Girls In White Dresses (24 page)

He was a chunky little baby and they named him Henry, after Ken’s dad. Mary knew it made Ken happy and also she liked the name Henry. Mary liked to hold his feet and put them in her mouth.

He had light blond hair and blue eyes, like Ken. Sometimes when he was concentrating on going to the bathroom, it looked just like Ken when he was working on a case he thought he was going to lose.

“He’s the cutest baby you’ve ever seen, right?” she asked Ken.

“Yes,” he said. “I think he is.”

Button came over the day they got back from the hospital. “I just can’t wait to see him!” she said to Mary when she walked in.

“You could have come to visit in the hospital,” Mary said.

Button shook her head. “No,” she said. “I remember how it is. You need some time alone to get it together. My mother-in-law stormed into the hospital right after I had Ken, and it was just too much! People didn’t do that in those days.” She leaned down to whisper to Mary. “Between you, me, and the lamppost, my mother-in-law was a little bit of a terror.” She winked at Mary.

Henry waved his hands and feet in the air. “Oh!” Button cried. “Look at those feet! Don’t you just want to eat them?”

“All the time,” Mary said. She leaned over and smiled at Henry. “Look who it is,” she cooed at him. “Look who came to see you! Grandma Button is here.”

“I think he needs to be changed,” Button said. “It’s the kind of thing you should do right away.”

Mary picked up the baby and brought him to the changing table. She started to wipe him, but Button came over and edged her out.

“No,” Button said, grabbing the wipe from Mary’s hand. “You want to do it like this. Here, let me show you. Go like this.”

J
esus is coming.”

And then: “Jesus is coming, folks, you should be ready.”

Isabella looked down the subway platform to see if she could find the man who was trying to tell her about Jesus. She couldn’t see anyone, which made her nervous. His voice boomed around her: “Are you ready? Jesus will know if you aren’t ready.” It was Friday night and Isabella just wanted to get home. Lately, she’d had the feeling that someone was going to push her onto the track while she waited for the subway, and just because this man was talking about Jesus didn’t mean he wouldn’t be the one to do it.

“Will you be ready when he comes? Will you be ready?” the voice echoed down to her. Isabella shivered and hoped that the train would come soon.

The whole week, things had been off for Isabella. New York, it seemed, was out to get her. It started on Sunday, when a crazy bearded man spit at her on the street and called her a cunt. Monday, while she was watching TV, a giant roach the size of a small dog crawled out from behind the bookshelf and died in the middle of the room. It shook and gyrated and then finally stopped moving. Isabella thought it might have had a seizure.

Tuesday, there was the situation with her underwear. Her laundry was delivered to her door that night. Usually this made her feel wonderfully organized and put together—for only a dollar a pound, she could drop off all of her dirty laundry and have it delivered clean and folded the same day—but this time, as she unpacked the bag, she found a pair of underwear that didn’t belong to her. It was a large, flesh-colored, silky pair of underwear with a rose on the waistband. She held it between her thumb and pointer finger like it was dirty, although she realized it must have been cleaned and washed with her things. Her dog, Winston, sat and stared at the underwear, his head cocked to one side, trying to figure out why Isabella was holding it in the air.

In the end, she threw it out. She thought of returning it but figured the cleaners wouldn’t know who the owner was anyway. It was such a small thing, but it made Isabella feel sick, like someone had broken in and touched all of her underwear. It didn’t make sense, she knew. After all, she paid these people to wash her underwear. She did it on purpose. But it still left her uneasy, the thought that people’s personals could get mixed up so easily—that someone else’s underwear could find its way into her drawers.

On Wednesday, Isabella found a whisker on her chin. She hadn’t noticed anything strange that morning, but when she touched her face that night, there it was: a coarse black whisker. When had it had time to grow? “This is not right,” Isabella said to the mirror as she plucked the whisker out. “This is not right!”

“What?” Harrison asked from the other side of the door.

“Nothing,” Isabella said.

Thursday, Isabella found out that Beth White was getting a divorce. She couldn’t believe it. It left her unsettled. Beth and Kyle had gotten married five years ago, in a perfectly bland New Jersey wedding where they’d had a DJ instead of a band and served chicken instead of steak. They weren’t the kind of couple you looked at and thought, “Now, that’s what love looks like” or “That’s what I want to have someday.” But they were a couple that was compatible in a very ordinary way, and Isabella had always thought they were a good fit.

Isabella had been one of Beth’s bridesmaids, and she remembered how Beth was so bloated the day of the wedding that her dress wouldn’t zip. Isabella had known Beth for twelve years, and for ten of those years, she’d been with Kyle.

“I’m moving into the city,” Beth said when she called Isabella.

“Oh,” Isabella said. “Great. What about the house?”

“We’re selling it. Didn’t Lauren tell you? I asked her for some real estate advice and she recommended someone to us. I’m getting out of this godforsaken suburb. We can hang out all the time!”

“Great,” Isabella said. “Great.”

Friday, Isabella’s boss asked her to type up some notes. It was a job Isabella used to do when she was Snowy’s assistant, but she’d been promoted to assistant editor over a year ago. So when Snowy walked by and dumped notes on Isabella’s desk, she was thrown. Was she being demoted or had she imagined her promotion in the first place? Had time gone backward? She stared at the notes for a while, and then put them in a neat little pile in the corner of her desk.

“Did you know that Snowy asked me to type up her notes?” Isabella asked Cate.

“She does the same thing to me,” Cate said.

“Doesn’t she know that she has two new assistants?” Isabella asked, and Cate shrugged.

“Probably not,” she said. “The woman is bat-shit crazy. Plus,” she said lowering her voice, “I heard she’s worried about her job.”

“Isn’t everybody?” Isabella asked.

Cave Publishing was in trouble. The
CFO
had been sending around e-mails that referenced the economy in vague terms. He used words like “cutbacks” and “accommodations,” but no one knew what he was trying to say. Cate was convinced that they would all be fired soon.

“It’s just a matter of time,” she kept saying to Isabella. “Make sure you have money saved. This shitbox of a company probably won’t even give us decent severance.”

By the time Isabella made it to the subway station on Friday, she felt defeated. It was so hot that she was sure she was going to melt. “Jesus is coming,” the voice said. Isabella wiped the sweat off her forehead. She thought she might faint.

Isabella went home, turned on the air conditioner, and lay down on the bed. Maybe, she thought, things just seemed worse because of the heat. It always made people agitated when it got this hot—the air seemed to stick in the middle of the buildings and that made it hard to breathe. There was no such thing as a breeze in New York, and the whole city started to smell like garbage. That’s all it was, she decided. The weather. She tried to stay completely still. The air conditioner whirred in the window. Soon the sweat started to evaporate and she started to feel better. Harrison was away on a business trip for a few days. Isabella decided that she would order Thai food for dinner and stay in. She might feel better for now, but it was safer to stay in the apartment. No sense in going out.

Isabella’s left side hurt. It started in her shoulder, then moved up to her jaw and down to her leg. She complained for a month, until Harrison told her she had to go to the doctor. “I mean, it’s probably an advanced tumor,” she said to Harrison. “What can they do for that?”

“I promise, it’s not a tumor,” Harrison told her. She knew he had no authority to make such a promise.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll go to a chiropractor.”

“You have a mean case of
TMJ
,” the chiropractor told her. “You’re carrying a lot of stress on this side. Your alignment is all off.”

“So what can I do?” Isabella asked.

“I’ll show you some stretching exercises. And you should get a mouth guard to stop clenching your jaw at night. You can come back and see me. But what you really need to do is lower your stress level.”

“Oh,” Isabella said. “That’s all? Thanks.”

“You should take yoga,” Mary told her. “It will relax you.”

Isabella went to hot yoga, which turned out to be a horrible mistake. The room was a hundred degrees, and Isabella could barely breathe. “You may feel nauseous or faint during class,” the instructor told everyone. “This is normal. This is a normal reaction. Just work through it.”

“This is not normal,” Isabella thought. During tree pose, her legs were so sweaty that she slipped and fell.

“Don’t go to that yoga class,” Lauren told her. “Oh my God, that’s, like, the worst one. Go to hatha.”

Isabella’s new yoga class was better. It was a normal temperature, and kind of reminded her of church with all of the chanting and bowing and putting hands in prayer position. At the end of the class the teacher sprinkled them with lavender water as they lay still, which was nice. But her yoga mat smelled like feet, which got in the way of her transcendence.

“Maybe we should move out of New York,” Isabella said to Harrison. “Things aren’t going well here.”

“It’s not like other cities are in great shape,” Harrison said. “Plus, we both still have our jobs.”

“For now,” Isabella said.

“For now,” he said.

“I pushed someone on the subway,” Isabella admitted. “They were going too slow, and I just pushed a little bit.”

Harrison laughed. “So you think you need to leave New York?”

“Yeah,” Isabella said. “I always said when I push someone, it’s time to go.”

“Well, that’s something to think about.”

Isabella went out for drinks with Lauren and Mary. All they wanted to do was talk about Beth White.

“The house is a piece of shit,” Lauren told them. “They didn’t take care of it, and in this market? They aren’t going to get anything for it.”

“Spoken like a wonderful real estate agent,” Mary said.

“I told them not to sell,” Lauren said. “Beth wouldn’t hear of it. She said she wants it gone.”

“Jesus,” Isabella said. “What happened, exactly? Does anyone know?”

Lauren shrugged. “She said it was mutual.”

“That sucks,” Mary said.

“I was wondering why they weren’t having kids, though, you know?” Lauren said. “I knew something was up.”

“She told me that she’s getting custody of the dog,” Mary said.

“That’s the saddest sentence I’ve ever heard,” Isabella said. When she got home that night, she looked at Winston and said, “You would go with me, right? You love me more.” The dog yawned, and looked away.

“What’s happening?” Isabella asked Cate. She’d gotten stuck on a subway with no air-conditioning and was twenty minutes late to work. When she walked onto her floor, the conference room was full of people and some of them were crying.

“They closed the whole YA division. They just told everyone today.”

“So all those people are just fired?”

“Yeah,” Cate said. “Crazy, right?”

“How can they just close a whole division?” Isabella asked. Her dress was stuck to her legs, and she tried to pull the material away without being obvious.

“The company is in some serious trouble,” Cate whispered. “I say, we’re lucky if we’re still here in a couple of months.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Harrison told her. “Just make sure your résumé is updated, and do your job. That’s all.”

Isabella felt sick to her stomach, and heard the yoga instructor in her head saying, “You may feel nauseous. This is a normal reaction.”

“But that’s all that I’ve worked for,” Isabella said. “If I leave now, with the title I have, I won’t be able to get a job anywhere.”

“You still have your job for now,” Harrison said. “You’re very resourceful.”

“
You’re very resourceful?
What kind of a thing is that to say to someone?”

Harrison told her to calm down, and she started screaming. “I hate when people tell me to calm down! You calm down. Don’t you call me resourceful, and then tell me to calm down.”

Isabella packed a bag and left the apartment. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. Harrison stood in the door and looked confused.

Isabella went over to Mary and Ken’s apartment. Ken took one look at her and carried Henry into the other room.

“I think you’re just stressed from work,” Mary told her.

“Maybe,” Isabella said. “But I don’t think that’s it.”

“It doesn’t sound like Harrison was really out of line, though,” Mary said.

“No,” Isabella said. “I’m out of line.” She thought about her left side, all gnarled and crooked. Then she sent Harrison a text message that said, “I’m sorry. I’m crazy.” He wrote back, “That’s okay.”

Isabella and Mary drank a lot of wine, and Isabella ended up sleeping on the couch. She woke up to Henry dancing in front of her while he watched
Sesame Street
. “Hi!” he said to her. Isabella saw how full his diaper was before she smelled it. She sat up and smiled at him. “Hi,” she said back, and this pleased him so much that he smiled and squatted.

“I think Henry needs a new diaper,” she called to Mary. Then she stood up and ran to the bathroom to vomit. She heard Henry banging on the door. “Ummmbllll!” he screamed. Isabella knew he was saying, “Let me in! What are you doing?”

“Not now, Henry!” Isabella called.

“Bllll, baaa!”

“I know,” Isabella said. “I’m a disgrace.”

Every day at work, Isabella was sure she was going to be fired. And, as if that weren’t stressful enough, Peggy, one of the copy editors, wouldn’t leave Isabella alone. She asked her about every comma, every semicolon, until Isabella wanted to scream. Peggy was in her forties and wore odd-colored pantsuits with large shoulders and funky buttons. Whenever Isabella looked at her, she thought of her fifth-grade social studies textbook. Peggy looked like she should be in there, with a caption that said, “Someday you will work in an office and you will have coworkers. Women and men work together as equals.”