by Judy Baer
Overachiever? That’s a quality I haven’t noticed in Mitzi, at least not around the office.
Still, my heart goes out to her. She’s been struggling for two years with the “what-if” of not being able to have a child. That’s a pain I, never having been in her position, cannot judge.
Later, back at the office, I still felt rattled by the alien expression of apprehension in Mitzi’s eyes.
Betty was at her desk, eating garlic stir-fry out of a white paper box. The odor wafted through the room, and I felt my eyes sting. I hope she finishes her lunch down to the very last snow pea, because if she leaves her leftovers in our refrigerator we’re going to need gas masks.
“Did you go out for Chinese?” I picked up the paper from her fortune cookie. “Treasures will come your way from unexpected places. Beware of the dishonest merchant.”
It figures—eBay again, even in Betty’s fortune cookie.
“Bryan brought it back for me from a Vietnamese restaurant.”
“What was that about?” Mitzi came into the break room, chewing on a large dill pickle.
I stared at the pickle. “And what is that about?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Hah. Mitzi replying to a question by saying “Oh, nothing,” is like asking Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun what they’re doing, gathering armies and polishing swords and having them innocently say, “Oh, nothing.” There’s always more than meets the eye.
“You don’t like pickles. Aren’t you the one who made the waiter take back a burger last week to remove the pickles and replace the meat so you wouldn’t have to taste pickle juice?”
“That was last week.” She took a determined bite of the gherkin.
“You didn’t have a palate transplant, did you?”
She glared at me in sheer annoyance. “If you must know, I’m practicing.”
“For what? A pickle derby?”
“For being pregnant.”
“Sorry, Mitzi, I don’t get it.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Whitney, you have no foresight whatsoever. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even have our girls’ night out on your calendar! You should really spend more time planning ahead.”
That’s what I thought I was doing by leaving girls’ night out off my calendar. Mitzi always plans it, and sometimes I just don’t want to have my body massaged with stones—there are already enough rocks in my head, thank you—to hear a clothing historian lecture on the invention of the girdle, or to attend an in-home brassiere party where we can all be fitted in the privacy of someone’s four-foot-by-four-foot bathroom. Kim, Betty and I have gone along with Mitzi’s wacko ideas, because we know camaraderie around the office helps foster a teamwork approach, but if she gets us invited to another one of those brassiere parties, I’m outta here.
“And just what are you planning ahead for, might I ask?”
She bestowed on me her “You poor, benighted idiot” look. “For when I’m pregnant, of course! Midnight cravings? Pickles and ice cream? Don’t you ever read anything other than software magazines?”
“Let me get this straight. You hate pickles, so you are practicing eating them so that when you get pregnant and have a craving for them, you will be able to tolerate them?”
“Of course. I want the entire pregnancy experience. I have to learn to eat pickles. Eating ice cream will be no problem.”
Weird as it all is, I’m impressed. If Mitzi will go to such lengths for a baby she isn’t even pregnant with, I can’t imagine what she’ll do for one she’s able to hold in her arms.
I looked at her, pickle halfway to her mouth.
She glared at me so I couldn’t speak. “Don’t you dare make fun of me, Whitney. Not only do Americans consume nine pounds of pickles per year per person, but Elvis loved fried pickles!” She turned and stalked off.
Well, if it was okay with Elvis, then it’s okay with me.
Monday evening, later, March 22
Chase was in the kitchen when I got home, making himself a tuna fish sandwich. Mr. Tibble and Scram were weaving in and out between his legs like skaters making figure eights on the ice. Scram was meowing at the top of his lungs. He thinks it never hurts to ask for what he wants—especially if it’s from one of his favorite food groups. Mr. Tibble normally doesn’t stoop to Scram’s level and act like a cat. He allows Scram to speak for him and express his displeasure. He also lets Scram steal food off the table and promptly takes it away from him. He does not let Scram go into the litter box first, sleep in his bed or have the one catnip mouse in the house that hasn’t been beheaded. For some reason, whenever I think about Mr. Tibble, I’m reminded of Mitzi.
“Hi, honey.” I slipped my arms around Chase’s warm, taut middle and laid my head against his back. I could feel him breathing, and his innate, irresistible masculinity held me there as firmly as if he were a magnet and I a metal shaving. “How are you feeling today? Stomach better?”
“I feel great. Must have been something I ate.”
“There could be something going around. Or maybe you have morning sickness.”
He put down the mayonnaise, wiped his hands on a towel and turned around in my arms to kiss me on the forehead.
“You understand, of course, that I can’t dignify that with a response.”
“Wise choice.” I plucked a carrot from the plate he’d prepared for himself.
“There’s too much pregnancy conversation in my life. I have more information about what happens when a couple goes to a fertility specialist than I ever wanted to know. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try to get Mitzi to quit talking, it doesn’t work. I’m the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. Mitzi is the water and it’s hopeless to think I can hold her back.”
“Sometimes medicine can be an insane business—the E.R., people coming in on drugs, hallucinating, hyperventilating, bleeding—but it’s nothing like your office. Insanity there is considered the norm.”
“No one does drugs, but there is definitely a lot of hallucinating going on.” And I began to entertain Chase with Mitzi’s newest prepregnancy scheme, learning to love the common pickle.
Chapter Seven
Friday, March 26
It wasn’t until today that Chase and I had time to sit down together and rehash our week. After dinner we curled up together on the couch, I with a cup of jasmine tea and Chase with espresso.
I only drink espresso when I can dip sugar cube after sugar cube into it, something my one-hundred-pound mother taught me. Since all this baby-nutrition-good-health conversation has started buzzing around the office, I feel guilty even considering a dietary no-no. Mitzi can read in my eyes when I’ve enjoyed food she’s barred herself from having, and she can smell toffee on my breath from forty paces. It can’t last forever, of course, because Mitzi loves junk food.
“Since when did Mitzi become such a force of nature?” Chase asked when I told him. “She’s always been a climactic upheaval, but recently she’s gained momentum.”
“She’s more serious about this than about anything I’ve ever seen, including sending me to Hasty-Date to find a man and shopping for the perfect pair of Prada shoes.”
That might have sounded shallow to an outsider, but Chase got my drift. I told him about the basal thermometer and the list of tests Mitzi and Arch were facing.
Chase whistled. “That should give them a pretty clear picture of what’s going on.”
“Not entirely,” I muttered. “No one has even considered what it’s going to be like to work with Mitzi while she goes through this. Aphids eat their mates, right? I’m afraid Mitzi will devour us like so many cheese crackers before she’d done. She’s had so many mood swings I feel like we’re already dizzy.”
“It’s an emotional time,” Chase murmured.
And an emotional Mitzi is quite a sight to behold. Today she was alternately crying tears into her penne pasta salad with artichoke hearts, gorgonzola and pine nuts—nothing as plebian as a cheese sandwich at lunch for Mitzi—and laughing
hysterically at the cartoons in the newspaper. Mitzi is becoming a split personality, and we at Innova have been watching her crack. When she got weepy over Blondie and Dagwood, we retreated to the safety of our desks.
“This has to hurt her more than she cares to let on,” I told Chase.
Chase suddenly took my face in his hands and kissed me soundly. It was the kind of kiss that, had I been standing, would have made my knees weak. Since Mr. Tibble and Scram were currently sitting on my kneecaps and had made them completely numb, the kiss only blew every sensible thought from my head as I kissed him back.
He stroked my cheeks with the pads of his thumbs and murmured, “You are amazing, Whitney.”
“What did I do to deserve that? I want to know so I can do it again.”
“You have compassion for Mitzi, even though she drives you crazy. You never dwell on the negative in anyone’s personality and always look for their humanity.” He grinned at me and, numb though they were, my knees did weaken. “Maybe that’s why I feel so fortunate to have you love me.”
“I love you because you are impossible not to love,” I told him. “Sometimes my heart hurts, I love you so much.”
“Hurts? I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s a good hurt. It feels as though it might explode with joy.” I snuggled into his chest and sighed.
“And?”
“And what?”
“And what was that sigh about? It wasn’t the sigh of a totally happy woman, now was it?”
“No fair. You know me too well.”
“So spill it. What’s not right in your world?”
“It’s Kim. She’s…” I searched around in my mind for a word, and could only come up with one. “Obsessed.”
Chase tucked me closer to himself, a sign that he was ready and willing to listen.
“They are finding adoption complicated and intimidating.” I thought back to this morning when, during her coffee break, Kim had filled out a self-assessment quiz meant to help her and Kurt identify their feelings and goals about adoption.
“Whitney,” she’d said, her eyes wide, “I assumed we’d adopt a healthy infant and raise him or her as we did Wesley. I didn’t even consider the children with disabilities who are in desperate need of parents.” She’d held out a paper for me to read. “Look.”
“Which disabilities in an adoptive child,” the sheet had read, “would you be willing to consider?” The inventory had been nearly a page long, listing everything from premature and drug-exposed babies to those with Down syndrome, blindness and a host of family history issues, such as diabetes, mental disorders and alcohol addiction. Then it had asked which racial heritages she and Kurt would consider and whether they had gender preferences or would think about taking twins.
“How can I decide? If a child needs love—needs us—then we would take it, wouldn’t we?” she’d lamented. “And what about all those we can’t take? What happens to them?”
“She either wants to bring all the children home with her or give up on the process entirely, depending on her mood,” I told Chase.
“They’re forgetting something important,” he commented. “They already have someone who is willing to direct them, someone who will find the perfect child for them—if it’s His will.”
I looked Chase in the baby blues. “You are absolutely right. God is on their side. He knows if they should adopt a baby or not. And He also knows who and where that baby is right now. Perhaps it isn’t even born yet.”
You knit me together in my mother’s womb…My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret…Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.
Psalms 139:13-16
I, too, sometimes forget God is in charge and try to tackle the world on my own.
“You’re so wise.” I brushed my fingers against my husband’s cheek. “Kim and Mitzi are both doing the ‘What-ifs’. No wonder they’re nervous.”
It makes more sense for Mitzi to be nervous. Although she doesn’t seem to mind that Kim and I are Christians, she doesn’t appear interested in joining the club herself. Just because she and Arch once committed to join a denomination in order to marry in a particular church, that didn’t make them Christian anymore than standing in a kitchen makes one Julia Child.
“Ah, for the good old days.” He gathered me into his arms and nuzzled his nose into my hair. I detected the faint, crisp smells of shaving lotion and soap.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I want to have a baby the old-fashioned way. You know, homemade, a do-it-yourself endeavor…”
“And if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?”
He grinned, and his even white teeth flashed. “It’s a project I’m willing to commit my life to.”
“Like the post office? ‘Neither rain, nor hail, nor sleet will stop…’”
“Something like that. In fact, I think playing post office is a good place to start.”
I didn’t even hear Mr. Tibble or Scram complain when I dumped them off my knees and onto the floor so that I could get my arms around my husband’s neck.
Monday, March 29
On Monday morning, Mitzi dealt out party invitations around the office as if they were Old Maid cards.
“For you, for you, for you…” She paused and gathered herself together before putting one on Bryan’s desk. “For you…”
Bryan isn’t exactly the life of the party. In fact, he can suck the energy right out of one. If he overhears an argument, he gets nervous and hides in the bathroom until it’s over. “What’s this?” Kim held hers up to the light to see if the flat vellum envelope contained a bomb.
“Arch and I are having a get-together on Saturday night. There will be appetizers, a buffet by the pool, music, and scads of doctors and their wives there. I thought it might be good to water down the intellectuals with you guys.”
Leave it to Mitzi to extend a gracious invitation.
“Suddenly, I think I’m busy,” Kim retorted.
“Don’t get huffy. You know what I mean. I don’t want these people discussing appendectomies and thyroidectomies all evening. You’ll be a diversion.”
“Like a juggling clown, or someone who does balloon art? You aren’t helping your case, Mitzi.”
“I’m having the food catered by Ziga’s.”
Ziga’s is a well-known dining spot on Lake Zachary, where Mitzi lives.
“Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? They have the best food I’ve ever eaten.” Kim exchanged a resigned glance with me over Mitzi’s head. We’re a family; we show up for each other no matter what—especially when food is involved.
Thursday, April 1, April Fools’ Day—Innova’s Annual Day of Celebration
Forget Presidents’ Day, Labor Day and the Fourth of July. April 1 is my company’s day to howl. Quite literally, in fact.
The first thing Harry did when he walked into the office this morning was to stub his toe on the leg of Kim’s desk and start hopping around as if he was riding a crazed pogo stick.
“Ouch, ouch, owww…”
Immediately, Kim jumped up to help him, Bryan headed for the bathroom to get out of the way, and Betty lunged to the phone to call for help. I, meanwhile, had the presence of mind to find the man a chair so he could sit down. But it wasn’t until Mitzi sauntered over to examine the damage to Harry’s shoe, that he erupted out of the chair and yelled, “Gotcha! April Fool!”
We all groaned in unison. How could we have let Harry get away with the first April Fools’ gotcha? There is, after all, a trophy at stake for the one who tricks the rest of the office with his or her April Fools’ joke. Harry had, in the first moments of the day, set the standard high. Now, if one or two of us did hoodwink the others with our stories, we’d still have to face the play-offs—a highly competitive game of dominoes, something to do with Mexican trains or chicken scratches or whatever B
etty dreams up.
It’s not like the traveling trophy is so fabulous or anything. It’s actually a spectacularly ugly lamp with the names of past winners taped to the shade, but such is the competitive element of our office that everyone takes pleasure in displaying it in a place of prominence in their homes. Mitzi won it last year and had a small decorative niche installed in her basement family room to show it off.
After a high-level meeting of the minds over the water cooler, we decided to play a group trick on Harry in retaliation for catching us all so early in the day.
While I distracted him with a bogus question about a spurious client, Mitzi sneaked into his office and took his car keys out of the pocket of his jacket and passed them off to Kim, who, on her break, went outside to the parking lot. Harry always parks in the first row of cars, those nearest our building. In fact, if there’s no opening when he arrives, he circles the area until someone leaves.
Kim reparked the car in the fifth row and returned to the office unnoticed because Betty was intercepting him with another counterfeit question. Kim handed off the keys to Bryan, who put them back into Harry’s pocket and was back at his desk before Betty let Harry return to work.
Then we all sat holding our breath, waiting for lunchtime.
Harry breezed out of his office and called back over his shoulder, “I’ll be back at one. I see I’ve got a luncheon meeting with a client today.”
Mitzi smiled and waved at him as he left, never letting on that she had fabricated the luncheon just to get him out of the office and into his car.
Then we all stood at the window and watched.
Harry strode to his parking space and, without even looking at the car, thrust the key into the lock. When it didn’t fit, he glanced up and did a double take when he saw that he’d been trying to breach a gleaming black Hummer instead of his charcoal Jeep Cherokee.
He glanced around the parking lot, and then at his key. We hooted with laughter as he tried the key in the lock a second time, as if hoping that upon feeling the familiarity of the key, the Hummer, like Cinderella’s coach, would turn back into a pumpkin.
