Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  “See, if you snuggle the snack into the contour of the water bottle you can make use of unused space.”

  She stared at him, then started to laugh. “I can’t believe you used the word ‘snuggle.’”

  He started laughing, too. “Neither can I.”

  “That was disgusting.”

  He shrugged and they both laughed harder. “I know. I have no idea where that came from.”

  “Apologize,” she demanded, practically doubled over now. “And promise you’ll never say that again.”

  In the evenings, after Leo was asleep, she and Peter planned their new schedule—arranging for her parents to babysit on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Leo wouldn’t be in preschool so that Peter could continue to go to the executive placement office in the city twice a week if he wanted to, and making sure all essential household tasks were covered. By the end of that last week home together, Peter, who during most of their marriage had taken little interest in the minutiae of their daily life, was now about to do something he’d never done before:

  “I’m going to study our existing domestic organizational structure and analyze our options for a structural reorganization,” he said, emptying a large Container Store shopping bag of supplies in the kitchen.

  She understood only half of what he said but it was enough for her to get his point: Peter was taking over.

  “Great!” she said.

  “It’s what I’m calling ‘The Project,’” he said with a surprising lack of irony.

  She grinned. Finally, after all these years of hoping and dreaming, he was bringing his work home with him like all the other husbands did! He was turning his keen eye and considerable analytical skills on their life and using the tools, toys, and language of his former profession to guide them through their upcoming role reversal! Two nights later he created a color-coded flow-chart on a large magnetic presentation board—the kind with movable blocks of time (Blue: Julia at work; Green: Leo at preschool; Yellow: Gymboree class; Red: Peter Executive Placement Office; Purple: Len and Phyllis babysit; Orange: Leo and Peter free for playdates; Pink: Adam and Lisa free for playdates; Brown: “Tom and Jerry” on Cartoon Network)—and placed it on a display easel in the corner next to the refrigerator.

  She pointed to an unmarked black square. “What’s this?”

  Peter raised his eyebrows up and down, then made googly-eyes. “Date night.”

  She blinked. She couldn’t believe they’d become the kind of people who had to “schedule” in “dates,” but they had. She stared at the rest of the board and forced a smile. “Wow.”

  “You like it?” he asked, as if his life depended on it.

  “Very thorough.” She nodded and pointed to the pink squares. He’d even gotten in touch with Lisa Goodman, her shrink friend who lived nearby and whose son, Adam, was Leo’s age and who Julia and Peter secretly called “Batman” because he always wore a black nylon cape.

  “When I talked to Lisa to find out her playdate schedule, she invited me to have coffee with that group of moms you two just started hanging out with.” He leaned over to check a pad of paper—his identity assumption notes—to make sure he got the names right. “Pinar. Monika. Hilary. Actually, tomorrow we’re going to Bradley’s after drop-off.”

  Julia blinked. Pinar was a former urban planner, Hilary was a former interpreter at the U.N., Monika was a former magazine editor, and, just as she had been up until now, they were all full-time moms. She had really liked that group of women from the start when they were all squished into the little coatroom those strange first days, putting away backpacks and lunchboxes in cubbies, trying not to cry when it was finally time to leave but all tearing up until Monika—the only one of them who had been through the preschool experience at the Preschool Experience before with an older child—led them around the side of the school and into a tight row of shrubs so that they could look into the classroom and see that none of the kids were sobbing and that they were all having fun. They’d all gone across the street for coffee those first two mornings after drop-off—something they’d planned on doing as regularly as possible.

  She’d longed to be part of a group of women like that since her years in Larchmont had yielded only one friendship—with Lisa, who saw patients part-time out of an office in her huge but equally disorganized Tudor two streets away from Julia’s. Their bonding, like the bonding of most women who lived in the suburbs with young children, took place at the nearby playground, and the issue that brought them together was what brought many women who spent time with their young children at playgrounds together: the mystifying, maddening, and largely ignored sociological phenomenon of woman’s inhumanity to woman.

  When Julia had started going to Turtle Park, Leo was eighteen months old, and whenever she went she always seemed to encounter among all the nannies the same three aggressively well-groomed (French manicured, hair blown straight and highlighted various shades of brown to blond), Pilates-obsessed (they were always talking about the class they took together) yummy-mummy types. She probably never would have noticed them—they didn’t look much different than all the other women she saw every day in and around town who basically ignored her and made her feel like some sort of minimally groomed barn animal—if they hadn’t literally turned their backs whenever they saw her coming and if they hadn’t been extremely friendly to Peter the few times he’d taken Leo there by himself, even going so far as to invite him to their Bikram “hot” yoga class. (Yoga, with its enforced sweating—unlike Pilates, with its odd emphasis on the lower abdominal muscles—seemed to have gender-crossover appeal.)

  Julia never knew what she’d done to offend them—she couldn’t even remember ever speaking to any of them—or why they never invited her to their fitness classes which she clearly needed far more than Peter did, and she didn’t really care, except that now the idea of going to the small, clean nearby park—something she’d fantasized about enjoying when she still lived in the city and had to drag Leo in his stroller over to Union Square Park at Fourteenth Street, which was crowded with people and bike messengers cutting through on their way to somewhere else and which really wasn’t much of a park to begin with, or down to Washington Square Park, which was thick with students and drug dealers and noisy little dogs on short leashes—was now fraught with uncertainty and dread: Would the Three Bitches be there? If she stopped going to Turtle Park and started going to Willow or Flint Park, would there be three different but equally bitchy bitches there, too? Were the bitches you knew better than the bitches you didn’t know?

  Despite Peter’s moral support after going with her to the park and seeing for himself how cold they were to her (so cold, in fact, that he pronounced without bothering to soften his message in any way: “They hate you. I don’t know why, but they definitely hate you,” which she deeply appreciated) she had been on her own.

  Until Lisa Goodman appeared one early spring day with her big liberal Jewish hair and her sense of rebelliousness and righteous indignation about almost anything—“What do you mean, Whole Foods has stopped selling Nutella? Who are they to dictate what we eat and why?” “No more free weight-training classes at the Scarsdale JCC? I don’t accept that.”—and saved her.

  “How dare they ignore us!” she’d said to Julia the first time they’d spoken—a day so important in her personal history of suburban human connection that it had since taken on a magical silvery haze in Julia’s memory. Lisa hadn’t bothered to introduce herself—she didn’t need to, really; they both felt instantly like they’d known each other for years—but she did take the time to explain as Leo and Adam had started to play together in the grubby little sandbox that those same women had never deigned to speak to her either and that her rage at their behavior had known no bounds for almost two years.

  “I think it’s because I don’t straighten my hair,” she said, nodding as if she’d just discovered how to split the atom. “Not because I’m not a self-hating Jew, but because I’m too lazy. Only, they don’t know that.
They probably just think it’s some kind of political statement.”

  Julia wasn’t about to admit that she thought Lisa’s hair was some kind of political statement, too, so instead she just pretended like she was so highly evolved that a thought like that would never have occurred to her.

  “If anyone’s going to ignore anyone, we should be ignoring them,” Lisa continued, her tone as indignant as a teenager’s. “We’re far more interesting and intelligent than they are. I can tell that just by looking at you, even though I don’t know anything about you.” She threw her hands in the air and shook her hair in frustration. “I mean, this isn’t Manhattan. This is Larchmont. You relinquish all rights to snobbery when you move to the suburbs.”

  Though Julia didn’t have as much disdain for the suburbs as it seemed Lisa did, Julia still couldn’t believe the relief she felt. Finally, someone who was not only validating her suffering but who was actually talking to her!

  “It’s just like Hebrew School,” Julia said. “When you were too afraid to get up from your desk because you knew all the girls were going to make fun of your ass.”

  Lisa nodded her hair emphatically, and then looked completely confused. “But you don’t have a big ass.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No. You don’t.” She turned around and flashed Julia her own behind—lifting her short faux-shearling jacket in an attempt to make her point. “I have a big ass.” She put her coat down over her very respectable-sized backside and returned her attention to Julia and to the matter at hand. “Ass size notwithstanding, they look at us like they hate us,” she said, pausing philosophically and with the hurt finally showing in her face. “Why do their hate us?”

  Julia was too delighted at that moment with their female-to-female mating ritual—the comparison and discussion of each other’s relative fatness, the acknowledgment of their equally miserable experiences in Hebrew School—to come up with an answer. But over the next few months during playdates with their boys at the playground or during quick evening walks to Starbucks, they would “process”—a word they used as a verb to describe a Talmudic level of analysis, deconstruction, interpretation, and explanation—everything from the Three Bitches to Peter’s job loss to the pros and cons of living in Larchmont.

  But none of that mattered now, on the eve of their official role reversal. Peter forced a smile and sat down at the kitchen table, his khakis and button-down shirt showing just the slightest bit of wear around the front side pockets and the collar.

  “Are you nervous?” she asked, with the same slightly taunting tone that Patricia had used with her when they’d discussed her new job. Only, unlike Julia’s, Peter’s answer wasn’t a big, fat ego-sparing lie.

  “Of course I’m nervous. There are a million things to remember, and I know I’m going to feel like a total outcast. I mean, sure, the other mothers will take pity on me once or twice and let me tag along, but in the end they’re not going to want me hanging around.”

  Julia sat down, too. He was probably right. Women liked to talk about their husbands and their marriages and their kids with complete impunity—they liked to deconstruct the other mothers and figure out their own place within the pecking order of “working” mothers versus “nonworking” mothers—and there’s no way they could do that with a man present. The thought of Peter feeling left out and out of place and uncomfortable made her feel sorry for him and she worried that he might feel even more isolated in his new job than she already thought she would in hers.

  She reached for his hand. “It’ll work out,” she said. “It’ll work out.”

  He forced another smile and shrugged, allowing himself to be convinced.

  Leaving him to work on The Project, she went up to bed, full of guilt for feeling so petty and small-minded and insecure and jealous about so many things, including the biggest one of all: the fact that he wasn’t going to have to worry about what to wear to his new job like she was.

  Sunday evening, the night before her first day, when he was finally finished with it, Julia looked at the chart. It was a vast sea of blue—Julia at work—barely broken up by other colors.

  She stared at it, and then at Peter, and then she felt tears rolling down her cheeks. Turning the presentation board over on the easel so she couldn’t see it anymore, Peter put his arms around her and whispered into her hair.

  “It’s only temporary,” he said, as they made their way upstairs and into bed. “I’ll find something soon and then things will go back to the way they were before.”

  Swallowing half a Tylenol PM so her worry-filled insomnia wouldn’t keep her up the night before her big day, she crawled under the covers and into his arms and fell asleep quickly. And though she dreamed of the time Peter had described—the time when he would find a new job and things would go back to the way they were before—she wouldn’t, when she awoke early the following morning, far ahead of the alarm clock, have any memory of it.

  6

  The red glare of the numbers—5:45 a.m.—blinked and flashed for several seconds before Julia, still inside the gauze of her sleep-aid hangover, realized that she was looking at the clock and that she had to get up. But she didn’t want to get up, and the sight of Peter still sleeping soundly across the bed only made things worse. All those mornings she’d rolled over with a smug little grin and gone back to sleep after Peter had left for work when it was still dark were finally coming back to haunt her.

  She showered and dressed quickly, struggling with a brand-new pair of panty hose that were shorter and nuder than they were supposed to be. Pulling a white T-shirt over her head and throwing on a black skirt, she reached into her closet for a black cardigan sweater and her shoes, and then tiptoed downstairs.

  She was just about to pour her coffee—Peter had been thoughtful enough to set the timer the night before—when she heard footsteps on the stairs. She assumed it was him, coming down to see her off, but it was Leo in his fire engine pajamas that were already getting too small for him, wiping the sleep from his eyes and clutching his blanket.

  She had tried to explain to him several times the previous week that she would be leaving home every morning to go to work, but each time she’d started to he’d ignored her, either because he didn’t understand what she was talking about or because he didn’t want to know. Taking two Eggo waffles out of the toaster and buttering them, she sat down at the kitchen table and pulled him onto her lap.

  “So I’m going to work today, remember?” She handed him a waffle and took the other for herself.

  He bit into his and chewed slowly like a little animal.

  “I’m going to go to the station and take the train,” she said.

  He stopped chewing and turned to look at her. His eyes were big blue discs and she could see a piece of waffle in his half-open mouth. “You’re going to take the train?”

  She nodded.

  “Which train?”

  “The big train that takes me into the city.”

  “You mean, Thomas?”

  She smiled and shook her head.

  “James?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Are you working on the railroad?”

  She put her waffle down and hugged him hard from behind, closing her eyes and trying not to cry but failing miserably. Yes, she was going to be working on the railroad. All the livelong day.

  Julia arrived for her first day of work sweating in the grip of another annoyingly humid late-September morning. Jack was on the phone when she got in a little before nine, still breathless and perspiring from the wrenching mad dash out of the house to the train and from the train to the office, but he waved her in and motioned toward one of his guest chairs.

  “Thanks, Vicky,” he said to someone who was obviously his assistant. “Send them in.”

  Jack put the receiver down and turned to Julia.

  “Before I show you around and get you started on the Mary Ford project, I want you to sit in on this meeting.”

  Jul
ia put her bag down on the floor. “What meeting?”

  “David Cassidy is here.”

  She stared at him. “David Cassidy is here?” she repeated, louder than she should have but she couldn’t help it. She was shocked—both because Jack wasn’t giving her any time to prepare for a meeting of such magnitude and because David Cassidy—Keith Partridge!—was about to walk through the door. “Why is David Cassidy here?”

  Jack shrugged as if it were obvious. “Despite the fact that he does, believe it or not, continue to appear live in concert and that he has had some success in Las Vegas during the past decade, David Cassidy is still perceived as one of the ultimate has-beens in American popular culture. Which, on a certain level, is unfair, given the fact that he was, according to his website, the first television personality—the first—to be merchandised globally, and that at one time the membership size of his fan club exceeded those of Elvis and the Beatles.” Jack adjusted his tie, pulled up his pants. “But that was 1971. Thirty years ago. He’s essentially been invisible ever since. Which is why he and his manager, Brian Young, want to hear our thoughts.”

  Julia tried to focus but her mind went blank.

  “How old is David Cassidy now?” was all she could think to ask. “I mean, he must be almost fifty.”

  “He’s fifty-four,” Jack said. He reached for his suit jacket that had been hanging on the back of his chair and winked at her as if this—the surprise meeting for which she was completely unprepared—was all in good fun.

  “Don’t be nervous,” Jack said, his tone too light to be at all reassuring. “It’s not like this is an audition. You already have the job.”

  She quickly reached into her briefcase for her yellow legal pad and a pen.

  Don’t remind me.

  Julia discreetly tried to catch a glimpse of herself in some reflective surface in Jack’s office and collect herself. Though she’d worked for him for less than five minutes, she knew that despite Patricia’s assertion that he was an idiot, he was smart enough to know that he wasn’t smart enough to wing anything. She was certain he was fully prepared for this meeting with David Cassidy—certain by the way he’d swung his arms into his suit jacket, certain by the way he’d swaggered over to the door with deliberate casualness, certain by the way he’d winked at her again on his way to greet the men who had just appeared.