The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  Seeing it in print made it feel oddly real, as if the conversation with Will had only been a dream, something that couldn’t have possibly happened until I read someone else’s third-person account of the events.

  After I read it, I waited for the phone to ring, for people to call and console me, but only Kelly did. “What are you going to do now?” she asked, and being completely unable to answer her, I lied and said I was in the middle of baking a pie and had to call her back, though I knew I wouldn’t do it right away.

  What I already knew for sure was this: It only takes a moment for your life to change forever. This was something I’d been keenly aware of since the age of thirteen.

  All it took was one little thing, one rogue cancer cell that breaks into a lymph node, something microscopic, invisible at first. Until it multiplies, grows, a tumor on your liver and then one on your lungs, until it has gone from a stage one disaster to a stage four catastrophe—a stage from which there is no going back.

  So in the quiet of my kitchen, staring at the article that shattered everything I’d thought to be true about Will, I sat there and waited calmly for the rest of my world to explode.

  It was Lisa who knocked on my door, the next morning.

  When I opened the door, I saw her standing there on the porch, with what looked like a smooshed pineapple upside-down cake in an aluminum pie tin. Four years later, and Lisa had not been able to up the presentation one bit.

  “For you.” She handed me the cake.

  “You want to come in and have some coffee and a slice?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I shouldn’t. I’m supposed to be making the boys’ Halloween costumes today. And that piece of crap sewing machine is not cooperating.” I was sure it was not a piece of crap sewing machine at all, but a top of the line one that Lisa didn’t really know how to use.

  “I’m impressed,” I said, and I really was. “You’re making their costumes.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah well. Chance and Chester wanted to be Peanut Butter and Jelly, and there’s no store in the freakin’ world that sells that. Believe me, I looked.”

  I nodded, and I waited for her to say it. Whatever it was she’d come here to say. She didn’t normally just drop cakes by my house.

  “Look,” she finally said. “Oh shit. I feel like such an asshole.”

  “Just say it,” I said, dreading whatever it was all the same.

  “Bethany’s going to run the auction this year.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. And though I probably should’ve been expecting it, I still wanted to yell or scream or throw the cake in her face, but my body, my head felt numb and incredibly listless, so I just stood still.

  “And. The ladies don’t think you should … Well, they don’t want you to be in the lunch club anymore. And please, please, please don’t hate me. I’m just the messenger.”

  I wondered if Lisa had argued, if she’d stood up for me, and though I wanted to believe she had, I thought she probably hadn’t. Lisa and I were friends, but deep down I knew our friendship was secondary to her role in Deerfield. After all, she’d had that first, before she’d even known me.

  “You could leave him, you know. No one would blame you if you did.”

  I shook my head. Despite the way the threads of our marriage had come apart lately, I could not imagine walking away, walking out the door for an auction, a lunch club. Her suggestion made me angrier than when Will had suggested it yesterday, because with Will, I’d known deep down that he hadn’t really meant it, that he hadn’t really wanted me to leave. But with her, it seemed like she genuinely thought I should or I might. I glared at her. “He’s innocent, Lisa.”

  She cocked her head to the side, and she put on her serious prosecutor face. “It was just easier to believe before he resigned. And got disbarred,” she said. “I mean, that’s some serious shit, that permanent disbarment.”

  “Thanks for the cake.” I held it up and pasted on a fake smile, an I-don’t-want-to-discuss-this-with-you-you-crappy-little-friend smile. Then I closed the door, before she could say another word.

  “Who was at the door?” Will asked. He emerged from his study, clad in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, his face stubbly from a week without shaving, his hair rumpled and uncombed.

  “No one,” I said, walking toward the trash can and dumping the cake in, tin and all. “Maybe we should move,” I said. “Start over somewhere else, where no one’s ever heard of us.”

  “I’m not going to hide,” he said, as if it would be the act of hiding that would actually make him look guilty. “Besides,” he said, “in this market, we’d never sell the house.”

  I turned to face him, looked him solidly in the eye, and said, “What now then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and then he turned and went back in his study without saying another word.

  That night, as I got ready for bed, my hands felt shaky, my heart felt like it was pounding too fast, out of control, and my head was throbbing worse than it ever had. I took my herbs with a full glass of water, and then I brushed my teeth and got into bed and waited. Waited to feel calm.

  Will always knew what to do, always had a plan. The fact that now he didn’t almost scared me more than anything else that had happened in the past week.

  But after a few minutes, I did feel more relaxed. My body felt limp and warm and soft. My headache dulled to a mild twinge just above my eyebrows. Ethel knows her stuff, I thought, feeling a true sense of tranquillity from the calming herb for the first time.

  Just on the brink of sleep, I thought about Lisa’s messed-up pineapple cake rotting in my trash can. I wondered if Will would remember to take out the trash, or if I would go down, find it there in the morning, and be forced to rehash my horrible moments on the porch.

  I was standing in Lisa’s kitchen. I recognized it from having had Ladies Lunch Club here—the pale green color, the thick maple cabinets that nearly reached the ceiling, the custom slate tile backsplash that matched the slate tile floor. I was walking around, from refrigerator to counter and back again, taking out ingredients, squinting to read the recipe without my glasses. Glasses? I didn’t wear reading glasses.

  But yes, I did. I picked them up. Lisa’s reading glasses—red-rimmed and oval, on a diamond chain that Barry had bought for Mother’s Day. I put them on, and I could see.

  I read the recipe for the cake. It was my mother-in-law’s recipe. I thought, That bitch is freakin’ Betty Crocker, and every time she looks at my cakes she grimaces. So my cakes look like shit? Big freakin’ deal. They still taste good.

  I measured out the ingredients, just so, dumped them in a bowl, melted butter at the bottom of the glass pan, added brown sugar, pineapple, cake batter, and then voilà, put it in the oven for thirty minutes. A cake for Jen, I thought. And now I could be freakin’ Marie Antoinette. Let her eat cake.

  I went to the bathroom, and then I stared at myself in the mirror, tried hard to make myself smile. Even smiling, I looked pale, listless, ghostlike.

  The phone rang. I walked slowly to get it. Something told me it could be Chance and Chester’s school. Maybe they were hurt. Or sick. But the fog in my brain made it hard to worry, to think or feel. Everything was dulled and blurry. It felt hard to move, as if the air were thicker than water. And I was tired. So, so tired.

  I picked up the phone, on the fifth ring.

  The lady on the other end informed me that Chester had forgotten his lunch.

  Of course I’ll bring it down, I said, with the fake joy of someone who loved this fucked-up life, the life of someone who baked and sewed and cleaned and took care of everyone. My voice sounded ethereal, estranged, as if it was not coming from me at all but from somewhere just a little distance away, like the radio on the kitchen counter.

  I lay down on the couch and thought about getting Chester’s lunch, but I knew I had to wait for the cake anyway, and I was tired, so I threw a blanket over myself and closed my eyes.

  Eventually I
heard the buzzer for the cake, from far, far away, as if it was cutting through something like ice, to make its way toward me.

  I woke up sweating, tangled up in the sheets, breathing shallow, rapid breaths. “Jen, what is it?” Will whispered. He sounded absolutely awake, and I wondered if he hadn’t even fallen asleep yet, though it seemed to be almost dawn.

  “Lisa’s kitchen,” I said.

  “You were dreaming.”

  “But it felt so real.” I thought about the feeling of fog, the deep and overwhelming sensation of trying to rise above a sea that was slowly pulling me under, and I could still feel it, still feel her.

  “You should write it down,” Will said. “Isn’t that what writers do with dreams? Keep a dream journal or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But after I watched him roll over and close his eyes, I got out of bed, went into the computer room, and rifled through the drawers until I found an old reporter’s notebook.

  Six

  My mother had a soft voice, so that even when she was yelling it sounded like she was saying something sweet. After she died, I would dream about her, hear her voice talking to me in my sleep, and it always was incredibly soothing, until I woke up. I guess that’s the way it is with dreams, they always seem much more surreal when you think about them after the fact than they do in the moment.

  So maybe that’s why I felt so unsettled, sitting there the next morning, reading over the dream of Lisa that I’d transcribed last night into my reporter’s notebook. Or maybe it was because it was a Wednesday, and I was supposed to play tennis at the club, but I also knew that I wouldn’t be welcome there anymore, that I was not expected to show up.

  Will had taken to the couch, in his sweatpants and worn gray sweatshirt. He was flipping between ESPN and FOX Sports as I closed the reporter’s notebook and checked the fridge. The only thing I had for dinner was a chicken, which had expired yesterday. It was unlike me to let things spoil in the refrigerator. I was usually on top of these things, but last night Will had been in his study and I’d made only a can of soup for myself.

  I took the chicken out of the fridge and threw it in the trash can, right on top of Lisa’s rotting cake. “Will, you didn’t take the trash out last night.”

  He didn’t answer so I slammed things around, making way more noise than necessary as I took the bag out and took it to the garage. “I’m going to the market,” I announced, when I got back. No answer. “Will,” I said louder.

  He paused the TV. “What?”

  “I’m going to the market. Do you want anything?”

  He shook his head and put the TV back on.

  I drove a little too fast to Whole Foods, accidentally ran a red light, and nearly swiped an old lady pulling into the parking lot. Still, she was in the middle of the lane, so I honked at her, only to see her give me the finger. I caught a glimpse of her, and even though I knew it wasn’t, she looked oddly like my father’s girlfriend, Sharon.

  Maybe it was the gesture, something Sharon might do. But no, Sharon was much more backhanded than that, and I felt thankful that Deerfield news did not readily wing its way down to Boca. The last thing I needed was Sharon on my case about it.

  As soon as I walked through the automatic double doors, I saw Amber and Bethany in their tennis whites, standing at the line by the coffee kiosk. I willed them not to look my way, not to see me here, unshowered, with my hair in a messy ponytail,wearing only gray yoga pants and a black hooded sweatshirt. I usually didn’t leave the house this way, but I’d been so annoyed with Will that I’d wanted to make a statement, wanted to storm out in a huff so he would notice. Though I doubted he had.

  And then, just as I’d almost gotten safely by them, Amber looked right at me, then looked away. She elbowed Bethany, who looked up, offered a half smile that looked more like a grimace (or maybe it was just too much Botox?), and then pretended to be incredibly interested in her soy latte.

  I didn’t want to make a scene, and I didn’t want to run into anyone else either, so I turned and quickly walked out. Then I got in the car and drove to the Acme in Oak Glen, by Kelly’s house, where I knew I wouldn’t be able to find the organic foods I usually coveted, but where I also knew not a single person there would recognize me.

  And so the days went.

  Will on the couch during the day, in his study at night, not even coming out to eat, or at least not when I was home or awake, while I invented reasons to leave the house. Acme every morning, and then afterward, sometimes, a drive. Sometimes I drove by Kelly’s house and thought about stopping in. She’d been calling me every day, just to see how things were going, but I’d been lying, telling her everything was fine, fine, fine. “A job does not define a person,” I’d told her, trying my best to sound like I believed it.

  “I know that, Jen,” she’d said right back. “But still—”

  Her still hung thick in the air between us, and I let it sit there, not bothering to explain more.

  But here, a week and a half later, Will’s stubble had grown so thick that it was starting to look like something resembling a beard, and I couldn’t be sure when he’d last taken a shower, much less shaved.

  And then, as I left to go to Acme, I drove past the blue Daniels and Sons truck, waiting to turn into our driveway. I grimaced at the sight of it.

  In the time between my mother’s cancer “scare” and her stage four diagnosis four years later, my father quit his job as an accountant and bought a small landscaping company that he’d renamed Daniels and Sons. Though it was clear he was never going to have any sons, he thought it added an air of longevity to the title.

  I’m not sure my father knew anything about landscaping before he bought the company, but he did know something about business, so during the worst of my mother’s illness and then after her death, he threw himself into his work, growing the business from five employees to fifty. Daniels and Sons was a big name in Deerfield County now—I drove by those little blue trucks all the time, and they always made me feel unsettled. Made me remember the way my father had ignored us, the hours I was home alone after school and at night while my father worked and Kelly was out with Dave and then later off at college.

  When my father retired six years ago, he gave the business to Dave. Just outright gave it to him, which Will told me was actually illegal for tax purposes. When I mentioned this to Kelly, she said, “So what the hell? Is he going to call the IRS or something?”

  “No,” I said. “I just thought you should know.”

  But my dad had wanted out, and Dave—the guy my dad said was the closest thing to a real son anyway, blatantly ignoring the fact that Will and I had just gotten engaged—wanted the business to stay in the family. Not that Will would’ve wanted the business, but it still seemed like my dad should’ve given it some consideration.

  Nope. One day he was the CEO of Daniels and Sons, and the next he was packing up for Boca with Sharon Wasserstein. And Dave and Kelly were proud business owners.

  Under Dave, the business was doing well. Or so Kelly reported at regular intervals, as if I would care, as if it would mean something to me. It didn’t. After we moved to Deer-field, Will convinced me to hire them to mow our lawn, do our weeding, and plant our flowers, even though I had been strongly against it. “We can’t just go hire someone else,” Will had said. “Your sister would have a fit.”

  “We wouldn’t have to tell her,” I said, but then reluctantly agreed. Still, I made a point of not being home on Wednesday mornings when they showed up.

  But today when I saw the blue truck pull down the driveway, with the trailer attached, when I watched the two men hop out and take out the tractor and the rake, when I thought about Will inside, lying like a lump on our couch, I had an idea.

  I dialed Kelly’s number on the drive to Acme, and as soon as she picked up, I said, “Will needs a job.” If Will had known what I was asking, I knew he would’ve been mad, and not the kind of mad that I wanted him to get, but
the kind of mad where he just glared at me, and then continued to sulk on the couch.

  “Oh, Jen.” Kelly sighed.

  “It was Dad’s business,” I said. “Dad’s business,” I repeated for emphasis.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Come on, Kelly.” I didn’t want her to make me beg, to make me tell her how much Will needed it. The silence on her end was so unusual for her that it made my head hurt.

  “Fine,” she finally said. “I’ll ask Dave.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And have him pretend like it was his idea, okay?”

  “He hasn’t even said yes yet.” But we both knew he would. Dave was a good guy, and he always did whatever Kelly asked. “What about you?” she asked. “Are you going to go back to work?”

  Truthfully, I hadn’t really thought about it, hadn’t thought beyond the drive to Acme and what I might make for dinner. “I’m considering my options,” I said, as if I had them.

  After we hung up, I thought about it. What were my options? No baby. No friends. No charity auction to plan. Maybe going back to work was my only option now. I’d quit working just after we moved to Deerfield because it had seemed like too much to commute into the city every day, we hadn’t really needed the money, we thought we might have kids at some point “soon,” and I’d told Will I’d always wanted to write a novel. But all of that was only partly true, and though I knew Will knew it deep down, he never confronted me about it.

  I thought about the feelings I’d had in my dream, as Lisa, and they felt oddly familiar. There was a certain numbness to my life in Deerfield, in my relationship with Will and my friends, even before everything that had happened in the last few weeks.

  It occurred to me now how stupid I’d been to ever consider Amber and Bethany and the other ladies of the lunch club my friends—even my interactions with them had been superficial,anesthetized—conversations about recipes and cleaning and gossip about the ladies who weren’t there. And then I thought about myself, sitting there the night before Will got indicted, watching that DVD alone, and I couldn’t even remember what it was I’d been watching. The way I’d felt then, the way I was feeling now—it was the same way I’d felt as Lisa, as if I were trying to walk through water.