Riding Lessons, Page 2

  "Oh, Evelyn," I say. "I'm glad you stopped by. I need you to run interference with Dennis. He just sent a note saying he was going to hand off the InteroFlo files this week. He can't. They're not on the schedule, and I'm eyeball-deep in SnapShot."

  Evelyn nods. "I'll speak to him."

  "Because that's exactly why I put the spreadsheet on the Intranet, and everybody else has been keeping it up to date, so I'm afraid their projects get priority, regardless of size--"

  "Uh-huh," says Evelyn, nodding. She steps inside my office and stands looking at her feet.

  "--and I simply can't dredge up a contractor that quickly, or at least not someone familiar with our style guide. I probably won't be able to fit him in for another three weeks, and even then, he's got to get his stuff on the schedule or it's going to fill up again. I cannot--"

  "I'll speak to him," says Evelyn, cutting me off. "Look, Annemarie, there's something I need to talk to you about. Do you think you could stop by my office in about five minutes?"

  I pause. I'm busy. But she is my boss. "Sure, yeah. I'll be right over," I say.

  When I get there, it's immediately apparent that something is going on. Evelyn is standing by her desk. Someone in a suit is sitting at her table.

  "What's up?" I ask, eyeing them warily.

  "Hi, Annemarie," says Evelyn, coming up behind me and closing the door. "Thanks for being so prompt. Please have a seat."

  She reaches behind her and takes a box of tissue from her desk. When I sit down, she places it on the table in front of me.

  "What's going on?"

  She sits and looks me straight in the eye. "I'm sure you're aware that the company hasn't made its numbers over the last two quarters--"

  Good God. I'm being fired.

  "--and we were hoping things would get better, but upper management has told us that we need to cut our staff, and I'm really sorry, but you're one of the ones I won't be able to keep."

  "What?" I say, although I heard perfectly well. It's more of a statement. I feel my lip curl. If she was expecting tears, she's going to be sorely disappointed.

  "This is not a reflection on your performance. Believe me, I'm well aware that your contributions have added greatly to the quality of our documentation--"

  She's bloody right they have. Nineteen products, twenty-two writers, and my department--me and three editors. Because of us--me, really--it all got edited, top to bottom. Substantively, copyedited, and proofed. I personally took home all the blues.

  "Unfortunately, in software, documentation almost never gets the emphasis it deserves..."

  And blah blah blah. My record will reflect that I was laid off, not fired. I can count on her for a reference, of course. No rush to get out of the building, but here's your crate. Omar will help you get everything to your car, or you can have computing services pack your office instead. Extension of my benefits to carry me over, severance pay based on length of time with the company, counseling should I need it, and all sorts of other crap that I don't hear because I've stopped listening.

  Two.

  When I open the front door of our house, Eva is in the foyer. She jumps a little when she sees me, perhaps because she has even more than the usual amount of midriff exposed.

  "Oh, hi Mom," she says. She recovers her cool and grabs a jacket from a hook. "You're home early."

  I set my purse on the floor and close the door. "Change of plans. Where are you off to?"

  "Lacey's."

  Lacey? What in God's name were her parents thinking?

  "Will you be home for dinner?" I say, stepping out of my Amalfi loafers. I lift them to the shoe tray one at a time, dangling them on extended toes.

  "Nope. I'm spending the night," says Eva. She slips past me, her pink backpack slung over a shoulder. I smell cigarette smoke, but let it go. Fifteen has been a tough year, and I have to choose my battles. Our most recent, for which she still has to forgive me, involved a cobalt blue tongue stud that I made her remove. I was absolutely firm--no more riding until it was gone. She called it blackmail, but at least it disappeared.

  "Bye then," I say, as the door starts to close.

  The door opens again. "Yup, bye Mom," Eva calls through the crack.

  When I reach the kitchen, I find a sealed manila envelope on the counter. I have a bad feeling the second I lay eyes on it.

  It's a report card. I scan it top to bottom, and then flip it over with an increasing sense of disbelief. I don't know who I'm angrier with--Eva, or the school. Her attendance has been perfectly abysmal, and as a result she's flunking spectacularly.

  I pick the envelope up again, and then realize there's something else at the bottom of it. I turn it upside down and shake. A smaller, white envelope falls to the floor.

  Inside is a personal note from the principal, signed in a crabbed, back-slanted hand. Dr. Harold Stoddard, Ph.D., wishes to inform me that if Eva is absent once more without explanation, she'll be permanently expelled. At the bottom is a place for me to sign.

  I hold it, blinking stupidly for lack of a better response.

  I'm so upset I'm shaking. Why in God's name didn't they tell me sooner, when I could still have done something? At this point, even if I manage to keep her from getting expelled, the best I can hope for is that she'll come away with a third of her credits.

  I stuff the letter back into the envelope, crumpling it in angry haste. I have no intention of signing it. It's like those infuriating error messages you get right before your computer crashes: Such-and-such has encountered a fatal error--sorry, no way to save your work, be a good girl now and click OK. Okay? No, it's bloody well not okay.

  I consider calling Roger at the office, but decide to wait until he gets home. Then we can play rock-paper-scissors to see who gets to call Eva and tell her to get her can home because she's been busted.

  I pour a glass of wine and go soak in the bath. I'm at loose ends, and I hate it. The house is clean, and for obvious reasons I have no work to do. I don't have a newspaper, so I can't even look for a new job until tomorrow.

  By the time Roger gets home, I'm sitting with my feet curled under me in the living room. I'm trying to make a dent in a year's worth of unread New Yorker s, and have graduated to coffee after two rather generous glasses of gewurztraminer.

  "God, am I glad to see you," I say when he comes through from the foyer. And I am. Our paths haven't crossed much recently, and I'm looking forward to a bit of company and support. "Get yourself a drink. You're going to need it."

  A moment later, he sits beside me on the couch, drinkless, still wearing his jacket.

  Something's wrong. Never mind the continued presence of the jacket or the lack of drink, he never sits beside me. He always sits opposite. I look up from my New Yorker, seized with foreboding. Somebody has died. I can tell.

  He takes my right hand between both of his. They're cold and clammy. I resist the urge to remove my hand and wipe it on my thigh because he's obviously distraught.

  "Annemarie..." he says. His voice is strangled, as though his tongue were twisted at the back of his throat.

  Oh God, it's true then. Who could it be? I don't remember anyone being sick. Maybe it was an accident?

  "What is it? What's wrong?" I ask.

  He looks down at our joined hands and then back at my face.

  "I don't know how to tell you this."

  "Tell me what?"

  His mouth moves slightly, but nothing comes out.

  "For God's sake, Roger spit it out!" I say, setting the New Yorker down and adding my left hand to our tangled mess of fingers.

  He looks down yet again, and once more I'm left staring at his bald spot. The next time he lifts his face, it's full of painful resolve.

  "I'm leaving."

  My eyes narrow. "What do you mean, leaving?"

  "I'm going to live with Sonja."

  I blink at him. The words are out there, swirling around my head, but my ears seem to have repelled their entry. Sort of. I yank my hands a
way.

  "I'm so sorry," he continues. He pulls his hands back into his lap, and then looks down at them, as though surprised to find them there. "I never meant to hurt you. Neither one of us expected this to happen."

  "Sonja?" I say. "The intern?"

  He nods.

  I stare, wide-eyed. Now he's speaking again, droning on about how sorry he is and all sorts of other nonsense that's meant to temper my reaction, but I've gone off on a parallel track. My mind races back to the Christmas party--the only time I've ever laid eyes on Sonja--to her hair, glossy and chestnut; and inevitably to her body, both voluptuous and thin, and encased in a sheath of red sequins.

  I interrupt his monologue. "She can't be more than--what, twenty-eight?"

  "She's twenty-three."

  I continue to stare, aware that my jaw has dropped.

  "It's not like that," he says, reading my face. "She's been through a lot in her life. She's very mature."

  After everything we've been through--my God, we raised a child together, we practically raised each other--and now he's going to leave me for a woman who's fifteen years my junior? Just eight years older than our daughter?

  At first it doesn't compute, and then when it does, I am flooded with anger. And while the rage is gathering, there's a strange split, a part of me that sidles off and starts to analyze, and what it finds is an absurd irony in the fact that he's rejecting me. After all the years I've put up with his faults, the crap, the almost-but-not-quite-there-edness that's been the very cornerstone of our relationship, and he's rejecting me?

  I suddenly realize I haven't reacted. He waits, staring at me with disingenuous concern. He is leaning forward now, his forehead crinkled, his eyes awash with regret. His stupid, stupid tie rests in his lap. I'd like to strangle him with it.

  "Get out," I say.

  "Annemarie, please--" His voice is quiet and gentle. He's working hard to project the appropriate level of regret. Something in me snaps.

  "Get out! Get out! Out! Out! Out! Out!" I shriek.

  Then I throw the African violet at his head. Then the coaster. Then a New Yorker, and then another, and then another, and when I run out of magazines, I throw a CD, and my address book, and by the time I reach for my half-filled cup of coffee he's ducking out of the room. It hits the wall with a gratifying crash and explosion of coffee but somehow, disappointingly, remains intact.

  Fifteen minutes later, he comes down with a large suitcase. I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my arms crossed. I'm on the very edge of the chair with my legs extended, almost as if I don't bend in the middle.

  I refuse to look at him, although he positions himself directly in front of me. I can't help noticing that he's packed the green suitcase with the broken handle. He's leaving me the good one.

  "I'll let you know where I'm staying."

  He waits for me to respond. I wish that he hadn't placed himself so that I'm staring at his crotch, but to turn my head would be to respond, so I look through him, past him, and let the tan of his chinos blur until they mean no more to me than the insides of my eyelids. After a few minutes of silence, the tan slips away and I am once again looking at the William Morris willow boughs that grace my kitchen walls.

  I hear his footsteps retreat through the house, then the front door squeaking on its hinges, and finally, the quiet click of the latch. Quiet, because he's taking pains to close the door gently, is keeping the doorknob turned as far as it will go until the door is completely closed. He leaves with a whimper, not a bang. In the course of a single day, my family has been launched into outer space.

  Three.

  Two weeks later, when it occurs to me that he really isn't going to return, I call my mother. She listens, but doesn't say much. She doesn't seem as upset as I was expecting her to be, which surprises me, because she and my father are Roman Catholics. And then I find out why.

  She has been meaning to call me, she says. There's something she has to tell me, she says, only she didn't know how.

  "What is it?" I ask, and she doesn't answer.

  "Mutti, you're scaring me. What's going on?" I say.

  There's another silence, frightening and expansive. Then she speaks.

  "Your father has ALS."

  Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Lou Gehrig's disease. Motor neuron disease. By whatever name, it robs people of the ability to move, speak, swallow, and eventually breathe, while--in the ultimate act of cruelty--leaving their mental capacity intact. A disease that would terrify anyone, but which holds special terror for me, because I know what it is to be a brain trapped in an unresponsive body.

  I didn't absorb much from that first conversation with Mutti, other than that he'd been diagnosed a few months earlier. He'd had symptoms for some time--strange tics and muscle twitches, and then weakness in the legs, progressing to stumbling. It was only when his arms also became affected that they'd put him through a battery of additional tests and handed down the diagnosis.

  The idea of such a thing happening to my father--a man who had spent his entire life in physical pursuits--was beyond horrifying, and for a while it displaced, or at least equaled, the headspace required by Roger's betrayal. In the end, though, it simply augmented it, sliding in and taking up residence beside it.

  Ten days later, Eva and I are having a rare mother-daughter moment. We're on good terms again, now that her grounding over the principal's note has expired.

  She stands at the kitchen table, slicing a tomato for our salad while I stir the gazpacho. She is bent slightly at the waist, and her blonde hair--straightened through force of will, a paddle brush, and 1600 watts of hot air--obscures her face.

  "Is your uniform dirty? Do you need me to do laundry tonight?" I ask, noticing that she's not wearing it.

  "No," she says. "I don't need it anymore."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't need it. I'm not going to school anymore."

  I freeze with my hand on the spoon, mid-stir.

  "What?"

  She says nothing, simply picks up another tomato and starts slicing.

  "What did you say?"

  "I'm not going anymore. I don't like it."

  I tap the spoon on the edge of the pot with deadly precision--one, two, three times--and then set it on the counter.

  "Over my dead body," I say, turning to face her.

  "It's too late," she says, pushing the tomato's core aside with the blade of the knife. "They caught me skipping and they wouldn't let me back in even if I wanted them to. Which I don't."

  I glance quickly at the telephone. The red message light is blinking. I look back at Eva, furious.

  She tries to play it cool, but when the silence grows conspicuous, she stops slicing and looks up. When she sees my face, she drops the knife, poised for flight.

  Both of us bolt for the door. I get there first, bracing my hands on either side of the doorway.

  "Oh no you don't! Not a chance, missy. You're not going anywhere."

  "As if you could stop me," she says, throwing a shoulder between me and the doorway. We scuffle for a bit, with me trying to keep her from passing, and with Eva launching herself at me like a linebacker. It's pointless. She's as big as me now, and certainly heavier.

  I step back and she barrels past me and up the stairs. A couple of minutes later, she comes down again, her pink vinyl backpack stuffed with clothes. She flounces through the house and out the door without ever looking back.

  If I'm lucky, she will go to the house of a friend who lives at home, although I know for a fact that she will tell the parents I kicked her out. If I'm unlucky, she will go to a grotty little apartment in the wrong part of town and do God knows what with a bunch of teenagers who live on their own.

  I look down at Harriet, my dachshund, who is visibly upset. Harriet likes her people happy, Harriet likes harmony. Harriet has had a hard month.

  I tuck her under my arm and carry her upstairs, telling her that everything is all right. But it rings hollow in my ears, because I'
m not stupid, and neither is Harriet. Absolutely nothing is all right. Not a goddamned thing.

  At the top of the stairs, I stop and look down. I can't see much of the main floor--a length of dark hardwood, some white fringe at the edge of a blood-red Bokhara, Harriet's Geoffrey Beene basket beside the antique hall chair--but I'm struck by how strange and impersonal it all looks. I don't give a damn about any of it, not a stick, despite the fact that until a month ago, I'd have ranked the house among my top accomplishments.

  I put Harriet on the floor and retreat to my room. It's the same here: the antique rocker in front of the fireplace, the mulberry eiderdown, the rows of antique books that line the shelves. The framed pictures; the candles on the long dresser, dusty from disuse; the skylight above the bed--all of it carefully chosen, and none of it means anything.

  Harriet sits on the carpet in front of the fireplace. She's clearly worried. I lean over and scratch her head, muttering placating noises. Slightly mollified, she lies down, resting her head on her front legs. Her eyes, with their funny worried brows, continue to follow me.

  I close the curtains and turn on the lights, one by one by one--ceiling light, floor light, both reading lamps, even the can lights aimed at the winter scene above the mantel. Then I stand in front of the full-length mirror and strip.

  It feels for all the world like I'm looking at a stranger. How can someone be so unfamiliar with her own person? When was the last time I took stock of myself, or anything else?

  Certainly, what I see bears little resemblance to that eighteen-year-old Olympic contender from so long ago. What I see is a woman on the cusp of middle age with a jagged hysterectomy scar. Or is that a caesarian scar? Both, I guess. A hysterarian, a caeserectomy. I finger it lightly, tracing its path up my abdomen. Then I look at my face; a good face, although it tends to sternness if I'm not careful. Freckled, which goes a long way toward preserving youth. I lean toward the mirror, fingering the lines that I know are there. They're hard to see, even with all the lights on, but I know the location of every one.

  There are the scars from my reconstructive surgeries, carefully hidden in the creases of my nostrils, behind my ears, and just past my hairline. And then there are the lines I've earned the usual way: the fine ones that run beside my mouth; the single line, tiny but present, that separates my eyes. It's the face of a woman past youth although not yet middle-aged; the face of a woman who should have arrived at where she wants to be.