Perfect Happiness

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  She is sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Key Bridge over the Potomac River, the spires of Georgetown’s stone buildings on the bluff just ahead of her. She adjusts the vents on the dashboard, punching up the AC to full blast, letting the clean cool air blow right into her face, settling her. It’s not like there’s something she wishes Jason had done when she reported Birdie’s transgression to him, but the problem, like so many things in their home life these days, is a task she’d like to be able to just delegate to him, the way he handles cleaning the gutters and mowing the yard. Sometimes she just feels so fucking alone when it comes to all the things she’s juggling, and when something unexpected comes along, it feels like a fireball hurtling toward her.

  Charlotte edges her car forward, trying to encourage the Camry in front of her to move already. She can see the driver’s head tilted down, probably scrolling through the latest inane top ten list on Facebook or something, and she tightens her grip on the steering wheel, visualizing herself just ramming into the bumper. What’s that TV show about women who lose it? Breaking Point? Snapped? One rainy Saturday morning last year, she was speaking at a wellness conference in Connecticut, and the time management expert onstage before her asked the audience to make a list of all of the responsibilities, big and small, that they dealt with regularly: shuttling kids to their various activities, running meetings and writing reports, buying toilet paper, paying bills, doing the laundry. Backstage in her metal folding chair, she played along, jotting her list in the margins of the speech she was holding in her lap. When she finally finished, looking down at the ballpoint scrawls, she didn’t feel relieved or justified or proud. She felt an immense heaviness, one that made her want to burst into tears and crawl into bed, have somebody give her a spoonful of something and run a palm across her forehead. Jason didn’t seem to get that. She’d tried to explain it to him months ago, how it felt embarrassing to admit it, but she yearned for someone to take care of her, for a change.

  She thinks of the day ahead, the weight of its responsibilities settling on her chest: the class she’ll teach, the doctoral student she’ll counsel, the emails and voicemails and emails and voicemails, the notes she’ll work on for the big talk out in Montana, the preparations for the trip she’s taking tomorrow to Savannah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then, when she finally returns home, rumpled and tired, her feet aching and sweaty in the flats she wears to work, the biggest mountain of all: how to address the issue with Birdie.

  Her eyes flick to the clock on her dashboard, knowing her mother’s probably wondering why she hasn’t called her yet for their standing morning chat. Charlotte can picture her now, sitting in the brick courtyard behind her home on Wright Square in one of her loud silk caftans, her breakfast (a porcelain teacup of Maxwell House, two Splendas, no cream) beside her, picking the crinkled dried petals from her gardenias while she bitches about how the gardener isn’t watering them enough. Her mother’s not the person to go to if she’s craving nurturing or encouragement. Her mother has the maternal instincts of Cruella De Vil. She considers dialing Stephanie instead to powwow on punishments for the girls.

  On her right, a few kayakers are setting out on the Potomac, and a rowing team, maybe from one of the high schools, is gliding back toward the boathouse just on the other side of the bridge. Beyond, the Kennedy Center gleams in the yellow morning light, the Washington Monument in the haze just behind it. Back when she and Jason were first dating, she made this trip constantly, back and forth from her place on O Street to his apartment in Arlington, and this very view made her feel such a sense of peace about her decision to leave Georgia. Her heart was full, every facet of her life a piece of evidence leading to the conclusion that she had made the right choices and had an incredible future ahead of her. She was so happy back then. Happy, happy, happy. She hates how that word has become so loaded for her now.

  The Camry starts moving, then stops short again. “Fuck!” Charlotte screams, piercing the quiet. She lays on her horn, then glances out her rearview and guns the gas, weaving around the guy, who’s now flipping her off. “Asshole!” she screams, flying through the light at the end of the bridge just as it’s turning red, barely making it, and then her phone buzzes through her speakers. Fancy Nancy, the caller ID on the dashboard says.

  She takes a deep breath, taps the green answer icon. “Hello, Mother,” she says over the speakerphone.

  “I’ve been waiting for your call.”

  “I’m sorry, we got a little bit sidetracked this morning.” In the background she hears yipping; Paisley, her mother’s Havanese, ten pounds of hell on earth, and known, on more than one occasion, to drag the bodies of the stray cats that roam downtown Savannah onto her mother’s cobblestoned patio. Charlotte hates the dog, but then again, she hates lots of the things that her mother loves.

  “Oh?” her mother says. “What’s happening now?”

  Charlotte clenches her jaw. Her mother always acts like Charlotte’s life is a circus designed to amuse her, like she’s lying on a chaise, getting fanned by someone holding a massive peacock feather, while a tiny Charlotte sprints in a hamster wheel on a table beside her. “It’s Birdie, Momma,” she says, knowing this admission might be a mistake. “She snuck out on Friday night when she was sleeping over at Hannah’s house.”

  “Oh, Charlotte!” Her mother’s cackle fills the car.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “How worked up you are! How—Oh, Charlotte!”

  “Are you kidding me?” Charlotte says. “I distinctly remember your demeanor during my and Aaron’s teenage years and it wasn’t particularly calm.”

  “Oh, I remember!” her mother says. “I remember all right! And it sure wasn’t fun, having you run all over the city of Savannah and every barrier island and Lord knows where else with Reese Tierney!”

  “That was different,” Charlotte says. “It was a simpler time. And Savannah isn’t a big city like DC. There were only so many ways I could get into trouble, and given that everybody knew everybody, I didn’t even try.”

  “My ass, you didn’t,” her mother says, laughing. “I have a long memory, don’t forget.”

  “Oh, I haven’t,” she says. If anyone can hold a grudge . . .

  “Birdie will be fine,” her mother says.

  “I know, I know,” she says, pulling onto campus, the dappled sun through the trees making her squint.

  “This is what being a teenager is all about.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says. “I know.”

  “And she’s falling in love!” her mother says. “You can’t deny her that experience, Charlotte, or the fact that she’s growing up. She deserves those memories. Everyone does.”

  “When did you become so rational?” Charlotte says, scowling. “You sound like the wise old matron in a Lifetime movie.”

  “Oh, well, thank you, Charlotte,” her mother says. “There’s nothing I enjoy more than being called old and matronly all at once.”

  “You’re welcome,” Charlotte says, pulling into her usual parking spot. She starts gathering the pile of notebooks and papers from her passenger seat and shoving them into her bag.

  “Speaking of young love, I was at a luncheon yesterday and heard that Reese’s divorce is final.”

  Charlotte stops what she’s doing and sits back in her seat. “Oh?” she says. “Well . . . good for him.”

  “Mm-hmm,” her mother says.

  Charlotte waits a beat or two for her to elaborate, but of course she doesn’t, because this is the kind of conversation her mother relishes. Rather than just come out and give her all the details, she’d rather have Charlotte ask for them.

  Charlotte closes her eyes. “Who told you?” she finally asks.

  Her mother laughs, just faintly enough. “Bryn Howard, that woman who has the little gallery on Abercorn. She said he’s keeping his place out on Wilmington Island but I’m sure that girl took him for all he was worth.”

  “Well, that’s hardly surprising. Wasn
’t that more or less her intention since the day she met him?” Charlotte says, remembering the wedding announcement from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that her mother had clipped and sent in the mail a few years ago. Over the past twenty years, Reese had become a sought-after plastic surgeon in the Southeast. The bride had been his patient, a former University of Georgia gymnast who’d done a few rounds on the pageant circuit before homing in on him.

  “That’s awful, Charlotte,” her mother says, though she’d probably said the same thing herself.

  “Momma, why else would a girl her age—what is she, twenty-six? Twenty-seven?—marry a man in his mid-forties?”

  “Maybe they fell in love.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I just hope he’s not too heartbroken,” her mother says, and Charlotte feels her ears start to burn. Her mother’s never come right out and said that she thought that Charlotte made a mistake by not taking Reese back, but she’s made her opinion crystal clear.

  “Well, why don’t you bring him a goddamn casserole?” she says, yanking her bag onto her shoulder and stepping into the parking lot, slamming her car door closed with her foot.

  “Charlotte! Language!”

  “He’s not that great, you know,” she says. “Don’t forget what he did to me.”

  “Well . . .” her mother says, leaving it at that, the silence enough to communicate everything she wants to say.

  Ten minutes later, Charlotte strides down the dim hallway in the psychology department, still smarting from the phone call, when her coworker Liza comes out of her office with an overstuffed messenger bag slung across her middle.

  “Heading to the lab?” Charlotte says, pushing her mother’s voice out of her mind.

  “Yup,” Liza says, her shoulders slumping like she’s a balloon being deflated. Liza is actually a lovely person, one of only a few colleagues that Charlotte would call a real friend, but she’s also whiny, which is funny given that she spends a lot of her time with little kids, studying their response to media, mainly cartoons, and how it affects the way they learn. “Hey, I saw your Today show clip!” she says, straightening the strap on her bag. “It was in that weekly PR email. Great job!”

  “Oh, it was?” Charlotte frowns, thinking of the email that’s blasted to the school’s employees, students, and alumni. “I mean, thank you . . .” Unlike some of her colleagues—academics are a snippy sort, no matter how you cut it—Liza has never seemed anything but genuinely happy for Charlotte’s success, or even mostly indifferent to it, which is a huge relief.

  Before they can say goodbye, Tabatha, their department chair, comes out of her office, narrowing her eyes at Charlotte. “No TV crews today?” she says, arching an eyebrow. “We don’t need to reserve the conference room for hair and makeup?”

  Charlotte purses her lips, digging her fingernails into her closed fist at her side. “No,” she says, exchanging a quick glance with Liza, who waves quickly and steps away, muttering that she’s late.

  “It’s amazing you get any work done, with all of your media commitments,” Tabatha says, and crosses her arms. She has been the chair of the psychology department at Georgetown for a little over a decade now, and she’s never liked Charlotte. Her specialty is the mechanics of memory, and she’s a sturdy woman, tall and almost rectangular, with salt-and-pepper hair that is always pulled back in the same kind of velvet headband that Hillary Clinton used to wear. She is serious, which is normal for a university faculty member, but her crime is that she’s humorless. When Charlotte first started working with her, she yearned to be able to ask her father how to handle her, because after a lifetime with her mother, he knew better than anyone how to mess with someone who couldn’t take a joke.

  Instead, when Tabatha passes over her at department meetings, or looks at her the way she’s doing now, like Charlotte’s presence is as vaguely amusing as that of a mediocre street performer, Charlotte finds herself taking up the slack, ingratiating herself in a way that makes her feel like a poodle in a carnival, balancing on a ball on its hind legs with its tongue hanging out. Like me! Like me! Why she bothers seeking out this woman’s approval is beyond her, but it pisses her off, how Tabatha behaves toward her, because there is no basis for it. If anything, she should be grateful to Charlotte for the attention—and funding—she’s brought to the department.

  “Just headed to my office,” Charlotte says, smiling up at her boss. “Need to run through some emails before class.”

  “You have that big talk in Montana coming up?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte says, her nerves flaring at the mention of it. This talk—at the ranch of a Silicon Valley bigwig during his annual “thought summit”—has her on edge, not only because of the intimidating invite-only audience but because of the heavy media coverage it gets. Charlotte has pored over articles about it, in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and it still baffles her a little bit that they want her there at all—last year’s speakers included a Nobel Prize–winning chemist and a former secretary of state—but according to her agent, the organizer is a fan who’s kept a stack of her books in his office to give to guests since it first came out.

  “And you’ll be out later this week, yes?” Tabatha says.

  Charlotte knows she’s doing this just to toy with her but it isn’t any less irritating. “Yes,” she says, sighing. “Tomorrow and the next day. But I’m leaving after my class. I won’t miss anything.”

  “Of course you won’t,” Tabatha says, turning back to her office. “Have a nice day.”

  Charlotte’s little office at the end of the hallway smells dusty and stale, and looks predictably industrial, but she’s done her best over the years to make it more welcoming, both for herself and for the students who come to her with questions, or debates, or tears, depending on the day. There is a busy rug, in blues and greens that remind her of the shoreline of her childhood, on the floor that hides the ugly tan carpet beneath, and the books in the shelves that line one wall are arranged by color—red, orange, yellow, and so on—a project that she and Birdie took on two summers ago after they saw a picture in a magazine.

  She hangs her bag on the yellow hook she fastened to the wall just inside her door and walks to her computer, her mind drifting again to Birdie, and how she’d brought up Charlotte’s latest Today show segment the other night at the Cunninghams’. She feels duped now, jilted. Was Birdie just buttering her up? Throwing a little extra honey her way in case she was found out?

  She distracts herself for the next thirty minutes, flying through her emails, then stops, taking her hand off the mouse, when she lands on the message that Wendy, her literary agent, had sent last week, just four minutes after she’d gone off air, on the ball as always. PHENOMENAL. BLEW ME AWAY. YOU’RE A NATURAL. She’d read the message when it first came in, of course, but now she reads it again, her eyes scanning the words over and over, like her fingertips over a string of prayer beads, wanting the easy praise to make her feel better, but it doesn’t. She’d sent back a quick reply last week (Thanks! Glad you liked it!) conveniently ignoring the sentence at the end of Wendy’s message saying that they really need to talk. Charlotte’s agent has been on her case for weeks now; emailing, calling. “The publisher isn’t going to wait around forever for your next book,” the last voicemail said.

  She scrolls through her unread messages and finds the email from the university’s public relations department, where a still from her appearance is featured just below the introduction. She’d chosen a peacock blue blouse, a shade that the personal shopper she’d enlisted at Saks a year ago had accurately told her was her best color, and right before air, she’d wiped off half of the bright pink lipstick that the heavy-handed makeup person at the studio insisted would look great on camera. The segment was part of a weeklong series about mental health, and it was her first on the morning show where she was the sole expert, a promotion from past appearances when she’d shared the couch with everyone from a goofy dating expert who seemed b
arely old enough to drive a car to a trio of sweet centenarians who’d shared their secrets to a long life.

  She clicks on the video, remembering, as Craig Melvin introduces her, that she’d wondered, despite the smile in his eyes, if he was just going through the motions, counting the minutes until he could get back to “real” reporting instead of running through her tips for creating a daily happiness “routine,” an idea from the producer who’d called her the week before to book it. When she starts speaking in the video, her voice explodes into the room, and she ticks the volume down on her keyboard, her cheeks warming, embarrassed at her on-camera enthusiasm. She hardly ever watches these things. She can’t stand the sight of her amped-up self, the way she overdoes it, the pitch in her voice rising higher, her hands windmilling in front of her as she speaks, the eager way she sits so close to the edge of her seat that it almost seems as if she might launch herself into the host’s lap at any moment.

  This isn’t the image she wants for herself. Susie Sunshine. It’s not who she pictures when she thinks of who she really is, deep down. And yet, minutes after she went off-air, while she collected her things in the greenroom off set, she watched as her number of Instagram followers ticked up and up and up, from just under 90K to almost 93K, and felt weirdly redeemed. And then later, riding home on Amtrak, the messages from her reliable superfans: You were fantastic today, Char, they said, like they were old friends. The blue looked great on you! I’ve already started implementing that tip about a midday break—I actually left the office at lunch for the first time in ages and browsed a bookstore—just for me! It made her feel a little bit nauseous, but of course, also validated. The praise made it easier, and there were worse things than peddling her kind of medicine. Why not just keep going, her own feelings be damned.