Sad Desk Salad (23 page)

Peter sighs. “It’s too late now, Alex. This week has been bad, but if I’m honest this job has changed you. You’ve become more insular and weird and selfish over the past couple months. I thought you were figuring it out, but now it seems like this version of you is here to stay.”

“It’s not! I swear, I’ll go back to the girl I used to be.” I’m crying now, huge ugly sobs replete with a snot avalanche. Usually when I cry Peter will rush to comfort me, but not today. He sits on the couch and stares off into the bedroom before abruptly getting up and moving toward his closet.

“I need some space,” he says, shoving his work clothes into a gym bag. “I’m going to spend the night at Doug’s.” Doug is his buddy from work who once called me a ballbuster and didn’t mean it as a compliment. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

I know I’m not in a position to argue with Peter. He’s right—I’ve taken him completely for granted. But I still manage to say quietly, “Please don’t go.”

“I have to. I need to think about everything, and you need to figure out what you want.”

“What do you mean, ‘what I want’?” I say, still sniffling. “I know what I want. I want to be with you!”

“I don’t mean about us. This person I’ve been living with since you started working at Chick Habit isn’t you. You need to figure out how to be yourself again.”

Peter finishes packing up his things. I watch his back muscles tense as he changes into a fresh shirt. I don’t have the heart to tell him what my new fear is: that this is me now, and that there’s no going back.

Peter doesn’t say anything else before he leaves. Though I don’t think he means to, he slams the door behind him.

After Peter’s left, the silence in our empty apartment is oppressive. I know what I
should
be doing right now, which is going back to Chick Habit and marching roughshod through my day like a zombie stomping down a village square. But I can’t bring myself to go back to the computer. I’m too sad and shocked. I would call Jane, but she’s had enough of this for one week and would be furious at me for screwing things up with Peter anyway.

I look down at my iPhone, which is sitting next to me like a tiny electronic companion. It’s blinking furiously with new e-mail messages. I click on a few at random, all from strange names that I’ve never seen before.

Sent at 11:45: “You should kill yourself.”

Sent at 11:46: “You’re a terrible person.”

Sent at 11:47: “You should be thrown in jail.”

Sent at 11:48: “Girl, I’m just being honest with you. You need a nose job. I know a great plastic surgeon.”

I decide I need to talk to the one person who is genetically hardwired to provide me with solace. I start dialing the 860 of my mom’s cell phone number, hoping that she’s taking an early lunch and can talk to me. The phone rings five times, and I’m about to end the call when I hear her worried voice on the other end.

“Alex?”

“Mommy?” I sniffle. I can hear the quaver in my voice.

“Alex, what’s wrong? Have you been crying? Why haven’t I heard from you?”

“P-P-Peter and I just had a huge fight and I posted this mean video and I might lose my job and—and—and—” I dissolve into tears.

“Slow down, puffin. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but it can’t possibly be all that bad.”

I explain the whole thing to her, in an abbreviated, snot-filled, heaving kind of way. I don’t think she fully understands the stuff about the hate blogger—she can barely use e-mail and only goes online to research stuff for her classes. She definitely doesn’t get the impact of the
Today
show, since she hasn’t owned a television since after the Watergate hearings. As a pop culture lover since birth, I think I chose my friends as a kid solely based on how much cable I could mooch off of them. My mom has heard of Darleen West, though, because some of her students’ parents were annoying West acolytes.

“Let’s separate the Peter thing from Chick Habit issues,” my mom says after I vomit out the story to her, as if they were still two separate problems and not a knotty, intertwined disaster. “It sounds like you were just doing your job for Chick Habit, but I can understand why it makes you feel so terrible. But what’s done is done. You can’t take it back.”

I sniffle an assent.

“Why don’t you start looking for another job if Chick Habit is making you so miserable? Something that’s maybe a little deeper?”

“Do you know what the market’s like out there right now in media? It’s not like new jobs are just growing on trees, especially now that I’ve possibly humiliated myself on national television
and
put an innocent kid’s life in danger.”

“But you’re getting death threats, too. How seriously can you take these messages from nutty strangers?”

This reminds me of what BTCH said about Dad, and even though I didn’t want to bother Mom with it, I’m feeling so fragile I can’t help myself. “Did Daddy have some secret life we didn’t know about?”

“What do you mean, a ‘secret life’?” She sounds puzzled and a little sarcastic.

“Ummm, I mean, like, did you ever find out after he died . . . that he like . . .”

“That he like what?” she says.

“Like, did stuff . . . away from us, that was bad?”

“Use your words, Alex,” my mom says, which is something she used to tell me when I was little.

“This crazy person on the Internet said that Dad was a secret drug addict!” I nearly shout.

Mom starts laughing so hard she can barely breathe. “Your father? Drugs? Alex, your dad wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t out cruising Hartford for illegal substances in his spare time.”

“How do you know for sure?” I ask this timidly, seeking reassurance.

“Al, when you’ve been married for thirty years, you’ll understand. Besides, your dad and I worked together and lived together—I saw him almost every waking hour of every day. Unless he cloned himself, I’m pretty sure this terrible person is just baiting you.”

“Aren’t you worried that she’s trying to impugn Daddy?”

“Not really.” Mom laughs. “It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in ages.”

“How can you say that?” I can’t believe she’s not taking this more seriously. She must think my life is one big creative lark, like I’m some acerbic girl Friday from one of the thirties romantic comedies she holds so dear. But I’m not Rosalind Russell tripping down the city streets in spectator heels.

“Because I have some perspective, puffin. I know who your father was, and some stranger can’t take that away from me. And hey, your dad’s dead—it’s not like he’s going to be hurt by this if this nutter decides to go public with this information.”

“I guess.” I’m starting to feel disoriented, like I’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.

“This situation is not so horrible. You could look for something in another field, if Chick Habit is really that bad. You could even temp for a while. You’re such a smart girl, Al, and you’re so young, and life’s so short. You can do whatever makes you happy.”

I bite my lip and go silent. Somehow her sensible words break through where Jane’s and Peter’s could not. The foundation of my swirling week has now crumbled, and saving my job suddenly seems like a really shabby excuse for my behavior. Happiness—mine or anyone else’s—hasn’t been at the root of the whole Becky West/hate blogger fiasco. It’s been all about that fleeting costume jewelry: notoriety, posturing, and success.

“I don’t know what will make me happy.” I start crying, because it’s true. I still love Peter and hope to salvage our relationship, and even though he makes life better, he’s not responsible for my happiness. Chick Habit, as stressful as it is, was a delight at first, before the traffic pressure started raining down. Now it’s just a source of anxiety and dismay.

“I don’t even know if I want to be a writer anymore,” I add through the tears. I’m afraid that having a job like this is the only route to being a working writer these days, and I don’t know that I can take it for the long haul.

I always try not to break down in front of my mom. I want to be strong for her, to give her one less thing to worry about. She was so proud of me when I got the job at Chick Habit, and I hate that I might be disappointing her or puncturing her image of me as confident and flourishing. But somehow, with our voices traveling in the ether, I say things I wouldn’t be bold enough to say to her face—maybe shouldn’t say at all. She’s hasn’t responded for at least a minute, and I’m worried that she’s crushed because I’m so upset.

“Mom? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here, honey, I’m just thinking,” she says in a smooth, deliberate way. “I never wanted you to feel forced into a life that you don’t want. The last thing I wanted was for you to end up like me, with your true passion deteriorating in a drawer somewhere, and now I’m afraid I’ve pushed you into this mess.”

“But how do I know if this is the right way to my true passion?” I thought the Chick Habit job could lead to something better but now it feels like a dead end.

“I can’t answer that for you,” she tells me. Damn it. “You need to sit with yourself—without the thousand distractions it sounds like you have—and figure out what it is that you want. I’m so, so sorry if my example has made it harder for you to know what that is.”

Now I go silent. I thought my mom would have an easy, soothing answer for me. But now I realize that was a foolish expectation. I have to take responsibility for my own choices. This isn’t, exactly, about publishing the Becky West video or its consequences. It’s about slowly stumbling down my own path, which unfortunately doesn’t happen in a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

At least the hugeness of this thought has caused me to stop crying.

“Alex?”

“Yee-aah?” I say haltingly, trying to pull back the last of my tears.

“Are you going to be okay, baby? What about Peter?” My mom really does love Peter and considers him part of the family at this point, and I can hear the worry in her voice when she says his name, like it’s slipping through her fingers.

“I’m just as confused about Peter as I am about my work. I want him back but I don’t understand why he didn’t tell me that I might lose my job.” The whine is starting to creep back behind my sentences.

“Do you want my advice?” she asks gently.

“Yes.” I try to say this crisply, to iron out that whine.

“I think you were a real dummy to read his report.” “Dummy” is the word my mom reserves for waiters who screw up her order and politicians who cheat on their wives.

“Mom!”

“It wasn’t your business. You think I’m a pretty good judge of character, right?”

“Yes.” It’s true—after decades of teaching, my mom can read the faces of her students on the first day and tell whether each one is going to be a disaster or a delight. I used to find this trait infuriating. When she would tell me that the parents of a new acquaintance had “cruel expressions,” and that I should watch out for their child, I would tell her she had no idea what she was talking about. But invariably that kid would end up snubbing me in some dramatic way/getting heavily into drugs/becoming an arsonist.

“Peter has a good face and a good heart. I know you think he betrayed you, but you have to understand how that report put him in an impossible position. And remember that the company hasn’t been sold
yet
.” I smile ruefully—her listening comprehension is better than my reading comprehension. “Maybe he would have told you when it was really happening. You never know. Right now it’s just classified information about a potential sale. It wouldn’t have been worth upsetting you if it turns out that the sale doesn’t go through, right?”

“Yes.” I sigh, conceding to her reasonable explanation.

“Okay,” she says. “Listen, my lunch hour is almost over and I have to get back to the kids. But I can be late if you need me. Are you going to be all right?”

“I guess so.” I say this because I don’t want her to spend all day fretting about me. I don’t know if it’s true yet—I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about BTCH’s sexposé threat, the details of which I will only disseminate if I have no other choice.

“I believe that you are going to be okay, because I believe in you.”

Chatting with Mom made me feel temporarily better, but ten minutes later, the enormity of my problems comes back to me. I started off this week as someone with a decent job, a stable relationship, and a sweet domestic existence. Soon I could be a single, unemployed lost soul whose ass is plastered all over YouTube, living in an apartment she can’t afford, trying to figure out what the hell she’s going to do with the next thirty years of her life.

I can’t face returning to work right now. I know Moira is going to be livid, but I just can’t bring myself to care. She can fire me if she wants to fire me—and I bet the success of the Rebecca West post will give me a little leeway anyway. I’ve already reached my page-view quota for the month, and it’s only the second week of July.

I turn off my phone so she can’t reach me and rummage through my bag until I find the Xanax that Jane gave me yesterday. I crawl into our bed—though maybe now it’s just
my
bed—and the sheets are crisp and cool because they’re sitting right below our one good air conditioner. I pull the covers up over my head and cry until my sobbing slows to periodic jagged sniffs. Finally my breathing becomes regular and I fall fast asleep.

FRIDAY

Chapter Twelve

I wake up because the sun is shining directly in my eyes. As I rub them and stretch my arms, I realize that I haven’t woken up naturally—that is, without an alarm or a burst of unconscious anxiety—in six months. I have fifteen full seconds of peace as I unfurl myself across the bed before I remember everything that happened yesterday. Still, everything seems a little more manageable in the clear sun.

I pad over to the couch, still muumuu-clad from yesterday. I turn on my phone and see that it’s seven forty-five, long after I should have been online. I have fourteen missed messages. I hope one is from Peter, but I’m not expecting much. The last time we got into a Chick Habit–related fight—it was about the fact that I wouldn’t get off the computer at nine
P.M
., even though I was finished with my work for the day—he stopped speaking to me for a full twenty-four hours. And this is of a different magnitude altogether.