A Window Opens: A Novel (11 page)

I picked out two summer dresses, an eyelet blouse, and a cropped cardigan at a local boutique. I also bought a yellow perforated leather bag at Anthropologie and a pair of gold ballet flats. Two other shoppers admired a similar pair and one said, “Too bad, I wouldn’t have anywhere to wear them.”

I would.

I looked at myself in the mirror, which was slanted in a cunning way so as to trim a few inches off the waistlines of the middle-aged women of Filament. Even with that minor mercy, I was still thicker than I would have liked to be and my hair had the maroon halo that announced “I will not go gently into gray hair.” Otherwise, I liked what I saw. At least my ankles were still in good shape.

I swore I’d never wear clogs again.

•  •  •

When my dad took me to Howard Savings Bank to open my first-ever account, I marveled over how easy it had been to earn the paycheck we were depositing: “All I had to do was sit there!”

I was fifteen, a lifeguard with a crush on a boy who worked at the snack bar. The summer was shaping up nicely; I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to drink Slurpees and teach kids how to blow bubbles.

My dad asked the teller to cash the paycheck, and then he handed me a thick stack of bills. “That’s what $472 feels like. Nice, right?”

I shrugged. “I guess so.”

“My first paycheck at Howard Johnson’s was a lot less, I can tell you that.” He was proud. Even through my new Ray Bans, which I wore inside, the glow was unmistakable. Then he handed the money back to the teller. “This all goes into savings.”

To this day, I remember the cool heft of those bills in my hand.

•  •  •

A week before my first day at Scroll, I gave Jessie the day off and took the kids to a store called Our Name Is Mud. The plan was for them to paint a penholder for me to keep on my new desk, but the mission immediately devolved into misery. It turned out, Georgie didn’t really want to paint a penholder; she wanted to paint a tiny bisque dog for $19.99 (“He can be twins with Cornelius!”); Margot wanted to tackle a platter that could hold a Thanksgiving turkey (or two); and Oliver loudly wished he were on the slide at the playground across the street.

Through gritted teeth, I hissed, “You guys,
we are here to paint a penholder
.” I almost said “a fucking penholder” but didn’t. I picked the one I wanted and plunked it down on the table while the scandalized, aggressively nice saleswoman showed us how to sponge down the piece before applying paint.

Is it possible that I was the first grouchy mom ever to paint pottery with her children?

As the kids painstakingly started to paint navy and yellow stripes (my choice) up the side of the penholder, I was reminded for the millionth time how like Nicholas they are. I would have slathered on the paint and been done with it. These three were meticulous and quiet, focused on the task at hand just long enough for a seed of doubt to germinate in my mind.

Why was I committing to this job at the very moment when my kids had reached the ages I’d been waiting for since they were babies? They were eleven, eight, and five. I could take them anywhere and they had interesting things to say. They could entertain themselves, which meant I no longer had to participate in games or dress-up or pretend to like puzzles.

Why was I doing this?

For the money, that’s why. And for the chance to spread my wings in a way I hadn’t since they were born. Was that so much to ask?

Just as my eyes started to well up, Oliver grabbed Georgie’s wrist and said, “Not like
that,
dummy. You’re messing it up!”

“Oliver, she can do it however she wants.
You’re
the one whose part looks ugly.” Margot is always quick to defend Georgie, especially when she has the chance to antagonize Oliver in the process.

“Yeah, you’re not the boss,
Ollie
. I’m doing it how
I
want to do it.”

Oliver started to cry. He’s a stoic soldier of a boy, so I was unaccustomed to the sight of fat tears rolling down his freckly cheeks. He didn’t make any noise. He just put his chin down on his chest, shoulders shaking with sobs.

I patted Oliver softly on his back, moving the palm of my hand in small circles under the hood of his Adidas sweatshirt. “Shhh, it’s okay, Ollie. You did a great job. I’ll think of you guys every time I reach for a pen!”

I tried to sound reassuring, then upbeat, but had trouble croaking out the words.

On the way home, I cranked up Z-100 and rolled down all the windows, much to everyone’s delight. While Margot, Oliver, and Georgie shouted out their dance moves—The sprinkler! The typewriter! The shopping cart!—I cried quietly in the breezy solitude of the front seat. I kept thinking of Oliver waiting by the bench, alone.

T
he morning of my first day at Scroll, my phone was abuzz with texts from mom friends wishing me luck. These were women who had slathered my kids with sunscreen, whose children’s birthday parties I’d attended, who knew all the ups and downs of my marriage thanks to endless poolside analyses and post drop-off coffees.

“We’re proud of you,” Susanna wrote. “We’ll be cheering from this side of the river!”

Nicholas was at the counter when I left for the train station, six slices of bread in front of him, assembling school lunches with the loving care I could never bring myself to apply to such a thankless operation. He looked at me very seriously and said, “You can do this.”

His first week in his new office was fast approaching, so I said, “You can, too.”

Cornelius met me at the front door with his red leash in his mouth. I smoothed the worry lines on his soft forehead. “Sorry, big guy.”

I expected the departure to be bittersweet but instead felt elated as I walked down the street, past the line of cars jockeying for position in front
of the school. Before I turned the corner, I glanced back at my house and saw all three kids framed in the front hall window. Georgie’s nose was flattened against the glass. Margot appeared to have an arm slung across both her siblings’ shoulders. It was such a rare moment of sibling solidarity, it might have been a mirage.

I blew a kiss and hustled off to join a stream of commuters rushing for the 8:16.

While I was standing on the platform, I texted Jessie, “Big day is here! WML. You’ll take good care of my little people, right?”

Her response arrived just as the train rolled into the station: “Of course I will, you know that. This is your moment, Al!”

It was.

•  •  •

My new commute was twenty minutes longer than my old one, bringing door-to-door travel time up to a grand total of eighty minutes. That first day, I floated uptown from Penn Station, propelled by adrenaline and possibly starvation, since I’d been too nervous to eat breakfast. As I speed-walked past my old building, I felt a homesick pang for
You
’s colorful elevator lobby decorated with photos of models doing healthy things like meditating and eating watermelon.

But Scroll is an
exciting
place to be, I reminded myself.

I pictured Nicholas that day at the train station—“Alice, I didn’t make partner”—the defeated slump of his shoulders, how alone he’d looked. Now we were in it together, both pitching in equally to keep ourselves afloat.

Another image floated into my head, unbidden: a line of editors saying good-bye on my last day at
You
. Proud frowns on their dear, familiar faces; women who had been mine alone during a time when everything else—food, sleep, sanity—half belonged to my kids.

Then I thought of my dad, a camera attached to a tube threaded through his nose and down his throat, watching his own cancer on a flat-screen TV. “Subglottic laryngeal fungating, friable tumor with heaped-up
edges and multiple areas of necrosis and surrounding areas of hyperemia.” The doctor had dictated these ugly words to a nurse, who closed her eyes briefly before jotting the verdict on my dad’s chart. My mom and I froze like statues, eyes glued to the film.

And the patient? He looked away first. He reached out his freckled hands and gently lifted Margot, who was only three months old, from my lap onto his.

Oh, I know courage. It runs in my family.

•  •  •

Scroll’s Office Support, David, answered the door when I buzzed. He was a transplanted Clevelander, and he wore the chunky gray plastic glasses befitting a recent Columbia grad living in a hip neighborhood of Brooklyn. I liked him immediately.

Scroll’s new Purchasing Manager, Ellen, happened to be starting on the same day, so David showed us the ropes together. Ellen was whippet thin and serious-looking like Emily Dickinson. She, too, wore statement glasses, but hers were silver cat-eye. David ushered the two of us into a bright-white conference room and handed over two heavy laptops. I tried to have a good attitude about switching from a Mac to a PC, but the red foam track button on my graceless black ThinkPad immediately called to mind Darth Vader with a pimple on his face.

Genevieve had warned me that I would have to share an office. I’d acted perturbed when I learned about this—noise level had been a factor in my thwarted case for a day to work from home—but the truth was, I’d never even
had
an office before, so sharing one was no problem. My new officemate, Matthew, worked from a standing desk and wore noise-canceling headphones. He was Content Manager, Non-Fiction. He lifted the headphones a few inches away from either ear and said, “Welcome, Scroll employee #305.”

Matthew was very tall, with a thick head of blond hair, bushy blond eyebrows, and a beard that looked like it had been planted with a different kind of seed— dark brown and coarse. He wore shoes with an individual
receptacle for each toe. Normally I found this style disgusting, but Matthew managed to pull it off.

“Thanks! Are there really that many of us?”

“Indeed there are. We multiply overnight like . . . I don’t know what. Let me know if you need any help getting settled in. I’m glad to have company in here.” Matthew planted his feet shoulder-width apart and turned back to his work.

Of course, the office was white, but when I arrived that morning it was bathed in a yellow glow in the very shade Georgie uses when she’s drawing a big smiling sun. My desk was next to the window and it had a view of the rooftop garden atop the Museum of Modern Art. If I stepped into the low window well and looked east, I could see one distant spire of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Far below, the garbage trucks and yellow taxis were Matchbox-sized, making their way haltingly down 55th Street.

My desk was made of simple pine, painted white, held together with industrial metal brackets. The chair was white molded plastic, with a dangerously responsive metal button on the side that controlled the height of the seat. One wrong move and you’d be on the ceiling before you knew it. Everyone who worked at Scroll—and MainStreet, at large—had the exact same workspace, known as the Prodigy Setup, hearkening back the Rockwell brothers’ early days working from their parents’ garage.

A Room of One’s Own
was sitting in the middle of my desk in a pool of soft light from a lamp that was the miniature of the ones I’d seen in the simulated lounge area during my interview day. Otherwise, the desk was empty, so the book looked like it was on display in a very chic modernist museum. I picked it up gently, admiring the homespun navy design on the cover, and felt dumbfounded by my luck. Underneath was a note printed on brown paper: “Welcome, Alice Pearse. We hope these words inspire you to take your literary work to even greater heights. Please treat your dream book with the care it deserves. First editions may not leave the premises under any circumstances.”

“I can’t believe this is
mine
.” Matthew didn’t respond and I realized he couldn’t hear
me underneath his headphones. I waved my hand to catch his eye and he lifted up one padded ear cup. “I’m just admiring my dream book. What was yours?”

“
The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair. Not the most upbeat subject, but . . .”

“Well. The author of my book drowned herself, remember? So where is yours now?”

Matthew tapped a metal bin over his desk. “I keep it in here. If you read the fine print, you’ll see that you’re not supposed to take the plastic off, although I did one time. I needed to smell the pages.”

I knew we would get along.

•  •  •

After hours of “onboarding,” which consisted of memorizing PIN numbers, reading the wiki page on MainStreet’s intranet, and collecting my employee ID badge, I met Genevieve for lunch at the Union Square Café. I’d been there once before, dining on a gift certificate from Sutherland, Courtfield.

As soon as we sat down, Genevieve told me she had to rush back to the office by one thirty for a phone call with Greg. “A million apologies,” she said. “This lunch is seriously the highlight of my day.”

We’ll be cutting it close, I thought, and then I wondered, who is
Greg
?

There was a birthday celebration happening at the table next to ours, and the guest of honor was a stocky middle-aged woman. Her companions were a broomstick-thin man and two little girls who were accompanied by two American Girl dolls wearing the same dresses in miniature. Naturally, I knew the dolls by name: Julie Albright and Kit Kittredge; their clones lived in my third-floor playroom.

“I’m going with the tasting menu. Who can pass up monkfish prepared the right way?” Genevieve snapped her menu closed. “You?”

“Same here.” The mussels made me nervous, but I didn’t want to damage my reputation as an adventurer.

She leaned over the table in the universal stance of women having fun
together in restaurants, smiling broadly. She had one crooked eyetooth, which gave her the rakish air of a girl I might have climbed trees with as a kid. “So, what are you reading right now?”

“At this very moment?
Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn. It’s a galley I took from
You
—not out until June—but mark my words, it will be big. How about you?”

Genevieve fished a well-thumbed paperback from her leather bag, which was structured like a briefcase, with a hot-pink seersucker lining. “Don’t you dare laugh.”