Skipping a Beat (8 page)

Eleven

FROM TIME TO TIME, you hear on the news about people—usually men, but occasionally a woman—who suddenly abandoned their lives, as cleanly and abruptly as if they took a pair of scissors and snipped away their pasts. The media always focus on the person who walked away, digging into the crushing pile of bills or the double life with another family, but what I’ve always wondered is what happened to the folks left behind, the bewildered people just outside the glare of the hot TV lights and the camera flashes.

Imagine: There you are in the kitchen, tossing salad in a wooden bowl while your baby bangs a spoon against the tray of his high chair and the dog hovers nearby, fervently hoping you drop a scrap of chicken on the floor. And while you putter around, absently listening for the sound of a key turning in the lock, the person you love the most, the person you thought you knew inside out, is in the process of walking away from the life you’ve built together, from the life you’ve only partly finished constructing.

Some people abandon a life in the snap of a finger, and now Michael essentially wanted to do the same thing by giving up his company, which
was
his life. It staggers me, given what it took him to create DrinkUp, starting from scratch.

When Michael and I first moved to D.C., we were about as broke as it was possible for two people to be. We had six hundred dollars in cash, a car worth about a third of that on a good day, and a couple of Hefty bags with our clothes and shoes and drugstore toiletries jammed inside.

But within a week, Michael landed a job as a waiter at a pizza place—we both agreed he needed to be fed at work or we’d go bankrupt, fast—and soon after that I capitalized on my babysitting experience and got hired as a nanny for a wealthy family with two-year-old twins. Later I’d learn the twins were biters, but at the time, I felt incredibly fortunate to be earning three hundred dollars a week—which, as it turned out, ended up being about fifty dollars per bite.

We lived in a youth hostel at first, until we’d saved enough money for a security deposit, then we moved into a fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment in Tenleytown, where my one luxury was keeping on a kitchen light all night so the cockroaches wouldn’t venture out of the cracks around the stove. We bought a secondhand futon that was our couch during the day and our bed at night, and we trash-picked a little kitchen table and two mismatched chairs that we painted sky blue to add a splash of color to our dreary apartment. Then we took out student loans for college and got even broker. But Michael had a telescopic view into the future; he could see that he needed to get deeper into debt in order to climb more quickly out of it. Somehow, between our jobs and financial aid and loans, we cobbled together enough to attend school—Michael at Georgetown University and I at the University of Maryland in College Park. We worked by day, took classes at night, and spent every weekend alternately napping and studying—at least
I
napped, while Michael used a yellow highlighter to mark up his textbooks on the futon next to me.

Michael’s grades and test scores were so phenomenal he could’ve gotten a job anywhere. I always thought he’d do something with computers, or maybe rise through the ranks of a Fortune 500 company. But Michael was determined to never work for anyone but himself. He bided his time, whipping through college in three years and applying to business schools while he pored over the blueprints and mission statements of start-up companies.

“There’s always room for a new product,” he’d say, pacing our apartment like a 1950s father outside the hospital delivery room. “The trick is finding the niche. Mrs. Fields cookies. Post-it notes. Baby Einstein videos. None of those took a lot of capital; they all started small and exploded. What’s missing? What does the market not know it needs yet?”

Our apartment was so tiny he could take only three or four steps before stubbing his toe on our futon frame or dark-wood dresser from Goodwill and cursing before he spun around again, and I hid a smile while I watched him. He felt to me like a greyhound, all coiled energy, every speck of his concentration waiting for the gate in front of him to slide open and reveal the racetrack.

The only thing he needed was an idea. None of us knew it at the time, but one was already simmering in his mind. During Michael’s very first semester at Georgetown, his favorite professor, Raj, had used Coke versus Pepsi in a case study about effective advertising strategies.

Much later, Michael would tell me he’d jotted down a question mark in the margin of his notebook as he idly wondered, “Why is it Coke versus Pepsi? Why isn’t there something else?” The thought didn’t take hold then, though. It lingered deep inside Michael’s brain, waiting to be triggered by the perfect collision of circumstances, which wouldn’t occur until a sweltering hot afternoon several years later.

By then I’d already started my own little party-planning company, All Occasions, and Michael was in his final semester of business school at Georgetown. My income made our lives a bit more comfortable. We’d moved to a nicer apartment building, one with an elevator and no roaches, and we saw a movie or went out for a beer together every week. We’d bought a living room set that was on sale, and secondhand computers and a television. But most of my money went toward my student loans; I was frantic to get rid of them as quickly as possible, and I doubled down on my monthly payments.

Whenever I thought about our future, I imagined it as a series of stepping-stones: We’d made the leap from West Virginia to D.C., and now to a better apartment. We had a few nice belongings. Next we’d buy a car that had fewer than six numbers on its odometer, and after that, we’d move to a pretty little house. Slowly but steadily, our life would take on a reassuring, solid shape. But Michael was focusing on a very different future. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe he’d be successful, but we were two poor kids from West Virginia. We were the first ones in our families to go to college. He was the dreamer, I was the pragmatist. How high could we realistically aim?

Every afternoon, when he had a break between classes and his shift at the pizza place, Michael laced up his sneakers and ran, looping through the city’s eclectic neighborhoods—Chinatown and Dupont Circle and Cleveland Park—as he tried to burn off some of the energy pulsing through him.

“A drink,” he gasped as he flung open the door one unseasonably hot May afternoon.

“Get it yourself, caveman,” I said, not even looking up from my computer.

“No, I mean
a drink,”
he panted, bending over and putting his hands on his knees. “That’s it. That’s what’s missing. I just went to 7-Eleven to get a drink, and they’ve basically got four choices: soda, Gatorade and iced tea—which are just as sugary as soda—or plain old water. None of it looked good to me. There’s a hole, Julie, right there in the middle of the 7-Eleven case. A giant freaking hole! What if there was flavored water that tastes good? But not as sweet as Gatorade; that stuff tastes as sugary as soda … no artificial dyes, but maybe I’ll add some vitamins. Health food is becoming trendy; it’s not for hippies anymore. I just read an article about it in
Newsweek
. I’ll use natural sweeteners instead of high-fructose corn syrup, that’s the key …”

As he spoke, Michael absently shed his clothes and walked into the shower, and I could hear him still talking over the flow of the water. I smiled and turned back to my computer, knowing his methodical brain would have worked through the kinks in his plan, weighing the potential downsides versus the merits, by the time he turned off the water. He’d already considered and discarded the ideas for a dozen companies.

But within five minutes, he’d called in sick to work and was racing to the grocery store, his hair still dripping wet. He went to three different grocery and health food stores that day, and by the time I went to bed, our kitchen looked like a convention of mad scientists had invaded it. Concoctions filled every pot and pan we owned.

“Take a sip,” Michael demanded the next morning, thrusting a spoonful of something lemon-smelling in my face as I stumbled into the kitchen for coffee.

“Did you even sleep?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Is it too sweet?” he asked urgently. “My taste buds are shot. I need a fresh palate.”

“Not too sweet,” I said, licking my upper lip. “But …”

“Not quite there yet. I know, I know.”

I looked at the ingredients flooding the kitchen—the brightly colored limes and oranges, the thick, golden honey and agave nectar, the jars of liquid vitamins, the stubby roots of ginger and rolled sticks of cinnamon and bowls of dried fruits. Our coffeepot held a light orange liquid, and every one of our mugs and glasses was full; it looked as if Michael was trying to isolate all the colors of a rainbow.
Was that
—I squinted and realized that, yes, Michael had uprooted an African violet and was using its pot as another container.

“How many drinks have you made?” I asked. The competing smells were overwhelming, and I flung open a window.

“Dozens. Hundreds. I’ve tasted them all. I’m peeing every ten minutes,” he said, grabbing a pot off the stove just as the sea green liquid inside began boiling over.

“I’ve got to run,” I said, grabbing an orange to eat for breakfast on the road. “I’ll probably be late.”

“Can I heat brown sugar into a syrup … hmmm? What? Did you say something?” Michael asked, frowning at the little notebook he’d filled with the scribbles that no one but he could decipher.

“Bar mitzvah for the Rosenbaum brat,” I said, reaching out to tilt up his chin and kiss him and coming away with a sticky residue on my lip that tasted like blueberries.

When I walked in the door that evening, the kitchen looked even worse, but Michael was smiling. He handed me a glass bottle adorned with a label he’d printed up on our computer.

“DrinkUp? That’s the name?” I asked. “What’s in it?”

“About ten cents’ worth of products,” he said, his face bright despite the dark circles under his eyes. “I’m almost there.”

* * *

In retrospect, it was a good thing I was so busy at work that month. If I’d known that Michael had stopped going to classes and missed the deadline on an important paper, that he was in the process of dropping out of school, I would’ve been furious. He was so close to earning his degree; why the rush? Wouldn’t his new product seem more legitimate when he had an MBA after his name? And secretly, while I thought the idea for his healthy drinks wasn’t a bad one, it didn’t seem revolutionary. Personally, I counted myself as a satisfied customer of Diet Coke.

But I was too busy dealing with the Spence stepsisters to keep track of Michael. They were a Cinderella story, but with a twist: Abby, the youngest sister, who was getting married, was homely and awkward. It was as though someone had taken a mold of her father’s face—heavy eyebrows, hooked nose, strong chin—and recycled it for her. Abby’s stepsister was the maid of honor, and she was thin, beautiful, and had just discovered her own fiancé was cheating on her. Which might’ve been a form of social justice, except that the pretty stepsister, Diane, was by far the nicer of the two.

“Which ones do you think I should wear?” Abby asked as she held up a glittering, teardrop-shaped earring and a simple pearl encircled by gold.

“I like the pearls,” Diane said. “They’re classic.”

“But you only get to be a bride once,” Abby said with a huge smile. “Everyone’s going to be looking at me. I think I should go for the sparkle.”

“Of course,” Diane said, managing a grin. “That makes sense.”

“Now let’s go over the seating chart again,” Abby said, her voice sympathetic but her eyes bright. “Are you sure you want an uneven number of chairs at your table? We could put someone else there instead of just taking away Rob’s seat.”

Diane blinked hard, and I quickly interjected a question about the centerpieces. That was one thing I hadn’t expected about my job. Party planning was the official title, but I was equal parts therapist, referee, judge, and troubleshooter. I loved it, though. Maybe because my life seemed like it was just beginning to unfold, and this gave me the chance to glimpse other people’s and imagine which pieces I wanted for myself someday: the lavish anniversary party? No way; I liked quieter celebrations. The first dance to a song that had meaning only for the newlyweds? Yes! The minivan with the gaggle of kids? Someday, maybe …

Michael was so busy putting together a business plan for his new idea, and studying for exams—or at least that’s what I thought—that our apartment was usually empty when I came home. But later, when I looked back on that time, what I remembered most was the little notes he’d leave for me every day in unexpected places.

“I’ll be home before your head hits this,” read one on my pillow.

“Meet you inside here at 10:00
P.M.
I promise to wash your back.” This one was taped to the shower curtain.

And propped up against a single red rose he’d left on our kitchen counter on Valentine’s Day: “You were smiling in your sleep when I left. I wanted to watch you forever.” That note I tucked into my underwear drawer to save.

A week or so after the Spence wedding (where I’d successfully urged the good-looking but shy drummer for the band to ask Diane for her phone number during a break between sets), I came home to find Michael sitting at our little blue table with four glasses in front of him.

“You look vaguely familiar,” I said, tossing my briefcase onto the couch. “Remind me of your name again?”

“I’ll be your server tonight. We’re having a tasting, madam,” he said as he stood up and bowed. He had a dirty old dish towel folded over his forearm; I’d have to withhold his tip. “Please sit down. Tonight we’ll be serving Citrus Fruit, Berrywater, Not-Too-Sweet Lemonade, and PuckerUp Limeade.”

“Sounds delightful,” I said. “And very filling.”

“I think you’ll find our tasting menu is deceptively light and refreshing.” He handed me a cup. “Your first course will be Not-Too-Sweet Lemonade.”

I sipped, and my eyes widened. “Michael, it’s
good
!”