by Melissa Bank
The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine
by Melissa Bank
I
My father knew he had leukemia for years before telling my brother and me. He explained that he hadn’t wanted his illness to interfere with our lives. It had barely interfered with his own, he said, until recently. “I’ve been very lucky,” he said, and I could tell he wanted us to see it this way, too.
This was an early spring weekend in the suburbs, and the three of us sat outside on the screened-in porch. My mother was in the background that afternoon, doing the brunch dishes and offering more coffee, weeding the garden and filling the bird feeder. It was warm but not hazy the way it can be in spring; the sky was blue with hefty clouds. The dark pink and red azaleas were just beginning to bloom.
~
Back in New York, I called my father before I left work. He was just getting home from the office. “Hi, love,” he said. I knew he was in the kitchen, sipping a gin and tonic while my mother cooked dinner. His voice was as strong and reassuring as ever.
I tried to sound normal, too. Busy. When he asked what I was doing that night I glanced at the newspaper open on my desk—a writer I’d heard on public radio was reading at a bookstore downtown, and I decided to go, so I could say so to my father.
After we hung up, I stared out of my window into the windows of the office building across the street. This was the year everyone started saying, “Work smart instead of long,” and the offices were deserted, except for the tiny shapes of cleaning women in their grayish-blue uniforms, one or two on every floor. The woman would go into an office and clean. A second later the light would go out, and on to the next office.
I heard the cleaning woman on my own floor, emptying wastebaskets and moving her custodial cart down the hall.
Her name was Blanca, and she was my social life.
~
I’d been a rising star at H–- until Mimi Howlett, the new executive editor, decided I was just the lights of an airplane.
The week she arrived she took me to lunch. At the restaurant, people turned around.
Some knew Mimi and waved, but others just looked at her because she was beautiful enough for them to wonder if she was famous, and she carried herself as though she was.
I couldn’t help staring, either—it was like she was a different species from me. She had the lollipop proportions of a model—big head, stick figure—pale skin, wintergreen eyes, and a nose barely big enough to breathe out of. That day, she was wearing a fedora, a charcoal-colored suit with a short jacket and an ankle-length skirt, and delicate, other-era boots that laced up. She might’ve been a romantic heroine from a novel, The Age of Innocence maybe, except she was with me, in my sacky wool dress, a worker in a documentary about the lumpenproletariat.
Her voice now: it was soft and whispery, the sound of perfume talking, which made her very occasional use of the word fuck as striking and even beautiful as a masculine man expressing nuanced and heartfelt emotion.
She began by telling me how sorry she was about my former boss, Dorrie, who’d been fired. She did seem sorry, and I hoped she was.
Then we talked about our favorite books—not recently published ones, but what we’d grown up reading and the classics we’d loved in college.
She’d gone to Princeton, she said, and asked where I’d gone. When I told her the name of my tiny college, she said that she thought she’d heard of it, adding, “I think the sister of a friend of mine went there.”
She didn’t mean to be disparaging, which only made me feel worse. Sitting across from her, I remembered all the rejections I’d gotten from colleges with median SAT
scores hundreds of points lower than Princeton’s. I remembered the thin envelopes, and how bad it felt to tell my father each night at dinner.
Mimi said, “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
~
I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I’d ever experienced—the teachers who’d looked at me as though I held no promise. The boys who didn’t like me back. Around Mimi, I became fourteen again.
I doubt my reaction was new to her, but it couldn’t have been pleasant. Even so, she tried to be kind and took me under her fluffy, white wing.
She brought in lipsticks she no longer wore, silk scarves she thought I’d like. She let me know when a good sale was going on at Bergdorf or Barneys. She told me about an apartment, which my friend Sophie wound up taking.
The first time Mimi asked me to read one of her submissions, she said, “I thought you might be interested in this.” But soon she was handing me stacks of manuscripts, every submission she didn’t want to read herself, a terrible, endless supply. She did it in the nicest possible manner, as though asking a favor I was free to refuse.
Without realizing it, I became less the associate editor I’d been than an assistant she’d decided to bring up. She was forever interrupting herself to explain some basic aspect of publishing to me. I had to stop myself from saying, Yes, I know, which would’ve come across as an unwillingness to learn. And I did seem to know less and less.
After a while, she never seemed to look at me without assessing who I was and what I was capable of becoming. I could tell she doubted my devotion, and in this she was perfectly justified.
~
That afternoon, she’d held up her bottle of perfume, and I’d brought my wrists forward to be sprayed, as usual. Then she said that an agent had called asking about Deep South, a lyrical novel he’d submitted weeks ago —Did I know anything about it?
I told her I’d look for it.
I knew where it was, of course—under my desk, where I hid all the manuscripts I hadn’t read for her. Now I put Deep South in my book bag, said good night to Blanca, and headed downtown for the reading.
The bookstore was so crowded I had to stand along the back shelves. Someone was already up at the microphone welcoming everyone. I was taking off my jacket and folding it over my book bag when I heard the welcomer say, “… his editor, Archie Knox.”
Since we’d broken up, I’d seen Archie a few times at readings and book parties. The first time, I went up to him, but he barely nodded before turning his back on me. My friend Sophie told me that he avoided me because he cared so much, but that wasn’t how it felt.
Archie was a big man, both tough and elegant, with thick white hair and a weathered face; he didn’t look older, but I was surprised by how old he did look, by how old he really was, just a few years younger than my father.
He wore an oatmealy Shetland-wool sweater I knew. He was saying that he’d read the book, Loony, straight through, forgetting dinner and postponing bed; he’d stayed up all night and eaten moo shu pork for breakfast, which he did not recommend. He paused and I saw him see me—his eyebrows pulled together—and he coughed and finished his story.
There was applause and then the author, Mickey Lamm, in a brown suit and sneakers, hugged Archie. Mickey looked exactly like his voice: bangs in his eyes and a bouncy walk; puppy-dog tails was what he was made of, though he was probably forty.
When the applause subsided, he said into the microphone, “Archie Knox, the best editor anywhere,” and he clapped, and got the crowd clapping again with him. He had a crooked smile that didn’t quite cover his teeth, and at about ninety words a minute he invited all the aspiring writers in the audience to send their manuscripts to Archie Knox at K–-, and he gave the full address, including zip. In an announcer’s voice he said, “That address again…” and repeated it.
I couldn’t see where Archie was, but I could feel him there. I closed my eyes wh
ile Mickey read and pictured Archie holding a pencil above the manuscript.
Loony was a memoir of childhood, and the chapter Mickey read was about stealing pills from his psychiatrist stepfather’s medicine cabinet. As it turned out, they were just antinauseants, though he and his friends imagined they’d discovered an excellent high—and he kept stealing those pills.
Mickey wasn’t reading as much as being the boy he’d been—daring devil, winking leprechaun, smiling sociopath—especially when he got caught stealing, and his stepfather asked, “Are you nauseated, Mickey?”
In the audience’s laughter, I heard Archie’s.
I couldn’t bear the prospect of him ignoring me. After the applause, I got my stuff together fast. On my way out, I heard someone from the audience ask the standard question What do you read for inspiration? and Mickey’s answer: “Bathroom walls.”
~
I was living in my great-aunt Rita’s old apartment in the Village. Legally, I wasn’t supposed to be there at all, so I hadn’t really moved in. There wasn’t room, anyway; she’d lived there for forty years, until her death, and no one had moved her stuff out.
My aunt, a novelist, had introduced me to Archie. She hardly liked anyone, but she liked him. Still, when I told her about Archie and me, she was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, “A young woman does a lot for an older man.”
I said, “It’s not like that.” I wanted to convince her. “We think alike.”
“Oh, my dear,” she’d said, “a man thinks with his dick.”
Her apartment seemed less defined by my presence than her absence, and the little terrace was the only place in it I liked to be.
But I couldn’t read out there. So I got myself a tall diet root beer and a coaster and took Deep South to her big formal dining-room table.
The novel started on flora (dark woods, tangled thickets, choking vines) and went to fauna—if bugs counted as fauna. Bugs, bugs, bugs—too small to see or as big as birds, swarms and loners, biting, stinging, and going up your nose. The prose was dense and poetic; it was like reading illegible handwriting and after a few pages my eyes were just going left to right, word to word, not reading at all. So, when the phone rang, I answered on ring one.
Archie said, “It’s me,” though we’d been broken up for almost two years. “What’s the matter?”
I was too surprised to answer. Then I started crying and couldn’t stop.
Archie hated to hear anyone cry—not because it hurt him or anything like that, he just hated crying. I could tell he was calling from a pay phone and knew that he was probably out to dinner with Mickey and his entourage, but he didn’t say. He was silent, waiting for me to talk.
Finally, I got out: “My dad has leukemia.”
All he said was, “Oh, honey,” but in it I heard everything I needed to. He told me to blow my nose and come over to dinner the next night.
II
Archie answered the door wearing a black cashmere sweater I’d given him as a Christmas present. “Hello, dear,” he said. He sort of patted my shoulder.
Behind him I saw peonies on the dining-room table. They were white and edged with magenta, still closed into little fists. “Oh,” I said. “My favorite.”
He said, “Yes, I know,” and his eyes said, You’re not yourself.
While he poured club soda and squeezed lime into it, he told me that he’d stood over those peonies and asked, ordered, and begged them to open, but they were as resistant as I’d been at the beginning.
“Maybe they’re seeing someone else,” I said.
For dinner, we were having soft-shell crabs, another favorite of mine. While he sauteéd them, I told him that my father didn’t have the leukemia you usually heard about; it wasn’t the kind that killed people right away.
“Good,” Archie said.
I said, “But he’s already had it for nine years.”
Archie was setting our plates down on the dining-room table, and he stopped and turned around. “Nine years?”
I nodded.
We sat. I repeated what my father had said about not wanting the illness to interfere with my life, but I was afraid Archie would suspect what I did, so I said it out loud: “I think maybe he didn’t think I could handle it or help him.”
“No,” Archie said, “he didn’t want to put you through it.” My father had been strong and noble, Archie said, which was how I was trying to see it, too.
I reminded Archie that I’d barely passed non-college-bound biology, but I understood that the leukemia and chemotherapy had weakened my father’s immune system, and he’d become susceptible to infections, like the shingles and pneumonia he’d already had. I told him that my dad’s doctor—Dr. Wischniak—had come over to answer our questions—my brother’s and mine—privately. I’d asked only one, How much time does he have? Dr. Wischniak said he couldn’t answer that.
“No idea?” Archie said.
I shook my head.
We took our coffee into the living room. He stood at the stereo and asked if I had any requests.
” Something Blue-ish,” I said.
While he flipped through his records, he told me about the time he’d asked his daughter for requests; she was about three and cranky after a nap, going down the stairs one at a time on her butt. He imitated her saying, “No music, Daddy.”
“I told her we had to listen to something,” he said. “And she languorously put her hair on top of her head and like a world-weary nightclub singer said, ‘Coltrane then.’”
He only saw Elizabeth once or twice a year—I’d never met her. I asked how she was, and he said she was beautiful and smart and impressive, finishing her junior year at Stanford. She’d spent the year on a kibbutz; he might meet her in Greece over the summer.
I said that I’d been hoping to go to Greece that summer myself, but I wasn’t sure now.
He sat beside me on the sofa, and patted my hand.
When we talked about Mickey’s reading, I admitted that I hadn’t read Loony yet, and Archie promised to get a copy to me. I could see how proud he was of the book, and I was wondering if I’d ever felt that way or would, when he asked what I’d acquired recently.
“Malaise,” I said. I wasn’t ready to pinpoint how nowhere my career was. “I have a new boss,” I said.
“Who’s that?”
I said, “Mimi Howlett.”
He said, “I knew Mimi when she was an editorial assistant,” and right away I thought, He slept with her.
He asked me what the last book I loved was. I was trying to remember the title of any book I’d read recently, when he added, as though it was just another bit of conversation, “Did you read my book?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did you like it?”
“A lot,” I said.
He asked if I minded that he’d written a novel about us, and I said, “I minded the way you submitted it to my publisher,” which was on the condition that I’d be Archie’s editor, and I’d refused.
“It was a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I said.
He said, “I was a little bit desperate.”
“Can you be ‘a little bit desperate’?” I asked. “Isn’t that like being ‘a trifle horrified’? Or ‘mildly ecstatic’?”
“Leave a man his dignity,” he said.
I said, “The amazing thing was that you pulled off a happy ending.”
He said, “We deserved it.”
“How’re you doing on the drinking?” I asked.
He said, “Great,” and told me that he’d started taking a drug called Antabuse, which would make him violently ill if he drank. Plus, he’d been to AA. He showed me a white poker chip they’d given him to mark his sobriety. He said he didn’t go to the meetings, but he carried the chip around in his pocket all day.
I told him I was happy for him. Then I said, “What do you think they give away at Gamblers Anonymous?”
When he hugged me good
night, it was just arms and squeezing, but now the familiar lack of comfort comforted me. I’d once told him that his hugging reminded me of the surrogate wire mothers in the rhesus-monkey experiment; it was more like the idea of a hug than the real thing.
“Archie,” I said, “your hugging has not improved.”
He said, “Lack of practice.”
~
He called the next day and asked if I wanted to have dinner.
I confessed that I was criminally behind in my submissions and planned to read my head off.
“Bring them here,” he said. “And I’ll behead myself, too.”
I called home before leaving the office. It was a relief not to pretend to be busy. “You sound good,” my father said, and I could hear how pleased he was.
~
I sat in Archie’s big leather armchair. He stretched out on the sofa. When I started to say something, he said, “No talking in the library,” and reminded me that I was there to work.
After a while, he said that he was ordering Chinese, which he called Chinois, and what did I want?
I said a librarian’s “Sh.”
He called and ordered—he knew what I liked, anyway—and when our dinner arrived and we set the dining-room table, we both made a joke of not talking and became our own little silent movie. We exaggerated our gestures and expressions; he held up the chopsticks in bafflement— What can these be?—and mimed conducting an orchestra.
Over dinner, he asked how I’d gotten so far behind on submissions.
I hadn’t wondered how—it had just seemed to happen—but now I tried to think. I told him that I wasn’t liking anything I read, which made me think it was me and not the manuscripts. “So I reread everything,” I said. “And I can’t reject anything.” It was the truth, and a relief to know it.
“Did this start after you found out about your dad?” he asked.
I shrugged; it seemed wrong to blame it on that, especially since my father had never used his illness as an excuse.
He said, “It’s perfectly natural to doubt your judgment about doubting your judgment.”
