Good Grief: A Novel Page 6

  I clutch the edge of the sink and stare at the drain. A spooky Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea monster that’s all dark circles and chapped lips peers out from the bathroom mirror.

  I’m sure that the toothbrush is as heavy as a hammer. My hand won’t go, won’t pick it up.

  My skin itches, probably because I haven’t showered all weekend. Sticky dribbles of ice cream are caked to my pajama top. Instead of showering and dressing for work, I carry the tube of toothpaste back to the air mattress. I rub a little across my teeth as a guy on Cops in a Firebird screeches away from the police, speeding the wrong way down an exit ramp. They shoot out his tires, but he keeps driving on the rims, sparks spraying everywhere, oncoming cars spinning out and crashing into the guardrail, and then I am asleep again.

  When I awaken again there’s a square of sunshine on the carpet and I hear the mailman’s feet shuffling on the porch. I resist the urge to throw open the door and embrace him. A J. Crew catalog. You shouldn’t have!

  Instead, I creep to the kitchen and root for carbohydrates. I stack a plate with toasted frozen waffles and pull a carton of Cherry Garcia from the freezer. I know I should be eating fruits and vegetables, but they don’t carry produce at 7-Eleven.

  Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow I’ll start a high-protein, low-fat diet and sign up for yoga, as Dr. Rupert suggested, and start walking thirty minutes a day. Order that light box. I will overcome my fear of the produce section. Speaking of tomorrow, I scan the kitchen calendar, trying to find today. Here it is: Tuesday, November 27. Ethan’s birthday. You are here. I swallow a bland, dry lump of waffle.

  The night Ethan died I wasn’t even with him. I went home around eleven to get clean clothes and a book of Thurber essays that were the last thing that made him laugh. Even though he hadn’t spoken for two days, and he lay so still that you couldn’t tell if he was breathing unless you stared straight at the little snowflakes on his hospital gown and made sure they were rising and falling, I read to him. Because they say hearing’s the last thing to go, even when you’re on morphine. So like an idiot I went home for a shower and the book. Marion stayed at the hospital with her cup of Sanka and her knitting, the steady click-click-click of the needles filling the room. I was packing jeans and a sweatshirt into a paper bag when she called.

  “We lost him,” she said.

  We’ll find him, then, I thought.

  Christmas is coming, the calendar says now. What are your plans for Christmas? It is a bossy gardening calendar that wants me to start a mulch pile and stock my pantry with pretty jars for impromptu floral arrangements. I do not have a pantry. I rip the thing off the wall and stuff it into the overflowing garbage. A tuna fish can clatters across the floor.

  I see myself bending over to pick up the can. I see myself taking out the garbage and rinsing off the lid, which has smudges of food all over it. I see myself loading the stack of dirty dishes in the sink into the dishwasher and showering and ironing something to wear to work. But I don’t do these things. Instead, I call our department secretary and tell her I’ve got the flu. She reminds me to get a flu shot; it might not be too late. It could be, but she’s not sure. I tell her that I will put that on my to-do list.

  Taking a shower is a good thing. I know this, but I can’t seem to turn on the water. I’m staring at the insanely busy scallop-shell pattern on the shower curtain when the phone rings. The answering machine picks up and Marion’s voice echoes through the house. She says that she tried my office and cell phone, and she wants to know where I am and whether I’d like to drive over to Half Moon Bay, where Ethan’s ashes were scattered, and maybe have lunch. She sounds a little frantic. I trudge through the kitchen and pick up.

  “Sure,” I say. Somehow this plan seems easier than taking a shower. I’m surprised that Marion sounds relieved. I’ve always assumed that she calls and takes me places to be polite. But maybe she needs me. Although she has her volunteer work and bridge club and luncheons, she lives alone, too. Maybe she needs me to be her basket case. Just as sometimes you need a person to be strong for you, maybe sometimes you need a person to be weak for you. Maybe I am to Marion what Cops is to me. Kooky screwups who help you tell yourself: Hell, I could be worse.

  I pull on overalls over my pajamas and tie a kerchief around my snarled hair. As I’m getting a coat out of the closet, I notice spotted brown mildew creeping up the wall near the leak under the house. It smells funny—damp and sour. Maybe the house is filling up with invisible spores. Spores that drain the energy I would otherwise have for renting living room furniture. Maybe the whole place is going to rot and crumble and sink into the swampy earth with a giant sucking noise, taking me with it. They might find me thousands of years from now in my pajamas, like those bog people whose leathery brown bodies they discovered curled up under miles of earthy peat, their woolen cloaks still clinging to their limbs.

  Marion doesn’t mention my pajama top. Normally she would ask if I wanted to go back inside and put on a blouse or turtleneck. Her posture is always perfect—straight spine, chin leading her through a room—but today her composure seems manic. I notice she’s got her coat buttoned crooked.

  Ethan was an only child, and he said his mother always planned lavish theme parties for his birthday when he was little—dinosaurs or cowboys and Indians, with hours of games and bulging goodie bags. Even when he was grown she still baked his favorite, banana cake, every year for his birthday.

  We head up I-280 and over the hill on Highway 92.

  “Is this the right way?” Marion asks, suddenly panicked. There’s really only one way to get over the mountain to Half Moon Bay, so I’m not sure why she’s asking. Certainly she wouldn’t forget this route. I nod and her grip loosens on the steering wheel.

  “Beautiful,” she says vacantly, pointing to the wisps of fog strewn through the eucalyptus trees, which smell sharp and clean.

  We stop at a greenhouse, where I choose six yellow roses to throw out to sea for Ethan. It takes me a while to decide how many: A dozen seems like overkill, hard to throw into the surf, yet one or two seems too sparse, like when only a few people show up at a party.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” says a white-haired man behind the counter, bowing ceremoniously at the flowers. “Will that be all?”

  “I’ll get those,” Marion says, waving a $20 bill at him.

  “You look just like your mother,” the man tells me. I glance up from a package of crocus bulbs and realize he means Marion. She looks shyly at the floor, her lips turning up slightly at the corners.

  I say, “Thank you.”

  We pass fields striped with rows of brussels sprouts as we head toward the sea, which is gray and chalky on the horizon.

  Ethan loved the ocean—scuba-diving and boogie boarding. After we were married, we had time for only a short honeymoon because he had just joined a start-up company and could take only five days off. We drank champagne on the beach and stayed in bed until two in the afternoon. But then engineers from his company started calling on his cell phone and he’d talk them through fixing bugs in the software code.

  “Enough,” I told him after we missed the sunset and our dinner reservation one night. I snatched his phone and tossed it into the bushes outside our room.

  “This is for us,” he said, running out to get the phone. It was always for us. He said I needed to realize that and focus more on the future.

  Now, here I am in the future with a handful of yellow roses.

  At the beach, angry waves pound the sand. I take off my sneakers and socks and roll up my pants, but I can’t make it out to where the water is even a little bit deep. A thorn on one of the roses pricks my finger.

  Marion stands facing the sea with her hands on her hips, as if commanding it to settle down. The wind blows her white hair straight back, and I see her pink scalp underneath. Her eyes tear from the cold.

  The weather was almost this blustery on the day of Ethan’s memorial service, even though it was summer. Marion, Dad,
Jill, Ruth, and our friends Sonia and Alfie and I gathered on the shore to sprinkle the ashes. The wind whipped everyone’s hair into their faces, and sand stung our eyes, and the ocean churned impatiently, tugging at our ankles as if to say You, too; I want you, too. Technically we were supposed to get a permit to disperse the ashes, but no one had done this. Marion looked around furtively and struggled to open the stubborn lid on the urn. She finally pried it off and tossed out the ashes, which tumbled straight down into the foam around everyone’s feet. She glared disdainfully at the urn. Clearly, this wasn’t what she’d had in mind. She must have imagined a crisp but windless day, the sky a big blue bowl overhead, the ocean twinkling, the ashes flying in a graceful arc toward Hawaii.

  Now, I fling the roses as hard as I can. They’re airborne for a second, spread out like a fan. Then they bob and rock in the white foam just a few feet away. The waves push them to shore, drag them back, push them in again.

  A German shepherd splashes through the surf, barking at the flowers. “Shoo!” I yell at the dog, who clutches one rose between his teeth. “Scram!” There’s no owner in sight, no one else on the beach. The salt water stings my calves. My feet are numb.

  I’m startled when Marion comes up from behind me, takes my hand, and squeezes it. I squeeze back. While her fingers are cold and dry, her palm is warm and cushiony. She says we should have remembered our gloves. Then her hand is gone. We turn away from the ocean, the roses, and the barking dog and climb up the hill toward the parking lot. The sand is so deep that it’s like one of those dreams where you’re trying to run but you can’t.

  Marion and I are the only ones at a restaurant that overlooks the beach. We order crab and a bottle of wine for lunch. I work at the claws and dredge a slice of sourdough bread in melted butter and drink some of the Chardonnay. Marion finishes her wine and pours another glass but doesn’t touch the crab.

  “Too much work,” she says. “Too much.” She looks at my pajama top suspiciously but doesn’t seem to have the energy to comment.

  “Maybe you’d like something else?” I ask her. The waiters, who outnumber us, stand by the coffee machines and glance over at our table.

  “No, thanks.” Marion smiles and tucks her napkin beside her plate. “Actually, know what I’d like?”

  I shake my head.

  “A cigarette.”

  “A cigarette?” I can’t imagine Marion smoking. “We could get you some.”

  “Oh, my gosh, no.” She waves her small hand over her plate.

  Across the water I think I see the ghostly sail of a boat on the horizon. Or maybe it’s just a whitecap or a cloud. Soon it’s gone, swallowed up by the ocean.

  I know, I know as I drive up 280 to work the next morning, that I should not be wearing my bathrobe. But I can’t stay home from work another day, and I simply couldn’t get dressed this morning. All of my clothes were either too small or mismatched or dirty. But mostly they were too small—the skirts unforgiving of my new apple pie middle. I tore blouses and dresses off hangers and laid them across the bed, trying to put together an ensemble, but nothing worked. I couldn’t get dressed and I couldn’t not go to work, so I climbed in the car in my bathrobe and started driving.

  Now, it’s already nine-fifteen. Who do I think I am, taking so many days off? This is Silicon Valley, for God’s sake. Is the NASDAQ going to shut down because my husband died? There’s business-to-business e-commerce valuation to shore up and leverage!

  I crank up the heat and take another slug of coffee from my travel mug. My bowels rumble.

  My head itches because I haven’t washed my hair in how many days? Who knows. The thing is, account executives from our New York public relations agency flew out last night and they’re meeting with Lara and me today to hammer out a strategy for East Coast story placements—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. Lara always says “hammer out.” She called last night to make sure I’d be there. I promised I’d be in by nine-thirty.

  Mastodon Suburbans and Land Cruisers chug past me. Maybe I feel fragile because my car is too small. Maybe I should be driving a van, a school bus, a tank. On World’s Scariest Police Chases, a guy stole a tank and plowed through a neighborhood, crushing cars and boats and bicycles. I can relate to having this kind of bad day. I wince when I realize what’s clunking from side to side in the trunk: my pies.

  I’m supposed to give a presentation after lunch to Lara and the PR women on patch strategies. But I don’t have a single idea yet. We’re the client. Why doesn’t the agency come up with a strategy? Their job is to implement the strategy under my direction, says Lara.

  I listen to the traffic report, hoping for a multiple-car crash to halt my commute, but there isn’t any.

  In the elevator, the CFO smiles at my slippers in an absentminded sort of way. Maybe he would like a slice of apple crumb. We both concentrate on the red square numbers overhead, which wink knowingly as we shoot toward the fifth floor. Two, three, four, here we are!

  I fetch The Wall Street Journal from the little table in the hall.

  “Oh!” the admin two cubes over says when she sees me. “Oh.”

  As I steam toward my cubicle, suddenly the floor seems all uphill. I think I can, I think I can! More and more employees are finding it hard to juggle work with family, an article in the Journal says. I envy that dilemma.

  My in-box is piled high. Doesn’t anyone at this company know we’re becoming a paperless society? I pick up the whole thing and dump it into the garbage. I move my ficus tree to where the in-box was. It looks pretty there, its wrinkly leaves outlined in white. I decide the other plants around my desk would look nice on the floor. I arrange them in a row that closes up the opening of my cube. The potted palm, ivy, Christmas cactus, and African violet create a much needed fourth wall.

  My presentation is in less than two hours. I turn on my machine, open PowerPoint, and get started on the slides, but I can’t decide whether to make the text centered, flush left, or flush right, let alone what to say. I pull my lunch out of my desk: a bag of old hot dog buns and a few restaurant packets of honey. I drizzle the honey on the buns and start eating. Not so bad, really.

  There’s a rustling in the plants and a knock on the edge of my cube. I love how people try to knock on your cube, as though you’ve got privacy.

  Someone says, “Sophie?”

  I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!

  Lara slides through the plants. She is small and lithe and can wedge herself into narrow spaces, like a bat.

  “Um,” she says. “What happened?”

  “Erm.” The buns and honey stick to the roof of my mouth. “My hug-band thied.”

  Lara crouches on her haunches beside my chair. She bites into her plump lower lip and draws in a long breath through her teeth. Finally, she clears her throat and speaks. But I don’t have any idea what she’s saying. I try to listen, but suddenly my brain can’t string words together.

  “Media streep froop,” she whispers.

  “Wha?” I swallow a dry lump of hot dog bun.

  I don’t think this is a sentence. Not in a hammer-this-out kind of way. No way.

  “Way,” Lara insists. “Flood mires grow blood brambles.”

  Supposedly, hearing is the last thing to go, but in my case it seems to be the first thing to go. I knock the side of my head, trying to get the water out.

  Is everyone speaking a new language starting today? I’ve always dreaded changes in the rules like this. Daylight saving time. The threat of a conversion to the metric system.

  “Flood mires grow blood brambles, hon,” Lara coos again, bending in closer. I’ve heard her on the phone calling her friends “hon.” It is a term of endearment for her. A derm of entearment for hoo.

  “Hoo!” I hear myself exclaim.

  I dig into the bowl of Starburst candies on my desk and begin unwrapping and eating them, first orange, then red, then yellow, then pink, then orange again. The orange ones are the best. The air
is warm and Lara is fuzzy and then she’s gone.

  I swallow the candies and pat my hair, a tangled nest on my head. I try to tuck the clumps behind my ears.

  In a little while an HR guy is in my cube, a bearded man who wears a lavender dress shirt and black jeans. His eyes are brown—two mud puddles staring calmly out of his face. He touches me, a hand on my shoulder that gives off warmth, even through the thickness of my robe.

  Oh, my voice echoes in my head.

  “Sophie, why don’t we go downstairs to my office?” he says, slowly pushing a box of Kleenex across the desk toward me.

  “That sounds good to me,” I hear myself stammer. I slide down in my chair and burrow my feet under my desk to hide my bunny slippers. I don’t want him to see how casually I’m dressed when it’s not even Friday. At least I don’t think it is. I believe it’s Thursday or perhaps Wednesday. Maybe that’s why he’s in my cube. There is a company dress code, after all. Jeans are one thing. But slippers? I’ve had them for years, since before Mother died, and the ears are frayed from getting stepped on.

  “Okay, then,” he says. I look at his hand on my arm. The fingers are big and square and pink.

  “That sounds good to me,” I repeat. Then I can’t stop saying “That sounds good to me.” I dig my hands into the sleeves of my robe. I want to move on and say something else, but everything’s stuck. “That sounds good to me,” I tell him.

  “Ready?”

  I nod. But I can’t get up. I need to rest a minute first. Some would argue that wearing your robe and slippers is enough of a rest, but I need something more. I lay my head on my desk, and the faux leather blotter is cool against my cheek. The branches of the ficus tree bend toward me, the small, pointed leaves stroking my hair.

  6

  Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. There are lots of white lines in the road on the way to Dr. Rupert’s office, and I can’t help counting them.

  Dad’s come to stay with me, and he’s been driving me to my appointment twice a week, just like when I was a teenager and he drove me to the library and community pool after Mother died. His wife, Jill, sent me a care package of apricot bubble bath and lotion, gourmet chocolate peanut-butter cups, and movie star magazines.