Good Grief (7 page)

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.

Dad had only one girlfriend between Mom and Jill, an accountant from his office named Beverly who bore down on him like a tropical storm about a year after Mother died. Everything about Beverly was big and loud—big bones, big bosom, big white teeth that always had a dab of orangey lipstick on them. She stayed over once when I was at a friend’s sleepover party. I came home early the next morning and found her in our kitchen wearing chiffon baby-doll pajamas and frying bacon. She offered me a cigarette even though I was only fifteen. There were so many things wrong with her that instead of being angry I was actually drawn to her, the way you might be drawn to an exotic bird or lizard if one wandered into your yard.

After he and Beverly broke up, Dad quit dating and took up beekeeping. He wrote away to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for information and set up two colonies. One of his queens died right away, and I worried that even a seemingly therapeutic hobby might break his heart. But he prevailed by cheerfully merging the two colonies with the one queen. Every morning he trudged out to the backyard to check on them, looking like an astronaut in his stiff white coveralls. As he lifted the lids off the white pine boxes the bees swirled up to meet him, dripping off of his black mesh bee veil. The precision and steadiness and underlying threat of danger involved in beekeeping seemed to calm him. Soon we had buckets of thick blond honey, and he and I worked at the kitchen table decorating jars with labels and bows to hand out at Christmas. Whenever the word
apiculturist
showed up on one of his crossword puzzles, he’d say it aloud proudly, his title—beekeeper—and he seemed grateful to be something other than just a widower.

Now, I feel bad that Jill’s alone in Vermont while Dad’s stuck out here chauffeuring me around. But it’s a good thing he’s driving because Dr. Rupert switched me to a new antidepressant that makes my head feel light, as though my scalp might float away. I feel more like a gas than a solid, and driving doesn’t seem possible with all these lines in the road.

According to Dr. Rupert, I had a depressive breakdown brought on by grief. “It can happen after such a large life loss,” he explained, as though showing up at the office in your bathrobe is perfectly understandable. I don’t like having to take the pills twice a day. I don’t mind relying on eyeglasses or vitamins or mousse, but relying on pills confirms that I’m feeble.

“You look nice today,” Dad says, clicking on the signal to change lanes and dipping his head to peer over the top of his glasses at me.

“Thank you.” He’s probably referring to the fact that I actually
got
dressed—shed my pajamas, showered, and wriggled into jeans and Ethan’s boxy old ski sweater. The rest of my wardrobe seems to belong to someone else: a happily married thin woman who’s too busy to spend her evenings baking and eating rolls of refrigerator biscuits. I smooth a hand over the yellow, red, and navy stripes on Ethan’s sweater.

“It’s the new black,” I tell Dad.

“Oh,” Dad says.

“That’s a
joke,
Dad.”

“Oh!” He laughs a little too hard, then tugs the handkerchief from his back pocket and dabs perspiration from his forehead. He perspires when he’s worried, even when it’s cold out. I feel bad for causing him anxiety. Mother was the calm one in the family, the one who soothed our nerves.

Dad wears his retiree uniform of khaki pants with a navy chamois shirt. He sticks to blue because he’s color-blind and if he strays into reds, greens, and browns, he ends up clashing and looking like a kid who dressed himself. A stub of pencil sticks out from behind his ear for doing
The New York Times
crossword puzzle in the waiting room while Dr. Rupert stares at me and I stare at the Oriental carpet. What does he scribble on that pad, anyway?
Wacko, hopeless, weird sweater.
Or maybe it’s just his list for what to do on the weekend:
weed, prune, mulch.

“Almost there,” Dad says as we exit the freeway.

Gorgatech has given me a three-month leave of absence without pay. LOA. They said I probably wouldn’t be PR manager when I returned, but there will still be a place for me at the company. I wonder if that place is in the cafeteria or parking garage. The HR manager presented a long document that I tried to read before signing, but the papers shook in my hands and the tiny type crawled across the page. I still have a job, technically, a business card to hand out at parties, but no paycheck. LOA. LoserOutofA job.

The state of my house has thrown Dad into a panic. Dirty dishes and laundry and unopened mail and overflowing garbage. Moldy pies in the trunk of my car and newspapers littering the driveway, their dry, yellowing pages curling into newspaper jerky.

“Soph, honey, why don’t you bring the paper in in the morning?” he asks, worrying that the pile signals burglars that no one’s home. I try to explain that the end of the driveway has become impossibly far away, but then he wonders why I don’t just call and cancel the paper. Frankly, that hadn’t occurred to me. Despite the fact that I’ve been dying to talk to someone, the phone confounds me with all its crazy buttons.

Dad wants to know what happened to my dishes. Are they in those boxes in the garage?

“Yes,” I fib. “I didn’t want to look at them anymore.”

He nods understandingly. But the boxes, and the fact that I have to park in the driveway, make him chew nervously on his lower lip, which has become red and raw since he arrived.

“I’ll rent you a storage locker,” he offers, flipping through the Yellow Pages.

“No!” I snatch the phone book away.

Dad still owns many of Mother’s things—her art history books, cashmere sweaters, letters from friends, old hats in festive striped boxes. But they are tucked away on shelves or in drawers—woven through his house unnoticeably. While this makes more sense to me than a towering shrine of boxes in the garage, I’m not sure how to merge Ethan’s things back with mine.

I see Dr. Rupert on Tuesday and Thursday; it’s not clear why I need to get up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Dad’s in my room every morning by eight, though, opening the curtains and windows and coaxing me out of my flannel shell.

“We’ve got a lot to do today,” he says, clapping his hands like a camp counselor. “How ’bout you put just one foot on the floor?”

I slide a foot out and explore the chilly wood floor with my big toe, the covers tugging me back into the warm center of the mattress.
Don’t listen to the father,
they insist.
Just sleep.

Finally I stumble out of bed and into the shower while Dad tidies my room. He’s a neatnik who can’t stand the sight of an unmade bed or clothes on a chair. By the time I emerge from the bathroom, the covers and pillows are as smooth and plump as a Macy’s display ad, making it hard for me to crawl back in. The next thing I know, he’s herding me outside to rake leaves or sweep the driveway, the air and light clearing my head.

Dad fixes my favorite grade-school dishes—Cream of Wheat for breakfast, Fluffernutter sandwiches for lunch, and creamed tuna on toast for dinner. He frets over the creamed tuna, which he hasn’t made for years, hovering over the stove and stirring the white sauce, the
Joy of Cooking
laid out on the counter with recipe steps outlined in highlighter pen.

“Please,
thicken,
” he begs the sauce, frantically scratching the bottom of the pan with the wire whisk as though he might dig through the burner into the oven.

I’m grateful. All this for bathrobe-can’t-hold-down-a-job me. I stand beside him at the stove, watching the white liquid finally congeal. Suddenly I worry about when Dad’s going to die. I hope I die first. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of everyone
else
dying and leaving me behind. I wonder if I need more than a leave of absence from work—maybe a leave of absence from the planet. Dr. Rupert says I’m doing well and just need to give everything more time. There are no miracle cures; there’s only time.

Dad and I shop for folding lawn chairs and TV trays to refurnish the living room and a set of dishes that serves four. I’m relieved when we don’t buy the bigger eight-serving set, which seems painfully optimistic.

We eat dinner in front of the TV, and I take a quarter of a tablet more of the antidepressants every other night. You have to go on the pills gradually, like shifting gears to merge onto the freeway. After supper we have pralines and cream ice cream and play cassino. Dad’s large block letters spell out BERNIE and SOPHIE on the back of an envelope, with our scores underneath.

He’s going to leave soon,
a little voice nags as I watch Dad shuffle the cards.
He can’t stay here and take care of you forever. You’re an adult!

But Dad stays for three weeks, and then Jill joins us for Christmas. I want so badly for her to like me, like
us,
stay with Dad, keep him happy, that I set the alarm and get up on my own at seven-thirty every morning and stumble out to the kitchen to fix them coffee and toast.

Jill, whom I’d met only once before, at their simple backyard wedding just before Ethan died, seems perfect for Dad. Sweet, smart, and funny. Even though they’re still newly married, she encourages me to come and live with her and Dad in Vermont for the winter. She brings pages from the classifieds with jobs circled—one for manager of fund-raising at the local public radio station. I’m flattered that she thinks I’m this capable. I suppose I could stay with them for a few months, as I did in college, when I’d go home to sleep off
Anna Karenina
and the categorical imperative and all those cafeteria carbohydrates. I imagine snuggling into Dad’s down coat and heaving the snow blower down the driveway. Tapping syrup from the maple trees in the yard. But I don’t want to barge in on them.

Dad and Jill come up with so many holiday activities, it’s impossible for me to sleep in the afternoons. We string cranberries and popcorn, bake Christmas cookies, go to matinees, and drive around town to see the colored lights. When it’s time to decorate the tree, I’m a little irritated by how agreeable they are. I miss having Ethan to argue with about the decor. He was from the garland-and-colored-lights school, while I favored the more understated tinsel and plain white lights. After much grumbling we would compromise, layering everything on until our tree looked like Las Vegas.

Now, Dad’s cheer and optimism about the holidays still seems unfamiliar to me. After Mother died, he and I grew to dread Christmas. That first winter he sank into a foggy depression. We were supposed to go to New York City for Christmas and stay at the Plaza, like Eloise, but he said he was sick and we couldn’t go. He sat in his chair in the living room all day for a week, a shadowy layer of beard creeping across his face. It didn’t seem as though we would have Christmas that year. No tree or stockings or turkey. I called my aunt Athena—my mother’s sister in Wisconsin—and she flew out and helped Dad find a psychiatrist and took me to pick out a tree and shop for all the groceries we needed. She layered a ham with canned pineapple rings, put it in the oven, then flew home to be with her own family. Somehow during Aunt Athena’s visit Dad snuck out of the house and bought me a new ten-speed bike.

On New Year’s Eve, Dad, Jill, and I celebrate with lobster and champagne. Dad looks relieved and victorious to have gotten me through the holidays, as though he hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. I’m not sure what to choose as a New Year’s resolution. Don’t crawl on the floor at the store anymore? I read an article in a women’s magazine that suggested choosing one easy, fun thing, so you can feel good about yourself. I decide my resolution is to wear more lipstick.

The morning that Dad and Jill go home, I bravely smear on a rock-star serving of Saucy Salsa lipstick and drive them to the airport, firmly planting my hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock. This is the first time I’ve driven in a month, and I manage not to count the lines in the road.

I follow Dad and Jill to the security checkpoint, where a guard tells me I can’t go any farther without a boarding pass. We hug quickly, not wanting to hold up the line. Dad says he’ll call as soon as they get home. I watch the backs of their silvery heads bob along with the crowd of passengers. The guard asks me to step back, please, step
back,
and I realize I’m lurching into the line.
Let me through!
I want to holler. I move away and sit in a row of green plastic chairs scattered with newspapers. Once through the metal detector, Dad turns, smiles, and waves. I jump up to wave back. Then he vanishes.

In the airport parking lot, I have no idea where I left the car. I stand swaying like a boat bumping a dock. The whole garage looks unfamiliar; the whole dadless planet looks strange.

I find my parking ticket in my purse and turn it over in my hands, noticing Dad’s big square handwriting on the back:
Level Two, Row G.
Thank you.

As soon as I see the
EXIT
sign in the garage, I lift my foot off the gas and the car slows. There’s no way I’m going back to that empty house. What if I can’t get up in the morning or rake the leaves or break out of the Oreo food group again? What if I’m terrified of the shower curtain and can’t wash my hair? I should have gone with Dad and Jill. Flying to Vermont to stay with them or moving up to Oregon to live with Ruth seems easier than going back to sleep alone in my house. Ruth worked up a good sales pitch for Ashland when she called on Christmas Day.

“There are lots of cute actors and there’s river rafting and plenty of jobs up here,” she said. “Not fancy jobs, but, you know, low-stress jobs.” She added this apologetically, not wanting to insult my career capabilities.