Through Thick and Thin

by Alison Pace

  She’s holding the phone, there’s dead air. She thinks she can remember Meredith saying, “You know what then, don’t call me,” and she thinks she remembers not saying anything, because she has no idea how exactly you say, My six-month-old baby is sleeping, for once, upstairs and I’m standing in the basement with her monitor, surrounded by her father’s Vicodin bottles, and I don’t really care if French Women Do or Do Not Get Fat because I am not French, even though right now I wish I were because then I’d be in France.

  If she were closer to the wall, she might go over to it to turn off the light. It would be better, she thinks, if the light were turned off. She looks into the baby monitor. She looks at all the bottles. She wonders how many others there might be, in how many other places. She’s not sure if she’ll look. She’s not sure about anything. She closes her eyes.

  part two

  you say you want a revolution?

  ten

  as lonely as you wanted to be

  In addition to the iPod and the Bose iPod dock, Meredith also has a Bang & Olufsen BeoCenter 2 CD player that she sets on a timer so it functions as an alarm clock. She greatly prefers waking up to a preselected CD. Really, it’s so much better than waking up to beeping (unpleasant) or even to the radio (could be pleasant, but pretty much, it’s a gamble). For a while, she did like waking up to the radio but in the end there were too many risks. For example, setting an alarm radio to NPR could seem like it was a good, smart, informative choice, but in reality, the world can be such a terrible place these days, news-wise, war-wise, Middle East conflict-wise, that after a morning of NPR she would so often feel defeated, spending her day espousing the merits of the one-hundred-dollar-an-ounce caviar at Petrossian while there are a billion people on the planet who exist on less than a dollar a day. It makes a planned contemplation of Del Posto and how much Mario Batali has done for dining in New York seem remarkably less relevant. WPLJ is of course no longer an option because while Meredith likes a Top 40 station as much as the next person, and will still listen to it in the afternoons every now and then, otherwise how would she ever know about songs like Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie,” she cannot stand the morning DJs. Lite FM plays far too much Barry White in the mornings, and there is not one country music station in New York City. Meredith thinks it could boggle the mind if you let it.

  The timer clicks, the BeoCenter 2 turns on, and the first note of music fills the room. It’s Patrick Park singing “Something Pretty.” It’s track five on his CD, Loneliness Knows My Name. She concentrates on the song, it’s the only thing she can think of to do. I know ugliness, now show me something pretty. Only, as Patrick Park sings, all thick and gritty and gravely, “Show me something pretty,” Meredith sings instead, “Show me something skinny.” And it doesn’t even seem like a big mistake; to her, pretty and skinny have always seemed so much like the same thing. Now show me something skinny.

  Patrick Park continues to fill the room, and she listens for the next line to make sure she’s got it right. As for loneliness, she greets me every morning. True story, that’s really the next line, and it might be a bit too much loneliness so early in the morning. But really what does she expect when she listens to the songs of a man who titles his CD Loneliness Knows My Name?

  I think I might need to look into a new CD, Meredith thinks, sliding out from under the covers. Maybe, she thinks, something more upbeat, maybe some Jack Johnson. She thinks also that at this point, she’s had just about enough of being lonely. But after that, she’s not sure what to think next. She’s not really sure what a person is supposed to do when she’s tired of being lonely. She’d just never considered it before. She imagines there could be solutions—joining a club, volunteering or giving something back to the community, taking up a sport. But she also imagines that the search for any solution has already been made infinitely harder due to the fact that the most important person in her life, the one who actually made it so that she never felt alone, now needs a break. And she’d very much like to say, it’s not as if Stephanie wasn’t kind of snippy with her throughout her entire pregnancy. And it’s not as if Stephanie hasn’t been quite the recluse ever since Ivy’s been born. And has Meredith ever said anything hostile and wrong, anything like, I need a break? No, she hasn’t.

  Out of bed, Meredith embarks on the short trip to her kitchen, and reaches quickly into her freezer for the foil package of Starbucks coffee. As the coffee drips through the coffee-making part of her Krups XP1500 Coffee and Espresso Combination machine, Meredith considers simply starting over. Rather than going with the run-of-the-mill pretty-much-how-most-every-day-starts coffee, she contemplates the myriad merits of making herself a cup of cappuccino instead. With whole milk. Definitely with whole milk, because if you’re going to take the time to make the cappuccino, to monitor it, to wait for it, whole milk should really be included in the reward. Does no one else think skim milk tastes exactly like water? Does no one else find skim milk to be, if you really stop to think about it, just a little bit upsetting? But the coffee is already made. And come to think of it, all that’s in the fridge anyway is some Zone-friendly skim milk.

  She carries the coffee back into her bedroom and sits down at her desk. She greatly prefers to sit by herself at her desk, as opposed to by herself at the round wrought-iron table for four, placed in the living room, right outside the pass-through part of the pass-through kitchen. She doesn’t recall it being intentional, but the way the table has been placed, it’s right there, so that if you were so inclined, you could pass plates and dishes and platters of food through the pass-through (hence the name), and then, people—people gathered happily around the table, or even just standing right by it—could take these passed plates and set them, happily of course, on the table. Unless no one was there. But then, if you were so inclined, you could throw things through the pass-through and with a little bit of aim, even just the small amount that Meredith has, you could probably get it to land on the table.

  Her desk is in her bedroom, right next to the window; in order to look out, all she has to do is turn her head slightly to the right. And that works well, as she likes very much to look out the window, to see the city from the twelfth floor, to see everything, and at the same time nothing, of what’s going on out there. Today she sees the buildings, as she sometimes does, as boxes. Boxes filled with other boxes, with more boxes. Looking at it like that makes Meredith feel claustrophobic, more than a little itchy in her skin.

  She’d like to think of something else; she’d like to think about something more productive. So she wonders if there’s a diet in the world, a successful dieter anywhere who can have whole milk—just in her coffee, nothing like an entire brazen glass of whole milk or anything crazy like that—and not feel like a failure, a bad person, someone who can’t do anything right, someone who’s getting to the point lately where she’s thinking so much more about loneliness than she used to.

  She’s sure if Stephanie were here, even just here on the phone, she’d tell her not to think so much. She’d say, “Try not to think about it, Meres,” and maybe she’d add on, “Really, that’s as good advice as any.” But Stephanie isn’t here, and suddenly she remembers that on the Atkins diet, you can have heavy cream in your coffee, because even though milk does have a very high carbohydrate count, for some magical reason, heavy cream doesn’t have any carbs at all.

  When the phone rings a moment later, she’s actually quite grateful for the interruption. Before it can ring a second time, Meredith reaches out quickly to grab the phone. The flick of her wrist, the almost instinctual speed; she is like a frog, a lizard, something with a really big tongue that it uses to snatch up no-see-ums, mosquitoes, and flies. Meredith’s phone, any phone within her reach, is a no-see-um, a mosquito, and a fly.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Meredith, it’s Leslie.”

  “Oh, hi, Leslie,” she says. She didn’t really want it to be Leslie, there was someone else she wanted.

  “Hey. So, wha
t are you up to on this Saturday morning?”

  “I’m just trying to think of a new place to put my kitchen table.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, okay then,” Leslie answers, and Meredith wonders for a perhaps ill-thought-out moment if maybe she should enlist Leslie, if she should just say, “Oh, I’m just here trying to decide which diet to go on since my sister got me thinking about it so much and then, just like that, abandoned me. So, Leslie, would you like to go on a diet with me?”

  She pictures Leslie, and it’s impossible to think of Leslie as someone who would ever have to diet. She has always thought of Leslie as someone who is just like that, just skinny. Leslie’s tall and lean physique is the type that is metabolic, hereditary. No amount of dieting, exercising, or starving could make a person look like Leslie. So she doesn’t say anything.

  “Well, I was calling for two reasons,” Leslie begins. “First, I wanted to thank you so much for introducing me to Kevin. What a fantastic guy, and leave it you to make a setup so subtle and pressure-free.”

  But it wasn’t a set up, Meredith thinks, quite seriously. I just needed two people to go to dinner with me.

  “It was nothing,” she says. “It was just dinner.” Even though if anyone should know there is no such thing as “just dinner,” it would be Meredith.

  “But still, he’s really great, you know.”

  “I know,” Meredith says and she’s reminded of an ad she saw once a long time ago, for jeans. She can’t remember the brand, but she can remember the campaign. It said, “No one can tell that you have a great personality from across the room.” Leslie is the type of woman who men fall in love with from across rooms.

  “I’m glad you two hit it off,” she adds after a pause. She is not glad.

  “I think he’s very romantic,” Leslie continues. “So many guys in this city, they play games. But Kevin’s just not like that at all. We went out last night, and he called just now to see if I wanted to get brunch tomorrow, and then we were talking, he’s such a good phone-talker, and so many of them aren’t, and we thought we would love it if you joined us, since we wouldn’t be brunching at all if it weren’t for you.”

  We would love it if you joined us, Meredith repeats to herself. We. Love. Us. And she thinks of brunch with them and can think of nothing she’d rather do less. “Thanks so much for the offer,” she says. “But I can’t. I’ve got something I need to do tomorrow.”

  “Oh, my pleasure, Meredith, really. Doing anything good instead?”

  “There’s this book I really need to buy.”

  “Another time then,” Leslie says happily and Meredith waits for a moment to see if Leslie is going to tell her she looks like a supermodel, or perhaps Carol Alt, but she doesn’t.

  “Definitely,” Meredith answers back, trying to sound cheerful. “Tell Kevin I say hi.” And then, even though she imagines that at this point they don’t need her advice, the need to give it is bigger than she is. “Red Cat in Chelsea has a really nice Sunday brunch.”

  “Thanks so much, Meredith. I’ll see you Monday at work.”

  “See you then,” she replies, thinking as she does that Twelfth Street Café down near Kevin’s apartment provides one of the more, in her opinion, charming brunch experiences in New York. She’s a fan, too, of Pure’s brunch on Irving Place, and while there, it’s always fun to stop into Casa Mono for a sampling of tapas and one of the best sangrias in town.

  eleven

  what you don’t know can’t hurt you, or not

  “Aubrey?” He doesn’t answer.

  She’s standing in their bedroom, right outside the bathroom. He’s in the bathroom, he’s shaving or he’s doing whatever it is he does to his hair, which isn’t much. Aubrey likes to live by some dictate, she thinks it was JFK who said it, that a man should be able to shower and dress in under fifteen minutes. She’s sure that when JFK said it, there was more eloquence. She’s sure that there are other dictates Aubrey might want to try living by. She’s sure that he can hear her. And what is he getting ready for, it’s Saturday?

  “Aubrey?” She notices a spot on the molding where the paint is peeling off. She’ll have to fix that.

  “Steph, yeah?” he says, and he says it rather normally. He steps out of the bathroom with his towel wrapped around his waist. There’s a tiny spot of blood on his face. He keeps touching the spot and she thinks he should get a tissue. But except for that he looks fine. He looks normal, more normal than she thinks she’s seen him looking in a while, and she feels lighter, just for a second, and she can imagine everything is fine. She can imagine that last night was just an illusion, a hallucination brought on by too much stress and the inability to deal with that stress by eating, due to the fact of being on a diet. Or maybe he just takes all his pills at night, and she’s always too tired, too busy, too preoccupied with Ivy to actually notice what he looks like at this time of day.

  “Aubrey, we have to talk.”

  His eyebrows raise and he makes this clucking noise he likes to make with his mouth. She’s filled with rage for an instant, that this is what Aubrey, lately, thinks suffices for an answer. But it seems even rage can be snuffed out so quickly by exhaustion. Exhaustion can knock down almost anything in its path. Ivy’s been up for two hours already. It’s seven fifteen in the morning and for the purposes of this important conversation, Stephanie has parked her in front of Baby Van Gogh. She tries to limit her TV, but what with her husband being a drug addict and her not having slept in a day, she thinks it’s okay.

  Aubrey walks past her to the dresser and pulls open the top drawer, fishing around and taking out socks and boxers. He doesn’t take out just one pair of boxers and one pair of socks, as you would have expected, or at least as Stephanie would have expected, but rather several pairs of each. Three pairs of boxers and three pairs of socks.

  “What is this?” she asks, and her voice sounds shrill. When did she become shrill? And why is he so catatonic, even when he looks normal? And why is it that out of all the things she thought she desired in the world, now that she seems to have them, what she desires most is to throw things?

  “Why all the socks, Aubrey?” And when he still doesn’t answer, she wonders if maybe it’s a drug thing. She does her best to banish such a thought from her mind, as such a thought can’t really help this conversation, if a conversation it can in fact be called. He walks past her again, lilting to one side. Aubrey’s walk, even long before his ACL surgery, has always been the kind that’s just slightly off-kilter. She had always thought of it as lilting, not limping, until now.

  He pulls his suitcase out of the closet and carries it back to the bed. He puts it right on the bed, dirty suitcase on unmade sheets. She hates that. He knows she hates that. But she won’t say anything about it because she needs to say something about other things, about hundreds and hundreds of pills. She needs to pick her battles. She wonders if he knew this. He is now piling shirts, button-down shirts, into the suitcase.

  “Are you just not going to answer me?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you packing?”

  “Chicago?”

  “Chicago?”

  “Yes, Stephanie. Chicago. The Internet conference that the entire marketing team is attending and as their fearless leader, I will attend with them?” Right, she thinks, right, even though she doesn’t remember anything about an Internet conference in Chicago. Aubrey’s job, she thinks, the place he goes every day. Every day, in the city. And she wonders, can you be a very good marketer of sports when you are on drugs?

  “Well, Aubrey, I think maybe you shouldn’t go.”

  He turns to look at her, half-confused, half-mean, the way he looks a lot of the time when he isn’t looking blank, and then looks away. He drops his towel and reaches for his boxers and as he heads back into the closet, taking out a pair of pants and stepping into them, he says, without turning to look at her again, “Stephanie, would you mind then telling me why?
And would you mind then telling me what your problem is this morning?”

  She wonders if other husbands, other men, would say other things. Things so much nicer, things so much more along the lines of, Is everything okay? Is our daughter okay? And you, sweetheart, are you okay? Is there something, some sort of help that you need? Would Aubrey say something like that if he were not a hoarder, and most likely a habitual taker, of prescription painkillers? How long has he been in the basement? Months now, she thinks, longer.

  “I was in the workroom last night,” she says. He looks up at her, right at her. “And I found all the bottles, all the pills. And maybe there’s a good reason, maybe you want to tell it to me?” She pauses, she waits. “And if not, well I don’t know, but I think either way, I think we should talk.” Aubrey exhales and doesn’t say anything for a minute and Stephanie waits, waits for him to say it’s nothing, waits for him to say that everything will actually be fine.

  “I can’t deal with this right now,” he says quickly, bending down to put on his shoes.

  “Aubrey, listen,” she says.

  “No, Stephanie,” he says, loud enough and sharp enough so that she’s sure the sound will reach Ivy downstairs, instantly undoing all the soothing and educational doings of Baby Van Gogh. Or Mozart. “You listen. It’s a basement, not a workroom. And I really can’t deal with this right now. I’m late. I’ve got a huge few days coming up right now. Can we just talk about this when I get back?” he asks, except it’s not really a question. So she doesn’t answer him. For a moment when she first saw the socks, and the suitcase, she thought that he was leaving, really leaving. Granted, he was leaving with only three pairs of underwear, but he was leaving all the same. And for the instant that she thought that, it did feel awful, just not quite as awful as she would have guessed.