Circle of Three (7 page)

I had just taken a sip of my drink. When I choked, a fine mist of Pepsi sprayed out over my plate. Chris stared at me for a shocked second, then started to giggle, hesitantly at first, checking to make sure it was okay. Before long we were leaning back in our facing seats, braying at each other. She had a swooping, crazy-woman laugh; the sound of it tickled me so much, I kept on laughing. After a while I lost track of what we were laughing at, but part of it had to be relief over not having to be so damn careful with each other.

Fledergast was Oz’s name; hers was really O’Donnell. I told her mine was Danziger. We told each other about our hobbies, my crafts and decorating, her creative writing classes. For some reason I found myself telling her about Jess and the Arkists. I was used to Ruth’s and my mother’s
disdain, and Chris’s delight took me by surprise. “What fun,” she cried, “what a blast you’d have! You’re not doing it?”

“When? When? I can’t, I just haven’t got time.”

“God, I know. If I had time, I know what I’d be doing—writing books for kids.”

“Really?”

“I’ve already written one—well, actually I wrote three when Andy was little. But now he’s nine, I don’t have the excuse that I’m writing them for him anymore. I miss it.”

“Did you ever try to sell them?”

“Oh, no, no. Although they weren’t terrible. But they weren’t picture books so, you know, I doubt there’d’ve been much of a market anyway. But honestly, they weren’t bad.”

“I bet they were great.”

“If only we didn’t have to make money. You know?”

I laughed.

“Wouldn’t it be a happier world? This job’s fine, I’m not complaining, but what does it have to do with
us
? For Brian, it’s the best job there could ever be, but that’s because it’s
his
. I’m jealous of him. I think people who have found their life’s work are the luckiest people in the world. Join me in the chorus now…”

We laughed again, but she was right. It was a disheartening thought for the first day of my new job.

Three weeks later, Brian braced his hands against the edge of my desk, his weight-lifter shoulders hunched, head jutted, eyes intent. “We can go to four quarters by the beginning of next year. We can. Already we have too many classes per term for the amount of space we’ve got, or we will by next summer. Thanks to you, Carrie.”

“Oh, no. That’s not true, but thanks.” I wasn’t being modest. I’d made some contacts, phone calls, had conversations with Brian about new courses, nothing more. Crediting me with pulling off the expansion of the Other School by a full quarter was taking employee boosterism too far. But that was the kind of hype Brian excelled at. The amazing thing
was that even when you knew he was doing it, it worked. I glanced past his shoulder at Chris, who winked at me.

“Yep, yep, don’t tell me, I know who’s making a change around here. New ideas, fresh air, that’s what we needed. Got stale, got sleepy, can’t let that happen. Like when you get tired driving—you want to get where you’re going, you don’t pull over and take a nap, no, you open a window, let the cold air blow in your face. That’s you, Care, a breath of fresh air.”

I laughed, flattered in spite of myself. Oh, he was so full of it.

But my new job wasn’t as interesting as he’d made it sound. Or maybe it was me. Chris had been doing the work of two people, so my job was to take over half of her work-load. Right now it was challenging, but I couldn’t help wondering for how long.

I guessed it was worth it, though, toy salary and all, because I had to get up at seven every day, shower, put on lady clothes, leave the house. Eat sensible meals at appropriate hours. Nobody, not even Margaret Sachs, was sorry to see the end of the assembly line of miniature flower arrangements. As routine and horizonless as I could imagine Brian’s job becoming, at least it had accomplished what my mother, guilt over Ruth, and fifty milligrams a day of Zoloft hadn’t been able to: my return to the real world. Half of me might still be in the ether, zoned out and inattentive, mired in the old grief and guilt that a death in the family brings—
naturally
—but the other half was coping. It was a start.

Brian leaned in closer. With anyone else, a man especially, I’d have moved back, maintained the conventional distance, but I was getting used to his enthusiastic invasions of my space. “Summer term will tell the tale,” he prophesied softly; I could smell the clove-flavored gum he chewed after he smoked a cigarette. “That’s the key. If it’s big, we’ll know. That’s the next corner we turn. Right? So are we on schedule? Did you get Lois Burkhart on board again? You have to nail her down, Care—”

“I did.”

“—because those finance courses are big in the summer. After April fifteenth everybody wants to reform, turn over a new leaf. They read the brochure in May, they can’t wait to sign up for ‘Debt-Free Living’ or whatever it is.”

“I got her.”

“And Albert Meyer, I want him for day trading again, and he didn’t reup. Call and get him on the bus. I was thinking we should beef up the touchy-feely stuff for summer, get more girls. I know, but it’s
true
, you offer ‘Relationships for the Millennium’—that’s just off the top of my head—and you’ve got fifteen, twenty women ready to talk, and not a man among ’em. Am I right?”

“Probably.”

“Right, so let’s think about it, get somebody from social services or one of the university shrinks. ‘Be Your Own Therapist’—how’s that? ‘Learning to Like Yourself.’ Because we’ve got enough tech stuff, enough computer, Internet, and small business, we need to girly things up a little for summer. I know!” he exclaimed, laughing, throwing up his hands. “But you know what I mean! Okay, I’m a sexist pig, and now I’m getting out of here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Got a meeting with Hal Wiley at the paper.”

“About an ad?”

“An ad, sure, but I’m talking to him about putting the brochure in the
Record
. The whole summer schedule.”

“Printing it? Oh,” I said, “that would be great.”

“No, not printing it. The whole thing, talking about an insert. Think of the distribution! And hell, it’s a community service.” He grinned, held his arms out wide. He looked like a fullback. “Heh? Think he’ll go for it?”

We women exchanged glances. “I think,” Chris said with conviction, “he won’t know what hit him.”

Part of my job involved editing course copy the instructors sent in, the short, hype-filled paragraph allocated to each class in the brochure. Most of them needed punching up,
“sexying,” Brian called it, especially the courses that sounded a little dry to begin with—“Amateur Radio Operating,” “Problem Solving,” “Autumn in the Herb Garden.” Any course could be jazzed up to sound more interesting, though, and I was getting pretty good at it. Titles were my forte. Last year’s “Basic Waltz, Fox-trot, and Jitterbug,” for example, would be “Gotta Dance!” next term; the old “Writing Screenplays for TV and the Movies” would be “Move Over, Quentin Tarantino.” And so forth.

Rarely did the course descriptions come to me too sexy already, but Lois Burkhart’s were an exception. She was an assistant manager at the Farmers and Merchants Bank on the Square. She sent me her course copy by E-mail:

“Hello, Lois Burkhart, how can I help you?”

“Lois, it’s Carrie Van Allen.”

“Carrie! Hey, how are you?” She had a bright, convivial voice, full of warmth and intimacy, like the TV voice-over for a women’s hygiene product. “I was just thinking about you. Did you get my last E-mail?”

“Yes—well, I think it’s the last. That’s why I was calling.”

“I nailed it this time, didn’t I? You know, I didn’t agree at first, frankly, in fact I thought you were being a little—well, ha ha! I’ll just say a little
strict
. But I went over it again and now I can see it’s better, so all’s forgiven. You were right and I was wrong,” she declared magnanimously.

Lois claimed we’d met before, that she remembered me perfectly. It was possible; I did have an account at her bank, although nine times out of ten I accessed it from the ATM and never entered the building. Say she was right and we knew each other—did that make it easier or harder to tell her that her copy was still a mess?

“Well, it’s much better,” I allowed cautiously, “much, much better, no question about that.”

“I took out all the exclamation points. It made it more dignified, like you said. You were right about that.”

“Well, um, not quite all. Did I say dignified? Also—”

“
Most
. You do want it to have
some
life.”

“Definitely, absolutely. It should definitely have some life.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Why hadn’t I done this by return E-mail? “Well, the guarantee.” Just for starters. “How does that work, now, I mean, who would pay—”

“Oh, that’s nothing, it’s irrelevant.”

“Well, but who—”

“Carrie, nobody’s going to ask for their money back!” A hard, cackling laugh.

“It’s just that usually we don’t guarantee results, you know, I mean never, we couldn’t, and besides—”

“Take it out, then. Go ahead. Just take it out.”

“Well, I think maybe we’ll have to.”

“Do it. Anything else?” The feminine hygiene voice went clipped and businesslike. Still melodic, but now it was selling disaster insurance.

“Well, the, um, textbook sale.” So much easier to talk about the little errors, easily expunged, than tackle the
larger issue of the blurb’s overall inanity. “And the mention of your name in the text, that ‘Leave it to Lois.’You know, usually we like to give the impression that somebody else, somebody objective and impartial is actually writing these—”

“Wait a second. What exactly are you suggesting?”

“—is writing these little paragraphs—What?”

“You think I get a cut from the texts? A little kickback? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“No, no. No, of course not.”

“Well, I don’t. It’s a courtesy, a convenience, but you can cut that right out, too. Take out anything you don’t like and write it yourself.”

“Wait, now. Lois, hold it, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s just a policy at the school that instructors never sell anything, nothing. It keeps everything—it just looks better, that’s all. I’m sorry if that wasn’t explained to you.”

“Nothing needs to be explained to me. I’ve taught personal finance for two of the three years the Other School has been in business, long before you were a gleam in Brian Wright’s eye. I have a bachelor of science degree in business and two-thirds of a master’s in accounting. I am an assistant manager at the fifth largest bank in the Commonwealth of Virginia. I know how to do my job. Overworking perfectly good course descriptions in your little brochure is apparently your job.”

“Oh, Lois.”

“No one has ever had any trouble with my course copy before, by the way.”

“No? Well, first time for—”

“I’ve improved it, is the only difference. The guarantee, the textbook offer—these are entrepreneurial enhancements. But I wouldn’t expect you to appreciate that. You ask Brian to call me, will you do that?”

“Yes, if you—”

“And if I don’t hear from him, I’ll be calling him myself.”

“Fine,” I snapped. We hung up simultaneously. With my hand on the receiver, I remembered. “Oh,
no
.”

“What?” Chris had stopped typing halfway through the conversation so she could listen. “What happened?”

“I forgot—Brian’s got a loan out at that woman’s bank.”

“So? She’s not a loan officer. What happened?”

“No, but—oh, God, I should’ve been nicer. But she was so rude at the end!”

“You didn’t say anything, I heard you.”

“I should’ve given in. Probably. Let her write whatever she wanted. But it’s
drivel
.”

“No, it is, and we can’t let the curriculum go out like that. Brian will support you, you’ll see.”

“She’s calling him.”

“Let her.”

“Oh,
damn
.”

“Carrie, relax, we’ve had crazy teachers before, plenty of them. And Brian never backs down if something with the school is at stake. Once this gas station guy, he was supposed to teach ‘Powder Puff Mechanics,’ you know, to girls and women, and he was donating his whole garage on Sundays, when he was closed anyway, and the students were supposed to bring in their cars and get them overhauled or whatever as part of the course. Which was great, we expected a big response, maybe we’d make it year-round instead of just a summer class.”

“What happened?

“So this
guy
, he decides he gets a free ad for his service station in the brochure,
plus
he wants to give out discount coupons for oil changes and lube jobs to all the students. And Brian said no, no advertising and no selling, no discounts, no nothing. Guy says screw you and won’t teach the course, but Brian held firm and that was that.”

“Huh. Is Lois a good teacher?”

She shrugged, made a face.

“She is, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know, I guess. I’ve heard she’s okay.”

“Oh, great.”

“But it doesn’t
matter
.”

“I know, I’m just not used to this.”

“What, fighting with people?”

“All of it. The last time I worked, I did research for professors. I looked things up and took notes. I usually communicated by memo.”

“Yeah, but you’re doing a great job. You’re good with people, you are, Carrie. I know Brian’s full of it sometimes, but you are just doing an
excellent
job, he’s right about that.”