Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  Julia looked up at them and sighed. Though they couldn’t possibly have looked any cuter, she dreaded the inevitable:

  The questions are coming. The questions are coming.

  “So?” her father began again, his voice full of trepidation.

  “You didn’t get the job?” her mother finished.

  Julia went to the refrigerator and turned. “Actually, I did get the job.”

  “Mazel tov!” Peter said, coming over to give her a kiss. His cheek was soft and smooth and smelled of Old Spice—another sign that he was either a stronger person than she was in the face of adversity or that he was sliding even deeper into denial. She knew he was happy about the fact that their five months of zero net income would finally be coming to an end, but she also knew that his true happiness had more to do with the fact that now they had a legitimate reason not to eat her mother’s food and to go out for dinner instead of staying in to save money: they needed to celebrate.

  “Thank God,” her mother said, hovering over the Pyrex dish as if the chicken breasts needed to be watched, lest they try to escape. “You’ll finally get a paycheck.”

  “And benefits,” her father added, beginning one of their perfectly timed duets of mutual relief for catastrophe averted.

  “Now you won’t have to sell the house.”

  “Not that you would have had to, of course.”

  “Of course not.”

  “We would have helped you.”

  “Even if we’d had to remortgage our own house.”

  “Anything to help you get back on your feet.”

  Julia looked at Peter and they both winced.

  “So this John Glom Public Relations that Peter was telling us about,” her father finally asked. “I’ve never heard of them. Who do they handle?”

  “They handle Mary Ford, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Which appears to be the main reason they’re hiring me.”

  “Mary Ford?” her parents asked in unison. Their eyes lit up the way they used to when she still worked at Creative Talent. Despite all her years in the business and all her attempts to explain to them that being a celebrity publicist wasn’t the same as being a celebrity (“Just because you’re with famous people doesn’t mean that you’re famous”) they never believed her. They were the children of Russian and Polish immigrants, who had grown up in Brooklyn, and to them, doctors were celebrities, and movie stars were gods. Riding around in limousines and staying in expensive hotels with them—no matter how much you had to wait on them hand and foot and get yelled at for things that weren’t your fault—was success and excitement beyond all comprehension.

  “Mary Ford is a big star!” her mother said.

  “Was a big star,” Julia clarified.

  Her father appeared not to hear her. “So what does she have out now? A new movie?”

  Julia shook her head. “She doesn’t have a new movie.”

  Mary Ford was a has-been. Has-beens didn’t have new movies. They had new “products.”

  “She has a perfume.”

  “A perfume?”

  “What kind of perfume?”

  Julia shrugged. “What do you mean, what kind of perfume?”

  “Well, what’s it called?”

  “Legend.”

  “What does it smell like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “They didn’t let you smell it?”

  “No.”

  “Or give you a sample?”

  “No.”

  “Or even a spritz?”

  “No.”

  Julia turned to Peter. He, too, seemed to be wondering why she hadn’t managed to get a whiff of the stuff.

  “She’s Jewish, you know, Mary Ford,” her father said to no one in particular.

  “Of course she is,” her mother said back.

  “She changed her name.”

  “They all changed their names back then.”

  “They still change their names.”

  “The first husband died of cancer.”

  “So did the second husband.”

  “I thought he died of a stroke.”

  “A stroke brought on by cancer.”

  “What kind of cancer brings on a stroke?”

  “Brain cancer.”

  “The first husband didn’t have brain cancer.”

  “Not the first husband. The second husband.”

  “Was he Jewish?”

  “Of course he was Jewish. So was the first husband.”

  Julia knew that when the talk turned to Jews and to death and dying, her parents would soon become so engrossed in their conversation that she could finally slip away unnoticed and find Leo. Backing out of the kitchen and picking up her shoes on the way up the stairs, she found him sitting on their bed watching a Thomas the Tank Engine video, pawing with his right hand through a small plastic bowl of salted peanuts in search of nuts that weren’t too big or too small or too brown. The misplaced train was now safe inside his left hand.

  For a minute she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to disturb the mental photograph she was taking of him at this exact moment in time which would never come again and preserve it, commit it to memory, so precious was the sound of his crunching and chewing and the sight of his little body, compact and round and soft, already in his pajamas, listening and watching with such intense concentration the fate of those creepy little trains with their big-eyed faces. Watching him, she almost didn’t notice the video’s narration (the episodic series featured voice-overs by such noted has-beens as Ringo Starr and Alec Baldwin) and the oddly evil and politically incorrect message that the seemingly endless series of stories—written by a British cleric at the turn of the century—delivered with unabashed frankness and without apology: that hate and rage were inevitable by-products of competition between “cheeky” little engines like Thomas and big “cross” engines like Gordon who were desperate for attention and approval from Sir Topham Hatt, the “Fat Controller.”

  Once, early on, when Leo was still a newborn, she had come up with an idea to take a Polaroid of him every day and write a caption in the blank white space beneath the picture (“Diaper change: 4 days, 2 hours,” “Sleeping: 2 months, 6 days”). And while she had taken hundreds of pictures—rolls and rolls of color and black-and-white film with a non-digital 35-millimeter camera that she dutifully got developed into prints and mailed out to a short list of friends and family—she had not, of course, managed to take a daily snapshot. She’d been too overwhelmed; it had begun to seem unmanageable (Where would she put all the pictures? Wasn’t Polaroid film ridiculously expensive?), not to mention vaguely pretentious. But it was moments like this—watching him when he didn’t know he was being watched, looking at his hands and feet and legs and wondering how he had gotten so big so fast—when she most regretted not having a stack of photos that she could look through and see the span of his life advance like a sequence of images in a flip-book or a silent time-lapse film clip:

  Birth to the present—three years, five months, and seventeen days—in six and a half seconds.

  She sat down behind him on the bed and kissed the smooth slope of the back of his neck, then put her cheek to his cheek and listened to the sound of his chewing. He smelled like soap and shampoo and peanuts, and she closed her eyes to take in his essence. Without turning his head away from the television, he reached around her face to touch her earlobe—a strange and slightly compulsive thing he did to her only when he felt great affection or was about to fall asleep.

  “You came back.”

  “Of course I came back,” she said, undoing the button of her skirt and sighing with intense relief. “I always come back when I go away.”

  He ate another peanut, then pointed at the screen.

  “Look,” he said. “Trains.”

  She nodded. “Trains.”

  “Can I get them for my birthday?”

  His birthday was seven months away a
nd he had nearly a hundred trains, but instead of trying to explain any of that, she stretched out next to him on the bed and closed her eyes. But he poked her until she opened them.

  “What?” she said.

  He pointed. “Your legs.”

  She looked down, confused, then realized Leo had never seen her in a skirt and panty hose. It was a long time since she’d seen herself in a skirt and panty hose, too.

  He nodded, and petted her legs as if she were some sort of exotic stuffed animal. “I like your legs.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He turned back toward the peanuts and the trains.

  “So, Scooby,” she said, about to begin her own round of questions (she was nothing if not her parents’ daughter). “What did you do today?”

  He grinned. “We had pancakes.”

  “At Stanz?” (their neighborhood diner) she asked, picking a peanut out of his little bowl and putting it in her mouth.

  “No. Daddy made pancakes.”

  Julia stopped in mid-crunch. “Daddy made pancakes?”

  Leo nodded.

  Even though she couldn’t remember buying the frozen kind—organic or nonorganic—she assumed that’s what Leo was talking about. “You mean, he made them in the toaster?”

  “No. He made them on the stove.”

  As Leo watched Tom and Jerry on the Cartoon Network and Julia watched him, she couldn’t help but wonder what other surprises were in store for her. Peter had never let on that he could so much as toast a bagel, but today he had pulled a Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer and made his motherless son a home-cooked breakfast.

  Half an hour later, Leo was asleep. Julia got up, changed into her favorite I-have-no-life-outside-my-houseoutfit: a pair of stone-beige Gap pants, a black T-shirt, and a pair of brown suede Birkenstocks—shoes so ugly she couldn’t believe she’d actually broken her vain youthful vow never to put comfort over fashion and buy a pair—and moved through the room to the door by completing a series of silent and exaggerated tai chi-like movements that she’d perfected after many such escapes from Leo while he was still sleeping. Downstairs she found Peter asleep on the couch in the midst of a room full of trucks and blocks and train tracks. Sitting in the armchair across from him, she wished she could stop wondering why, when he’d been home all day, he couldn’t have cleaned up the living room or made their bed or emptied the dishwasher—Isn’t that what she did when she was home?—but she couldn’t. Before they had Leo she never thought about their household division of labor and who did more, but after they had Leo—and especially after he’d lost his job—she seemed to think about it all the time.

  Since everyone was asleep she figured she’d call Patricia and get it over with. While she waited for her to answer one of her phones—work, home, or cell—she opened up the refrigerator and looked in on her mother’s chicken breasts. She poked at them and then left them alone in the chilly darkness to think about what they’d done. She’d deal with them later.

  Patricia answered her cell phone. She was walking outside and Julia could hear traffic and people’s voices nearby.

  “Where are you?” Julia asked, sticking her head back in the refrigerator in the hopes of finding something to shove in her mouth.

  “On Madison and Sixty-eighth.”

  “Why?” Julia opened a plastic take-out container and found two half-eaten chicken fingers. She wondered how long they’d been in the refrigerator and whether or not Leo would miss them.

  “Hair color and cut, leg wax, bikini wax, manicure, pedicure. I was there for almost six hours.”

  Julia ate the chicken finger in two big bites. She hadn’t had a decent haircut—not to mention everything else—since before the new millennium, but that was neither here nor there.

  “How’d the interview go?” Patricia asked.

  “Good,” she said, trying to swallow. “I got the job.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What do you mean, how do I know? Jack told me.”

  “You mean, he offered you the job on the spot?”

  Julia attacked the second chicken finger. “Yup.”

  “God. He must have been more desperate than I thought.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Julia said.

  “No, no, no. What I mean is he must really be short-staffed. Or maybe he’s swamped with clients.”

  “Never mind,” Julia snapped. She went to the long cabinet next to the refrigerator to see what else she could compulsively eat.

  “So are you nervous?” Patricia asked.

  “Nervous? Why should I be nervous?” She ripped open a sleeve of saltines and shoved one into her mouth whole and felt the points of the square digging into her cheeks. She wondered if the lower part of her face had taken on the shape of the cracker the way Tom’s head took on the shape of a frying pan when Jerry hit him with one. “Jack DeMarco is an idiot and John Glom Public Relations is a joke. You basically said so yourself.”

  “That’s true. But Jack is still a new boss and the position is still a new job. I don’t know . . .” Patricia hesitated, then cleared her throat. “You must feel a little . . . rusty.”

  Rusty didn’t begin to describe how Julia felt, but she wasn’t about to admit that to Patricia. Instead, the way she usually did when Patricia’s brilliant career made her weak with insecurity, Julia pretended to be intensely confident.

  “Actually, I’m really looking forward to the challenge.”

  Despite the fact that she didn’t have anything to wear.

  And that it would probably take her at least a month to figure out the phones.

  And the cell phones.

  Not to mention the computers.

  And the laptops.

  And all the other miniaturized electronic communication and data storage devices that had been invented since she’d left the business world.

  “That’s great,” Patricia said with enthusiasm which was actually completely genuine and which only served to complicate Julia’s already complicated feelings toward Patricia. If only Patricia were always a bitch instead of only just sometimes, she would be so much easier to dismiss.

  5

  In the cool early autumn days that followed—the few that remained in her life as a stay-at-home mom that she loved and didn’t want to give up—Julia and Peter and Leo were almost inseparable. When Leo didn’t have preschool, they forked over their seriously overtaxed Visa card at Whole Foods, then went to the park or to the nearby beach, had dinner, and gave Leo a bath and read to him before bed. When Leo did have preschool, Julia prepared his lunchbox (a wide-mouthed thermos of Annie’s organic macaroni and cheese, a small plastic container of organic cheese curls, a sippy cup of milk, and a napkin and fork) with a ridiculous level of devotion (making the time- and labor-intensive ten-minute stove-top Annie’s instead of the two-minute microwave version; tucking the fork into the little pocket of the folded napkin; making sure that everything was right-side-up when she zipped up the lunchbox instead of upside down the way it had been on more than a few occasions during those very first days of school).

  She would have folded the napkin into an origami swan or sailboat and climbed into his lunchbox herself if she could have, but instead she tried to pretend that this week of mornings was just like the other week of mornings and the other week of mornings before that; that she would always be there to drop Leo off at school in the morning and pick him up in the afternoon, even though, in a few days, she wouldn’t be.

  But Peter—her understudy, her replacement, her own personal All About Eve—would be.

  Peter would make Leo’s lunch, get him dressed, lock the seatbelt around him in the booster seat; Peter would talk to him about trains and school buses and trees and leaves on the way to school and talk to the mothers at the cubbies about the weather and the teachers and the pros and cons of fleece or flannel, mittens or gloves, snow pants or long underwear. Peter would pick him up after school, put his art projects into his backpack,
and talk all the way home in the car about his day—who he’d played with; what they’d done; what snack had been served, graham crackers or animal crackers; whether or not someone’s mother had brought in birthday cupcakes.

  One morning while Peter was shadowing her, staring and watching her every move so that he could copy it later, she stopped zipping up Leo’s lunchbox.

  “What?” She stared at him from across the kitchen island.

  “I’m watching you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to see how you do that.”

  “Do what?”

  He pointed. “That.”

  She looked down at her hands. “You want to see how I zip up a lunchbox?” She shook her head as if it were the stupidest thing she’d ever heard and then turned away—her eyes were filling up with tears and she couldn’t help feeling ridiculous. “Okay. Here’s the plastic container of pasta,” she said, making a big point of unzipping the lunchbox and opening it up wide so Peter could look in. “Here’s the small bottle of water. Here’s the snack-size Ziploc bag which today just happens to be filled with Cheez-Its even though they’re made with transfat and salt and everything else that cancels out the organic macaroni and cheese I just slaved over. And here is the fork and napkin which I forgot to put in and which I’m now going to squish in over here on the side.” She flipped down the soft-sided flap of the lunchbox and found that she couldn’t zip it shut. “Shit,” she said under her breath even though she felt like screaming it as loud as she could.

  Peter leaned across the island and gently slid the snack bag next to the water bottle instead of where it had been, on top of the plastic container of pasta. He then flipped the lid of the lunchbox down and zipped it easily.