A Window Opens: A Novel (16 page)

Me:
Stuck at Penn—the 6:09 was canceled. Can you pick up M & Audrey from swimming?

Me:
Hello? Do u read me? I just tried to call—no answer.

Nicholas:
Srry. Just waking up from a nap.

Me:
Where r the kids?

Nicholas:
Playing on the iPad.

Me:
So much for no screen time during the week. Did you see my message about the train? Need you to pick up the girls.

Nicholas:
Can you ask Susanna?

Me:
Why?

Nicholas:
Forget it. I’ll ask her.

Me:
Wait, why can’t you pick them up. Or Jessie?

Nicholas:
She’s not here on Wednesdays, remember?

Me:
Right. And you?

Nicholas:
I had a few beers while I was cleaning the basement.

Me:
Are you kidding?

Nicholas:
Alice, lay off, k? I’m fine. Susanna & I will handle this.

When I got home, the recycling bins were already at the curb, hours earlier than we usually dragged them out for collection. Headlights from a passing car lit up a mountain of bottles, artfully stacked. I averted my eyes.

Mom:
please call me when you can

The text popped up in the middle of a meeting and I turned my phone upside down so I wouldn’t see it again until later. Two seconds later, I received an e-mail from Matthew, who was sitting right next to me (because of course we both had our laptops): “Are you in trouble with your mom?”

I typed back, “I’m late for my curfew.”

Before Matthew, the only man I’d ever worked with was a former boss who jotted his measurements on a notecard so I could shop for him at Brooks Brothers. Matthew and I were like a random roommate match that might have appeared disastrous on paper—some housing dean’s idea of a funny joke—but we turned out to be pleasantly harmonious. We bonded about how old we were compared to our colleagues. They didn’t write anything down! They didn’t answer e-mail, either, which could be disconcerting; were we really supposed to learn to IM?

Matthew’s side of the office remained as spare as it had been the day I arrived, adorned with one simple black-and-white picture of a typewriter. My side was bristling with book cover postcards push-pinned to the wall, a sketch made by Georgie of a stick figure reclining with a book, a framed WPA poster encouraging reluctant readers to tackle the classics, and a whiteboard with all my projects color-coded in red, green, and blue.

Once I noticed Matthew eyeing my collection of ephemera and my (ever-increasing) stacks of books. “What?”

“Nothing. I’m just . . . a minimalist, I guess.”

“Well, avert your eyes, then.”

“No, no. It’s all good. There’s enough black and white in this company. We can use some color.”

Me:
On the train. How was your day?

Nicholas:
Quiet.

Me:
Good quiet or stressful quiet?

Nicholas:
Playing solitaire on my computer quiet.

Me:
Are you regretting your decision?

Nicholas:
What decision?

Me:
To go out on your own.

Nicholas:
Kind of a big topic for texting, don’t you think? Not my choice, really.

Me:
But it was your choice to throw a laptop across the room and ruin any chance you had of building on the relationships you made at Sutherland, Courtfield.

I looked at this final message inside the white bar on the screen of my phone. Then I deleted it and typed “xo” instead.

Mom:
alice, did you get my message question mark please call me exclamation point

This time I was scrubbing a lasagna pan and my hands were slick with Palmolive and ground beef. Once again, I didn’t respond.

•  •  •

The principal of Louisa May Alcott was transferred to a different school in the district, and the moms were up in arms. I listened to them rage one Saturday morning at spinning and felt smug about having more important things to think about, like whether Honest Tea or Odwalla juice would be the optimal accompaniment to the reading experience at Scroll. It’s not that I wasn’t upset about losing our principal. I felt a neighborly kinship with him—and I’d appreciated his sympathy when our kitten was hit by a car—but now I was too busy to get ensnared in the web of venomous texts passed among moms who were convinced this was the end of decent public education as we knew it.

“Alice, we miss you. How’s your job going?”

I brought myself back to the group, ashamed of feeling momentarily superior.

•  •  •

For Scroll’s sales conference, I wore a green silk dress printed with cheetahs lounging in trees. My kids were horrified when I came downstairs—“You look like a tablecloth”—but on my way to the train I felt like a million bucks.

The new principal had already rejiggered the traffic pattern around the school: instead of an orderly drop-off line, where kids hopped out of cars one at a time, we now had a melee of parents in SUVs jockeying for position within a four-block radius of my house. North Edison was clogged with incoming students and school buses almost all the way to Sunshine Bagels, a quarter of a mile away. I made my way down the line, spiffy and smug, smiling at my friends and secretly judging the families whose tinted windows hinted at the ghostly glow of a movie being screened inside.

“Announcement: The 8:16 train from Filament to Penn Station will be arriving on Track Two in approximately three minutes.” I was still in the school parking lot, so I picked up my pace, delivering my usual rushed greeting to the lunch lady whom I passed every morning on her way to my kids’ school.

“Have a beautiful day,” she said.

“You, too!”

•  •  •

At the sales conference, the Content Managers took turns presenting their Top Ten lists to the fifteen or twenty salespeople in the room, plus another thirty people who dialed in via video conference from Cleveland.

Genevieve had given us talking points, but they were so general, I found myself paralyzed by nerves, too antsy to eat lunch. When I ran into her in the bathroom two minutes before it was New York’s turn to present, she said, “Are you ready to rock this?”

I avoided her eyes in the mirror. “Not really. I’ve never done anything like this before.” My experience speaking in front of groups was limited to giving toasts at weddings; I would have felt more at home with a deejay behind me—and would have preferred for my audience to be lubricated with a few cocktails. Instead, a few of them looked downright dyspeptic, especially the gang in Cleveland.

Genevieve turned to face me, thrusting a paper towel into my hands. “Alice, you are going to
shine
in there. Just be yourself.”

Not surprisingly, Matthew and I had very different approaches to sharing information about our books with the team. When it was Matthew’s turn to present, he leaned back in his conference room chair and spread his arms over the backs of the two chairs on either side of him, looking for all the world like a bored college student who knew this material cold. He barely consulted his notes and spoke calmly and intelligently for his allotted time—no pauses, no frills. The sales reps were rapt as he quoted Truman Capote from memory: “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

Then I was up.

I put a big smile on my face and spoke so loudly, the guy sitting next to me jumped. But I knew I’d lose the Clevelanders if they couldn’t hear me; I already knew what it was like to be in a conference room halfway across the country, missing out on every other word of the conversation. I dove into the merits of a new novel I’d just read, which I thought had the potential to be a best seller for Scroll. My audience looked a little bored; Greg stared at his laptop.

In the Content Manager equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, I veered off topic: “Many of us remember that moment when we realized our parents need us more than we need them—that the roles have been reversed.”

People looked up. I had their attention.

I explained how, for me, this moment came right after my dad first got sick. My mom needed to learn how to use the ATM machine, and I was the designated instructor. After she’d collected her bills, my mom leaned into the machine and said, loudly, “Thank you, ma’am.” That was when
I knew she was mine to take care of, at least for the time being. The axis had shifted.

The sales reps laughed warmly, and then they leaned in to listen as I explained how my anecdote related to the book.

I knew my presentation hadn’t been as confident or as intellectual as Matthew’s, but the head of the sales team nodded her head and smiled when it was over. “Good job,” she mouthed across the table. The Clevelanders were hardly effusive with their praise, but at least they were awake and some of them nodded approvingly.

I felt like a Mylar balloon, floating above the conference room table, high on helium and glinting in the sun.
I think I can I think I can
 . . .
I am
. I thought of all the years I’d made work phone calls from inside my closet so editors wouldn’t be able to hear my kids watching
Blue’s Clues
in the next room. My presentation was no TED Talk—the pièce de résistance among Scrollers—but still, the sales conference left me feeling like I was starting to get a handle on what I was doing. Plus, the danish was delicious.

On the way back to our offices, Genevieve gave me a pinched, “Nice job. Looked like you were having fun up there.” Later she sent a message to the whole team: “Good hustle, gang. In future, please stick to the script. No need to introduce personal anecdotes into our pitches.”

What happened to being myself? I wondered.

•  •  •

“Mom? It’s me.”

“Alice! You are a tricky woman to track down. Hold on.” In the background: lovebird chirping, the yank of the detergent holder being pulled out on the dishwasher, Cascade pouring in,
snap
. “Okay, I’m back.”

“Sorry to be so elusive. It’s been a crazy week. What’s up?”

“Well. Probably nothing. But I did want to tell you—I mean, it’s too soon to worry, but—”

“Mom, what’s going on? I’m calling from work.” I didn’t mean to sound like an irritated sitcom husband, but I knew I did.

“Well, you know we had Daddy’s appointment yesterday.”

In the beginning, I went to all the appointments—once every three months, once every six months, once a year. I’d missed the last few, but I always kept track of them on my calendar and made sure to call my mom afterward. Talking to my dad on the phone was tricky, but sometimes I asked my mom to put him on so I could tell him how relieved I was that his scans had come back clear.

Now I had the sickening sensation that this conversation was heading in a different direction. Before my eyes, my cheerful kelly-green dress faded to drab olive.

“And?”

“Now, Alice, I know you have so much happening these days and I really don’t want you to be upset. But Dr. Davis saw something he didn’t like in the exam. We still need to wait for the scans, but he’s . . . concerned.”

“What do you mean, concerned?”

“I mean, he wants to keep an eye.”

“Keep an eye?”

“Sweetie, I wish you’d stop repeating everything I’m saying.” I could hear my mom rearranging the pens in the square beige cup by the phone. Sharpies in the middle of the bunch, Bics filling out the periphery like carnations in a bouquet.

“What did he find?”

“A blockage.”

“A
blockage
?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“In the throat.”

It had been years since we’d disembodied my dad this way: the throat, the esophagus, the stomach, the lungs.

“Where in the throat?”

“Where . . . where the tumor was the last time.” My mom rushed through the final part of the sentence, as if it wouldn’t be true if I couldn’t understand what she was saying. But I understood. Perfectly. The
language of illness is like pig latin: no matter how much time has passed since you last heard it, you remain fluent. “Apparently, he’s been having some trouble swallowing? He didn’t mention it to me. I thought he was eating a lot of soup, but . . .”

I remembered my dad at Michael’s, swirling his spoon through the crème fraiche on top of his lobster bisque. I thought of the jaunty paisley ascot he wore that day, of his blue blazer, his penny loafers. I thought of him polishing those shoes in the living room, swiping a cordovan-stained brush over each toe. The smell of Kiwi parade gloss. The tin cigar box of shoe shine supplies stored on a basement shelf between a tackle box and yearbooks from Roxbury Latin. Forever a scholarship student, my dad didn’t replace a pair of shoes until the soles were thick with patches, like a roof with too many layers.

“Oh, Mom. What else did he say?” Again: the same old rhythm, the endless inquisition about what the doctor said, what the nurse said, what was the look on her face, did she seem optimistic, did he look worried? Will and I used to joke that someone should wear a wire to the appointments so we could replay, pause, and rewind the conversation at a later date.

“He said it could be scar tissue. That’s always a possibility. He might get the scan back and decide to do a minor surgery to abrade the area.”

I flinched. Imagine ten consecutive strep cultures and you get the idea of having your throat abraded. One time I watched my dad endure this procedure and had to excuse myself to get sick in the bathroom. “What if it’s not scar tissue?”

“Alice, we’re really not there yet.”

“What do you mean, we’re not
there
yet? Where are we, exactly?” I didn’t know why I was being so combative with my mom; she was only the messenger. But my whole body was suddenly alight with rage. I could taste it in my mouth, bitter and hot.

“Now, Alice, I can tell you’re getting hysterical. We’re going to stay calm here. We’re not going to panic. We’re going to find out what this is and then come up with a plan.”