Some Nerve

by Jane Heller

  I nodded. “I’m sorry. So very sorry.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what else you are!”

  I clutched the arms of the chair, bracing myself for the inevitable.

  “You’re fired!”

  No, it wasn’t a surprise, obviously. I would have fired me too. I wasn’t someone my boss could depend on.

  “I doubt it’ll make any difference to you,” I said after swallowing hard, “but I tried every way I knew how to get rid of my phobia in time for the interview. I did hypnosis, deep body work, virtual reality therapy, but none of that helped. I was supposed to meet Goddard in the pilots’ lounge, and I didn’t show up.” I swallowed again, feeling sort of emboldened that he’d been silent for half a second. “I just want to assure you that this isn’t about me being irresponsible or lackadaisical or even the least bit flaky,” I continued. “I could still do a hell of a job for you and this magazine, Harvey. If you’d reconsider.”

  He didn’t say anything for an entire minute, and I didn’t know what to make of it. A quiet, contemplative Harvey was a rare occurrence, almost as intimidating as the shouting, combustible Harvey. His expression was blank too. He looked at me without moving a muscle, a poker face. “You should have told me all this when Goddard set the location for the interview,” he said finally, in a voice that seemed more disappointed than angry. “I would have put somebody else on the case.”

  “You’re right,” I acknowledged. “But I really wanted to prove to you that I was up to it, that I was the killer you keep talking about, that I would do whatever was necessary to get the story.”

  “That didn’t happen,” he said. “You’re not a killer and you didn’t get the story.” He started pacing around his office, and I anticipated the breakage of his various artifacts. But he surprised me by remaining calm, without any arm flailing, and turned to meet my gaze. “Look, you’re a nice person, Ann. We’ve established that. And you write better than plenty of the hacks around here. Why don’t you go back to that little town in Mississippi and get your head together—”

  “Missouri,” I corrected him. “Middletown, Missouri.”

  “Missouri,” he said unapologetically. “They have a local paper in the town, right? Probably even a magazine. With your experience, they’ll grab you in a heartbeat.”

  “And I would—what?—interview bank presidents? Mall managers? High school drama teachers?” I heaved a disconsolate sigh. “I don’t want to go home, Harvey. I came to L.A. because an entertainment journalist is all I’ve ever wanted to be.” I pictured my old bedroom, off the kitchen of my family’s ranch house. The walls were plastered with photos of movie stars that I’d clipped from magazines just like Famous. “There’s an electricity in Hollywood. Things happen here. The biggest thing that happened in Middletown recently was that a cat jumped out of its owner’s minivan and ran away, and it took the cops three whole days to find it. Oh, and a kid came in fourteenth in the national spelling bee.” I gave him a pleading look. “Please don’t send me back to that.”

  He shrugged. “You could try landing with another magazine here, but it wouldn’t be worth the effort,” he said. “Once the Malcolm Goddard fiasco gets out, they won’t return your calls.”

  The Malcolm Goddard fiasco had already gotten out, thanks to my performance earlier that morning.

  “I hate to say it, but you’re toast in this town, Ann.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, and the small gesture of kindness, so out of character for him, made me realize how pathetic I must have seemed. “Go home, chill for a while, get it together. Then who knows, huh?”

  “Who knows?” I repeated, my spirits lifting a tiny bit. “Are you saying there’s a chance you’d hire me back?”

  He removed his hand and walked toward the door, opening it to let me out. “Listen, if I’m still running this rag and you can show me what you’re made of, anything’s possible.”

  Wow. So he might take me back. All I had to do was grow a spine. And maybe Middletown was just the place to do it. I could pull myself together in the peace and quiet and moral rectitude of the Midwest and return to L.A. as a totally fearless, ready-for-anything killer journalist—if I didn’t die of boredom first.

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  “How old were you when you first realized that you wanted to be a chimney sweep?” I asked a twentyish man named Bud Goober, who was wearing bib overalls and had extraordinarily long, soot-encrusted fingernails. We were sitting in a Naugahyde booth at Kyle’s drugstore, a pharmacy and soda fountain located on Middletown’s main drag, at the intersection that boasted our lone traffic light. I was interviewing him for the local paper, the Town Crier (everybody called it the Crier for short). Bud had just won a John Deere lawn tractor—the zero-turn, SST-15 model—in a sweepstakes sponsored by Middletown Lumber and Lawn. He was, therefore, a celebrity, and I, newly hired by the Crier as a freelancer, had been given the plum assignment of bringing his story to our readers. He was a big get, relatively speaking. My first one since leaving L.A. two weeks ago.

  “Gosh, I dunno,” said Bud, as my tape recorder continued to pick up the long silences between his answers. “I guess I was about ten. My daddy is a chimney sweep and his daddy is a chimney sweep and his daddy is a chimney sweep too. Never thought about being anything else.”

  “Very interesting,” I said, nodding. “So you’re carrying on the family tradition.” No, he wasn’t carrying it on in the manner of, say, Drew Barrymore, but actors were not my beat for this temporary gig of mine, and I was okay with that. I just needed to fill the time while I pulled my life together and got over my panic and phobia disorder, just needed to keep my writing and interviewing skills sharp for my return to Famous.

  Still, leaving L.A. was a downer and I’d done my share of sobbing. I’d sobbed arranging for my garage sale, sobbed clearing out of my apartment, sobbed saying good-bye to Tuscany and James. But the sobbing had really kicked in during the trip across the country. Somewhere in Kansas, I’d run out of tissues and was forced to blow my nose into my AAA map.

  I’d also managed to block out the fact that it was winter in Missouri, which didn’t help matters. When I’d reached the outskirts of Middletown on February nineteenth, the weather was as grim as my mood—28 degrees and snowing.

  And then there was the cultural disparity between L.A. and Middletown. The closest thing to an arts festival in our little hamlet of five thousand people was the county fair in July with its demolition derby, mud marathon, and horse-and-mule show. Moving home was an adjustment for me, in other words. I hadn’t had a full-blown anxiety attack since I’d arrived on my mother’s doorstep, not like the one at the Santa Monica airport, but I was still fighting off moments of out-of-the-blue sweating and light-headedness and palpitations—moments of low-grade fear that were so hard to anticipate and even harder to ignore.

  “HOW OLD WERE you when you first realized that you wanted to be a retailer of women’s intimate apparel?” I asked Betty Nettles, the forty-year-old owner of Bettina’s Fancy, Middletown’s answer to Victoria’s Secret. Her idea of sexy lingerie was a pair of tube socks, but she was my second profile for the Crier, following the one on Bud Goober the week before. The occasion was the grand opening of her shop, which was located between the ribs joint and the tanning/hair salon.

  “I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I started watching Oprah,” Betty said, winking at me. “She taught me the value of lifting women up.” She started laughing hysterically and pointing at all the bras hanging on a nearby rack. She was laughing so hard she could hardly catch her breath. “I’m lifting them up all right, aren’t I? Lifting and separating.”

  “You are,” I said, shutting off my tape recorder and wondering if interviewing people for the Crier was really such a hot idea. Yes, I was keeping my hand in, but I’d be lying if I said I was fully engaged.

  OVER THE NEXT month, I interviewed a girl who trained her parrot to recite passages from her favorite Harry Po
tter book, a man who built a snow figure on his front yard that vaguely resembled the Virgin Mary, and a woman who peeled so many carrots at one sitting that her palms turned orange permanently. Yes, I tried to bring out the best in all the people I interviewed, but my eyes crossed whenever I’d actually have to write up these stories. I’d sit with my laptop at the Caffeine Scene, Middletown’s answer to Starbucks, where every table offered Internet access along with a cup of joe, and dwell on how much I missed my old life. Eventually, I’d snap out of my funk, force myself to make the profiles as entertaining as possible, and e-mail them to the Crier. I kept reminding myself that I wasn’t there for excitement. I was there to get my head together.

  And then something happened that not only broke the monotony but changed the course of events in ways I could never have imagined. An understatement, as you’ll see.

  It all started when the Crier assigned me a profile of Richie Grossman, a former classmate of mine from elementary school through high school, not to mention the only other Jewish kid in town.

  “So, Richie, how old were you when you first realized that you wanted to be a doctor?” I said as I sat in his cushy corner office at Heartland General, the hospital that served the residents of north-central and northwest Missouri, as well as metropolitan Kansas City. It was the largest employer in the area, and Richie had just been named assistant chief of staff, the youngest one they’d ever had.

  “People call me Richard, now that I’m a big boy,” he said with a chuckle, fingering his bow tie. “And I was ten when I knew I wanted to play doctor with you. Jeepers, what a crush I had.” He was the kind of person who said “Jeepers.” The kind of person who wore bow ties too.

  “Come on.” I waved him off. “You were too busy getting As to pay attention to me or any other girl.” I remembered him as a nerdy kid who aced every subject. I also remembered that he’d been desperate to be popular, to be accepted by Middletown’s version of the “in” crowd. He’d tried and failed to make the basketball team, tried and failed to be elected class president, tried and failed to date me. That was his problem, I thought as I appraised him. He’d always tried too hard.

  “Okay, I’ll answer your question truthfully,” he said, with a mock-serious expression. “It was just the other day when I thought, Well, I don’t look like the kind of Hollywood stars Ann Roth hangs out with, so I might as well go into medicine.”

  “Richie,” I said, then corrected myself. “I mean, Richard.” When he was young, his “look” could be summed up in one word: acne. But as an adult, he was fairly handsome. The acne was gone, his nose had receded into a less prominent role on his face, and his once dark, shaggy hair was now clipped neatly and conservatively. But he was still gawky—well over six feet tall and thin, with broad shoulders and an extremely erect posture—and he couldn’t hide the inferiority complex that continued to hover over him. “Obviously, I’m not hanging out with Hollywood stars anymore,” I said, trying to put him at ease. I went on to tell him I’d been pink-slipped by Famous, but I withheld the gory details.

  “Well, their loss is our gain, and I, for one, am glad you came back to town,” he said. He glanced down at the pile of papers on his desk, shuffled them around, didn’t meet my eyes. “You must think we’re all a bunch of hicks compared to Ashton Kosher.”

  “Kutcher.” I laughed, not knowing whether his mistake was intentional. “I’ll admit it’s been an adjustment, especially living with my mother, aunt, and grandmother. But I’ll be going back to L.A. one of these days. I’m just taking a little time-out here, preparing myself for the next chapter. In the meantime, it’s really good to see you again, Richard. I’m so proud of you for what you’ve accomplished.” I was proud of him. Happy for him too. I sort of liked the guy in spite of his tendency to push too hard. After all, he’d been around when I went through braces and pigtails. He was at the playground the day I’d gotten my period and stained the back of my white shorts. He’d even come to my father’s funeral. We shared a history.

  “Proud of me?” He seemed surprised, but pleasantly so.

  “Absolutely.”

  He sat back in his swivel chair and started spinning around in it. He was making me dizzy, but that didn’t take much these days. “Okay, ask me all those questions you’ve written down on your legal pad,” he said when he completed his last rotation. “Maybe you’ll be so fascinated by my rise to power at Heartland General that you’ll have dinner with me tonight. Or maybe we could do a movie.”

  Was he asking me out? On a date? Richie Grossman?

  He must have read the ambivalence on my face because he said, “Cancel that about the movie. Jeepers, what an imbecile I am. You’ve probably seen every single one. Been to the premieres. Interviewed the actors, the directors, the producers, the screenwriters. Forget the movies. Just forget I even came up with that idea. I don’t know what I was thinking. We could—”

  “Richard,” I said, before he whipped himself into a lather. “I’m the same Ann Roth who went on that class camping trip with you. The teachers ran out of supplies, remember? I sneaked away on a little investigation and came back to tell everybody which leaves made the best toilet paper. I may have gone to Hollywood, but I didn’t go Hollywood. Understand? There’s no reason to put me on a pedestal.”

  “Sure.” He nodded vigorously. “I’m just overeager.” He held up his left hand and wiggled his left ring finger, which was not adorned with a wedding band. “I’m not married. You’re not married. I’m in Middletown. You’re in Middletown. I guess I see this as the big chance I never had when we were in high school.”

  I smiled. I had no romantic interest in Richie Grossman whatsoever, but it had been so long since a man had shown romantic interest in me that I couldn’t help but be flattered. Still, I wasn’t about to lead him on. I hadn’t done it in high school and I wouldn’t do it now. “We can make plans to have dinner or a movie or whatever you want,” I said. “As friends. I’m just not in the market for a relationship right now, and I need to be up front about that. Okay?”

  He shrugged. “What choice do I have?”

  “Good. Now, let’s do the interview,” I said, turning on my tape recorder.

  “Right, and then we’ll go have dinner.”

  I laughed. He was nothing if not persistent.

  “ANN, THERE YOU are!” my mother exclaimed, pouncing on me the second I walked through the door. “Oh, sweetie. I was so worried. All I could picture was a terrible accident, what with the slick roads and your funny car. It could have been a complete disaster.”

  So worried. Terrible accident. Complete disaster. You can see how I might have turned into a catastrophizer, right? As for the funny car, no one in Middletown drove foreign cars except communists. When I bought the Honda, my mother had to change our phone number.

  “I called and told Aunt Toni that I wouldn’t be home for dinner,” I said. “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Yes, but she said you didn’t tell her why you wouldn’t be home for dinner. We were frantic.”

  Frantic. I wrapped her in a protective hug. A squishy hug. Linda Roth was an attractive fifty-one-year-old woman—shiny reddish-brown hair in the same bangs-and-flip do she’d worn forever, dimpled smile, rosy cheeks—but she’d gained weight since my father died and become rounder, puffier, more matronly. And then there were the clothes; she used to wear them. In the past few months, her anxiety had progressed way beyond heights and dogs and dentists, and she didn’t leave the house anymore. Instead, she padded from room to room in her pink terry-cloth bathrobe and matching slippers. She still cooked professionally, baking pies and cakes and breads for local grocers and bakeries and the occasional catered party, but now she hired people to deliver them to her clients so she wouldn’t have to set foot outside. Her life had gotten smaller and sadder, and while I loved her very much, I was determined not to become her.

  “I had dinner with Richie Grossman,” I said as we walked arm in arm into the living room and sat down on the sofa t
ogether.

  “You’re kidding,” she said. “Where on earth did you run into him? I hear he’s practically running Heartland General now.”

  “I know. I interviewed him for the Crier. He invited me to dinner and I accepted.” I giggled at the memory. “I suggested we grab a quick bite in the hospital cafeteria, but he insisted on driving me all the way to Center Creek to a restaurant that served ‘sophisticated fare.’”

  She chuckled. “That boy always did turn himself inside out to impress you.”

  “What boy?” said Aunt Toni as she stomped into the room. She was four years younger than Mom and strikingly similar in terms of coloring and facial features. But she was harder, more angular. Where my mother was doughy, Aunt Toni was crusty. She spoke in a hoarse, husky voice from the many years when she smoked, and she was bitter toward men after her husband, Mike Benvenucci, the owner of three auto-body shops, dumped her for Claire Honeycutt, a cheerleader at Middletown High when I went there, which made her young enough to be his daughter and caused a scandal that was our equivalent of Brad and Angelina. Aunt Toni was the tart-tongued, blunt one in the family—the “businesswoman,” my grandmother called her because she worked as a paralegal for Stan Orwell, Middletown’s most successful slip-and-fall lawyer—but she was as fearful as the rest of us. As I’ve mentioned, her specialty was freaking out in enclosed spaces. She had taken to leaving her bedroom door wide open at night so she would feel less confined, and her snoring reverberated throughout the house.

  “Richie Grossman,” said my mother as my aunt joined us on the sofa. “He asked Ann on a date and she went.”

  “It wasn’t a date—”

  “He’s a big shot at Heartland General now,” Toni interrupted me.