Why We Lie

by Amy Impellizzeri

  Chapter 12

  After Laila finished reading from The Washington Truth, I rolled my eyes and looked at Jude. He wasn’t jumping in to correct her fast enough. So I had to. “Oh, come on. Neither Mena nor Appletreese has ever been beholden to any donors, and certainly not donors whose money was spent years ago now.” I slipped into party line mode as I did so often where the Foundation was at stake. “When Innovative Media donated that money, it was for tech support to the inner city schools. Appletreese provided one-on-one technology resources, including iPads and chrome books to students who had never before had access to working computers. That money has nothing to do with that loathsome app, LessThan, and it was used to do good work. Maybe the only good work Innovative Media has ever done. Let’s not trivialize that fact. And similarly, let’s not exaggerate their connection to the good work that’s currently being done by the Foundation—which is now supported annually by hundreds of corporate donors, big and small.”

  Jude finally found his voice. “Yes, of course. Laila, let’s drop this whole Innovative Media seed money thing once and for all. I don’t want to buy into that propaganda ‘The Washington So-Called Truth’ is spewing along with others. You know they’re just trying to bait me. I won’t have it. I want to prep talking points for the Town Hall meeting next week … ” And with that the two of them were embroiled distractedly into another strategy session. I excused myself loudly, and needlessly, from the room.

  I returned after a walk around the block with three lattes to go, feeling hyped about the imminent caffeine. In the hallway outside the strategy room, I reached for the door handle, but at the sound of the loud voices on the other side, I stopped with my hand on the doorknob and the drink carrier perched awkwardly on my knee. I was afraid to move, afraid the doorknob would turn loose in my hand and I’d be thrust into the fight that was blowing up on the other side.

  I heard Jude yelling but his words were hard to make out because Laila was interrupting him, repeating over and over. “That’s a lie.”

  Jude gave up trying to make his point when Laila switched off her one-line script with a loud hiss: “Are you kidding me, Jude?”

  “Laila, it’s been years, for God’s sake. What do you want me to say? I’m sorry? Haven’t I apologized over and over again? I have tried to make it up to you. I gave you this job. Do you know what a wedge having you in this position has put between me and Aby?”

  I felt all the air leave my chest and rush to my head.

  What was Jude apologizing for? Were my suspicions correct? Laila and Jude did have a history together that seemed to include much more than law school and political strategizing.

  I let go of the doorknob in my hand and it squeaked softly. The occupants inside didn’t seem to notice, or if they did, they didn’t let it disrupt them.

  Laila kept on hissing. “You didn’t give me anything, Jude Birch. Don’t you even dare. I earned this position on my own merit, and if you want to see a wedge between you and your girlfriend, then let me have a few moments alone with her to tell her the truth. I suspect, knowing Aby the little that I do, it won’t just be me who’s no longer accepting your apology at that point.”

  I backed away from the door and walked backward down the hallway, lattes spilling out over my arms. I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to know about the relationship Laila and Jude had before we met. Or maybe it overlapped with our relationship? Maybe Jude had broken up with Laila for me? Regardless, their relationship had not ended amicably. It had ended due to something so terrible, that Laila was using it as blackmail against Jude—to get this job I knew she wasn’t really qualified for. And to put a distance between him and me. A distance further exacerbated by the lies I was still perpetuating about my own past. How could I expect Jude to be honest with me? And yet I wanted to trust him so badly. I wanted a relationship that moved forward in truth. My heart was a jumble of hypocrisy and jealousy and pain.

  I ran out of the building, and jumped into my car, throwing it in drive and then park again, as I realized there was a huge crack in my windshield that hadn’t been there earlier that morning. I laid my head on the steering wheel in frustration and startled myself when the horn buzzed loud and low beneath my chin.

  I lifted my head and threw the car in drive again and drove straight home where I retreated to the guest room, refusing to come out even when Jude got home later that night. From the guest bed, I heard him come into the house, and pad down the hallway to the bedroom. I heard his hand pause on the doorknob, and then I heard the decision to turn it, rather than abandon it, as I had earlier that day on the other side of a door from he and Laila. I heard him whisper quietly into the darkness I was cocooned in, “Sweetheart—are you awake?”

  And in the silence that followed, I thought about that crack in my windshield and how it probably started out as a small and totally reparable chip, but I’d ignored it so long, it had started to spider out until the whole damn thing was now impossible to fix.

  The Washington Truth, dated July 1, 2018

  Excerpt from the Op Ed piece, by Nate Essuzare

  ….The news, they say has become all fiction.

  That’s too kind.

  What they really mean, is that it has become all lies.

  But that’s not fair. The media voice may just be the one place devoid of filters these days. In life, everyone is tempering their words and their actions with exaggerated courtesy, with a misguided sense that the truth is too difficult to handle, too difficult to stomach.

  Political correctness, they call it. And it’s advocated for.

  What an odd turn of events. Since when did politics become the barometer for what is true, for what is correct?

  Since when did the media become the enemy?

  Chapter 13

  When I was a kid back in Pennsylvania, my mom, my step-dad and I would go to the local arts fest every year. I’d wait for it to come to town, even though in hindsight it was a silly thing to pine for. We’d get up early and always beat the traffic. We’d wind through the makeshift fields-turned- parking lots stacked against each other until we ended up close to the entrance. We’d walk back through the early bird exhibitors to a place I later learned was the favorite and perennial spot of Kane, my step-dad; it was near an oak tree that was downwind of the funnel cake stands and upwind of a thick lilac bush. There was an old stump with swirled signs of life decorating its top, even though it was long dead. Kane used the old stump as a stool and set up everything around it for the day. Easels, a folding table of canvases, paints and brushes.

  I looked forward to this familiar routine every single year.

  The first time Kane told me about the Art Festival, it went like this: “Come on, I want to take you and your mom and walk the grounds a bit before I’m scheduled to paint.”

  “Scheduled to paint? What does that mean?”

  My mom grabbed his arm and beamed, like she had just been selected homecoming queen. “Didn’t you know? Kane’s on the schedule as a live oil painter. He creates a piece of art before a small crowd and sells it to the highest bidder.”

  “Really?”

  From what I knew about my step-dad, even in those early days, he didn’t seem like someone who would jump on board such a commercial trope. Sell his art to the highest bidders? I told him so.

  He simply smiled at me. Maybe he didn’t want me to know the truth. I’m not sure why not. But my mom jumped in and answered for him. “Oh, he doesn’t keep the money. It’s for charity. It’s for the art fund in the local school district.”

  Of course it was.

  Kane had been around since I was about eight. What I’d understood was that he’d pretty much been the town drunk who’d run off his first wife and children. After years of recovery and relapse, he’d finally gotten his life back on track, but his first wife and kids, now grown with kids of their own, wanted nothing to do with him. They’d moved across the country, and advised him every year when he called on birthdays and such
, to basically “stay the hell away.”

  At first, some people in town said my mom was crazy for taking a chance on Kane, but she always smiled and said, “The heart wants what the heart wants.” Eventually people forgot who Kane had been, or maybe they just showed it less. I never really had to take a chance on Kane, as I’d never known him in his town drunk days, and in my world, he was a good guy who loved my mom and donated money to the art fund in the local school district.

  My mom was a recovering alcoholic as well, who had lost a baby daddy and a preschool teaching job when I was still very young. As the years went by, I forgot all about those years. I just knew her as my mom, diner waitress extraordinaire, and dispenser of kindness and advice everywhere she went.

  So when Kane wanted me to go with him to the Arts Festival the year I turned 10, I went. And every year afterward, until my mom was too sick to go. After I moved to D.C., Kane and I didn’t keep in touch, something I felt badly about, but I thought about him when the last week of July came around each year—the traditional week of the Arts Festival back home. I hoped he was still going. Still selling his art to the highest bidder. Still sober.

  When I was a kid, I’d circle the opening day of the Arts Festival on my calendar and look forward to it for weeks prior like it was the prom or something. When the morning arrived, my mom, Kane, and I would climb into the pick-up truck at 8 am sharp. Always the same departure time. No debating it or trying to change it or trying to sleep in that day. It was understood and I went along with it. After I climbed into the truck, I’d always give the same backward glance at the canvases and painting supplies cluttering the back seat.

  Blank canvases.

  Later on, those canvases would really become my best memory from those summers.

  I shared a pared-down version of the story of Kane and the pick-up truck and the blank canvases with Mena one day after Yoga class, before I could filter myself. Our yogi had finished the class by asking us to focus on a pure and happy childhood memory.

  “Take the first thing that comes to mind, and strip away its layers until you are left with only its essence. That essence? Keep hold of that. Use that when you are trying to meditate. Focus.”

  I’d thought the whole thing was sort of hokey, but nevertheless, I kept thinking about those damn canvases in the back seat of the pick-up truck year after year. My poses felt effortless for the first time since I’d started the class.

  The yogi must have sensed I was on the verge of a breakthrough. She came up to me after class. She was wearing a thin salmon-colored tee shirt with “OHM” on the front; her white-grey hair pulled off her lined face in a pony tail that made her look younger than her years. She put her cold hands on my shoulders for a moment and then released me. The touch was unexpected but not unwelcome. I stood still, while she spoke to me in a thick unidentifiable accent.

  “What is it that you need, Aby?”

  I was struck with the realization that no one had ever asked me that question. I stood looking at her, bubbling over. Raw from the words she had spoken out loud. I held my breath, afraid that I’d say something I didn’t mean. Or worse—something that I did. I felt the tingly feeling of emotions coursing too close to the surface, as if the slightest touch, scratch, or bump would pierce my skin and let them all ooze out.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  She nodded, as if I had gotten the answer right, and I felt some relief in that. “Keep showing up, Aby. Don’t give up on yourself. Keep fighting for you.” I nodded earnestly in return.

  Later, over a glass of pinot and chef salads at the café across from the yoga studio, I told Mena about the blank canvases. I think the yogi had pierced me open after all.

  Mena nodded and returned the favor by telling me that when she was a child, her most vivid memories revolved around the times she and Suzana frequented a Maryland soup kitchen. She told me they spent every Thanksgiving (and a few other Saturdays per year) there. Her father never came. He was always too busy working or something else.

  Mena hated this custom.

  They’d leave their house early in the morning, dressed unassumingly and let the press follow them to the Franklin Street Soup Kitchen.

  There they’d meet with some other hard-working volunteers who probably had actual families waiting for them at home but still had chosen to come to Franklin Street on Thanksgiving morning. In Mena’s mind, this constituted actual sacrifice while her and her mother’s holiday plans at the Soup Kitchen seemed more designed to cover up the fact that they didn’t have anywhere else to be.

  While they waited for the doors to open to the public, Mena (and her mother) would head to the back of the kitchen and take some inventory so that Suzana would know what to have her staff send over the following week. As Mena counted and made notes on a clipboard, Suzana would routinely stack the soup broths on top of each other with the labels facing outward. Mena always noticed that Suzana wasn’t alphabetizing them as she did at home. It was conspicuous, her mother’s need for things to line up, she told me.

  In their home, Mena reported that gourmet jars of soups and exotic creamy sauces purchased at full list price, without any coupons, from a gourmet kitchen store in town, lined the shelves of an immaculate well-stocked pantry. As she watched her mother’s hands twisting and turning the jars in the soup kitchen every Thanksgiving, Mena imagined that Suzana was likely congratulating herself inwardly for resisting alphabetizing, but Mena didn’t share her mother’s pride in the restraint. Mena felt even the resistance was—itself—an act of ridiculousness.

  “Who else would even think about putting the cans of soup in proper order while waiting for the doors of a soup kitchen to open?” I shook my head wondering when this story was going to get, you know, happy.

  As it turned out, Franklin Street wasn’t an ordinary soup kitchen, Mena told me further. The press had confirmed Mena’s suspicions about the Franklin Street Soup Kitchen by writing up numerous stories about it. Sometimes the press would profile the actual patrons of the soup kitchen, but more often, thanks—Mena suspected—to the highly paid publicist Suzana kept on her payroll—the stories were about Suzana’s pioneering efforts, and the pilot program she was trying to inspire with it. At Franklin Street, Suzana had advocated for the needy hungry families to come in and cook for themselves. Pots were lined up on the counters and before they could eat, vegetables would be sliced and diced, meat would be browned, and containers of soup broth would be dumped into industrial-sized pots to be boiled and stirred by people who would not have had a hot meal in several days, perhaps longer. It felt like a taunt, a tease to Mena, but her mother insisted that this was how to really help people. By not providing a fiction that the world would continue to provide for them. To not pretend the world would keep on preparing soup for them.

  From Mena’s point of view, she told me, there seemed a soft whiff of well-meaning intention underneath a back note of patronizing condescension, masked by rancid self-righteousness.

  “I hate that my mother has always worked so hard to turn everything into a learning life lesson—even for hungry people.”

  “Dear God, Mena,” I said when she was done. “I don’t think you’ve done the exercise correctly. You can’t strip that memory down to any happy essence. You have to try again.”

  “You weren’t listening, Aby. It is a happy memory from my childhood. One of the best. I love coming back to it.”

  “Hunh?”

  “I was surrounded by food, and not eating one. Single. Bite.”

  I noticed then that Mena hadn’t eaten her salad, just pushed it around with a fork as she told me the story. And I realized I’d never seen Philomena eat in front of me—not once in all the time I’d known her.

  And I nodded while I thought: well, I suppose demons come in all shapes and sizes and flavors, no?

  Chapter 14

  The first time I met Suzana Treese, other than that halfhearted meeting in the coffee shop that Mena never once bothered to rem
ember again in my presence, and that I never bothered to remind her about, was a night that Mena and I were working late at the office. We had a grant proposal due the following day and we were pulling an all nighter, trying make sure to dot every i and cross every t. Literally.

  Mena was a brilliant woman but a terrible writer, and her brain seemed to work too fast for her hands so she was always typing things that didn’t make sense. We sat next to each other on side-by-side laptops editing the same google document and it was a mostly an exercise in frustration.

  Suzana arrived with lattes and granola bars around 11 pm and while she should have been a welcome sight at that point, I remember feeling annoyed. Even when she reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of small creamers that were actually alcoholic. “Here you go loves, a little Rum Chata to get the brain juices flowing.”

  Mena snatched the latte and creamers from her mother’s hand hungrily and waved off the granola bars.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Treese.”

  “Oh, Aby, Suzana, please. I know we’ve just met, but I feel like we’re old friends. Mena adores you, so that means I do, too.”

  Her words sounded genuine and warm, and her body language matched. She sat down on the sofa across from the laptops, and took off her expensive looking cardigan, revealing long toned arms, and gestured to Mena.

  “Why don’t you print out a copy? I’ll help you guys proof. You must be exhausted. I’m sure you could use another set of eyes.”

  Mena looked relieved to have her mother there. I wondered if my annoyance was fueled by competition.

  I’m here, helping. Why are you so relieved your mom is here?

  But it was more than that. It wasn’t garden variety competition. It was jealousy. The kind of green-colored emotion I wasn’t used to feeling. Especially where mothers were concerned. The emotion stung with realization as I watched the gentle interactions between Mena and Suzana that night. It was more than missing my Mom. I did that every minute of every day. Another thought hit me with a pang, as Suzana marked up the proposal and made some quality insights that probably would differentiate our proposal from the rest.