Pumpkin waddled toward the end of his life slowly and sweetly. He became particular, like the old man at a church supper who can’t decide what to put on his plate. He grew svelte, thin even, and one day I saw him wobble and lose his balance. It was summer, and we were in our little house on Main Street. Pumpkin was spending much of his time stretched out on the cool floor of the porch.
Our vet, Gry, is also a neighbor. She was born in Denmark, but now she and her family live on a small, tidy farm at the edge of the village limits. Her husband is a farrier who raises and works a team of huge and handsome horses. One summer evening I was driving up the road past their place as the sun’s last rays were glancing across the field near their house. Gry’s husband was in the field, standing on a thresher being pulled by a team of horses, mowing the field in the ancient way.
Gry felt a mass in Pumpkin’s abdomen that for once wasn’t his lunch, and she ordered an ultrasound. Emily held and stroked him as he lay on his side, purring, while the technician worked. The news was terrible. He had lymphoma. Like an experienced therapist working with a depressed client, Gry automatically held out a tissue box as she told us. I took one tissue and then another and then I decided to cut out the middleman and asked her to give me the box.
She said that Pumpkin could have surgery, but that even with the surgery, she didn’t expect him to last the summer. “Either way, I’m sorry to say that Pumpkin won’t be going back with you this fall,” she said. She pursed her lips. She had gotten to know him over the years. She looked at him, stretched out on the examination table. “Oh yes. What a good boy he is,” she said. We agreed that he was a fine cat.
We decided against the surgery, but this time, it wasn’t about the money. We had to try to answer the question that people who love animals have to make on their behalf: How will this end? The last weeks of his life, Pumpkin spent his time slowly prowling the place, marking his extensive territory throughout Freeville with his presence for the last time. We hung out together, and as I worked in my little upstairs office overlooking the creek, he’d check in on me and lay at my feet. Then he’d wait at the top of the stairs for me to carry him down.
The day Pumpkin was euthanized it was beastly hot and the air was still. Emily’s godfather, Kirk, my oldest friend from childhood, was visiting us from Maine with his wife, Camille, and their teenage daughters, Hannah and Alice. Kirk said that he would help to dig a hole to bury Pumpkin in the backyard, and I took a box and a towel along with me to bring his body home from the vet’s.
At Gry’s clinic, she has a separate room with a separate entrance for the animals that are going to be killed, presumably so that those who are carrying dying or dead animals don’t have to pass through the more public waiting room on their way to and from the car. The room is serene and pretty. There are curtains on the windows and framed poems and quotes on the wall with passages from Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and the Bible. I sat in a rocking chair with the cat in my lap and told him one last time that I treasured his eleven years with us. I said that I would never forget him, just as I’ve never forgotten any of the live-stock that have graced my life, even while they have occasionally trampled it.
By the time I got home it was ninety-nine degrees. The air was heavy, and the trees, limp. Kirk and his family had gone to pick up Emily, who was working as a counselor at a local camp. The house was empty, but even allowing for the absence of the cat, something seemed different. I looked around. Before they left, Kirk and Camille had gathered Pumpkin’s food bowls, washed them out, cleaned out his litter boxes, and cleaned up some spots in the house where he had been sick. I couldn’t believe that they had thought to do that. Kirk doesn’t even like cats, though he always claimed that Pumpkin, by virtue of his attractiveness, personality, and presence in our family, was a special case.
By the time Kirk and family returned home with Emily, I was sitting in an Adirondack chair in the backyard; I had finished crying and was drinking a beer. They formed an arc around me, looking down at me with concern. For the first time in a couple of weeks, I turned my full attention toward the people in my life. What magnificent creatures they are! I first met Kirk in fourth grade, and we’ve been close friends ever since. He had embraced his role as a special person in Emily’s life and was in touch frequently. He was always available to step in and do “guy things” if we needed. He knew that he had an opportunity to be a positive influence in Emily’s life and he took it seriously, traveling from Maine to attend birthdays or school events and always sending postcards and gifts from his other travels. Our families had become extremely close, trading visits each summer, and whenever they came to Freeville, Kirk baked Emily’s favorite blueberry pie and also grabbed a paintbrush and managed to do some home maintenance for us.
Emily looked down at me. Her long chestnut brown hair was shiny in the sun. The heat formed a milky halo around her. “Mom, are you OK?” I raised my hand and shielded my eyes with the Heineken bottle. It was cool and sweaty against my cheek. “I’m OK, honey. And you?” “Me too,” she said.
I told them that because of the heat, I had decided to have Pumpkin’s body cremated, and that was partly true, but mostly I couldn’t bear the thought of handling his dead body. We picked a spot on the bank of the creek where we would bury his ashes when we received them. A few days later, I got a call from Gry to pick up his ashes. Pumpkin came back to us in a round metal tin from the Dollar Store—exactly like the tins I had packaged my ill-fated biscotti in so many years ago. We kept the tin on our kitchen counter for several weeks, and then the evening before we drove back to the city for the start of school, Emily and I went out to the creek, dug a deep hole, and set it in.
SEVEN
Failing Up
I DIDN’T BECOME an advice columnist on purpose. It’s not the sort of job a person can train for, after all. Like much of my work life, this latest opportunity seemed a case of failing up. Failing up is a specialty of mine. It happens at low points when a certain sort of plucky confidence meets with luck in the form of unexpected circumstances. It happens when you kick yourself for not picking up that dime you saw on the sidewalk, only to find a dollar on the next block.
I’ve always felt like the lazy leftover in my family of worker bees. Like a caterpillar at a picnic, I feel most comfortable grazing around the edges, inch-worming my way in and out of situations. I’ve worked at a bicycle repair shop, I’ve cleaned hotel rooms and been a receptionist. I’ve held jobs that other people didn’t want, but I’ve never taken a job I didn’t want. The way I see it, in a pinch I can always work the overnight shift at a 7-Eleven—to use an example of a job I definitely don’t want. I’m fairly sure that I wouldn’t be a very good convenience store clerk, partly because I’d drink my wages in Slushies, however, probably because I grew up on a farm, any work that doesn’t involve shoveling manure ultimately seems pretty cushy. Manure is like that—it has a way of affecting a person’s standards. As it turned out, working with manure as a child prepared me nicely for making television, which was my first in a series of careers.
Years ago, when I lived in New York and worked as a television producer, I used to ride the city buses to and from the office. During the ride, out of idleness and in order to avoid contact with my fellow commuters, I’d stare at the little posters over the bus’s windows advertising job training for various careers. Though I liked my job, I was under no illusions about it. Making television is hardly a high calling. The hour-long show I worked for specialized in the sort of low-rent exploitive story that is commonplace now but seemed new, if not particularly fresh, when we were doing it. We excelled at “Tragedy in the Heartland” stories, which we balanced out with “How the Mighty Have Fallen” pieces. For a time, during the mid-1980s, I did little else but stand with my camera crew on crowded sidewalks outside Manhattan court houses covering the “perp walks” of Wall Street tycoons brought down by insider trading scandals. “Tycoon in the Slammer” stories were especially popular around the holidays.
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My commute down Manhattan’s West Side more or less ruined me for long-term job satisfaction working in television because the ads lining the bus filled my head with dreams of making a living doing something I considered useful.
On my arrival home, I’d say to my husband, “Welding seems like a very lucrative and rewarding career.”
“You said that yesterday about law enforcement,” he’d remind me.
My husband knew I had a soft spot for law enforcement, where I was certain that some of my more surprising qualities—physical strength on a small frame, the ability to yell loudly, and an uncanny knack for hiding in plain sight—would serve me well. “They don’t let just anybody join the FBI academy. You have to be physically and mentally agile to withstand eighteen months of grueling training in Quantico, Virginia,” I’d mumble, but he’d heard it all before.
For me, the two hardest questions to answer have always been: Who am I? and What do I want? In my early professional life, I dipped in and out of jobs drifting toward an answer until I finally arrived at the one career that truly seemed to be my calling. Once I had Emily I finally knew what I wanted to do with my life. Being a mother completed my résumé. I shocked everyone who knew me—and even surprised myself a little—by wanting to stay home and be a full-time wife and mother. My husband liked this plan. He told me, “I just want you to be happy!” and I believed him until he left me with the baby and moved to Russia with his girlfriend.
Divorce clarified so much for me. Without any backup parenting, I stopped worrying about having a career. I chose to work at jobs that served my family. After moving to Washington, I found a niche doing work that served other people’s families too—as a freelancer filling in for women on maternity leave. My first office jobs after my divorce were as a receptionist and a booker (filling in for a long-term employee having twins), securing guests for shows on National Public Radio. At 5:30 P.M., just as All Things Considered was winding down, I’d race out of the building and over to Emily’s school to pick her up from her after-school program. If I hit a traffic snag or other delay, I’d feel like my head would explode. No deadline in the news business ever prepared me for the pressure of after-care pickup. Emily’s school had a zero-tolerance policy for lateness. Parents were charged $20 for each five minutes after 6 p.m. and, worse than that, the late children were brought out to the curbside like tomorrow’s recycling, where they stood with a caregiver until the parent arrived. Sometimes I was the last mother to arrive for pickup, and I’d find Emily waiting with her backpack on over her coat. I asked her, “Does it make you nervous when I’m last? Do you worry that I’ll forget to come get you?”
“No, I don’t worry about that. I mean, you always do come, so I think you always will come,” she said. Her faith in me far exceeded my faith in myself. There were nights after work when I was too tired for dinner. We’d get dinner at the drive-through Burger King, limp home, take a bath, and be in bed by eight. More than once I sent her to school with an empty lunch box because in my rush to get out of the house in the morning, I’d forgotten to fill it.
I kept begging the producer of All Things Considered to let me do radio stories, and she finally told me to stop asking and just do it, and so I did. She found a part-time desk job for me during school hours (filling in for someone having a difficult pregnancy with mandated bed rest), and I worked producing commentaries and writing my own. When I needed to, I would bring Emily into the office and studio, happy that she was being exposed to creative people who worked in such an interesting medium. In between stints at NPR, I worked as a substitute teacher at Little Folks School, Emily’s former nursery school (a spate of pregnancies among the staff meant plenty of work for me). Trying to corral the class’s toddlers into “circle time” reminded me of various former bosses of mine in television; I instinctively knew how to handle them.
When Emily was in sixth grade, I got a call from Time magazine’s new Washington bureau chief. He said he had been hearing me on the radio and wanted to talk to me about a job at the magazine. We met and he offered me a staff position as a writer. Reluctantly, I said no. I couldn’t imagine taking on a job that would require sixty-hour work weeks and travel. He said, “Forgive me for asking, but not a lot of people turn down these jobs. Do you mind telling me why?”
“I have another job,” I said.
“I didn’t realize that. Could you tell me what it is?” he asked.
“I’m trying to raise a person,” I told him. The elevator arrived with cinematic timing, and I got on it. If this were a movie, my future boss would have stopped the closing door with his hand in order to offer me something more acceptable, but this wasn’t a movie and I took the Metro home from my meeting, kicking myself.
I had thought that asserting my needs and values in this way would feel good, but it didn’t. I went home to my kid, feeling like a loser. Actually, I felt worse than a loser. I felt like a freelancer. My professional future as a maternity fill-in niche worker was tied up with other women’s birth choices. Frankly, ovulation—even my own—had always made me sort of nervous; now I realized that I had become a job doula. Right now, a midlevel female journalist is having sex; in eight and a half months I’ll have her job, I thought. It gave me that not-so-fresh feeling.
The defining characteristic of failing up is that the turning point happens at the lowest point of the failure cycle, and so it happened here. Several days after I turned down the job at Time, the bureau chief called me back, praised my family values, and offered me a job writing a column about families and parenting. I would be in the office two days a week and then work from home. I would be well paid in a job that wasn’t tied to another woman’s family planning and maternity choices. This was a position with absolutely no connection to fallopian tubes. I took it.
“You know that you skipped over the part where you work here for years and then get your own column?” he said.
“Yeah, I know. I skipped over that part,” I said.
The last couple of years of the twentieth century were good for me, professionally. I wrote my column and had a nice office downtown, complete with smart colleagues who would occasionally have lunch with me. Emily and I moved into a larger apartment in our same building where we each had our own bathroom. I started paying my bills in the same month they were due. At night we would sit in our front room, looking out onto the twinkling lights of Connecticut Avenue. My work was flexible enough that I could write the column from Freeville during the summer; I set up an office in the back bedroom, overlooking Fall Creek.
September 11, 2001, changed everything for a lot of people, and it changed everything for us. I could see the smoke over the Pentagon from my downtown office. My boss asked me to cover a press conference outside the Capitol building where representatives of the legislative branch of our government stood on the sidewalk, looking like a tour group that had lost its way. (The rest of Congress had been spirited to a mountain vault in West Virginia.) A lone camera crew had set up a tripod on the lawn of the Capitol; the crew trained their camera toward the Capitol building and then sat in lawn chairs on the grass facing away from the building, waiting for the apocalypse.
As soon as I could, I jumped onto the Metro and raced to Emily’s school. The train was crowded with stunned government workers escaping downtown. Their government ID badges jangled against their chests as the train swayed back and forth. No one spoke. At school, the seventh graders were gathered together in the gym. The girls were group hugging; the boys milled around looking confused. I walked Emily home. Connecticut Avenue was crowded with well-dressed professional refugees too scared to take public transportation—all of us furtively scanning the sky for more signs of attack. “If anything else happens and we get separated, I want you to head north,” I told her. My daughter had just started riding the bus by herself, but somehow I saw Emily making her way three hundred miles due north to Freeville. I knew my mother would give her pancakes for dinner. “And north is…?” Emily asked. “That wa
y,” I said, pointing up the avenue.
By September 12, I was out of a job. Time magazine had found a new focus, and there was no more room in the magazine for the sorts of “How to get your baby to sleep through the night” stories that were my specialty.
With no job and no job prospects, this left plenty of time for me to fretfully plan escape routes from the city in the event of an emergency. All through that terrible fall, as the anthrax scare hobbled our mail service and a dusting of confectioners’ sugar fallen off a doughnut could cause a citywide panic, I would lie awake at night reviewing the map of Washington in my head and plotting the fastest and safest way out. The route varied, but my mental compass always pointed north toward home. I was grateful to be from a place so inconsequential that no one would think to attack it.
I used to wonder why old people are always glued to the Weather Channel. Now I know it’s because watching a weather system form over the Great Plains gives them a three-day focus for their anxiety (“Velma—there’s a low-pressure system over Nebraska; get out the candles!”). After the September 11 attacks, jobs in Washington dried up. I couldn’t even find a pregnant woman to fill in for, so I started living off of credit cards. I also became our family’s safety officer. I attended a seminar at a local college at which we were urged to stock up on duct tape and plastic in case we had to seal ourselves into our home in the eventuality of a chemical attack. We were told to have a three-day supply of food and water on hand.
I went directly from the seminar to a supermarket and hurriedly browsed the aisles for our emergency supply. Unfortunately, I’ve always thought that granola bars taste like plywood and I’m not much of a water drinker, though I do enjoy just about every other beverage. I thought about it. If we were trapped in our apartment, would we want to eat raw soy while we waited, probably pointlessly, for help to arrive? I filled my basket with Twizzlers, Mister Salty pretzels and Diet Coke—my PMS diet. I also picked up an extra bag of Friskies for the cat. It was quite obvious to me that Pumpkin was one of those frightening apartment cats you see in the tabloids who eat their owners under duress. Lately I thought I’d seen a certain look in his orange eyes; in the event of a terrorist attack, I wanted him to remain well fed.
The Mighty Queens of Freeville Page 10