Balancing Acts (31 page)

S
arah, what the hell?”

From above, I peered down the three flights of stairs to Josh below. He stood over the flattened cardboard box filled with now-broken picture frames. Even as I had balanced that box on the banister for just one second—
just one second!
— while I knelt to retrieve what looked like an integral screw from the bed frame that Josh and Ben had just hauled down the stairs, I had known that the aforementioned second would be its last. Still, I did it—tempting fate and physics out of sheer exhaustion. Naturally, the box had toppled over almost immediately, and I had watched its graceful descent with surprising ease.

“Sorry!” I yelled down. Josh gazed up at me, his face an accordion of annoyance. “That was stupid.”

“What was in here?”

“Picture frames, I think?”

“Great.” He sighed heavily. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I'll come down there and clean it up.” I wiped my sweaty brow with my sweaty forearm. It was August in Brooklyn, and boy, was it hot. So hot that my bra had become a medieval torture device as far as I was concerned. I descended the stairs carefully, hugging the wall at the second flight in order to let Josh and Ben by.

“You sure you're okay?” asked Josh, grabbing my hand. I nodded.

“Yeah. Just clumsy.”

He smiled and kissed me with lips that tasted like salt before continuing on.

After I had moved into Josh's apartment five years earlier, we had made a pact never to move without enlisting professional help ever again. And yet here we were, lugging our boxes of pots, pans, utensils, appliances, books, clothes, and miscellaneous crap and our heavy furniture up and down three—four, including the stoop—flights of stairs in ninety-degree heat. The fact that we had gotten the couch out without filing for divorce was no small miracle.

At the bottom of the stairs I surveyed the sad, flattened box.
FRAGILE,
it read on its side, in wobbly black letters. I picked it up gingerly, cringing at the sound of broken glass inside. So much for the newspaper I had wrapped each frame
in. I could either just load the box on the truck and deal with it in Virginia, or duck out of further work by sitting on the floor and dealing with it now. Now sounded good.

I moved over to the opposite wall and sat down, feeling only a remote pinch of guilt as Ben stumbled by under the weight of a giant box of books. Ben was Josh's younger brother, and they were ridiculously close. Like
The Waltons
close, except the Jewish version. His wife, Kate, and I were friendly but far from tight. She was someone to roll eyes with at our husbands' and their family's expense whenever we went out to dinner or gathered around a holiday table together, but that was about the extent of our relationship. To be honest, she intimidated me. Someone four years younger with her own catering business and a baby on the way could do that to a person with neither of those things on her resume.

My best friend was Mona, who was nowhere to be found. I couldn't blame her. When I'd told her that we were handling all of the moving ourselves she had shaken her head in disbelief.

“How come you're willing to spend two hundred bucks on a pair of jeans, but you can't spring for some burly Russians?” she had asked. It was a valid question that I had no answer for.

I opened the box and pulled out a photo of Josh and me from our very early days of dating, marveling at our youth. When my friend Betsy's wedding invitation had arrived in my mailbox, I had begged shamelessly for a plus one, even
though Josh had not yet earned his plus-one rights. The thought of attending another wedding alone was enough to drive me into the East River. She had mercifully agreed, and here we were at our table, me with my head thrown back and laughing, and Josh grinning beside me. It represented so much to me, this picture. Us before us.

I was thirty when we met. At thirty-two, we were married, and now here I was at thirty-six—moving to Farmwood, Virginia, of all places. Not three months prior, I had fought through the predictable end-of-workday subway mob; picked up my and Josh's dry cleaning as well as toilet paper, beer, and Thai food; hauled it home like the urban pack mule that I was; dumped it on the kitchen table; and promptly burst into tears.

“I can't do this anymore,” I had said to Josh, who watched me with alarm from the couch. “I hate New York.”

“Me too,” he'd replied, and promised to look around for professorships out of state. I nodded absently, dried my eyes, drank my beer, and felt a little bit better but no less trapped. We both wanted to leave, but for some reason an escape seemed out of the question, as though beyond New York City's borders was nothing but sky.

And then, impossibly, a job offer from a small liberal arts college in Virginia had landed in Josh's lap. A friend of a friend knew someone who knew a sabbatical-bound mathematics professor whose planned fill-in had bailed last-minute. Voilà—a job for Josh and the escape we had been pining for. We had hemmed and hawed about whether I
should come with him—after all, the job was only guaranteed for a year, and my job in New York, although mind-numbingly uninspiring, was stable and lucrative—but when I had asked my boss about the possibility of working long-distance, she had literally laughed in my face.

“You're going to run the marketing division of a makeup empire remotely?” she had cackled. “That's like Biden working from Spain. All due respect, Sarah, but no dice.”

The liberty she took in comparing my job to that of the vice president was beyond delusional but, in my world—as the second-in-command to a lunatic—unfortunately, not that far off. I was on call twenty-four/seven to make decisions about bronzer packaging. Somehow, despite the fact that my personal face prep involved only lip balm at best, I had become, over the course of thirteen years in the business, a big shot. My life was consumed by my job, or at least it had been. Until now. Now we were moving to a town called Farmwood, and I was unemployed. You couldn't get farther from New York than that.

“Hey, Sar, c'mon. You can sort through that later,” yelled Josh over his shoulder. “Let's get this over with.”

“Why would we haul a box of broken glass to Virginia? I'm just going to rescue the photos real quick and dump the box. It'll take two seconds.”

I slipped the remaining photos out of the rubble with minimal fanfare, miraculously managing to avoid slicing my fingers open. As I transferred the box to the garbage and the photos to my back pocket, I kept a close watch out for our
landlord, Denise, who lived next door. Her maniacal attention to our refuse had given me heart palpitations on countless occasions.

“You can't put Tupperware in the recycling can,” she would yell when I begrudgingly answered her phone call only moments after putting our bag out.

“But it's plastic, I thought that—”

“No!”

It went on and on:

“Are those your empty boxes downstairs?”

“Is that your old air conditioner on the curb?”

We had gotten to the point where we only took our garbage out under the cover of night. She was watching now, I knew it.
Glass in the recycling bin or no because it's broken? What to do ?
My heart began to race.
Screw it.
I dumped the whole thing—box and all—into the can and exhaled deeply. A point for Farmwood: no Denise.

I headed back up the stairs slowly. Our apartment was nearly empty. Five years of cohabitation all packed up and shipped out. In Farmwood, there would be no more bath-room attached to the kitchen, no more dust balls the size of cats, no more onion apartment smell weeks after cooking something that involved onions, and no more listening to our middle-aged downstairs neighbor rapping in his makeshift studio.

Who would I be without those things to complain about? Sure, I would find new things to complain about—I had a
natural talent for that sort of thing—but it wouldn't be the same. These were New York complaints, which by context alone made me cool. Farmwood complaints were not going to be cool. And what about the fact that I had no job? Who was I without that to complain about? What if all of the free soul-searching time that Farmwood was going to provide me with fulfilled my deepest fear—that I had no passion? What if there was no career option that excited me? I grabbed one of the last boxes and made my way back down to the street.

“Hellooooo!” Mona's familiar, raspy voice shrilly pierced the air just outside my building's front door. “Sarah?”

“I'm here! You're just in time to help with nothing,” I yelled back from inside, smiling behind my box as I stepped blindly over the brownstone's threshold. Mona had been in denial about my leaving ever since I had announced it two months earlier. I had been afraid she wouldn't show up.

“Oh, that's too bad,” she answered. “I was hoping to help schlep your armoire down four flights of stairs this morning. So sorry I missed it.” I put the box down on the stoop and stuck my tongue out at her.

“I can't believe you're really leaving, Sarah. Can't you change your mind?” She picked up the box and we walked down the stoop stairs together to the truck below. “Here ya go, Josh.” She handed it to him and he nestled it into our beige mass of belongings.

“Thanks. Anything else in the apartment?” he asked.

“One or two more boxes, I think, but that's it,” I answered.

He looked at his watch. “Cool. I'll take a shower, we'll grab some lunch, and then we'll hit the road. Sound good?” I nodded.

“Hey, Ben, call Kate and tell her to start making her way over,” he yelled. Across the street, Ben looked up from his phone.

“Nah, I'll go get her. She'll appreciate an escort. We'll meet you at Bodega.” Kate was eight months pregnant— much to the overwhelming delight of Josh and Ben's family, who had been eyeing my empty uterus with contempt as each year crept by—and painfully candid about the entire experience. Over chips and guacamole a few nights before, she'd told me that her labia were blue.
Smurf blue,
she had added for emphasis, before asking me to pass the hot sauce.

Josh disappeared indoors, and Mona I and walked back over to the stoop and took a seat.

“I'm not going to shower,” I announced. “It's too much work.”

“Agreed,” said Mona. “You're just going to start sweating again immediately afterward. What's the point? Anyway, I brought us beers.” She reached into her giant bag and pulled them out. “And contraband cigarettes. I figured we should go out with a bang.”

Mona and I had both quit smoking on my thirtieth birthday. Well, I had. She claimed to have as well but always seemed to have cigarettes on her person. On a different day—one when I wasn't about to move several hundred miles away—I would have given her shit for it. Not today.
Today a cold beer and a cigarette on the stoop with my best friend sounded perfect.

“Thanks,” I said, lighting mine and taking a deep drag. I rubbed the beer bottle across my forehead. “I've always wanted to do that.”

Mona gave me a sideways glance. “You're such a weirdo, Sar.” We watched the Italian man across the street water his roses, a cigar hanging precariously from his lips.

“So, this is it, huh? You're moving to freaking Virginia?”

“Yeah, this is it.” I took a swig. “Am I doing the right thing?”

“Sure you are. You've been over New York and your job for years now. It's time.”

“I know, but what if I miss it? What if bitching is all I know how to do?”

“Sar, you certainly have other talents. Don't be dramatic.”

“Like what?”

“Hmmm. Let's see . . . Oh, I know, you're very good at French-braiding.”

“That is true. It is a coveted skill. I was very popular in middle school.”