A Window Opens: A Novel (5 page)

•  •  •

The card led to an interview, the interview led to a job offer from a textbook publisher, and the job offer came with health insurance and twice-monthly paychecks for $649—just enough to afford me two suits from Labels for Less, a pleather bag from Strawberry, a year’s supply of generic macaroni, and a windowless, closetless bedroom above Let’s Pet Dog Grooming in Cobble Hill. My life in New York had officially begun.

From college engineering textbooks, I moved on to Page-A-Day
calendars: cats, dogs, horoscopes, Bible verses, cars, Magnetic Poetry. In this job, I learned the hard way how to be detail-oriented—but for the keen eye of a copy editor, Valentine’s Day would have fallen on February 15th in the 1996 Sagittarius calendar—and I collected a lifetime supply of crossword clues and useless trivia. A cat with extra toes? Polydactyl. Planet ruled by Pisces? Neptune. First automobile with a compass on the dashboard? Templar Touring Roadster.

From calendars, I moved to magazines, where I was happy. Trust me, there is no better place to work than a women’s magazine when you’re newly engaged: the
squeals
! The endless admiration of your emerald-cut diamond! The shower with an exquisite buttercream cake and Veuve Clicquot champagne and a gift certificate for a couples massage at Bliss!

But still, I remained on the fringes of the professional world I’d hoped to be part of. When I waited in line in the basement of Coliseum Books to have my copy of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
signed by Helen Fielding, it was not the hilarious author I had my eye on but the young cardigan-wearing woman to her left: the editor. What was it like to be the person who chose books readers would fall in love with, buy for their mothers, and remember forever after, the way you never forget a delicious meal?

•  •  •

Nicholas was thrilled by the e-mail from Genevieve—and tickled by the way she found me. “Maybe Twitter isn’t so pointless after all,” he said, begrudgingly. “And Scroll! They’re supposed to be a great company.

“You’re just biased because of the Cleveland connection.”

The Rockwell brothers are natives, too. In every profile for
Fortune
or
Businessweek
, they wax poetic about eating Notso fries at Yours Truly in Shaker Square (you don’t want to know) and their annual viewing of
A Christmas Story
, which was filmed in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, even though the family in the movie is supposed to live in northern Indiana. The brothers deliver this line interchangeably: “When we decided to start our retail business, there was only one place to go: Cleveland. For us, that’s where MainStreet starts.”

“Do you think I’ll get
an employee discount at all the MainStreet stores, or just Scroll?” We were driving up the gradual slope of Bloomfield Avenue, on our way to a neighboring town to look at office space for Nicholas. He wanted to sign a lease immediately; I thought he should set up an office in the basement until he was established.

“Alice! Pace yourself. You’re meeting this woman for
coffee
; I mean, I’m sure she’ll want to hire you, but it’s hardly a done deal.”

“I know. I wonder what Genevieve is thinking I’ll do there?”

“I guess you’ll find out soon enough. Which reminds me: I hope you won’t mind, but I told your dad about your interview with Scroll.” Nicholas angled his Accord into a parking lot behind a bagel store and a Mexican restaurant. “And here we are.”

I glanced at the stucco facade of his new building, a far cry from the mirrored skyscraper he was leaving, and put a hand on his arm. “Wait,
what
? You’re the one who just pointed out, it’s
coffee
, not an interview. Why would you bring it up with my dad?”

Nicholas grimaced. “Sorry, he was trying to give me advice and I couldn’t understand what he was saying, so I just . . . blurted it out, I guess.” He paused to fish Glen’s key off a carabiner attached to his belt loop, a look which reminded me depressingly of the dozens of keychains dangling from the zippers of each of our kids’ backpacks. “Anyway, your dad was excited, Al! Really excited. It was a nice way to sidestep a weird heart-to-heart with him about my future.”

“My dad isn’t a heart-to-heart kind of guy—you know that. He just wants to be in the loop.”

“That’s the thing, though. I don’t really want him in the loop right now, okay?” Nicholas squinted through his windshield into the window of the Mexican restaurant, where two men were removing pits from a mountain of avocados. “I don’t want to get into the specifics of
why
I’m leaving Sutherland, Courtfield. You get that, right?”

“Of course. Fine. Let’s go check out the new digs.”

Actually, I
did
mind that Nicholas had taken it upon himself to spill news of my interview. But at least I knew why the morning’s deluge of
texts from my dad had contained two articles about MainStreet— one from
Forbes
, one from
Wealth
. Those Rockwell brothers were outrageously young! In their Warby Parker glasses and Hugo Boss shirts, they looked like boys dressing up as businessmen.

We walked by a Dumpster overflowing with cardboard boxes and slipped inside a door propped open by a brick wrapped in duct tape. “You have to use your imagination,” Nicholas explained. “The place is bare bones but it has potential.”

I pasted a supportive smile on my face and toured the new office. The Flor tiles were stained and the filing cabinets might have been salvaged from the set of
9 to 5
, but the light was good and the skyline view couldn’t be beat, even if it did look incredibly far away.

•  •  •

I was still surprised to find myself living on this side of the Hudson. For me, growing up in New Jersey, New York was true north on the compass, the place you looked for from the highest point in town. For a Clevelander like Nicholas, it might as well have been Oz. The first time he rode the subway, he bought an extra token to send home to his mom.

I didn’t miss the city, exactly, but I got whiplash when I reflected on my own transformation from post-college East Villager hanging out at Veselka to downtown mom with Gourmet Garage bags hanging from the handles of my stroller to Filament commuter navigating the hordes in midtown. Now, no matter how authoritatively I strode toward my office building in Times Square, I always found myself on the receiving end of a sales pitch from a representative of Big Apple Bus Tours. “Buy the all-day pass! Including the Cloisters, the Statue of Liberty—”

“I
live
here,” I said, brushing by imperiously in my best approximation of Anna Wintour, if Anna Wintour wore a raincoat from Strawberry.

One night, a year after we got married, I met Nicholas after work at his summer associate event at the New York Public Library. There were speeches from the heads of the different practice groups and signature
cocktails with names like Expert Witness and Blind Justice. The ice luge was bigger than our whole apartment.

While Nicholas was shouldering his way up to the bar, I approached three Nehru-jacket-wearing men who looked friendly enough. “Hi, I’m Alice Pearse, Nicholas Bauer’s wife!”

The men looked surprised, as Sutherland, Courtfielders often did when confronted with a wife who had not taken her husband’s name. One of them said, “Hi. Do you need a cocktail napkin?”

“No, thanks, I’m all set. So . . . are you guys with the bankruptcy group?”

“We’re the caterers, actually.”

“Oh. Well, I love your jackets.”

Suddenly, I felt a very strong hand on my shoulder. I spun around to see Win Makepeace, the head of the bankruptcy group, towering over me with a self-satisfied expression on his face. “Alice, is that you? Let’s let these fine gentlemen get back to their canapés. Come meet my wife, Lucinda—she just went on the South Beach diet, so I’m sure you’ll have a lot to discuss.”

As Win steered me in the direction of a frail blonde with unnaturally smooth skin and bubble hair, I waggled my fingers at the caterers, who smiled sympathetically. They were probably as baffled by the legal life as I was.

Nicholas and I were the last ones to leave and my feet were killing me, so we sat down on the front steps of the library between the marble lions, Patience and Fortitude. Nicholas was still chuckling over my gaffe.

“How was
I
supposed to know? Those guys were the friendliest people there!”

“Exactly, which should have been a dead giveaway that they weren’t Sutherland, Courtfield material !”

We leaned comfortably into each other’s shoulders, enjoying the warm breeze and unexpected pocket of peace on Fifth Avenue. I felt the cool stone of the stairs through the thin fabric of my skirt. I watched the street vendors quietly shouldering their closed-down carts in the
direction of Tenth Avenue, then looked up at the elegant arcs flying atop the Chrysler Building.

“Nicholas, you know I adore you, right?”

He looked surprised, then tickled. “Alice, I adore you, too.”

“Good. Now that we have that ironed out, I have something to tell you.”

“You
do
?” As he glanced over at me, his expression leapt from relaxed and content to alert and ecstatic. He didn’t give me a chance to answer; I didn’t need to. “No. Way. You
are
?”

“I am!”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I just took the test. Two tests, actually.”

“Just
now
?”

“I figured, why wait?”

“Wait, you mean you just took a pregnancy test in the middle of the welcome party for summer associates?”

“I figured the library was as good a place as any.”

We grinned at each other. We adored Cornelius, our jointly adopted dog, so we’d made a split-second decision to expand our household, figuring parenthood couldn’t be so different from pet ownership. I don’t need to explain how many times we’ve marveled at our naivety since then.

“Oh, Alice.” Nicholas buried his face in my shoulder. For a minute, I thought he was crying, but then I realized he was shaking—with excitement, I thought, and maybe with fear. “A
baby!
We’ll have a little New Yorker!”

I imagined a jelly-bellied toddler wearing frog rainboots, twirling in the blue glow under the whale at the Museum of Natural History.

It was another beginning, the best one. Falling in love and getting married were nothing compared to Margot.

•  •  •

When Margot was five and Oliver was three, we decamped from our one-bedroom apartment to Filament. We wanted more space and, between
preschool tuition and Nicholas’s school loans, we were having trouble keeping up with our bills. The commute seemed like a worthwhile price to pay for a front porch and a fenced yard for Cornelius, even one pocked with the roots of a dogwood tree, which turned a Slip ’N Slide ride into a death wish.

But what really sold me on our ramshackle house was its proximity to Blue Owl Books. The first time we visited, I paused at the front door and took in the beamed ceilings, the walls stenciled with names of local authors, and tables piled high not just with best sellers, but also art books, travel books, cookbooks, and poetry. An entire wall of shelving was dedicated to books about New Jersey: diners, lighthouses, amusement parks, the Pine Barrens, the parkway, the shore. There was even a kids’ biography of Thomas Edison and a board book about Jersey tomatoes. I remembered my mom saying she had been
overcome
the first time she saw the rose windows in Chartres Cathedral. That’s exactly how I felt the first time I beheld the Blue Owl.

That day, I bought the tomato board book, a new volume of the
Nutshell Library
(ours had been chewed to pieces by humans and a canine), and two copies of
Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs
by Mo Willems—one for our new house, one for my parents’.

The red-haired woman who rang up my purchase said, “You can never have too much Mo. ‘If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.’ Isn’t this the one where he says that?”

“Yes! It’s one of my favorites. You can probably tell.”

From there, Nicholas and I went straight to our home inspection, where we heard all kinds of dire warnings about termite damage and basement dampness. Given the proximity of these problems to the bookstore, nothing could dissuade me from offering the full asking price.

•  •  •

The red-haired woman at the Blue Owl was Susanna, but I didn’t really get to know her until a year later, when Georgie was a baby. By then, I’d mostly adjusted to the rhythms of suburban life, grateful for luxuries like
slipping into a car after coming out of a movie on a cold night or sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc on the front porch while our kids circulated among the neighboring yards. I still missed the playground culture of the city; friend-making in Filament was a little like casual dating—you hoped she’d call, but she might not. The moms were friendly and generous with their farm shares and recommendations for electricians, but none of my relationships had progressed to the next level. I feared I might have to host a dinner party in order to find my soul mate.

Then the fire alarm went off during music class, and I ran into Susanna in the parking lot outside the Y. Rather than wait for the green light to return to our positions on the floor of the gym, we chose the same moment to escape from the pack of unimpressed babies and their exhausted, egg-maraca-shaking adults.

“I’m never going back,” I muttered under my breath to Susanna, who fell into step beside me with the familiarity of a kindred bookworm.

“Me neither. This is my third kid! I don’t have time to play the bongos.” She was a full head taller than me and had the graceful carriage of a woman who grew up alongside a ballet barre. She carried Violet effortlessly, like a very light bag of groceries. With her cheek resting on Susanna’s shoulder, Violet looked down at Georgie in her stroller and the two exchanged gummy smiles.

It wasn’t long before the four of us were tucked into a diner booth. The babies bobbled around in their booster seats, smashing saltines to smithereens, while Susanna and I chatted over the first of hundreds of cups of coffee sipped in our kitchens, at PTA meetings, and on the bleachers at our older girls’ swim team practices. (Black for me; milk and two sugars for her.) Violet and Georgie grew up alongside each other, first strapped into neighboring car seats, then toddling around playrooms, bickering like biddies over Slinkies, tea sets, Hexbugs, and which of them got to be the mom.