People Who Knew Me (6 page)

I don't know if it's normal or good for a child to be concerned for her mother, to pick up on cues of angst. My daughter always has, though. As young as five years old, she brought me soup in bed when I was sick. There's an unspoken understanding that I am all she has, and vice versa. At least she has friends, though, Heathers in her life. Of course, Heather can't take care of her if I'm gone.

“I'm fine, just got some things on my mind,” I say.

“Wanna talk about it?”

She bites her lip now, instead of the eraser end of her pencil. She pulls her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around them. In that little ball she's made of herself, it's painfully obvious how young she still is.

“No, just boring adult stuff.”

“Is it money?” she asks.

Despite all my attempts to shield her from money problems before, she's heard me on the phone with credit card companies, begging shamelessly for forgiveness of interest fees. She's heard me tell JT that I'll be late on rent because I just don't have it.

“I can babysit,” she says. “I'm old enough now. Heather babysits her neighbor's kids and makes fifty bucks a night.”

“It's not money, sweetie. We're fine,” I say, which is true. The bar pays my bills and a little more if I smile big for tips and take a few extra shifts. I've never had a lot of money in my life. My mom lived paycheck to paycheck in good years. Drew and I had our struggles. There were so many adjustments coming to California, but thankfully I already knew how to stretch a dollar. Claire and I shop at thrift stores, like I used to do in college. I clip coupons. I pack all of Claire's lunches in reusable containers. I take toilet paper rolls from the bar to stock up at home. Sometimes I take a jug of orange juice.

“Okay, well, I'm here, if you want to talk,” she says, releasing her knees and resuming her homework.

They'll do the biopsy tomorrow.

I'll have the results by Monday.

And then, if it's cancer, I'll have to change Claire's world as she knows it.

 

SIX

I started working when I was fifteen years old. Before that if you count babysitting the neighbor kids. My mom said I had to earn my keep, so I waited tables, tore tickets at movie theaters, folded clothes at trendy stores. But my first real job was a year after Drew and I got married, when we were forced to come to grips with the reality of being adults.

“You must be Emily Morris,” the receptionist said as I walked through the doors of Mathers and James Advertising. She was my age, or even younger, with black hair, accented with random strands dyed red, and a big loop ring in her nose. I'd come to learn that it's hard to tell the difference between people on their way to a concert and people who work in advertising.

“That's me,” I said.

“I'm Jessica.” She stuck out her hand confidently, shook mine, and leaned in close, as if to tell me a secret: “We got, like, hundreds of applicants for this position. You are
so
lucky to be here.”

I didn't feel lucky. I wanted to be at Brooklyn College, backpack on my shoulders, notebook in my hand. I'd been accepted into their grad school program for English. According to the welcome letter, I had a future of “immersion in literature from the Middle Ages through modern day, studying and analyzing texts, using different critical and theoretical approaches.”

But we needed money, Drew and me. One of us would have to get a job. A coin toss decided it would be me.

*   *   *

Drew had our monthly bills spread on the kitchen table when I came home from the coffee shop one night. He was biting his thumbnail.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I'm doing the math,” he said.

Our plan was to live one measly paycheck to the next, to barely get by, in that romantic way young people do. I'd work at the coffee shop; he'd work at the shipyard. That would pay the bills while he went to culinary school and I went to graduate school. We would be poor, but
enriched
.

That was the plan.

I sat at the table, surveyed the bills.

“What math?” I asked.

He stared, wide-eyed and unblinking, as if the bills were tarot cards holding the secrets to our future. “I don't think we can both afford to go to school right now.”

I had already been accepted at Brooklyn College and Drew had been accepted at the Culinary Education Institute. We would both get some financial aid, but not full scholarships. My mom said it was because we were white. I told her that was racist.

“School is expensive,” he said, explaining his conclusion. “More expensive than we thought.”

“Okay, what are you saying?” I asked.

“We should take turns. One of us goes to school, one of us gets a real job, then switch.”

He was still staring at the bills. “We're twenty-three. Our programs are only a couple years. We could both finish school by twenty-seven, twenty-eight this way. In the meantime, we'll make more money as a couple, start saving, pay off our loans faster…”

He finally looked up at me. “We're a team now, right?”

I nodded apprehensively, forcing a smile.

“What's a ‘real job'?” I asked.

“Salary, health insurance—all that responsible stuff,” he said. Neither of us knew anything about being responsible. We were imposters.

“All right,” I said. “Then who goes first?”

I was sure he would say I could go to school, live my dream, while he worked. He always let me have my way.

He didn't say that, though. He said, “Flip a coin?”

I laughed, he didn't. “Can you think of another way to decide? Neither of us will be happy putting off school. We both know that.”

He was right. I couldn't think of any other way to decide, nothing “fair,” at least. Any other way would lead to a fight, and Drew and I, as a couple, did everything possible to avoid fights. He grew up in a house where problems were actively ignored; for years, his mom told him that his father might come back. I grew up overhearing shouting matches between my mother and her boyfriends-of-the-moment. Both of us were terrified of conflict.

He took a quarter out of his pocket and I wondered for a split second if he'd put it there, knowing it would come to this.

“Call it?” he said.

The coin started flipping through the air and I acquiesced: “Tails,” I said.

It landed on heads.

I thought he would see my disappointment, say,
Best of three?
But he just put the quarter back in his pocket.

*   *   *

Jade was the woman at Mathers and James who made the bizarre decision to hire me for the junior editor position. She was a tall, thin blond woman in her forties who held the title of creative director. She painted each nail a different color. If you saw her on the street, you wouldn't guess her to be the director of anything.

The interview was short. I did my best to appear somewhat disinterested, as I had in the other interviews I'd landed. I didn't really want a job. Jade said she had a good feeling about me, though, and proclaimed herself to be someone who went with her gut. She did all of the talking—yammering on and on about the opportunities for advancement within the agency. Then she complimented me on my sea-green earrings and said I'd hear back in a few days. Which I did. They offered me a salary of thirty thousand, a small fortune in my eyes. Drew hugged me when I told him, then ran downstairs to the liquor store below us and bought an eight-dollar bottle of red wine.

*   *   *

The punk-rock receptionist brought Jade out to greet me.

“So good to see you again, sweetie,” Jade said, hugging me like we were old friends. She smelled like lavender.

I followed her to a tiny, empty cubicle. She waved her hands in front of it dramatically and said, “This will be your personal office.”

There was just enough space for a small desk—with a computer and phone—and a chair. I set down my purse.

“Marni, sweetie, meet your new neighbor,” she said, peering over the wall into the cubicle next to mine.

The face of a young woman—about my age, maybe a couple years older—peered back. She was wearing thick-rimmed glasses that appeared to be more for style than prescription.

“Hey,” she said, and sat again.

“Marni's a junior writer here. You will be proofreading some of her stuff,” Jade explained. “See how she's decorated her cubicle?”

Pages of magazines and photos had been tacked to the walls. Next to her computer, a goldfish swam in a small bowl with blue pebbles. A Post-it on the bowl read
Bob
.

“Feel free to decorate your cube, too,” Jade said. “We encourage people to express themselves creatively here, right, Marni?”

“Truth,” Marni said from over the wall.

Jade looked at her watch and said she had to “scurry” to a meeting. As soon as she was out of sight, Marni came around the corner and sat on my desk.

“Jade is such a fucking weirdo,” she said, loud enough for me to look around to see who may have heard. Marni waved me off. “Don't worry, everyone here thinks that.”

“I figured she must be crazy because she hired me,” I said.

“She probably thinks you have a good aura,” Marni said. “That's what she said about me, anyway. And it's total bullshit because my aura sucks.”

I laughed.

“I'll give you and your aura the benefit of the doubt, though,” she said. “You have to be better than the last guy. He talked to himself.”

“Did he get fired?” I asked. “For talking to himself?”

“No, he quit. I think he wanted to pursue comic book writing or something.”

I liked Marni.

“Have you worked here long?” I asked.

“Couple years. Started here right out of college. I was gonna go to grad school, but that would have been a grand waste of money.”

“Funny you say that. I was supposed to start an English program at Brooklyn College. Today, actually.”

“You made a good decision coming here instead.”

“I want to go someday, in a couple years, maybe. Right now I'm working while my husband goes to school.”

She stepped back, analyzing me up and down, blatantly.

“Forgive me for saying so,” she said, hand on her hip with attitude, “but you look
far
too young to have a husband.”

“I probably am,” I said with a nervous laugh. “College sweethearts. We're about to celebrate our first anniversary.”

“I guess that's cute, as long as you sowed your oats or whatever.”

I didn't confirm or deny the sowing of oats. I barely knew her.

“Just be careful,” she said. She stood and smoothed out a wrinkle in her magenta pencil skirt.

“Careful?”

She sat again.

“Things get weird when the woman is the breadwinner.”

She could see I wanted her to explain. She exhaled.

“My ex couldn't handle it when I got promoted to copywriter—fifty grand a year if you twist Jade's arm a little,” she said. My eyes got big. “It was like I cut off his dick.”

I flinched at the word “dick.” She must have sensed my discomfort, because she stood again and waved at the air, swatting away her theory like it was an annoying fruit fly.

“Actually, don't listen to me. What do I know? I just date a bunch of losers.”

Her chair creaked as she sat. “I'll tell you about them—my losers—over drinks after work if you want.”

“Sure,” I said.

I waited until lunch break to go outside and call Drew to tell him I'd be home late. I didn't want Marni to hear me, to see me as a wife who needed to check in with her husband. I spent the afternoon reviewing ad copy, correcting typos, suggesting rewordings, and wondering if I'd ever want to go back to school if I was making fifty grand a year.

 

SEVEN

Marni and I were friends immediately, the best of friends after only a few weeks. So when she left Mathers and James a year later, lured by a 30 percent increase at another ad agency, we promised each other we'd continue to meet up for after-work drinks. As happens, we kept our promises weekly at first, then monthly, then sporadically.

She called me one Friday to say she'd been promoted to senior copywriter, so we had to celebrate. “Meet me at the Dive,” she ordered. Marni always had a beat on the best new bars. And in New York City, there's always a “best new bar.”

This one, true to its name, was grungy, even a little dirty. There was a jukebox in the corner, a flickering Budweiser sign, and a sawdust-covered concrete floor, just like at the bar in Jersey my mom used to frequent; she'd get whiskey and I'd get a Sprite. At first glance, it was the type of place where men broke each other's noses on a nightly basis. But when you looked closer, most of the people in the place were white-collar Manhattanites, slumming it for a night with stiff drinks and Bruce Springsteen through the speakers. Even so, it was a decent alternative to the usual pretentiousness of SoHo.

I sat at the bar, between two guys with ties tucked into their button-down shirts. Marni was late, as expected. I ordered a vodka tonic. I'd come into my own, alcohol-wise, ditching the cheap beers and wine coolers of college days and graduating to liquor—on the rocks. It would take a couple difficult years for me to fully appreciate anything straight up.

I'd developed a habit of sitting with my hands under my thighs in bars. It hid my wedding ring and gave me an opportunity to see just how desirable I still was. Marni knew of this game of mine. We played it frequently during our happy hour outings. I kept a collection of business cards and phone numbers scribbled on bar napkins in a desk drawer at the office. Marni said it was weird, that I was longing for the single years I never had. I told her I was just having fun. Maybe I was a little bored. Drew was so occupied with school and I was working long hours at the office. Still, it's not like I ever called any of the guys. And when Marni left Mathers and James, I threw away all the numbers, which makes me think I kept them around to impress her more than anything.