Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  Safe now on the giant slate-gray velvet sofa that she and Peter had splurged on before he lost his job and that was, she realized as she felt a sharp pain under her left buttock, apparently the new rail yard for a seditious group of those creepy little Thomas trains, she closed her eyes and rehearsed the line she would tell Jack DeMarco when she reached him, the line she’d come up with in the limousine on the ride home from the Upper West Side where Mary had been dropped off less than an hour before.

  I’ll understand if you have to fire me, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to travel with Mary Ford.

  There was an elegant simplicity to that sentence, a haiku-like quality to it, and she was certain if she hadn’t been perfecting it and repeating it over and over in her head like a Zen mantra all the way up the FDR Drive, across the Triborough Bridge, and onto 95, she probably would have had to make the car pull over so she could vomit somewhere on the side of the road.

  Knowing that Peter and Leo were out for the afternoon—at the playground, or the mall, or at that horrible Gymboree place where there didn’t seem to be a single square inch of rug or padded mat that some child hadn’t sneezed, coughed, or peed on—Julia collapsed on the couch, suit and sweater and black three-inch-heeled boots still on, and tried to focus. Behind her head on the side table was the phone recharging itself in its cradle. She removed it and started trying to get Jack on the phone.

  But he wasn’t answering.

  Of course he wasn’t answering.

  Why would he want to hear her raging into the receiver—She screamed at me! She yelled at me! I thought she was going to hit me!—when it was “his idea” for her to travel with Mary Ford in the first place?

  I’ll understand if you have to fire me, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to travel with Mary Ford.

  Not that it would be easy, of course, since the only things she’d ever quit in her life were smoking and her old job right before Leo was born, and she wasn’t used to taking the easy way out of anything. But this time the easy way looked like the only way and now all that mattered was escape.

  It was sometime after four when Jack finally answered the phone, and when he did Julia was shocked; she’d been dialing and redialing for so long that she’d half expected him never to answer at all.

  For a second or two after they’d said hello, there was an awkward silence, one that Julia interpreted as coming from a deep well of guilt and empathy on his behalf regarding her suffering. So sudden and unexpectedly touching did she find this moment of silence that she took it as a sign—a sign that, though they had argued almost incessantly since she’d started working for him, he was, indeed, a human being after all.

  For an instant she considered not saying what she had called him up to say, but when he began cross-questioning her about the events of the day—How many people were there? How many units of Legend were sold? Did the media we begged to cover the event (the loser at the Associated Press whose pieces never seem to run and the other loser at CBS This Morning whose segments never seem to air but who both have official legitimate press passes and thus make it look like we’ve done our jobs) actually show up?—it all came back to her, the parade of indignities and humiliations waving and smiling and making its way down the center of her brain like a noisy high school marching band.

  Here were the two hundred people lined up outside the store and the three hundred people lined up inside the store that Julia had to push Mary through:

  “You should have gone ahead of me into the crowd, not behind me, you idiot.”

  There were all the little yellow Post-it notes with names the customers had written on them that Julia removed from the boxes of Legend before handing the boxes back to Mary:

  “Slow down.” “Hurry up.” “Stop being such a spastic blowfish.”

  And telling her what name to sign on the box with her big, thick black Sharpie pen so each one could be personalized for the purchaser:

  “Speak up. I can’t hear a goddamn word you’re saying.” “Shut up. I can’t hear a goddamn word this customer is saying.”

  And how to spell it:

  “Is that ‘Catherine’ with a ‘C’ or ‘Katherine’ with a ‘K’?” “‘Mirranda’ with two ‘r’s? What moron spells ‘Mirranda’ with two ‘r’s?”

  And the can of Fresca—which Julia had to constantly check for temperature and fullness:

  “It’s too warm.” “It’s too flat.” “Get me a fresh can now.”

  And last but not least, the first thing Mary had said to Julia as they both crawled back into the limousine:

  “You’d better get with it, kid, or you won’t last a full day with me.”

  She knew that this was her moment to speak and to be heard, to tell Jack what she’d rehearsed over and over again all afternoon in the car, but her mind suddenly went blank. The elegantly simple haiku had disappeared and in its place had come new words.

  “Go ahead and fire me,” she yelled, as the front door opened and Peter walked in with Leo draped over his shoulder, asleep. “But there’s no way I’m ever going anywhere with that fucking animal again.”

  14

  Of course Jack didn’t fire her.

  And of course Julia would go back on the road with Mary.

  Julia needed the job and Jack needed her and neither of them had any leverage to negotiate.

  But Julia also needed clothes for the trip, so she used part of her precious Saturday to shop—an endeavor that was depressing under even the best of circumstances (finding clothes to wear around the house), but so extremely depressing under these circumstances (finding clothes to wear to work) that she would rather have had her gums scraped than schlep around the White Plains Mall and Loehmann’s wasting money on cheap “career separates.” The other part of the day she used to finally look through her Container Store Travel Package. She hadn’t touched the bag since she’d picked it up from the store, because it reminded her of her dinner with Patricia and of what a geek she’d felt like for being so excited about winning it.

  As she was refolding and rerolling and reconsolidating her things for her first work trip in years, she couldn’t help wishing that the Container Store had included a “child-storage case” (she imagined something about twice the size of a cat transporter, made out of black nylon and equipped with air holes and a sturdy shoulder strap with lots of inside pockets for small toys and snacks) so that she could have taken Leo with her. But since they hadn’t, she had to spend what little time there was left on Sunday staring at him and taking digital pictures of him which Peter loaded onto her laptop so she could look at them from her hotel rooms while she was away.

  Later that afternoon, she squeezed in a playdate for Leo with Adam at Lisa’s house—a ruse, really, for Julia to kill three birds with one stone: spend time with Leo; let Leo have some time with Batman; and most importantly, catch up on what she’d missed all those weeks she’d been out of the preschool loop: Juice.

  “There is no Juice,” Lisa said, shaking her hair emphatically. “When will you believe me when I say that nothing ever happens out here?”

  Julia rolled her eyes. “We live in Larchmont. Not on the moon. I must have missed something.”

  Lisa rolled her eyes back—It might just as well be the moon, Julia knew she was thinking but not saying—and pretended to think really really hard. “Except of course for the fact that we’re all in love with your husband.”

  Julia laughed, then waved her away. “Shut up.”

  Lisa reached across her kitchen table and grabbed Julia’s arm. “No. I’m serious. It’s like he’s one of us. Only better. Because he’s organized. He’s teaching us all how to be more like him. For the past few Wednesdays after drop-off he’s taken us all to the Container Store and helped us pick out things like magnetic bulletin boards and filing systems and supplies to make our own Family Binder.”

  “What’s a family binder?”

  Lisa tightened her grip on Julia’s arm, too thrilled to let go. “It’s a three-ring
notebook that you ‘customize’ by filling it up with plastic inserts and colored tab dividers and business card holders and pocket folders so that with a simple three-hole punch you can organize everything from medical insurance forms to summer camp brochures to take-out menus. Then he’s going to help each of us make a Home Flow-Chart. He wants us to start thinking in color-coded blocks of time so we can learn to see the Big Picture.”

  Julia extracted her arm from Lisa’s grip so that she could drink her coffee, then watched the boys playing just beyond the kitchen in the hallway outside Lisa’s living room. Maybe she was crazy but she could have sworn that Leo looked taller, older, different. If that was the big picture—that she was missing out on Leo growing up—then she didn’t want to look at it. She wanted to see only the small picture—the little tiny snapshot she always kept in her head of him and that she always saw when she closed her eyes at her desk—the image of him in those plaid pajamas, his tattered blanket in one hand and a train tucked into the other, staring up at her as if he loved her more than anything else in the world.

  That night, after she’d looked in on Leo sleeping, his face serene and peaceful and pristine against the fire engine pillowcase and sheet and duvet cover set from Pottery Barn Kids that Patricia had brought him when they’d moved him out of the crib and into a bed the year before, Julia couldn’t believe that she would actually be leaving without him early the next morning. She’d never spent one night away from him since he’d been born, and she didn’t know how she was going to be able to stand it.

  “You’ll be okay,” Peter said, when she joined him on the couch.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You will. You’ll get busy and the days will fly by and before you know it you’ll be back home.”

  She knew he was right, and though she appreciated his reassurance, she couldn’t help wanting to beat him. It was easy for him to say since he wasn’t going away from Leo for days to be tortured and abused like an animal by an animal. She also couldn’t help feeling annoyed by the implications of what he wasn’t saying: that Leo would be fine without her.

  “So Lisa told me all about your playgroup,” she said, as if she’d caught him in a lie.

  “What playgroup?”

  “The Container Store Playgroup. The one where you take her and Pinar and Monika and Hilary shopping to get them orga-nized. Sounds like you’re not just tagging along, but leading the pack.”

  He nodded. “It’s been fun.”

  “Who knew that being a stay-at-home mom could be so much fun?” she said sharply.

  Either he didn’t get her tone or was choosing to ignore it. “Did she tell you about our plan?”

  “What plan?”

  “The plan to all march together in costume in the Ragamuffin Parade?” That was Larchmont’s annual event on Halloween night.

  “Yes, she told me,” Julia lied.

  “It’ll be fun.”

  Again with the fun.

  “What are you going to dress up as, a color-coded Family Binder?”

  Julia laughed and Peter did, too. “Something like that.”

  The more he talked and laughed, the more annoyed she got. While she was getting pummeled by Mary Ford, Peter was home yukking it up with the Preschool Moms.

  “Do I get a vote?”

  “Sure,” Peter said, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “What do you think we should dress up as?”

  Julia shrugged. “Let me sleep on it.”

  “While you’re away,” he continued, “I’m going to make the gingerbread house and bring it into school for their Halloween party.”

  Julia’s mouth dropped open. “You’re going to make the gingerbread house? I thought I was going to make it!”

  Peter looked stunned by her reaction. “I know. But I assumed you wouldn’t have time. You’re away all this week and next week.”

  She threw her hands in the air. “Fine. Fuck it,” she said, getting up off the couch and heading for the stairs. She could feel the weeks of guilt and jealousy about not being home anymore surfacing and all the rage she didn’t want to admit to having about being the sole breadwinner while Peter stayed home and baked and organized surging right behind it.

  She tried to shake the feeling of infantile unfairness but it was gripping her by the neck and she could barely breathe. It was, after all, her idea to buy the kit from the Martha Stewart Catalog the year before, and she was the one who made it the first time. But Leo was only two when she’d done it—too young to care how much effort she’d put into trying to impress him. And she was so lost in her fantasy of creating the kind of home and childhood for Leo that she didn’t have—one that was fun—where the mother spent thirty-three hours over six days and over two hundred dollars making a fabulous Edward Gorey-esque mansard Victorian with a mock-slate roof (imported licorice discs), bats hanging from the eaves (slips of black royal icing), a warm glow emanating from amber glass windows (interior battery-operated light source behind hard candy “panes”), where the smell of gingerbread and the sound of pans being thrown in frustration and the F-word being screamed countless times filled the house—that she was too distracted to care that he didn’t care. He was too young; she’d try it next year when he was older. Which is why over the summer before she’d gone back to work she’d vowed to make it again in the fall when Leo would be three and when Peter would have a job again.

  When she went upstairs to their room and shut the door, Leo’s T-Rex pajamas were under her pillow and she could see the traces of him all over the room—trains and Matchbox racecars and socks and board books on the nightstand and on the floor. She could just imagine what the afternoons and early evenings were like when she wasn’t home—Leo and Peter eating dinner downstairs, coming up for bath time and then spending the hour or so before going to sleep reading books and playing in the big bed. Peter might as well be taking a stake and driving it straight into her heart—that’s how much it hurt knowing that he was taking over her role so seamlessly and effectively.

  Holding Leo’s pajamas in her hands, she tried to figure out why she felt so shitty. She should feel lucky to have a husband who, suddenly thrust into the role of stay-at-home parent, was doing such a great job. She should feel lucky to be able to leave in the morning for work and not give the care and feeding of her child a second thought. She should feel lucky to be able to take a break from being stuck at home for three long years and have a chance to reclaim her career and spend some time back out in the “real” world.

  Shouldn’t she?

  Peter came in and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “I should have known the gingerbread house would upset you. It was your thing—your special thing with Leo—and I shouldn’t have taken it away from you.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I was just being a baby. I think it’s great that you’re going to make it.”

  He nodded. “I know things are hard for you, being back at work,” Peter said. “But it’s not easy for me either—being home; pretending I have a purpose in life, that I’m not a loser. I mean, Jesus, I’m fucking unemployed. I’ve been unemployed for over six months. Who knows when I’ll get a job.”

  She took his right hand in hers and squeezed it. “You’re not a loser. And you do have a purpose in life. You’re Leo’s father. And you’re really really good at it.”

  “So what?”

  “What do you mean, so what?”

  “Nobody cares. I’m just Unemployed Guy. Stay-at-Home Guy. Pathologically-Organized-Guy-Who-Takes-All-the-Moms-to-the-Container-Store Guy.”

  Julia laughed at the last one. “Who called you that?”

  “Lisa.”

  She nodded. “She’s just jealous.”

  “Jealous of what?”

  “Jealous that you’re Amazingly Helpful Guy.”

  “She is?”

  Julia nodded. “She is. Her husband’s never home.”

  He shr
ugged as if he didn’t care, but she could tell he did and that he was feeling ever so slightly better.

  “And you’re going to get a job, Peter. We just don’t know when. So we have to be patient. It’s going to work out.” She took his left hand in hers and kissed it. His wedding band was cold against her lips and his fingers smelled like soap. Soon his hands would smell like cloves and allspice and gingerbread dough, and his fingernails would get stained with black food coloring. The more she pictured Peter swearing in frustration and realizing, after the first batch of gingerbread dough wouldn’t roll out flat enough or big enough to trace the giant front façade template, that he was in way over his head with this particular project, she could feel her crankiness subside and the calm finally set in.

  “So, when are you going to start baking?” she asked, pulling him over to the pillows and under the covers with her.

  He dropped his head, shook it slowly. Despite his Acquired Situational Judaism, he was still such a good Catholic, so susceptible to guilt and shame.

  “Please,” she said, poking a finger into his ribs. “I want to see you suffer.”