by Joni Cole
“Two . . .” I refocused. “Enhance your students’ abilities by pointing out what is already working in their writing and why.”
“Three . . .” I took a bite of toast and smiled. “Have faith in every student, because even a little positive feedback can make a big difference.”
Forty minutes later, my talk was drafted, albeit rough in certain sections. Of course, now I had no time to rework it or make additions, despite one of the most important points I wanted to share with teachers—that writing is mostly rewriting.
7:42 a.m. I raced upstairs to the shower. En route, I grabbed the bar of exfoliating soap I had discovered earlier in the bathroom drawer. Yes, it occurred to me, as I scrubbed at the make-up on my face, careful to avoid my still-puffy lips, there indeed was a more humiliating way to die than to be attacked by an alligator while sitting on the toilet. You could be attacked by an alligator while sitting on the toilet while wearing glitter-blue eye shadow.
Winning the Lottery
The same day I got fired from my job as an advertising copywriter, I had my second miscarriage. I don’t believe there was any connection between these two events, other than some cosmic wise-guy’s idea of a bad joke. Still, the timing gave me pause.
Most women rely on home pregnancy kits to verify conception, and I’d availed myself of two different brands just to be certain. But I also had my own way of reassuring myself that this pregnancy—which occurred about a year after my first miscarriage—was progressing. I simply ran up and down the stairs, as a means of seeing whether my breasts felt weird. Not painful really, but noticeable, given that under normal circumstances thoughts like—Oh, my goodness, I’m certainly aware of my breasts today—rarely, if ever, occurred to me.
That morning, however, when I’d hurried up and down our steps several times, worried I’d be late for work yet again, I didn’t notice my breasts even once. This, I knew, was not a good sign.
I was a talented copywriter, but a terrible employee. First of all, like nine out of ten copywriters on the planet, I harbored dreams of becoming a famous author. At the time, short story writer Tama Janowitz was my standard for success, as much for her cool name and artsy New York City vibe as for the power of her prose. I was sure I could exude an artsy New York City vibe, if my name wasn’t a relic of the Eisenhower era and I wasn’t stuck writing brochures for the locally owned bank.
While my artistic pretensions didn’t win me any points with my boss, more problematic was the fact that I spent a good part of each workday goofing off. In my defense, there wasn’t much work to do, thanks to a recession that had motivated a lot of clients to cut their advertising budgets. But even when I worked at agencies during boom years, I was the kind of employee who trawled co-workers offices, hoping for entertainment and opportunities to pry into their personal lives.
At this particular agency, most of my time was spent gabbing with the art director, a kindred spirit, though his ambitions lay in creating weird paintings and art objects rather than hip short stories. How could I not want to spend all day hanging out with a guy who packaged little bottles of “holy water” with labels he designed depicting Elvis superimposed on the Shroud of Turin?
And then there were other transgressions, like my liberal use of the copier for personal projects, and taking long lunches to allow for a shower after my mid-day workouts. (But really, why hurry back only to try and look busy?) My easy-going boss, George, seemed willing to ignore these offenses, but not so the agency’s book-keeper, a ruddy-cheeked woman with a tight perm and tighter fists. She made it abundantly clear that she was on to me, and while she had no authority over me or the creative department, she wielded her limited power by giving up our bi-weekly paychecks about as eagerly as a buzzard releases carrion.
Given my poor attitude and behavior, it was obvious even to me that my boss should have fired me months before he actually got around to it. Or I should have had the good graces to quit. But a paycheck is a paycheck, and with a baby coming in about seven months, knock on wood, my preference was to leave the job not as a quitter, but as a new mother wanting to devote herself fully to her child. Of course, being an unemployed mom was not feasible, given our financial situation, nor had it ever been a particular ambition of mine. At the time, however, all I knew was that I wanted this baby more than anything in the world.
“I’d like to take you to lunch today,” George announced to me on this particular morning. “Do you have time around noon?” Was he being sarcastic? He had found me, as usual, hanging out in the art department. As soon as I saw him approach, I pretended to be discussing some layout with the designer.
“Uh, sure.” This was the first of never. To date, our socializing had been limited to him insisting on telling me jokes about dumb blondes and gays. I could never really tell if his affinity for this type of humor meant he actually was sexist and homophobic, or just clueless, given that some comic material is clearly better left untapped by straight male bosses.
As the morning wore on, even more tedious than most, I occupied myself by finding excuses to walk up and down the agency steps, hoping for some signs of reassurance, and debating with the art director the meaning behind my boss’s invitation. Could I really be getting the ax? But who takes someone to lunch just to fire them? Answer: The same type of boss who thinks it’s appropriate to affect a lisp and limp wrist as part of his regular stand-up routine at client meetings.
“I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to go to lunch,” Shortly before noon I went into my boss’s office and bagged out of his invitation. By now I felt certain of two things. One: I didn’t want to be eating some Caesar salad while hearing all about my failings as an employee. And two: I didn’t want to be eating a Caesar salad at all, given that I felt like crying. But this emotion had little to do with my job situation, and everything to do with my suspiciously quiescent breasts, as well as other worrisome symptoms that had begun to show themselves.
“Fine,” George shrugged. “We’ll talk when I get back.”
Fine! I imagined myself responding. Just know that I’m pregnant and probably having a miscarriage. Of course I didn’t say this aloud. I’m not the type of person who can pull off this kind of soap opera dialogue with dignity. But also it felt disloyal to the baby. Was this what people meant by maternal instincts? The fates had handed me the perfect guilt-inducing card, yet I didn’t want to play it if it meant exploiting my child.
After my boss took off for lunch, I sneaked into his office (first making sure the buzzard wasn’t anywhere around), and confirmed my suspicions. My “Letter of Termination” rested face down on his desk, the header a cruel double entendre. Mercifully, it cited just one offense: I had misspelled the word “tomorrow” in a headline. Normally, this kind of careless mistake would have stung my professional pride, but at the moment my only reaction was, Who cares about stupid tomorrow?
I was thirty-seven and had been married for almost ten years when my husband and I finally got around to trying to conceive a child. This delay wasn’t because I had mapped out my life, say, wanting to get established in my career before starting a family. Rather it was more like that refrigerator magnet with the image of a forty-something woman wearing a shocked expression on her face. “OMG,” the caption reads, “I forgot to have children.”
Because my biological clock was approaching last call when we started trying to conceive, one miscarriage, and then a second, brought with it the fear that soon enough I would either be unable to get pregnant, or I would simply run out of time before my body figured out how to make another pregnancy stick. For me, this second scenario was the less palatable one, maybe because it is one thing to have been screwed by the fates who determine conception, but quite another to have screwed yourself (absolutely no pun intended).
The afternoon I got fired from my advertising job, I went home, changed into sweatpants and one of my husband’s flannel shirts, and then sat in a recliner with a blanket over my head. Sunlight filtered through the loose
cream-colored weave. The cocoon made it easier to shut out the reality of losing another baby.
Only it wasn’t a baby, I reminded myself, remembering how the doctor who had treated me after my first miscarriage seemed to avoid that tender word. “Most likely a chromosomal abnormality,” she gently explained. Apparently most early miscarriages are simply random, isolated events, a “medical mystery,” as the doctor put it, too common to merit further testing, even in our country’s test-happy, fee-for-service medical model.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” well meaning outsiders have been known to comment in these situations. No doubt, they’re considering the alternative, such as giving birth to a mutant with two heads or six extra pairs of feet. I’m not offended by their logic, knowing their words are meant to comfort. And goodness knows my slacker-mother tendencies were much relieved when the children I eventually did give birth to became capable of brushing their own teeth and feeding themselves. But still, for the best?
About a year after I was fired, I found myself once again working at the same advertising agency, and once again two months pregnant. It was like déjà vu all over again, including the fact that I didn’t want to divulge my condition until I was at least in my second trimester. If something should go wrong again, I wanted to deal with my grief privately.
George had invited me to return to my old job (with no mention of our past troubles) because business had picked up and he liked my copywriting style. In turn, I had agreed to come back because, while I totally preferred the life of a freelancer, self-employment had provided me with a new respect for a steady paycheck.
And now our small agency had been invited to pitch the New Hampshire State Lottery account! We worked for weeks on our creative strategy, media plan, and sample campaigns. I wished George’s excitement at this opportunity would rub off on me, knowing that if we became the lottery’s agency of record, it would be a windfall for our small firm. But secretly my feeling was that the only thing worse than having to look busy as a copywriter, was to actually be busy, always having to come up with creative new ways to get people to spend money on games of chance with impossible odds, and to do so while playing responsibly.
Ten minutes before our presentation was to begin, I found myself in the ladies’ room of the State Lottery Commission’s office, in a panic over whether I needed to throw up. With this pregnancy, unlike the previous two, came a good deal of morning sickness, and this queasiness was exacerbated by the fact that my dress—held together in the front by a long vertical row of ball-shaped buttons—was squeezing my thickened frame like a sausage casing.
Knowing that time was running out, I decided to take matters in my own hands. If I vomited now, this might allow me a reprieve from morning-sickness during the scheduled hour-long presentation. With this reasoning, I went into a stall, leaned over the toilet, and tried to make myself gag. This failed to achieve the intended effect, but the effort strained my dress to the bursting point. Tiny buttons popped forth, falling scattershot to the floor. Looking down, I discovered that my dress was gaping open across the chest, a sight at once horrifying and strangely gratifying. How was I supposed to leave the ladies’ room in such a state of undress, let alone give a presentation? On the other hand, the display was even more reassuring than the step test. Clearly, my breasts were making themselves noticed, by me and soon enough by the three men and one woman who comprised the lottery commission.
In a panic, I started crawling around the bathroom tiles, frantically chasing down buttons. How this would remedy the situation I had no idea, given that I had no means of sewing the buttons back on. While I was on my hands and knees, the agency’s account executive entered the bathroom.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “George asked me to come get you.” By now, I could only assume he must be apoplectic about my prolonged disappearance.
“I’m pregnant,” I reluctantly volunteered. What choice did I have, given my compromising situation? This was not how I envisioned telling my coworkers my big news. If and when that time came, I fantasized a quietly triumphant disclosure. I’m with child, I would murmur, basking in my Madonna-esque glow, my hands cupping my rounded belly. What would be understood but remain unspoken was the joyful coda to this news—and, finally, thank God, I have a legitimate excuse to quit this job!
“Congratulations,” the account executive offered, and to her credit she refrained from any further commentary. A transplanted Southerner, the woman had always fit my stereotype of a Steel Magnolia—gracious, fearless, and in possession of a designer handbag capacious enough to hold everything from bourbon, to charger plates, to a pearl-handled revolver. From this bag, she extracted a small plastic box with an array of safety pins, which she efficiently used to fasten me mostly back together.
We met George in the hallway and hurried into the conference room. En route, I felt compelled to tell him my situation, in case I needed to bolt for the bathroom. In response, he placed a trash can by my feet at the presentation table, a gesture that made up for every tasteless joke he had ever told.
In the end, we didn’t get the lottery account, though our presentation went off without a hitch. But to capitalize on an obvious metaphor, I hit the jackpot. Not only did my lottery baby make it, but less than two years later I brought a second daughter into this world. Both my girls are perfect, of course. I say this in the same way that game show contestants always seem to introduce themselves on TV, “Yes, Pat, I’m married with two beautiful children.” Just looking at some of those contestants, you know their children can’t all be beautiful. But I get it. A parent sees what no one else can see.
Even after all these years, even as I celebrate my amazing good fortune as a mother, I still feel the loss of those first two pregnancies. I understand the logic of chromosomal abnormalities and how those babies—as babies—existed more in my head than in fact. But sometimes wishful thinking prevails over logic, which explains why those unborn babies remain so real to me, and, come to think of it, why so many people play the lottery.
Given that I take no comfort in the concept of cosmic wise-guys, or random, isolated events for that matter, I have had to come to terms with those miscarriages in my own illogical way. And so here is one medical mystery resolved, compliments of my abilities as a talented copywriter to sell almost anything, at least to myself.
Those first two babies simply chose to live somewhere else; let’s say a big, fluffy cumulous cloud where they and all the other babies who were never born are not just viable but happy. In my mind’s eye I can see them now, smiling and waving down at me, kicking soccer balls with their extra feet, and looking so beautiful, so perfect, I could almost cry.
Breaking Dawn
I like to think that the family I grew up in wouldn’t fit in with the type of people who appear on all those judge shows my mother used to watch on TV. My family is well educated, morally superior—we work as teachers, writers, wire-tapping specialists. When I watched the judge shows with my mom, and listened to the disputants argue their cases, all I could think was, How stupid can you be? If you’re going to allow your deadbeat ex-lover to crash at your apartment after his landlord gives him the boot, then you deserve to be out the damages when his pit bull chews up your X-box.
“Why do you watch this stuff?” I asked my mom during one of my visits. Judge Judy was presiding over the case of the New Jersey exterminator who accused one of his clients of throwing a brick at his van, causing him undue stress.
“Bullshit,” my mom had responded, not to me but to the television. According to the defendant, he wasn’t aiming the brick at the van; the van just happened to drive by when he threw it. My mom was not a lawyer, but she was a first-grade teacher for over thirty years, making her equally, if not more qualified than Judge Judy to see through the lame excuses of immature criminals.
Because my mother was never a sap, and because she had been witness to hundreds of televised court cases since advancing age and decrepitude confined her to her recli
ner, this makes the case of Dawn versus my family all the more perplexing.
Dawn was one of a roster of home health aides who came to my mom’s house to make sure that she and her two dogs didn’t have to go to a nursing home. Dawn wasn’t from the “Visiting Angels” agency my family relied on to guarantee round-the-clock assistance. Dawn was an independent hire, brought in several days a week to provide some continuity of care and companionship.
Dawn—Caucasian, sun-leathered, fortyish, full of manic energy and celebrity gossip—seemed like a good fit for my mom, and not just because English was her first language. Unlike a lot of the Visiting Angels who sit quietly and do paperwork and exude a Bible-study-group vibe, Dawn was fun. She liked to talk back to the TV and drink box wine, just like my mom. They went places—A.C. Moore, Yankee Candle, the mall. They even had Lucy-and-Ethel like adventures, like the time they stole an Obama-for-President sign from someone’s front yard, and their crime (unsolved) made the evening news.
Dawn worked for my mother for over a year and was, by far, her favorite caregiver, more like a friend than an employee. Unfortunately, Dawn was also a liar, a thief, and a drug addict.
This was not just my family’s opinion, but also that of my mother’s cleaning lady, Jane. At one point, Jane and Dawn had been best buddies (in fact, Dawn was the one who had recommended Jane to my mother), but then they’d had one of those falling-outs so common among thieves, and Jane started snitching on Dawn.
Here, I should add that Jane had her own criminal tendencies, like asking my mother for cash advances, then failing to remind her of this come payday, thus taking advantage of an old woman’s lapses in short-term memory, as well as her fear of losing a good housecleaner. Still, my sister believed Jane when she ratted out Dawn, mostly because it confirmed our family’s own suspicions.