath the GOOD-BYE AND GOOD LUCK! banner, the one we use for every farewell party, which has come loose at one end and sags down so it reads, GOOD-BYE AND GOOD…I resist the temptation to stand on a chair and pick the sagging end up to see if it possibly reads GOOD-BYE AND GOOD RIDDANCE!
“Just don’t stay out of the work force for too long,” Ashley says as she saunters through the door and pauses briefly over the hacked-up cake. “Once you’re out, it’s never quite so easy to get back in, is it?”
Great.
Why did she come? This is proof they’re trying to be sadomasochistic. Ashley would never voluntarily show up somewhere unless there was something in it for her. She pours herself a cup of coffee. “So what are your big plans?” she asks, looking smug.
What I really want to say to her and Big Trish is, “Well, I’ll be rich now, so I won’t be doing anything that doesn’t amuse me and I’ve always wanted to explore Fabergé egg collecting,” but I can’t because Ted’s right there and I don’t want to say anything that would hurt him.
Plus, if I said that, I’m afraid they might hear the hesitation in my voice. They might see the worry in my eyes, because even though people think marrying into a rich family would solve all your problems and give you the fabulous life you’ve always wanted, ever since I became part of the Keller clan, I’ve never had to do so many unamusing things in my life. Last week I had to go with the family to Trevor’s play and sit through a three-hour rendition of Pinocchio. I’m sorry, but having to watch a children’s play if you don’t have a child actually in the play should be classified as cruel and unusual punishment. Then we all had to go to Circus Tubs, where Trevor thought it was funny when the guy in the panda suit bopped me on the head with his big foam bamboo shoot, so the family cheered the panda on and the panda bopped me fifty times at least.
“It’s for the family,” Brad says whenever we have to do something inane, spine-numbingly boring, or creepily religious. Brunches, birthdays, barbecues, card nights—I’ve never known a family who gets together so often. It’s unnatural. I have been to twenty church services or more since we started dating, more than in the past ten years combined. I’ve spent enough time with the family’s favorite pastor, Pastor Mike, to observe he is very gay. Brad thinks this is ridiculous, he’s known Pastor Mike since he was five, and all that hugging and back rubbing, that’s just good-natured kindness. “Ha,” I tell him. “Boy, did he see you coming.”
I don’t want Ashley or anyone suspecting that I’m not in heaven, because I
am in heaven—I mean, it’s not exactly heaven, but it’s not far from it. Every relationship takes work and no couple is perfect. So what if Brad has lost his temper a few times and actually embarrassed and/or scared me? People get angry. I get angry. Hell, I launched a CD across the room at Brad like a flying circular saw and it cracked in half when it hit the wall. So I can’t be marching around telling him to stop screaming at the waiters and hiding cookies from me when we all have flaws.
Maybe that’s why I want a huge piece of this horrible strawberry cake. I haven’t had anything sweet in so long. I went on this diet and I’ve been really watching what I eat, and Brad out of love and concern is equally particular about what I eat. It’s not that he thinks I’m fat. God no. He tells me I’m beautiful all the time, but he also knows I am trying to lose weight, by my own choice, and that things like cookies and cake are too much of a temptation. He knows I make every effort to reduce calorie intake and that I am in fact getting better about splurging, which is why I will not be having any cake today!
Thank you, Big Trish, for ordering a cake I hate!
The PR girls stop in and kiss me good-bye. They all chipped in and got me a farewell coffee mug that says GOODBYE GIRL! I thank them and tell them I’ll treasure it. Then I put it by the sink, where I’ll leave it when I go. Christopher manages to break away from his visual display duties and brings me a farewell cappuccino. I tell him nothing will change, we’ll be buddies like we always were and he says sure and I say sure and we both look down at our feet.
After the party’s over and everyone wanders back to their various work stations, I clear out my desk, take what’s left of the things in my cubicle, and stuff them in a cardboard box. I can’t even bear to look at the photograph of Mrs. Biggles, whose picture I find in a bottom drawer. “Can I have it?” Ted asks.
“You want a photograph of my cat?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he says, “at least it’s something.”
I give him the photograph and my map of the world and my dictionary/thesaurus set. “Brad has a way nicer set at his house,” I say, and then I wish I hadn’t.
My cubicle looks so strange with everything gone, like it did the first day I started working at Keller’s. I was so young then, and it wasn’t that long ago. I thought this place was just a lily pad, a jumping-off spot to the next big thing. I was going to be a novelist, a travel writer, a big-time ad agency executive. Now it looks like the next big thing is never working again, which doesn’t fill me with the kind of happiness I’d expected. I’ve gotten so negative in my thinking lately. I haven’t listened to Dr. Gupta in forever.
I sit at my desk and go through my computer files one last time to see if I forgot anything. It’s nerve-wracking to leave a computer behind, you have to delete every personal e-mail, document, and computer game you downloaded. I started doing entire system scans for the words “fuck,” “shit,” “asswipe,” “bitch,” “miserable,” and “kill.” I found quite a bit of sensitive stuff that way. Ted helped me do a system reinstall, which he says will reset everything to the way it was when it was brand new. Still, I sort through my old e-mails one more time, forwarding anything I want to keep to my personal account, looking for strays I didn’t catch before. I see an e-mail from Exploding Hearts, saying it’s been awhile since I checked my account and they miss me. I’d completely forgotten about my profile; I guess now it’s time to finally cancel this stupid account forever.
I’m surprised to see an e-mail from AndyMN. Three e-mails from him actually. In the first one he apologizes for taking so long to contact me. He had some weird reaction to the food on our date, which is why he was acting kind of funny. Then he couldn’t find my number. His second e-mail is glum. He says he understands he blew it, he had his chance with me and circumstances conspired to make him muck it up. He says he’s sorry, because he thought I had the most beautiful face he’d ever seen. The third e-mail just says good-bye and good luck and if I ever want to cross paths with him again, e-mail him at his Yahoo account. He wishes me a grand life.
A grand life.
I don’t e-mail him back. At first I think I might. I even jot a few sentences down, but everything sounds stupid and fake, which it is. I close my account. It’s forever and for permanent, like everything seems to be these days. Then I put my coat on and get ready to go. I tell Ted I’ll call him tomorrow night so we can plan when we’re having dinner together and he nods. I hug him. When I’m about to let go, he hugs a little harder.
I take a last walk through the Skyway, reminding myself I can always come back; it’s not like the Skyway is going to disappear if I don’t work at Keller’s anymore. I buy a Cinnabon for old times’ sake and the Cinnabon girl says she wants to cry, I was her favorite customer.
“You’re the best,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says sadly, “I know.”
I stop into Frontier Travel, where Susan tells me to hang on while she finishes a phone call. “I’ve been waiting for you to come by,” she says, shuffling through some papers on her crowded desk, “just in case you never found that millionaire. I asked my boss in New York if he needed any regional Midwest writers and he said if I found someone here I liked, I could try them out on something small, like this right here.”
She hands me a fax. On it is a writing assignment from the Frontier Travel headquarters in New York. “It’s just a short piece about classic diners,” she says. “You’d have to drive up the North Shore and have a slice of pie or something in each one, then write up a blurb about each place. Frontier’s trying to put this Americana tour together, since everyone’s afraid to be an American traveling overseas these days.”
I frown and hand the fax back. “I did find one.”
“Pardon?”
“A millionaire husband. I mean, I’m getting married. In a few weeks.”
“Oh,” she says, and looks at the fax in her hand. “Well, couldn’t you write the story anyway? It’s travel writing. What you always wanted to do.”
I stare at the floor.
“I know it isn’t much,” she says, “but my boss is great and I know he’d give you bigger stories, like there’s this tour we’re putting together in France—”
“Sorry!” I say loudly. I feel like I’m walking around a big, dark hole, but I don’t know what the hole is. I just know I don’t want to tumble into it. “That’s so nice that you asked,” I say, “really, but with everything so busy and everything, I just, you know, I can’t.”
“Okay. Well, if you change your mind, let me know, I guess.”
“I will!” I say, backing into the safety of the Skyway.
“And congratulations,” she says. “Best of luck in your new life.”
“Thanks,” I say and then I hurry away.
I take the Keller’s chandelier-lit customer elevators up to the eighth floor because, after all, I’m not an employee now; I’m just a customer. I lock myself in a bathroom stall and then I dig out that delicious, disgusting Cinnabon and cram it into my mouth, gluey icing smearing on my face and my fingers, cinnamon chunks crumbling down my shirt and bouncing onto the tiled floor. I tear off the crusty outer folds and rip at the hot, moist inner cinnamon heart, which gives itself up like a porn star, unfolding, yielding, and giving me every horrible thing I want. This is me sitting in a public bathroom eating a Cinnabon.
Just for old time’s sake.
Christopher and Jeremy give me a “mental health day” for my wedding present and it includes a spa massage, hydrotherapy session, craniosacral skull realignment, an hour in a flotation sensory-deprivation tank, and a meditation class. I know they mean well and by the looks on their faces, it is a gift they’d love to receive. I’m learning that’s the big problem with gifts, wedding or otherwise. People give you what they themselves would love to get. It would actually work really well if people bought each other gifts and then traded back. I guarantee you, everyone would be happy.
Christopher and Jeremy, for instance, would be pleased as gay penguins to be locked inside a plastic porta-potty filled with warm water, floating there endlessly, not knowing if anyone was ever going to let them out, if it meant they would look rejuvenated afterward. Not me, thank you. I’ll do the massage and the craniosacral whatever, because I think that’s just a fancy word for head rub, and I’ll even do the meditation class, but nothing will get me to set foot inside a sensory deprivation tank. “I’m claustrophobic,” I tell them.
“Since when?” Christopher demands.
“Since I thought about someone snapping me inside a large liquid-filled Tupperware storage tub.”
“Let her do what she wants to,” Jeremy says, defending me. “It’s a gift, not a set of marching orders.” Thank God for Jeremy. Thank God for both of them, really, because the day does turn out to be fantastic. I get kneaded, exfoliated, and realigned. I have so many calming treatments that my feelings can bubble to the surface, and by the time I go to the Zen Center on Lake Calhoun, which exudes peace, tranquility, and calm, I’m ready to burst into tears. A girl with green eyes greets me at the door. “Welcome to the Zen Center,” she says. “Namaste.”
“Namma-stay to you, too,” I say having no idea what it means but trying to brush away the prickly sensation that if Mrs. Keller knew I was here, she’d inform Brad I’d joined a cult.
“First time?” she asks, smiling.
I nod.
“Well, we ask that you take off your shoes here and put them toe-first into the cubbyholes over there. Then please go to the main hall, where you can collect your meditation mat and pillow. Then you can go to the sacred center, and we do ask that you bow toward Buddha before you enter, and find yourself a comfortable place on the floor. After the meditation hour please refrain from speaking and take your mat and meditation pillow back to the hall.”
“Wow,” I say, “complicated.”
She smiles, not unkindly.
I follow her directions to the best of my abilities. I take my shoes off, get my mat and pillow, and go to the sacred center, but I’m halfway across the room of people sitting perfectly still and not speaking before I realize I didn’t bow before entering. I don’t know how seriously they take that, so I backtrack, bow, and reenter. I’m already a nervous wreck.
Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single Page 24