Joy

by Erin McGraw

  A day hasn’t passed that I don’t remember.

  Nathan has finished his cereal. Soon it will be time to leave for school. He asks if he can have my phone back, and penitently, I give it to him. He treats me to Adele and the Beatles and even—auld lang syne—a chorus of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.” “Which one do you like best?” he says.

  He’s never asked about a playlist before, never seemed to be aware of an audience that existed for any reason except to applaud. No new awareness sparkles from his eyes, but now I’m paying close attention, and watch the way his hand absently opens and closes on the tabletop. I say, “I like the songs with gentle emotions. It’s nice to be loud only some of the time.”

  He wrinkles his face. He’s working on it. “Loud is fun.”

  “I know. But sometimes soft is good, too.” This moment is coming too fast. I needed time to prepare, but my son stands before me, his brain’s work nearly audible. “Listen,” I say, and hit “Moondance,” the only song in that moment I can remember whose emotions are soft and good. When it’s over Nathan takes the phone from me and plays it again. By the third time he’s moving his lips. I dampen mine. “Come on, son. Sing. Let me hear it.”

  Fat

  I’m not fat enough for Big Beautiful Girls sites. The guys who promise to adore a woman’s righteous curves are not talking to me. Neither, obviously, are the ones that end their posts with “No Fat Girls ” A site for me would say: “I’m looking for something, but I’m not sure what. What’s your name again?”

  When Em at Reception asks if anyone wants to join her for drinks after work, she is not asking me. The sign-up sheet for the Adopt-a-Highway cleanup weekend rarely gets to my desk. After the Fourth of July party, I stop by Mike in Accounting’s cube and compliment him on his home run that saved the game for us, fifth floor always playing against fourth floor.

  “Were you there?”

  At the end of the day I go home and brush my sister’s hair until it spills down her back in a glassy sheet. We both like this. I haven’t told her about Jordan. He’s new, and he stopped at my desk before his first week was out. “It’s Sherry, right?”

  “Sherry-from-HR. Distinct from Sherry-from-Accounting.”

  “I’ll never keep everybody straight.” His smile is rueful, blinding, straight out of Hollywood.

  “You’ll forget there was ever a time you didn’t know,” I assure him.

  “Good to meet you, Sherry-from-HR.”

  You didn’t have to be the fat girl to hear the flirt.

  Because I eat lunch at my desk where people can see, a typical meal looks like a poster from a nutritionist’s classroom: one pear, one cup of greens with lemon juice, three ounces of poached chicken breast. Often I can’t do more than pick at it, since I’m stuffed from the cheesecake I ate in the car on my way to work. It isn’t hunger, exactly. Hunger is a friend, a presence I understand. This other thing, this compulsion, has no name. Often it’s the opposite of hunger—I eat through indigestion, through fullness, through the rich self-disgust that accompanies me like a choir while I, the fat girl, sing at the front of the stage.

  “Get over yourself,” says my sister, wincing while I work a knot from her fine hair. Her body slopes out from her neck in a lazy succession of folds. She hasn’t been able to fit into a desk chair in years, but she can type from her bed or armchair. She blogs about disability and fat as a political issue, and has posted one photograph of herself, looking tragic and almost boneless, a head floating on top of pools of flesh. Beside her I look stout, capable, and forgettable. My sister’s hair looks terrific.

  I am not about to tell her about Jordan. She tells me about patriarchy and commodification, and I pay the pizza guy. I may not eat as much as she does, but I eat my share. Before I go to bed, I’ll join her for cake. The difference between us is that after I close my bedroom door, I’ll do one hundred stomach crunches, because I’m still trying.

  I know I won’t see Jordan the next day, but I still dress with extra care, my heart rapping out a quick beat that is the rhythm track to every happy love song in the world. For the rest of the week I keep dressing with extra care, and I don’t eat anything on the drive to work, so I attack that chicken breast with zeal when lunchtime rolls around. I try not to look too enthusiastic. If there’s one thing people notice about the fat girl, it’s what she’s eating.

  My sister has caught on, and is watching every morsel that slips into my mouth. “I don’t want to have to take you to the hospital again.”

  “You never took me to a hospital.”

  “You were passing out.”

  “I was fourteen and stupid.” I had gone for nine days on nothing but black coffee and sugarless gum. I wouldn’t mind having a little of that self-control back again. Now, under my sister’s rigid eye, I eat a full serving of mac and cheese.

  My sister eats: the second half of a bag of potato chips. Mac and cheese. Milk. Broccoli gratin that I microwave. Cake, and then ice cream. I hide the idea of Jordan like a locket between my breasts, which I keep strapped in a brassiere as sturdy as a saddle. My sister’s breasts spread and puddle like pudding, like heavy gravy. It is so hard to look at her and not think of food.

  At work, while Em is asking who wants to go out for drinks at five o’clock, I pore over staff birthdays, because parties are my responsibility. The next birthday is Mike in Sales, two weeks away. I order the cake and one balloon bouquet. Then, from a different site, I order a skirt to have sent to me at work. I know what lines are slimming, and there’s plenty of room to change in the bathroom.

  Jordan’s birthday is six months from now, Leo, a fire sign that would go well with my airy Libra. I know better than to think like this. If I don’t stop myself, soon there will be pills in my purse, and phone calls to numbers from HR files that I have access to. Twice I’ve had to change jobs. My sister says she will stay with me until I understand what I’m doing. I understand perfectly.

  This afternoon Jordan waves to me in the parking lot. “Sherry-from-HR!” he calls. “I’m coming to see you soon.”

  “Jordan-from-New-Accounts! Why are you coming to see me?”

  He walks toward me, and the smile makes my eyes fill. He says, “Everybody should have a friend in HR. HR knows the dark secrets.”

  “Your birthday is in August, and you were at Nicholson and Nicholson before you joined us. Pretty tame secrets, really.” He brings home $5,007.43 a month, and hasn’t yet started up a 401(k). His marital status is left blank.

  “I’ll have to up my game. Who gets to judge your secrets?” he says.

  “No one in HR has secrets. Company policy.”

  His hand on my wrist is slightly sunburned, and roughened. I have the clear sense that my beating heart is working its way up my throat. “Can we be friends?” he says.

  He’s been fired three times in five years. Twice there were questions about bookkeeping and billing, once a complaint. But no accusations ever filed!

  “You’ll have to fill out some paperwork,” I say, the standard HR joke. His squeeze on my wrist is so light I almost don’t feel it over my crashing pulse.

  I collapse into the driver’s seat and need ten minutes before I can start the car. Once home I’ll order Indian for dinner; my sister and I have every delivery service on speed dial. I’ll brush her hair. She’ll talk, and if she thinks I’m not listening, she’ll tip something over. “Poor motor control,” she says as if it’s an accomplishment, and then she’ll wait until I come back with the paper towels and bucket before she starts to talk again. This time I’ll make her wait.

  Pebble

  Not yet: The day before Easter, all three kids in the kitchen with five dozen boiled eggs and neat pots of dye, the air stinging with vinegar. No one ever admitted throwing the first egg. The stained wallpaper stayed up until it was time to sell the house.

  Not yet: The Easter glorious even without eggs, the boys in their suits handsome and slick, the girl’s starched yellow dress as pretty as a tulip, th
e mother confidently singing “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” so she could be heard in the last pew. “You are a perfect American family!” a friend says, and the mother smiles because it would be rude to agree. That afternoon the children’s grandfather will die of a heart attack in front of them, but not yet.

  Already: Diphtheria. Scarlet fever. Malaria, malaria, malaria (WWII, Pacific). Disease is behind them, and all they see in front of them is tennis courts and skis. In the evenings, bundled up, they go to the beach. Just after sunset the light that has no source shows them the limitless horizon, and they talk about his day, and her day, and what they will do together the next day.

  Not yet: Perfect babies in a row, one, two, three. Their faces are as sweet as blossoms. In a moment of whimsy she won’t ever replicate, she finds photographs of roses and pastes her babies’ faces at the centers.

  Now: Even though they are almost married, they are shy when they look at each other. Too much happiness is unsafe. They would not claim to be beautiful, but they are tall and handsome, and the bad things are behind them. They know there is no reason they should be unreasonably happy, but they don’t see any reason they shouldn’t.

  Or rather: Happiness is waiting to be picked up, like the smooth pebbles on the beach. He finds one to skip, but it sinks on the first try. He laughs and picks up another. The beach is full of them.

  Silly. You don’t say these things.

  Not yet: The big ski trip, the one they are all looking forward to. He grumbles about the cost every chance he gets, pretending not to be proud. Their daughter drinks the good Swiss chocolate, happy for once. Thirteen is not a happy year. Tickled to see her smiling, they let her follow her hotdogging brothers to the top of the black diamond run. Her brothers promise they’ll take care of her, and no one has the heart to blame them when she falls, twisting, obliterating her left knee. They should be blamed. She loses the leg.

  Not yet: One hospital after another. She cries through her PT, refuses to do her exercises at home, spits at the therapist. She gets fat. Pills, pills, pills, pills, pills.

  Not yet: The kindergarten-aged daughter brings her mother a bouquet from the backyard, even the stout geraniums wilting from the heat of the little girl’s grip. The mother thanks her, and then thanks her again because the girl continues to stand in front of her. Finally her daughter says, “Don’t I get a cookie?”

  Not yet: The dinner out, just the two of them. It took months to plan, and she thinks up topics for conversation. She is determined not to talk about the kids, and so is he. Picking up his wineglass—it really is a night on the town—he says, “To our happiness.” “Don’t,” she says. “It’s true,” he says. “Don’t say it.”

  Already: The hungry days, the making do. Shirts made out of dresses made out of uniforms. The magazine pictures of movie stars on the walls. When he proposes, he promises her real china, a yard with flowers, children one, two, three. A butterfly bobs next to them, grazing her shoulder, and they laugh. She rests her face next to his and bats her eyelashes against his cheek, a butterfly kiss.

  Not yet: Are they boyfriends? The father calls them thugs, which is better than what the mother is thinking: pimps. Their daughter’s eyes are walls. After one night out, she comes in without her prosthesis. The next morning she says she lost it, and by noon she says she broke it. The whole family has learned that needle marks don’t only show up in arms, and they try to think of ways that they could casually glance between her toes.

  Not yet: “Stop teasing your sister.” “We don’t use that kind of language.” “Stop teasing your sister.” “WHO left this in the bathroom?” “Stop teasing your sister.” “Stop talking. Just. Stop. Talking.”

  Not yet: Laughter from upstairs so shrill it’s like a fire alarm, and then a scream. They can ignore the noise, but when silence falls they race up the stairs to find all three kids, panting, pajamas stuck to their sweat, and the bed slumped where they’d been jumping. The long silence stretches with the children’s eyes fearfully tracking their parents. “Oops,” says the oldest boy.

  At his daughter’s funeral, the father collapses. “I can’t sit at the front,” he whimpers. The aisle is dominated by the casket, closed. There was only so much the mortician could do with the blue-black face, the tongue like a sausage. The mother’s face goes rigid. In the end, she sits with her sons in the front pew while her husband sobs at the back of the church, facedown on the carpet.

  Now: She is much better at this than he is. She finds a good, flat rock, and with a whip of her wrist sends it skipping over the placid surf: three, four, five. “Beat that,” she says, her face shining.

  “I can’t,” he says, admiring her unruly hair, “but I’ll tell you this—”

  She slaps her hand, salty, over his mouth. “Not one more word.”

  “Or what?” He grins. She is a fine-looking woman.

  She picks up another pebble. Just as she lets it go, the sun slips away from a scrap of cloud and dazzles the crinkled water. No telling how far that rock goes before it slides under the water.

  Pariah

  Of all the scenarios I imagined, this one never came up: my heart leaping at the sight of Iris Murphy. She takes ten minutes to cross the post office lobby so she can stand in line, where she complains about how federal employees—“That’s the same as my employees, you know”—take too long to weigh her letters. She smells bad, but she meets my eye when she finally gets to the counter, and doesn’t pretend to be looking at stamps until she can get another teller. I say, “How are you, Iris? How is your cat?”

  In a small town, news and gossip break first in front of the out-of-town mail slot. The day Marie McIlvoy’s son found out he passed the bar, I went into the back and broke out some Franzia we had left over from a birthday party, about as against the law as you want. The wine was awful, but we all felt like we were getting away with something, which is fine, it turns out, until you try to get away with the wrong thing.

  Back two years, when I used to be married, my ex Cindy worked at the hospital. She called from work to tell me things, like when Henry Lipert had been admitted for a heart attack, so I could put a hold on his mail without anybody asking. It was good to be able to do small things to help people, and Cindy and I were famous for helping people. We reached out, we volunteered. We were nice.

  Two nice people can share a house for a long time. They can have nice meals and nice sex. It isn’t a bad life, animated by nice conversations about the people you know. Standing side by side with your spouse, looking out onto your nice life, the view is comfortable. Then one of you looks off to the side, and everything goes to hell.

  Robin wasn’t as pretty as Cindy. Several people have told me so. She also wasn’t as kind. “What are you thinking?” Marie Bledsoe snarled, the last thing she said to me. Her husband, Terry, explained that if there were another post office, they’d go there. I knew I’d lose some friends. I just didn’t think I’d lose all of them.

  Robin and I didn’t even last a year. Not as pretty, not as kind. Unwilling to overlook the sounds I apparently make when I chew, which Cindy brought up, too, in our short-lived mediation when I was trying to get her to take me back.

  Robin had just been another customer, once a month with the postage meter, little jokes about the crap picture of Elvis on the commemorative stamp, until one day she said, “This is my third time here in two days. I wanted to get you to wait on me.” Right there in front of everybody. She was wearing a brown sweater, and the hair that curled back from her face was touched with red, and I couldn’t tell you how long it had been since I had noticed anything.

  After that it was nothing but noticing: Cindy’s stained panties in the laundry; the rush of breath behind Robin’s words, almost a lisp, sexy; the treacherous, dove-colored skim of ice in front of the post office door. I stared at it until my supervisor made me go out and spread rock salt. Iris had almost fallen.

  For two months Robin and I were blazing, as constant as teenagers, in our cars, out
side in the lake park where we melted the snow, in motels where it wasn’t as exciting, with sheets and bedside tables and lamps, as it was in the tiny back seat of her car where our hot breath made her hair curl more. I came home shaking as if I had a fever, and Cindy asked if I wanted a cup of coffee. I was forty-eight years old and looking at the rest of my life.

  When I ran into Ron McClurg a month ago, he walked right past me, even though I said his name. It took me a while to realize that I was being snubbed. I didn’t know the rules.

  People want me to leave town, and I’d like to accommodate them, but what would I leave to? The only software I know belongs to the USPS. I can do some good here—whenever anybody at work needs to trade a shift, they come to me. “I’m our utility infielder,” I offered when Denise asked me to switch shifts.

  “Is that a joke?” she said.

  “No,” I said, which was the same as saying “Yes” or “No habla inglés,” since she’d already turned away, leaving me to greet Iris, waiting with a flat parcel that I would privately readdress to cover her shaky handwriting.

  “Guess you’re stuck with me,” she said.

  “We’re always happy to see you, Iris,” I said.

  “Don’t add lying to your list of sins.” Smelling like old tea, she wore one pilled gray sweater over another pilled gray sweater and moved as if her knees had rusted shut. A nice person would have felt sorry for her.

  “I hope there’s not a list,” I said.

  “There’s a list.” She handed me her parcel. “Be careful with this. It’s my parents’ wedding picture. I don’t want it bent.”

  I made myself smile, not reminding her that she could have packed it in cardboard to protect it. Ringing up the postage, I said, “How’s your cat?”