A Window Opens: A Novel (23 page)

One by one, they dumped their bowls into the sink and filed out of the kitchen: to the backyard, to the playroom, to the bathtub. Jessie and I scraped greasy napkins into the garbage, then loaded cutlery and Fiestaware into the dishwasher. She paused and put a hand on my shoulder. “Alice, you know they’re just tired, right?”

I shook my head and sighed, watching a swirl of kidney beans and bell pepper disappear into the black hole of the garbage disposal. “They just seem so . . .
blah
. You know what I mean?”

“I do. But I swear, they’re chatty when I pick them up from school. By the time you get home, they’ve exhausted every ounce of energy on homework and art projects and sports.” Jessie gestured out the window, where Oliver ran in circles with his lacrosse stick. She wore a ring on every finger and her nails were painted fluorescent yellow. For the second time that week, I wore a black wool turtleneck; it was hard not to be a little envious of Jessie’s eclectic style.

“I know. I guess I just miss hearing all the news.”

“But you know the important stuff.”

But I wanted to know more than the important stuff about my kids: I wanted to know the little things, too. And I wanted to have a job where I earned a respectable paycheck and was an active participant in meetings and could occasionally hang out in the office kitchen talking about Sharon Olds and Anne Sexton. And I wanted to spend time with my dad in long, uninterrupted stretches, playing Scrabble at the dining room table without the deadline of an orthodontist appointment looming.

I’d internalized the message of all the brown-bag lunches and bean suppers I went to at the women’s center in college:
Yes,
it really is possible to do anything, be everything. But maybe if I hadn’t dozed through physics for poets, I would have been a little more up to speed on the limitations of time. You can’t create more of it. You can sleep less, plan more, double-book, set the alarm for a 5:30 a.m. spin class, order winter coats for your kids while you’re on a conference call, check work e-mail while your family is eating breakfast—but ultimately there are only so many hours in one day, and you have to spend some of them in bed. In an ideal world, you share that bed with someone who is sober, but this isn’t always the case.

•  •  •

“Hey, Alice, did Nicky tell you what happened the other night?”

It took me a minute to figure out whom Jim was referring to, but then I realized: he meant Nicholas, my husband. Who never goes by Nicky. “Um, no, what?”

“After basketball, when the guys were drinking at the Shannon Rose? Ask him. It’s epic. Let’s just say, your husband was in rare form. I had no clue he could break-dance.”

Jim continued loading six-packs of Red Stripe into the freezer at the liquor store. I’d taken a detour there on my way home from the train
station; this was one of those days whose ending I couldn’t face without a hefty goblet of merlot. Actually, lots of days fit this description—karmic justice for all the times I’d rolled my eyes at my dad when he headed straight from the train station to Shop Rite Liquors for booze.

Now I understood.

But what was Jim talking about?

Every fall, Nicholas plays basketball in a Sunday night adult league at a Catholic boys’ school in West Orange. Once or twice a season, I’ll bring the kids to see him on the court. I’m always dazzled by his grace; Oliver always wonders why the game seems so much slower than the ones he watches on TV. Nicholas’s teammates are a motley crew—guys in their late twenties and early thirties who are clinging to their golden high school years. After games, they go out to a bar, usually one we’d never go to together. I know the basketball guys are a hard-drinking crew and that they’re occasionally unfaithful to the sweet, big-haired girlfriends who faithfully show up for their games.

If Nicholas was drunk enough to break-dance, what else could have happened? And how had he gotten home?

I clutched the neck of my Monkey Bay and headed toward my house. It took me a few minutes to get there because I stopped on every corner and checked my e-mail, monitoring the influx of messages from Genevieve. She wanted the agenda for a meeting I’d set up and a debrief on a meeting I just had two hours ago. Then Will sent me three texts about an herbalist in Chinatown who had some luck with cancer patients—did I think we should try to get our dad in to see him?

Before I even opened the screen door to shout hello to my kids, I hunkered down on the front porch, addressing as many of these issues as possible. By the time I went upstairs and found Nicholas reading to Georgie—
Bedtime for Frances,
her favorite and a semi-excruciating read after a long day—I forgot to ask what Jim was talking about.

Instead, I realized this was the third day in a row I’d only seen Georgie in a nightgown. She’d been wearing a different one when I
left the house that morning; for all I knew, she might have worn it to school.

Dad:
Good day today. PEG safely installed. I can now pour food directly into my stomach. Kids will be in awe.

Me:
I’m in awe. Thanks for letting me know.

Dad:
Hope you’re well. LOL.

Every day, on the train into the city, I made my to-do list on the right-hand side of a notebook page—a list of meetings and appointments I had during the day. On Mondays, when Genevieve and I had our regular nine-thirty 1:1, I would also list topics I wanted to cover with her. She liked to hear about what I was reading, and she wanted to know how industry folk reacted to my descriptions of what Scroll had in store for the book-buying public. The excitement was contagious, especially since I’d surreptitiously snapped a few photos of the Sim on my iPhone and shared them with a few trusted editors. One followed up on our lunch with an e-mail copying her entire office, saying, “WHEN CAN WE COME?!?!?!?!”

One rainy Monday, before I had a chance to dive into my list, Genevieve said, “Lance and I went to the best Ethiopian restaurant this weekend. Bunna? In Bushwick? You
must
try it.”

“Good to know—I love Ethiopian!”

“Actually, we should all go there sometime. Would you be up for that?

“You mean the team here . . . ?” I gestured around me, indicating Keith, Mariana, Matthew.

“No, me and Lance, you and Anthony.”

“You mean Nicholas?”

“Nicholas, sorry. You guys could bring your kids! This place has an amazing brunch.” She looked tentative, as if she’d never made plans with a parent before and didn’t know the etiquette.

I smiled politely, trying to envision Georgie with a mouthful of injera;
we had a hard enough time getting her to eat Nutri-Grain Eggos. “Sure. Maybe . . . after the holidays?”

“Great. We’ll circle back then.” Genevieve sat back in her chair and adjusted the broach on her lapel. It was in the shape of a cowboy boot, with tiny rhinestones forming a star on the toe. Then she said drily, “So. Joystick. You heard about the acquisition?”

I nodded while jotting exclamation marks next to the name of a famously curmudgeonly agent who had submitted a novella by his top-earning author for ScrollOriginals. “The video game company? Of course.”

“And . . . ?”

“And what?”

“What did you think?”

“Honestly? I couldn’t care less. As I told Greg, I’m really not a fan of video games. Why?”

Genevieve held up a surprisingly small hand, palm facing me. “Wait. You
said
that?”

“That I’m not a fan of video games? Yes.”

“You said it to Greg’s
face
?”

“I did. Is that a problem?” I reached up to turn my earring, wondering idly if my double pierce was still viable after a decade of neglect.

Now Genevieve brought a palm up to her forehead, which she cradled with her eyes closed. “Oh, Alice. Tell me exactly how this conversation unfolded.”

I closed my notebook; it looked like we weren’t going to be getting to my list anytime soon. “I just told him I don’t allow video games in my house. I might have said they’re like crack for kids . . .” My voice trailed off.

“That’s enough.” Genevieve spoke in the tone I use with Margot when she’s asking if she can sleep over at Audrey’s house after I’ve said no twelve times. She quickly shook her head and looked back at me with a shadow of a pitying smile on her face. “Alice, can I ask you a question? Does your honesty ever get you in trouble?”

This seemed like a rhetorical situation, so I didn’t answer. “Genevieve, Greg asked me about video games
before
the Joystick acquisition. I thought it was just a casual conversation. I had no idea—”

“See, that was your mistake. There
are
no casual conversations at this company.
How
have you not learned that by now?” She took a sip of her tea, eyeing me over the rim of her Scroll mug. (“Unfurl Yourself.”) “Yeah. Okay. I’m just going to lay it out for you. Greg mentioned the pivot?”

“Yes. I had no idea what he meant.”

“This is the pivot: We’re introducing a gaming component to our lounges. We’re moving away from carbon-based books altogether and swapping out first editions for video games. The market research shows, our demo wants something for their kids to do while they shop.”

I thought of the most popular nail salon in Battery Park City—the one where Margot used to watch
SpongeBob
while I got a pedicure. The only customers there were moms; I wore earplugs so I couldn’t hear the din of the flat-screen at the back of the store. Serene and spa-like, it was not.

My mouth went dry. “Will we still have the SSR areas for VIP readers?”

“That’s TBD, but probably not. We’ll need that real estate for the rugrats. Apparently some of the games have an interactive component, so we have to allow for wiggle room. In fact, now that I think of it, that might be a good name for the kids’ area. Wiggle Room.” Genevieve created a Post-it on the screen of her laptop and then typed in the two words. She turned back to me with a sympathetic expression on her face. “Alice, I realize this isn’t ideal. It’s not what I signed on for; I’m sure you feel the same way.”

I was too preoccupied with logistics to commiserate with Genevieve. “Wait, what about Mariana?”

“What about her?”

“I mean, what will she do if she’s not hunting down first editions?”

“In light of the discontinuation of our ScrollFirst program, Mariana
will be now transitioned over to Environmental. She’ll be a direct report to Rashida, with a focus on creating a nut-free, egg-free menu for our youngest customers.” Genevieve sounded like she was reading from a script.

“How does she feel about that?”

“Mariana is a team player. She’s willing to shift gears, just the way Rashida did when she pivoted out of Analytics.”

I nodded, noting that the hands of the giant clock on the steeple outside Genevieve’s office were creeping toward ten o’clock. We’d gone over our allotted time. At Scroll, the person who set up the meeting was responsible for making sure it ended promptly; in this case, that would be me.

She continued, taking a deep breath. “Alice, I have to tell you, given your experience with this age group, Greg has asked that you play quarterback on the video game initiative.”

“What do you mean by my experience with this age group?” I needed to hear her say it.

“I mean, you’re a mom.” We sat there in silence. “So we’re going to tap into your expertise in regards to how kids behave on a screen: what do they want to see, do they want to play alone or with a partner, what lighting conditions are optimal, do kids stand or sit while they play, which games do they want to see, that kind of thing. MainStreet marketing has already started crowdsourcing this data and building out a spreadsheet; you should familiarize yourself. It’s called MMO. You can find it on the Sharepoint.”

“MMO?” I’d learned not to bluff my way through the acronyms; where one appeared, others were sure to follow.

“It stands for Mom’s Morning Out. This is the experience we want to create for our customers.”

“But Genevieve . . .” I paused to swallow, hard. I thought of Virginia Woolf, tucked into my overhead bin in her plastic wrap. “I don’t even like video games.”

“Yes, Alice, we’ve established that already. This mandate comes directly from Greg, who apparently is aware of your feelings.”

I leaned back on her stiff white couch—a far cry from the sumptuous recliners down the hall. “Wow. This is—a big change. This isn’t the Scroll I’ve been selling to the publishing community. People are so excited about—”

“You’re going to have to deliver a different message to your contacts. But for the time being, this pivot is confidential and I would ask you to keep it that way.” Genevieve leaned forward, conspiratorially; for a fleeting second I thought she was going to tell me it was all a joke. “Listen, Alice, I know this will take some time to wrap your mind around. But at Scroll, we’re expected to think like MBAs. We assess where our business is heading and what our customers want, rather than what we want them to want, and we all pitch in to keep it on track.”

I opened my notebook again, moved aside its fussy brown ribbon placeholder and wrote “MMO” on a blank page, underlining it twice. I thought of Nicholas, stretched out on our living room couch in front of a coffee table full of empty beer bottles. No matter where I was in the house, I heard the
plink
of a bottle cap landing on wood.

“Of course, Genevieve. I’m a team player, too.”

“Alice, can I give you some advice?”

“Sure.”

“Try not to get to attached to your idea of how you thought things would be at Scroll. Getting set in your ways is the first step toward mediocrity. You have to be nimble.”

Oh, the humiliation of getting a lecture like this from someone seven years your junior.

Genevieve smile-smirked and brushed an invisible shred of lint off the front of her blazer. Suddenly, she gave the impression of being a corporate true believer, a company woman— or at least someone who would play this role, method-actor style, until she mastered the performance.

Befriend, then berate.