Heather, the Totality

by Matthew Weiner

  When she saw that Heather, now 13, was changing, first growing taller and leaner and then her breasts beginning to develop, Karen jumped in with delighted concern and took her bra shopping, reliving her own adolescence and sharing the wisdom that these changes were indeed for the better. Behind the transparent shower curtain that served as the dressing room of Madame Olga’s brassiere boutique, they laughed like girlfriends, the foreign woman cupping and tucking Heather for a custom and indisputable fit. Karen even bought Heather a gift certificate that would allow her to buy more bras as she grew without dragging old Mom along.

  Heather was given a cell phone and allowed to stay out later and was even driven to Philadelphia to see a loud, drug-filled rock concert. Still, Karen wondered if her magnanimous anticipation of Heather’s rebellion actually triggered it because it came in a tidal wave just weeks later. Chores and phone calls were ignored, curfew was broken, makeup was stolen, and Heather’s hygiene first lapsed and then became extreme with two showers a day.

  During the next year Heather found catastrophic uses for her newly acquired power like quitting all her lessons and failing to hear her Mother’s voice so often that Karen took her to an audiologist. One night after being admonished for eating dinner with headphones around her neck, Heather calmly walked to her room and slammed the door and a silence set in. Suddenly all talk was small talk, and nothing, not the weather, not the election, not even the saltiness of the soup could be dealt with in more than one word.

  This silence created such an anxiety in Karen that even after a month of looking at her daughter’s phone while she slept, her dread could not be abated. The arrival of Heather’s period was discovered sometime later when Karen found a box of tampons under the guest room sink and realized that the tearful speech she had prepared about the future wonders of motherhood and married love had long expired, leaving her with nothing more to offer than practical advice like not to flush things down the toilet.

  Since Heather’s very first day of school, Karen would hang out at drop-off with the other moms, all in their exercise clothes debating which coffee place to go to or whether to go at all, and the bragging was constant. Even though Karen had the most to brag about, she still left these interchanges feeling inadequate and inarticulate and unarmed. She also found that if they did go to coffee or lunch, it would always be in a group and she never picked the restaurant and her attempts at leading the conversation through topic or emotion were always ignored. And although she knew that by not being there she would become the topic, and that people who bragged were expressing their own insecurities which she was bringing out in them, none of this could dispel the awful feeling that she had about being the third, fourth, or probably fifth wheel. It seemed best that she skip the whole thing and so she never ran for Parents’ Association or volunteered anything more than paper plates. Her services would clearly be unwanted and unneeded and, she anticipated, ultimately unrewarded.

  Karen’s suspicions were confirmed when right before Heather’s elementary school graduation, one of the moms invited her along for a stationary bicycle workout. As they approached the studio on 83rd Street and Third Avenue, she casually suggested that Mark and Karen underwrite the entire cost of the grad night skating party and dinner dance. She reasoned to Karen with a smile that she knew they were a busy family and that they should participate in the school in some way. After all, they didn’t want to embarrass Heather, did they? Karen made it halfway through the workout before her pulse exceeded the bicycle’s heart monitor and she left in what she eventually discovered was a full-blown panic attack.

  This new distance from Heather was unbearable alone, and even Karen’s own Mother had just laughed at it all and said Heather would be fine. So after a brief course of psychotherapy that predictably turned into an irritating discussion of her own childhood, Karen became angry and moody herself. She began to provoke her daughter with arbitrary rules and excessive punishment and withholding money and even had mock conversations where she played both parts and imitated her daughter’s monotone. Finally, one night, after Heather had been forced to cancel a sleepover because it was snowing, she appeared in the doorway of Karen’s bedroom and said, “I know you don’t want me to have friends because you don’t have any and you’re afraid I’ll abandon you,” and then walked away. Heather’s empathy had matured with the rest of her and was now incisive to the point of pain.

  Karen stopped sleeping and would lie awake alone since Mark had taken permanently to the couch. She was heartsick with memories of her little girl in their bed, sweating through a fever or sobbing in the aftermath of a bad dream or whispering to herself as her dolls navigated the terrain of the comforter. Once in Central Park, as they picked up their iced coffees at the restaurant near the sailboats, Karen dropped her purse and the contents spilled across the cement. A young French tourist couple began to help them gather the things and at that moment Heather said, “Thank you so much. My friend is a little clumsy.” Karen became so emotional that Heather blanched, fearing that she’d hurt her mother irreparably. God, Heather was so beautiful and Karen was there for her but still let her be independent and no one laughed more and thank God Heather was modest because too much attention did not make nice people. Only now did Karen realize she had reacted that way because all she had ever wanted was for Heather to be her friend.

  As much as Karen hated the loss of what had been, what she really hated was that Mark was reaping the rewards of all her hard work, exaggerating his own conflicts with their daughter when for the most part they enjoyed each other’s company and their shared interests of coffee and shopping and letting her do whatever she wanted.

  The real trouble at the Breakstones’ started when a hedge fund manager with a wife and two sons bought the penthouse. They planned to gut the unit and offered their new neighbors a 6-month reduction in fees if they could run a chute from their future kitchen down to a dumpster during demolition. The usually obstructionist building board offered a compromise to their newest, most generous occupant and the hedge fund manager agreed to take advantage of this moment of inconvenience to personally refurbish the entire building’s exterior as well. There was both jealousy and suspicion in the elevators, but within weeks, scaffolding cloaked the whole edifice and all but a few families chose to relocate.

  Mark knew that Karen would be most affected by daytime construction but his suggestion of a furnished sublet in the Carlyle House revealed that Karen was clearly not interested in such a drastic though temporary change and was overwhelmed by even having to redirect the mail. So they stayed in the building with the option of leaving if the interruptions of water and power or the constant noise became too much of a hardship. Heather did not have a vote but they deluded themselves that they would sacrifice their comfort so that she could have the consistency of life essential to teenage well-being.

  The beauty of autumn in New York was not lost on Mark although soon it became evident that this fall would be as bleak as the longest February. The day after Labor Day he received a discouraging memo regarding year-end bonuses, and then a week later the construction battle was fought and lost. The worst of it was that Heather had begun ninth grade by enthusiastically joining the debate team, and her afternoons and weekends were occupied by practices and tournaments, sometimes out of town.

  She was good at it and was becoming political and argumentative even though her natural charm made everything she said seem reasonable. She was still good-natured and talkative with him but completely obsessed and he hated that her coffee was taken to go in the expensive thermos Karen bought her and that she traveled to Buffalo and Chicago and Dallas on commuter planes. Most of all he hated that there were hotel overnights with co-ed carousing, every team trip marked by some incident, never involving Heather, but older girls, alcohol and room-hopping.

  Heather assured him that she was still irritated by boys and preferred her girls’ school where no one had to hide that they were smart or ambitious to get a boyfriend and M
ark realized that all of Heather’s thoughts were deeply reasoned and presented as positions to be defended. He started reading the newspaper to keep up with her since his opinions were often dated and based on statistics long since disproved. He loved their new intellectual engagements, no matter how hotly argued, because he was often truly humbled by her logic and proud that a girl raised in that world, at those schools, could have such deep economic empathy.

  The only subject off-limits was the building, because Heather was excited by the changes but Mark was angry at the disaster of noise and dust, believing it to be his fault. He had brought the construction on all of them by never making enough money to buy the penthouse himself or, more importantly, failing to earn his way to 5th Avenue where there were no such problems and you could look out on Central Park and remember only the pleasures of childhood.

  Two weeks into construction Karen began planning for Heather’s fourteenth birthday, which included many unnecessary trips to various bakeries and restaurants for firsthand inspection. Upon making reservations at two different spots, she texted her daughter to ask if she preferred French or Italian for her birthday dinner. A few minutes passed and Karen realized that she wasn’t going to get an answer for a long time and she began walking down Lexington Avenue at a brisk pace composing other texts in her head about how she had made a reservation for four so that a friend could join and how they couldn’t eat at the house because of the dust and how she didn’t want to celebrate anything in there and what else could she say, it was Heather’s goddamn birthday, was Heather coming to dinner or not?

  When Karen burst into the apartment, the extreme heat sent from the basement had not been adjusted for the unseasonably warm weather, and she quickly ran to the kitchen, where she had closed the window because of the noise, and opened it wide, vowing never to close it again. The kitchen was still bright, too close to the next building for scaffolding, and as Karen caught her breath, she lingered in the low window, her hands on the narrow sill, looking down at the ten-story fall, contemplating the dramatic possibilities for permanent change.

  She recognized the panic and after taking two antihistamines with a glass of white wine she sat at the kitchen table and made the second list of her life, one column labeled “Reasons for Being,” the other “Reasons for Not.” Could Heather still be at the top of the positives? Somehow clarity slipped in and Karen began to carefully consider other paths to purpose, including returning to work in publicity or getting plastic surgery to lift her breasts and her eyes. She knew that these were good enough plans to get her through Heather’s adolescence and that an attitude of independence, no matter how false, would serve her well when her daughter had matured and come back to her. She also knew as she studied the paper that Mark was absent as a reason for anything.

  Upon leaving Harrison, Bobby had close to 1,200 dollars, some from the government death benefit and some from a collection made at the lumberyard as a condolence for his poor Mother. With the aid of his Parole Officer, Bobby looked for new work in a different place and ended up in a long-term motel in North Bergen near the area called Routes 1 and 9. It was a good place for picking up work since it was a federal highway with no tolls and emptied out near the Holland Tunnel, turning the whole strip into a run-down garage and toolshed for New York City. He took the advice of the clerk who rejected his application at the home store and stood in the parking lot with the men and boys who waited for any one of a series of trucks to pick them up for 50-dollar-a-day work. Being young and strong was not enough to guarantee being selected so he began to imitate the Mexicans who smiled gratefully even though they weren’t happy and never shared their morning beers and spoke Spanish in front of him like he wasn’t there.

  Lining up every day including weekends meant that Bobby started to work regularly and save money and also that he could perhaps be a permanent part of a Manhattan crew. He had not spent much time there outside of class trips and the circus and was excited by the commute from the moment the city came into view in the distance to when they made the turn uptown out of the tunnel and he suddenly saw the huge buildings up close. The city was so organized, so perfectly blocked in rows, every steel box filled with a glass box; even the cars were mostly black and square and the same. Bobby’s favorite part was after they passed the leafy park with the cops on horseback and they could pick up enough speed so he could feel the rhythm between streets as they crossed avenues with quick blasts of sky.

  On the sidewalks though, Bobby felt nervous and watched so many people pass without eye contact that it recalled his first weeks in prison. Adding to his discomfort were the smells, not the diesel or garbage but the constant waft of human odor, as seemingly all strangers’ skin and breath reeked of onions and vomit. The constant foot traffic and general chaos of the new job site made it impossible for Bobby to avoid interactions with these aromas as old ladies breathed dumb questions in his face while they held plastic bags full of warm dog shit. He was often so sick from the stench of mothballs and human rot that he would hide in the gutted top-floor apartment, usually above the deck, so he could be alone with the view and the tarpaper fumes.

  It was from his rooftop spot in the late afternoon that Bobby first caught the faint traces of a scent that made him drop his coffee and inhale. His nose and lungs filled with a mix of cigarettes, soap and blood that exploded from a tall skinny girl talking on her phone, smoke curling around her shoulder-length light brown hair as if she were on fire. For someone else it would have seemed that time had stopped, but Bobby had no concept of time so things were either interesting or boring and when it came to people, either threatening or arousing.

  He watched her knowing she thought she was alone on the roof as she unrolled the waist of her plaid skirt to cover more of her soft thighs and chomped on mints to prepare for her return to the building. Bobby looked at the girl and felt a yearning so powerful he thought he might faint or ejaculate.

  The truck left right at five o’clock that night which meant he wouldn’t see the girl again that day, but it hadn’t been hard to figure out who she was since there were only two or three families still living in the building and the mail was stacked on a table in the demolished lobby. She was named Karen or Heather Breakstone, lived on the tenth floor, and loved catalogues and magazines with perfume in them.

  Bobby spent the ride back emotional, cursing himself for not taking a picture on his phone while trying to rebuild her face and body in his mind and when he arrived home he searched for a picture of any girl he could imagine to be her. The closest he could find was a cheerleader in a porno but she didn’t have those perfect tits or long plump thighs cut by her plaid skirt or little hairs on her cheek that looked like she was sprayed with gold dust in the sunshine.

  Bobby had enjoyed no release when he killed his Mother. He had just let her go, his actions so practical and steady that even setting her house on fire hadn’t given him satisfaction. His urges had been denied so long that they now grew into a low hum of need, constant in his body like a spring was being stretched through his limbs.

  A glimpse of the girl was all he wanted each day or all he was allowed because eye contact was forbidden with the tenants, especially for Bobby, whom they had been told had a record. He got by at first by looking at her in a piece of discarded mirror and then used it cleverly he thought, to take pictures and some video on his phone, but this was still dangerous and he refused to jeopardize this job in any way for fear of not seeing her at all. He started to observe her by smell, breathing the perfume mist that lingered outside their apartment door and in their garbage, her garbage in particular, with its cotton balls, Q-tips and other things ripe with the aroma of iron. He knew he could never risk entering the apartment but sometimes ate lunch on the scaffold outside her bedroom looking in at the real-life setting for his increasingly specific ideas.

  He tried to be calm as he learned the habits, routines and schedule of what he realized was a small family. The girl’s Mother and Father, the Doormen
, her friends and even the Construction Foreman seemed to arrange their lives around her presence the way Bobby did. People waited for her or tagged along with her for a block and everyone always paused to watch her walk away. He saw everything like a soap opera in the corner of his eye, the girl’s nature becoming clearer even from a distance because the family lived so much of their lives in the street.

  Heather, as Bobby now called her in his head after discovering a shiny square envelope from something called the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation addressed to Mrs. Karen Breakstone, was clever with people the way he was, especially her parents; flirting with the baby-faced Father and strong with the heavy-breasted Mother. But he noticed Heather was very different from him at all other times, laughing and confident, kind to her little fat friends, talking only nicely on her phone and even crumbling the remains of her muffin on the sidewalk for the birds. She was radiant with life even when she was alone, or thought she was.

  Of course a glimpse of her was never enough and luckily as the days got colder her goose-pimpled legs were often covered in sweatpants that were loose at her waist and one day, as she paused by the awning, they revealed the top of her baby blue panties when she bent over. Bobby saw this from the dumpster by the curb but did not have time to take out his phone. It didn’t matter because somehow, as if he had willed it, when Heather ran across the street to join the Father she shot a tiny look back to Bobby and their eyes met for a moment and as all the city sounds fell out of the sky to silence, he tried to remember how to smile.