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The Art of Forgetting

Page 14

by Camille Noe Pagan


  “Last week, someone”—she narrows her eyes dramatically—“and I won’t say who, but someone who is very popular, took my skirt during gym class so I had nothing to change into. I had to wear my gym shorts the rest of the day,” she says, pointing at the blue canvas shorts she’s wearing now.

  “How did that make you feel?” Naomi asks, and I smile, realizing that her favorite therapy catchphrase is poached straight from Take the Lead lessons.

  “It made me feel bad at first,” says Estrella, looking at the group. “But then I went home and talked to my mom about it. She helped me see that whoever would do such a thing doesn’t feel very good about herself.” Estrella puts her fists on her hips and leans forward. “She has to be mean to other people to make herself feel better. It’s very sad,” she says, shaking her head.

  Alanna, Naomi, and I glance at one another in surprise, and I’m almost tempted to clap by Estrella’s stirring performance. Apparently the girls are impressed, too, because one after another opens up about a time when she, too, was bullied.

  Anna is the last to speak. “I’m not sure if my thing counts as bullying,” she says sheepishly.

  “Go ahead and tell us. There’s no wrong answer in group discussion,” Naomi says kindly.

  “Well,” Anna says, pulling at one of her ponytails. “I have this cousin. She always gets me to do what she wants. Like, I’ll want to go to the park and she’ll say, ‘No, we’re going to get ice cream,’ and I have to do what she says or she gets angry and stops talking to me. It makes me mad, but I don’t ever say anything to her.”

  “I’d say that’s bullying,” Naomi tells her. “Bullying isn’t only about calling names or physically hurting others. It’s also about pushing people around and making them do what you want. That’s not being a good friend, or a good sport.”

  “Oh,” says Anna. Then she smiles. “So I was right.”

  “You were right,” says Naomi, and several of the girls nod solemnly in agreement.

  Later, as we run around the gym, I think about how fragile the girls are—even tough-acting Josie. After several laps, I find myself reminiscing about childhood. When I was the girls’ age, three of my classmates—who continued to torment me through junior high school—used to pinch my stomach and call me “Shamu” if I didn’t let them copy my homework. (To this day, I refuse to visit Sea World.) It made me dread going to school, but unlike Estrella’s mother, my mom told me it was my own fault. “They’ll only keep torturing you as long as you let them,” she reprimanded me. Of course, standing up to them made it worse, hence my decision to go to a new city for high school.

  A few Christmases ago, Julia and I were out at a bar in Ann Arbor when I ran into one of the girls who’d bullied me during junior high.

  “Marissa?” Stacy asked, walking over to our table in a way that made me suspect she was several Miller Lites into the night. She was a good thirty pounds heavier than the last time I’d seen her, and her brown hair was now a badly dyed shade of blond that only made her curls look frizzier. Shallow as it may be, when I saw her, I was glad I was having an especially good hair day.

  “Stacy?” I said, feeling off-kilter by this chance encounter with the primary source of my adolescent trauma. I half expected her to reach across the table and grab my midsection.

  “Yeah! You remember! So good to see you!” she warbled, confirming my earlier suspicion that she was well marinated.

  “Really?” I asked a bit snottily, leading Julia to raise an eyebrow at me.

  Stacy inquired about what I’d been up to since junior high, so I told her, not without a hint of pride, that I was living in New York and was home for the holidays. In turn, she told me that she was a hostess at Chili’s. “It’s not fancy, but it pays the bills,” she said, clearly embarrassed by this admission. I was contemplating whether or not to make a snide comment when Julia interjected. “I’m sure it’s fun,” she told Stacy. “After all, in this economy, a job’s a job.”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking drunkenly pensive. She looked at Julia, then back at me. “Well, I’ll let you get back to talking. I just wanted to say hi.”

  After Stacy left, I scolded Julia. “You ruined my chance to get back at my childhood nightmare!”

  I half expected Julia to suggest one of the elaborate practical jokes she was famous for. But she just shook her head, looking wistfully in Stacy’s direction. “Nope,” she told me. “That girl doesn’t deserve it. Even this early in the game of life, it’s clear that you’ve won.”

  Julia could be needy and, yes, even manipulative, but she was never deliberately unkind. Most times, as she had with Stacy, she went out of her way to make people feel good about themselves; that was part of her magnetism. As I recall that evening so many years ago, I can’t help but wonder if that person—the one who boosted me and everyone else around her up—is still inside of her somewhere, and if so, when she’ll reappear again.

  Twenty-one

  I know that roughly between two and three p.m., body temperature drops, circadian rhythms slow down, and the dreaded midday slump takes hold. I also know that the best antidote for afternoon sleepiness is not M&M’s and coffee, but rather a dose of sunlight and exercise administered in the form of a brisk walk. I know this because I have written about it, in some incarnation, no fewer than half a dozen times in the past five years. And still, when I find myself staring at the back of my eyelids after lunch instead of tackling my massive workload, I do the only thing that I can manage: trek over to the vending machines in the kitchen for a caffeine and chocolate one-two punch.

  “I didn’t take you for the candy type,” says Ashley, coming up behind me with Farrah, another editorial assistant, hot on her heels. She opens the fridge, pulls out a lime green Tupperware container, and peels back the top. “Want one?” she asks, and I see that the Tupperware holds perfectly sliced green apple pieces, each smeared with just the thinnest layer of peanut butter. Of course Ms. twenty-five-inch-waist would be snacking on the perfect combination of protein, carbs, and fat.

  “No thanks,” I tell her, and insert a wilted dollar bill into the vending machine next to the fridge. I hit the number/letter code and my M&M’s hit the bottom of the metal machine with a satisfying thud. I rip open the paper and pop a few in my mouth. Then I look at Ashley. “Nirvana.” I sigh contentedly, then hold the bag out to her. “Want one?”

  She holds up a flattened palm. “I only do dark chocolate.”

  “A shame,” I say with a hint of pity, and head back to my office, feeling markedly more energized.

  Lynne Pelham is the queen of five o’clock edit meetings, but their frequency does not make them any easier to handle. This particular January evening, she’s summoned the entire editorial staff to the cavernous conference room across from her office to discuss the June issue. Typically, it’s a cash cow, because around May, women begin to panic in anticipation of the impending bathing suit season. But although it is too early to know for sure, this June issue, Lynne informs us somberly, looks like it will be much thinner than usual—a good attribute for a woman, she notes, but not for a magazine.

  “That’s why I’ve brought you all here today,” she says, clasping her vein-roped hands together.

  She may be my superior, but Naomi can’t help but act like she’s a schoolgirl forced to sit through the most insipid class. She means tonight, she scribbles on her notepad where I can see it. I smirk. The windows in the conference room look over Bryant Park, and I can see that the streetlights are already on. Should be home in time for Letterman, I write back, and look away so it’s not obvious that the two of us are trading notes.

  Lynne continues. “We need some major wow factor infused into this issue. It’s true that health magazines aren’t taking a hit the same way the fashion and general interest titles are. But there’s absolutely no doubt that aside from food advertising, which remains the sole reason why you’re all sitting here instead of collecting checks at the unemployment office, ad pages are dow
n. Way down. We. Are. Not. Doing. Well.” She tosses her golden hair over her shoulder and straightens her spine, looking like a European princess who’s just survived a trek through the Serengeti and lived to tell the tale.

  “Lynne, tell us what you mean by ‘wow,’” asks Roxanne, our executive editor. “Do you want pieces like we normally run, but repackaged? Or do you mean completely out-of-the-box like that hundred-word-essay series we did last September?”

  “Both,” Lynne answers ambiguously. She looks at Naomi. “Let’s run through the current lineup. Tell me which stories you have scheduled and then we’ll brainstorm for ways to make them more appealing to advertisers.”

  I swallow hard, nervous. Suddenly my brain trauma idea seems unbelievably stupid; I can’t believe it ever got the go-ahead. There is no way it will make the cut.

  Sure enough, when Naomi mentions it, Lynne barks, “Whose idea was that?”

  “Mine,” I manage to squeak.

  Then Lynne surprises me. “Well done, Marissa. I like it. That’s not our normal type of story, but we need to up the ante if we’re going to win any Ellies at the American Society of Magazine Editors conference. And we all know those awards mean more advertising dollars. Ladies, I want more of what Marissa came up with. Think sharp, smart, and service-oriented. Think The Atlantic, but for women who don’t want to get fat.”

  Naomi writes “!!!!” on her notepad and I can’t even look at her because I know I’ll lose it.

  “The Atlantic for women who don’t want to get fat!” she howls in my office an hour later.

  “I know, I almost died,” I tell her, wiping laughter-induced tears from the corners of my eyes. “And to think that my article has set the bar for our new standards of journalism.” I hear footsteps outside my door. “Shhh,” I tell her.

  There’s a knock, and before I can answer, Ashley lets herself in.

  “We’re in the middle of something,” Naomi tells Ashley in her best coaching voice.

  “Oh,” says Ashley. “Sorry.” All traces of the attitude she usually pulls on me are gone.

  “That’s okay,” I say to her. “It’s late, anyway, and I’m heading out. Can you swing by first thing in the morning?”

  “Sure, absolutely,” Ashley says almost meekly. When she closes the door behind her, I turn to Naomi. “Um, why is it that she suddenly acts like an angel when you’re around?”

  Naomi looks amused. “You ever watch the Dog Whisperer? Same techniques apply to humans, really. You just have to make it clear that you’re the boss. Otherwise she’ll walk all over you. It’s not the most kosher thing to say, but it’s true of anyone who you’re supervising. Mammalian Behavior 101.”

  “Is that how you keep me in line?” I chide her.

  “No, thank God. You’re easy,” Naomi says, flinging a pen at me. “Now bark!”

  I laugh. “Well, I wish I could say the same about Ashley, but she seems hell-bent on undermining me at every turn,” I tell her, and then fill her in on the scene at Dave’s company party.

  “I think you’re overthinking it. She’s probably just talking herself up to her fiancé and doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “I’m willing to bet that’s at least a large part of her motivation,” Naomi says to me. “But even if she’s trying to reenact All About Eve, I’ll tell you what my mother always tells me: Think about what you want out of the situation, not how you feel about it. You’ll get better results that way.”

  “Interesting theory.”

  “Well, you want blondie to do a good job for you, right?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Then, don’t worry about how highly she thinks of herself. Just check her work. If she’s doing what you ask her, great. If not, tell her what you need. And if that doesn’t work, take her off the story.”

  “Easier said than done. It’s not like we’ve got assistants to spare.”

  “True. But it’s a good story, and it’s not worth letting her mess it up. Just keep that in mind if you’re not pleased with how things are going.”

  But the next morning, Ashley surprises me by showing up outside my office door with a bulging research folder, a detailed story memo, and, to seal the deal, two cappuccinos.

  “Thought you might want some coffee while we go over everything,” she says, handing me the second cup before she sits down next to my desk. I wasn’t planning on running through the entire story with her this morning—I’ve got four articles to edit in the next two days—but the caffeine is more than welcome, so I let it slide.

  “Okay, let’s start by comparing research,” I tell her, and pull up my notes on my computer. We spend the next hour poring over studies and statistics. I discover that with little instruction from me, Ashley has done an impressive job sorting through the medical jargon and pulling out the information that’s actually relevant to my story, and I tell her so. “You mean it?” she asks me with a huge smile.

  “I do,” I say. “And I appreciate it. I think you’re ready to take on that sidebar we talked about.”

  She practically squeals. “Yay! What do you think it should be about? Because I have some ideas.”

  “Hmm . . . that’s a good question,” I tell her. “Maybe a first-person interview with someone who’s had a brain injury?” I tug on a stray lock of hair and think for a minute. “Actually, it should probably be more service-oriented. Something like, ‘Signs you need to get to the hospital after hitting your head’ or ‘What to do if you think you’ve suffered TBI.’ Why don’t you e-mail me your ideas, then I’ll compare them with mine and pick one?”

  “Will do,” she says confidently. “Marissa, I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. It’s been the most fun thing I’ve worked on since I started here.”

  “Me, too, Ashley,” I tell her. “Me, too.”

  Twenty-two

  It’s an unseasonably warm February day, but beyond the weather, nothing is out of the ordinary when I leave my office for lunch. Same crowded elevator ride to the first floor; same security guards checking ID in the lobby; same mob of tourists to push past in order to get to the deli on Forty-third Street where I usually go for salads. Yet, from the minute I leave my office, I cannot shake the unsettling feeling that I am being watched.

  I’m so on edge that when someone taps me on the shoulder at Friendly’s Grocer, I jump, even though it’s just another customer letting me know that my MetroCard fell out of my wallet when I went to pay for lunch. And while I know I’m only making myself more conspicuous, I can’t help but glance over my shoulder every few minutes to see if someone is trailing me. I am Grace Kelly in Rear Window, minus the glamour, flaxen locks, and murder plot.

  Intuition is a funny thing. Most people assume that their “gut feelings” are sheer luck, or God giving them a nudge in a certain direction. In fact, studies show that it’s the brain’s way of adding past experience and external cues together at lightning speed—a spontaneous burst of logical thinking, so to speak. Intuition can make a person choose the right stock, or say yes to a date with a stranger who they end up marrying. But from a biological perspective, its primary purpose is to protect us from danger.

  Which is why, although I am not entirely surprised to see Nathan—something deep in me already knew I would run into him today—the sight of him leaning against the granite slab of my building’s entrance when I return from lunch sets off multiple alarms in my head.

  My first instinct is to duck and walk the other direction. On top of the fact that I’m fairly certain nothing good can come of us talking, my hair looks like I’m auditioning to be Bride of Frankenstein, my shirt has a coffee-stained Rorschach blot on it, and I’m exhausted. But it’s too late; he’s already seen me.

  My escapist urges must be obvious, because the first thing Nathan says is, “Wait! Don’t go, Marissa.” He holds up both hands, palms toward me as though he is surrendering. Clad in jeans, boots, and a well-worn brown suede coat, he is squi
nting in the sunlight, and I can see tiny golden flecks in the dark stubble shading his jaw.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, sounding sharper than I intend to. I soften my tone. “I mean, I wasn’t exactly expecting you.”

  I look around to see if any of my colleagues have seen us. I’m not doing anything wrong, I know, and yet I’m as embarrassed as if I’ve been walking around with my skirt tucked into granny panties.

  Then it hits me. Dangerous though he may be, I’m embarrassed because I’m secretly thrilled to see him, and not just because I may finally get some answers about his intentions with Julia.

  “I know you weren’t expecting me,” Nathan says, breaking into a sheepish grin. I remember that he always used to smile when he was uncomfortable and am glad to see that he’s as jittery as I am.

  “You flew all the way to New York to track me down outside of work?” I ask, shifting the plastic bag holding my lunch from one arm to the other.

  “No,” he says quickly. “Well, not exactly. I’m in town for a wine and spirits convention. You know, for the restaurant.”

  “Oh.”

  “But, uh, obviously I wanted to see you, or I wouldn’t be standing here.” He looks at me and smiles again, sending a shot of electricity straight through my body. “So I Googled you to see if you were still working at the magazine, and decided it would probably be better to show up here than at your house.”

  “Probably,” I say, because this is all I can manage to get out. The thought of Nathan showing up at my apartment—the apartment I share with Dave—is enough to give me a minor panic attack.

  “Why didn’t you call?” I ask him.

  “Can I blame it on a sudden burst of spontaneity?” he jokes. “Because the truth is, I kind of figured you’d say no if I got in touch ahead of time.”

  “You’re probably right,” I confess.

  We say nothing for a minute or two, just standing there staring at each other like idiots. I cannot get over how good he looks, even better than when I last saw him. An image of him lying on his futon in college flashes through my head, and I blush and turn away so he won’t see my face. Again I think of Dave, and more blood rushes to my cheeks. What am I doing here? It doesn’t matter if Nathan were Johnny Depp himself, waiting to whisk me off to his private island in the Caribbean. I am in a committed relationship, and regardless of whether it constitutes as cheating, I know for certain that the thoughts I’m having are not kosher.

 

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