Hope in a Jar

by Beth Harbison

  Allie could have stopped and showed them that it wasn’t poo but Pooh, but she wasn’t sure that was any better. It might, in fact, just double the stories that were bound to go around.

  “I do not!” she yelled heatedly, focusing her attention on the person who had started it all.

  “Yes you do!” Vickie was red in the face from laughing so hard. “And you know it!”

  “Liar!”

  “If I’m a liar, pull your pants down and show everyone.”

  “No!” Allie sniffed, hoping no one saw the tears. “I don’t have to prove you’re a liar, everyone knows you’re a liar.”

  Vickie was completely unfazed by the argument. She’d won and she knew it. And with every word Allie spoke in protest, she just proved Vickie’s point to everyone else.

  “What’s the matter, Pooh-pants?” Vickie taunted.

  Poo-pants, everyone else heard.

  “Are you going to cry, Pooh-pants? Maybe you should go to the nurse and take care of your little problem.” There it was. It had taken a minute for Vickie to get the misunderstanding she’d created but once she did she wasn’t going to let it go. “Maybe you can get some new pants there.”

  “You’re a bitch!” Allie cried.

  There were gasps and then a silence followed.

  At first she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like no one had ever used the word before.

  But when she heard Miss Stein’s voice behind her—“I beg your pardon, Miss Denty?”—she knew exactly why everyone had finally stopped taunting.

  And she knew she had lost in more ways than one.

  Three

  You’re soaking in it.

  —ad for Palmolive soap

  Olivia Pelham listened to the tiny click click click of the Bulova wall clock opposite her desk. It was the electronic mantra to her end-of-day meditation. A routine she went through every day as sort of a cooldown. If the clock ever stopped ticking, she’d probably go mad, like some character in an old Twilight Zone episode.

  She loved this time, late in the evening, when everyone else had gone home and she could enjoy the quiet, watching the lights of Manhattan slowly click on and off in the honeycomb windows of the buildings across the street. She loved the sound of the traffic below, even the incessant honking of the taxicabs.

  To Olivia, it was a lullaby.

  She could have gone home and gotten the same kind of quiet, of course. And the view from her Upper East Side apartment was arguably prettier than the one she had now of Madison Avenue.

  But it wasn’t alive.

  It was empty.

  She was empty.

  Not that she was lonely particularly—she wasn’t. Whatever was missing in her life was a lot bigger than romance. It was . . . She couldn’t say.

  The clock continued to tick in the semidarkness.

  She wanted to open the window and fly away. She wanted to fly all over, to see everything, smell everything, taste everything.

  She wanted to get out of the small room her life had become, if only for a little while.

  All the way through college, she’d been sure she would find a way to at least take a year off and travel the world before entering a Serious Career, but money was tight. Money had always been tight.

  So traveling the world was a pipe dream that had just gone up in smoke.

  Sure, she’d been to Paris, Milan, London, all the big fashion spots, but she’d never seen much outside the walls of her hotel rooms or the runways there.

  In Olivia’s life, going abroad was more claustrophobic than staying in bed.

  And leaving her job to go off and experience the world fully was impossible. She couldn’t travel with her job but she couldn’t afford to travel without it.

  She was stuck.

  Trapped.

  Pushing that thought aside, she forced her mind back to work. It was far more comfortable than contemplating her dissatisfaction.

  An hour ago, her date for the evening, David Weiner, had called to cancel. Well, date might be stretching it a little bit—David and Olivia had a “relationship of convenience,” meaning a couple of times a month they got together and . . . well, got together.

  It was amazing how little emotional connection she felt to a man who knew her body inside and out, but Olivia told herself that was because she was at a place in her life where commitment could only make things muddy.

  Of course, Olivia had been in that place all her life, so she wasn’t sure she could envision a time or place when that wasn’t true.

  She tapped a pen on her desk. She wasn’t sure what to do with herself now. She’d planned her time out for the evening with three hours at David’s. Now she had a three-hour gap and she didn’t want to spend it sitting at home.

  She put the final touches on her notes on the layout for the November party makeup feature for What Now magazine, where Olivia was the senior beauty editor, and set it aside in the out bin. If she counted her success by the number of issues she’d herded to publication, this was her fifty-sixth accomplishment.

  And she was pleased with that at least.

  The clock ticked on. Hypnosis.

  God. She didn’t want to go home. It was like resisting a magnetic force to try to get up from her desk and haul herself down the elevator, outside to the waiting car, and home to her apartment only to come back in again in, what, fifty hours. Hm. Maybe that was stretching the idea of working late a bit too much.

  Her phone rang, startling her.

  That was the other thing about the quiet. Nice as it was most of the time, it sometimes made her jumpy.

  “Yes?” She didn’t take the time to look at the caller ID. “Olivia Pelham.”

  “Olivia.” It was a man.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you still at work?”

  “Yes.” Even if she wasn’t, it would be the correct cautious answer. Yes, I’m still at work, surrounded by people and protected like Rapunzel in the tower by the security guard in the lobby.

  “Do you ever leave?”

  Finally she recognized the voice and sat down in relief. “Noah,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I was about to do just that. Why? Feeling guilty about being a slacker?”

  “Not tonight.” He laughed. “It’s Friday. I know you don’t normally keep track of that sort of thing, but this is a night that a lot of people choose to go out and enjoy themselves. You remember that, right?”

  She smiled. “I enjoy work.”

  He laughed. “Man, I give up. You are a workaholic. You need help.”

  “Point taken.” She leaned back in her leather executive chair and it squeaked. She had to get some WD-40 to take care of that. Ages ago, her friend’s father had told them about the many uses of WD-40 and she’d never forgotten it. “So what are you doing tonight? Or is giving me grief your form of entertainment?”

  “Of course it is. But that’s not why I’m calling. I just wanted to ask what time you want me to pick you up from Union Station tomorrow.”

  She drew a blank. “What?” Union Station, Union Station. There was Union Square Café downtown, but Union Station . . . Oh! That was in D.C. Where Noah lived, but still—what had she forgotten? “Why?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  She shrugged, even though he couldn’t see her. “No. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The reunion.”

  “Oh.” Now she remembered. “Shit.”

  “That’s right, oh, shit. Most people have been dreading this for weeks, marking the days on their calendars like condemned men going to the gas chamber. I can’t believe you forgot.”

  “Blocked it out, most likely.”

  “Don’t blame you. So when do you want me to pick you up? Or do you want me to at all?”

  She leaned back. “You know, I’m not sure I’m going. Tomorrow? Huh.”

  Noah laughed. “I don’t have a lot of patience for the traffic by Capitol Hill, so if you don’t lock in quick my offer may expire. Better decide, Ms. Pelham
.”

  “Noah, I can’t go. I’m just”—she looked over her neat-as-a-pin desk—“swamped.”

  “Bullshit, you’re not too busy to come down for one night. At least tell me the truth, that you don’t want to.”

  “It’s not that. I am busy,” she lied, feeling a growing dread at the very idea of going back. “I really am. Look, I know I said I was going to go, but you caught me after three martinis, and I wasn’t really considering everything I have to do.” Guilt swept over her. “But it’s not like you’ll be all alone there, right? Are you still in touch with anyone from high school?” She doubted it. She knew very few people who were, even among those who had had good experiences.

  “You don’t need to set me up with a substitute friend, Olivia. I can fly without you holding the strings.”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  “But I still think you should come.”

  “Why?”

  He let out a long breath and said, “Because high school sucked, and going back sucks, so I think we should do it together. It’s sort of a ritual in moving on.”

  “Twenty years later.”

  “It is a little depressing, isn’t it? Twenty years.”

  There was a silence while she thought about what he’d said and he, presumably, thought she was a scaredy-cat, afraid to go back and face her past.

  “Would you go?” she asked, vowing that she would lock in with his answer. “If you were me?”

  He laughed. “I don’t want to answer on the grounds that it might weaken my argument to get you here.”

  “In other words, you wouldn’t.”

  “Probably not.”

  “But you think I should.”

  He hesitated. “Hell, Liv, I have no idea if you should. I just wish you would.”

  “Is anyone I know going to be there?”

  “Undoubtedly. Lots of them. And plenty of people you hoped you’d never see again.”

  She sighed. “Obviously. Stupid question.” She pictured herself going, checking into a hotel in D.C., dressing up, and walking into a room filled with some of her worst memories. “Listen, I just don’t think I can make it this time. But, hey, there will be another one in five years or so, won’t there?”

  “I’d bet on it.”

  “Then I’ll go to that one. I promise.”

  “You may be on your own there.”

  “No way,” she said flippantly. “I’ll hound you into coming so badly you won’t be able to say no. None of this letting your friend off easy stuff for me.”

  He laughed. “I’ve always been too easy on my friends.”

  “For sure.”

  “All right, well, since you’re not going, I may as well tell you that I’m going with—”

  Her call waiting beeped on the line.

  “What?” she asked. “Sorry, you were beeped out.”

  “I said that I’m taking—”

  The phone beeped again. She loathed call waiting but in her business it was, occasionally, a necessity. Enough so that she couldn’t strike it completely from her phone service. “Wait, hold on, okay? Just for a sec.”

  “Sure.”

  She clicked over. “Olivia Pelham.”

  “Olivia,” a weepy female voice said on the other end of the line. “It’s—” Sob. “It’s me. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

  “Mom.” Oh, no. “You’re not bothering me. What’s going on? Is something wrong?” Dumb question. Clearly something was wrong. “What is it?”

  “I’m having a bit of an emergency and I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “Wait, Mom, hold on.” She clicked over to the other line. “Noah?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ve got to take this call. It’s my mother and something’s up. God knows. Can I call you back later?”

  “Sure. Of course.” He sounded concerned, no longer messing around with her. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. I think I’m going to need it.” She clicked back over to her mother, who was in midsentence, apparently having missed Olivia’s instruction to hold.

  “—so there is, at least, that, but now that I’ve left I just can’t see going back. Especially after”—muffled crying—“after he’d do that to me. With her, of all people.”

  So, even having missed a little chunk of the diatribe, Olivia was able to tell what had happened.

  Again.

  And now her mother had left husband number . . . four? Five? Caroline Pelham O’Brien Lindon Katz Libitzky, Olivia counted silently. Five. Jesus, at this rate she was going to go through enough husbands to form a football team before she died.

  “It’s terrible,” Olivia said, because it was terrible, even without knowing the details or who the her was in this case. What was more terrible was her mother’s taste in men.

  In fact, Olivia truly couldn’t bear to think of some of the mistakes her mother had made.

  Yet here she was, faced with another one, fighting the urge to yell, Why the hell don’t you just learn from your mistakes? You’re sixty-five years old. That is too fucking old to be moaning that your boyfriend is cheating on you again!

  Maybe it’s time, she wanted more than anything to be able to say, that you try taking care of yourself for a while instead of always looking for a man to take care of you.

  But she couldn’t.

  Or at least she wouldn’t.

  “I know it is. I just can’t believe this has happened again.” Her mother drew in a shuddering breath. “But I didn’t call you to whine and cry.”

  “You didn’t?” Olivia’s shock at this little snippet of self-awareness made her more frank than she meant to be. “What is it you need, then? How can I help?”

  “I’m going to get a new start,” her mother announced. “On my own. No fellas for a while.”

  Olivia’s jaw dropped. “That’s wonderful!” Although her mother had been married five times, she’d moved for men even more than that. Olivia counted the moves she’d had to make with her mother, then stopped at six when her mother went on talking.

  “It’s worth a try. I’ve never done that. You know, just for a little while.”

  Olivia nodded enthusiastically to herself. “Absolutely. Amen to that, Mom. I am so proud of you.”

  “I was hoping you’d feel that way.”

  “I do. I absolutely do.”

  “That’s good to hear because, as you might imagine, I’ll be needing a little help. Just at first, you understand. I wouldn’t want to put you out.”

  A small swirl of dread coiled in the pit of Olivia’s stomach. Another shoe was going to drop. A boot. A steel-toed work boot. Size thirteen, men’s. “How do you mean?”

  “Oh, honey, isn’t it obvious? I need to stay with you for a little while.”

  Need not want. A subtle difference but enough to make Olivia a pretty bad person if she refused.

  “Just a little while, like I said,” her mother went on. “Long enough to get back on my feet again. You don’t mind, right?”

  No matter what she had on them, Manolos or Wal-Mart, Caroline had never stood on her own two feet. It might be more of an undertaking than she expected.

  “I guess not.” Olivia swallowed. “What were you thinking?” she asked, imagining a learning curve that would last approximately as long as rehabilitation from paralysis. “For how long? And when?” She hadn’t meant for her apprehension to ring out quite so clearly but she couldn’t help it.

  “Now,” her mother answered, but it sounded like a question. Now? “I’m at LaGuardia Airport.”

  “You’re at LaGuardia?” Olivia repeated. She stood up and started pacing in front of the window that, a few minutes ago—or had it been days?—had seemed to represent such a pleasant peace and solitude. “God Almighty, Mom, why didn’t you call me before you got on the plane?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was afraid you might try to talk me out of leaving. Pull the old Dr. Joyce Brothers routine and suggest talking and confessing, and all that kind of nonse
nse before just giving up on the marriage.”

  Dr. Joyce Brothers might have said that thirty years ago, but Dr. Phil would tell her to leave the bum today and Olivia wouldn’t have disagreed.

  Or would she?

  If she had honestly known the next step her mother would have taken was to hop on a plane and fly from Oregon to New York to move in with her, would she truly have encouraged her to leave? Or would she have given in to that small temptation, which would undoubtedly have been there, to tell her to stick it out, try to make it work.

  Stay out of my world.

  Guilt tightened Olivia’s hold on the phone. “You did the right thing, Mom,” she said. Because even if Gary Libitzky hadn’t slept with her (whoever her was) this time, he was a domineering, bossy, nasty old piece of work and no one should have to live with an SOB like that. “Listen, save your cell battery for now. Hang up and I’m going to send a car for you. Are you at the baggage claim?”

  “Yes.”

  “What airline? Do you know which baggage claim?”

  “AirTran Airways,” she said. “I think this is baggage carousel two.”

  “Stay put. I’ll send a car.” Olivia snapped her phone shut and took a deep breath.

  Baggage carousel two. It sounded so festive.

  Too bad it was anything but.

  Three hours later, Olivia had gone through three cups of Bigelow Orange Spice tea and her mother had gone through half a bottle of cheap airport chardonnay and all the nasty details of the last week of marriage to Gary Libitzky.

  The finer points were different, but basically it was the same story Olivia had heard many times before. He seemed so nice at first, he was so generous and solicitous when he was courting Caroline, but then, almost as soon as they tweezed the rice out of their hair from the wedding reception, he’d begun telling her what to wear, whom to talk to, etc., etc., etc.

  Had she left right then she would have spared herself a lot of heartache, Olivia thought. Or Gary would have straightened up. Probably the former. Either way, it would have been better.

  But Caroline hadn’t left then. She stayed until long after the party was over, just like always, and now her crisis was Olivia’s, as well.