The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  “What’s that you’re saying about me?” The sound of Kat’s voice from the doorway made me jump, and I turned around and smiled sheepishly.

  “She was just asking where you were.” Grant lied easily, in a way that made me distrustful of anything that would come out of his mouth.

  “Well, I’m here now.”

  “Nice to see you again, Jen.” Grant nodded at me.

  I nodded back, but I shot him a look that I hoped would make him think twice about Kat.

  Back in Kat’s office, I handed her the folder of announcements. “You didn’t have to come all the way down here for this,” she said.

  “I know.” I nodded. “I wanted to see you. I thought we could get lunch.”

  “I can’t.” She shook her head. “Fucking lunch meeting with Hank today.”

  I made a face. I remembered the lunch meetings with Hank, incessantly long and boring, where he handed out assignments and made fun of people who actually dared to—gasp—eat their lunch while he was talking. It was something that I didn’t miss, that made me happy not to be a part of this place anymore. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you have a few minutes now? To talk.”

  “Not really,” she said, gesturing for me to sit down anyway. “What’s on your mind, hon?”

  “You,” I said. “What are you doing, Kat?”

  “What?” She looked confused.

  “With Grant.”

  “What are you talking about?” Her eyes narrowed to slits. “What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I almost blurted it out. The truth. The whole truth. About the dreams, about knowing everything now, knowing too much. But there was no way she was going to believe me, and besides, it didn’t matter how I knew, only that I did. “Kat, you have Danny and the kids.” I thought about the way Ara had held on to my watch with her tiny delicate fingers, the way she’d admired my curls, the way her warm body felt snuggled into my lap, and I felt desperately sad for what might happen to her if Kat and Danny split up, if they both buried themselves in work and other people even more, and what it was like to lose one parent, and then lose another. “I’m just worried about you.”

  “Jen, look. I appreciate your concern. I really do.” She paused. “But come on, you’ve spent the last four years in some fancy-schmancy suburb with all your rich-bitch friends. Suddenly they’ve had enough of you, and you come running back here?”

  “It’s not like that,” I said, though what she said stung, maybe because it was partly true. I’d never meant to leave Kat behind when I left the city, but she became a working mom and I become a woman of Deerfield, and there was not too much to say to each other the few times a year we did talk, when our calls were filled with awkward slow silences and discussions of things we remembered from the past.

  She leaned in closer. “I know you’ve been through some shit this year. Will fucked up. Big time. And you didn’t leave him. Good for you, Saint Jen. But I’m not a fucking saint, okay?” She paused, pulled a cigarette out of her purse, and tapped it on the desk. “Just get out. Get the fuck out of my office.”

  I sat on a bench in the train station, Kat’s words echoing in my head. Saint Jen. Was that really what she thought of me, that I was a martyr for staying with Will, that there was nothing else there? My head was throbbing and I rubbed my temples, willing the pain to stop.

  A little girl, Ara’s age, ran past my feet, dropping her book on the ground. I picked it up as her mother came tumbling after her. “Here.” I handed it to the mother.

  “Thank you.” She smiled, scooped up her daughter and the book, and sat on the bench across from me. “Goodnight Moon,” the woman read the title of the book.

  I closed my eyes, and it hit me in this flash, my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, reading that book to me. I couldn’t have been more than five years old. I could hear the soft, sweet sound of my mother’s voice—a memory that flashed back for only a few seconds and then I knew it would disappear just as quickly.

  When I opened my eyes, the woman was gone, and I was sitting in the train station, all alone.

  Twenty-three

  Icame to the realization that if a moment could change your life, then another one could change it back, just as quickly, just as irreversibly. I would stop taking Ethel’s calming herbs, and the dreams would stop, the windows into other people’s lives would shut.

  But without the herbs, I found myself lying awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet hum of Will’s snore in my ear, and when I finally did fall asleep, my sleep was fitful in short and anxious bursts, so no amount of coffee or jogging could clear the fog from my head the next morning. Midweek, Lisa called and canceled our jog, saying she wasn’t feeling up to it this week, so I stopped going by myself, too. I was too tired for the exercise, and I realized I was feeling even worse off the herbs than I’d felt on them.

  I sat in front of the computer screen, vowing to go back to that novel I’d started when we’d first moved here, but after searching, I couldn’t even find where I’d saved the file. I opened up a new document, and then I stared at the blank screen for a while, but my mind was so foggy that I couldn’t think of anything to write.

  I got the Deerfield Daily and scanned the help-wanted ads, looking for something that might interest me. I did find one thing, a nonprofit agency that was looking for a part-time grant writer, but I didn’t have the energy to dust off my résumé, fix it up, and send it out. And besides, I wasn’t even sure if this was what I wanted.

  I went into my bedroom, opened my jewelry box, and took out the figurine that Will had bought me, “The Perfect Family.” I spun it around in my fingers. The perfect family, I thought. And all that can be yours. Just pop out a baby, and voilà.

  Maybe the only difference between me and everyone else I knew was that my problems with Will were seemingly obvious; my embarrassments had been splashed across the front page of the Deerfield Daily, while their pain was private, un-detectable to the naked eye. Like the couple made of glass, frozen with these slick smiles on their faces.

  If only you were real, I whispered to the woman before putting her back into my jewelry case, you’d be a mess, too.

  By the end of the week, I was so tired, so listless, that I stood in the bathroom debating what to do. Maybe I could take the herb and force myself not to dream, not to think before I went to bed. Once Kat had done an article on breathing techniques for relaxation, where you were supposed to focus on every individual part of your body, focus on making it become heavy and tired until your whole body succumbed to rest. Kat.

  I thought about the way she’d looked at me, and then, sleep or no, I considered washing the whole container of herbs down the sink. I held the bottle in my shaking hand, but my decision was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  I put the herbs back into my medicine cabinet. “Come in,” I said.

  Will opened the door and walked in. His face was drawn, tired or sad or maybe both; I couldn’t tell. “Everything okay?” he asked, and I noticed I was gripping the sides of the sink, as if I needed it to stand, to hold me up.

  “Yeah,” I lied. “How was your day?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Fine.” He paused. “I’m going to have a drink. Do you want one?”

  “No thanks,” I said. He turned to walk out, and I reached out for his hand. “Wait,” I said softly. “What are you having?”

  “Scotch.” And then I knew something was wrong. Will never drank scotch unless he was upset, unless there was something he wanted to drink to forget. I wondered if there had been another incident, another bitch slamming a door in his face. “Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked. He shrugged my hand away. “Okay,” I said. “Pour me one, too. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  He left, and I stared at my face in the mirror. I pinched my cheeks to give them some color, smoothed out the curls with my fingers. Who the hell are you? I thought, and I wondered without the dreams, without a job, without friends, without a husband
who worked incessantly, if it might finally be the time for me to figure it out.

  Tomorrow, I promised myself, and then I went downstairs to have my scotch.

  Will built a fire, and we drank our scotch on the couch. At first we sat at opposite ends, watching the nightly news, Gary Adams smiling bigger than a clown on crack. “I hate this guy,” I said to Will. “We should change the channel.” But neither one of us felt like moving to do it, so we watched him.

  “Look at him,” Will said, finishing the first scotch and pouring himself another. “He smiles and his face doesn’t even move. It’s like he’s not even human.”

  “Botox,” I said. “Lots and lots of Botox.”

  “I don’t get it,” Will said. “Why would a person willingly inject themselves with poison?”

  I shrugged, and I handed my empty glass to Will so he could pour me another. “Vanity,” I said. And then I thought about my former friends Bethany and Amber, and their perfect boobs and flat stomachs. “Fear.”

  “Fear?” He handed me back the scotch and I sipped it, ignoring the burning in my throat that ricocheted to my lungs and made it almost hard to breathe.

  “Getting old. Getting ugly. Not wanting to lose something.”

  “Hmm.” Will considered what I said. “What a strange way to try to hold on.”

  After the news was over, we watched Extra, and I drank another scotch.

  I crawled over to Will’s side of the couch and put my head in his lap. Will stroked my hair with the hand he wasn’t using to hold his glass. I closed my eyes and let the warmth of the fire, Will’s hands, radiate through my body, and I could almost forget about everything else. “Jen,” Will said, after what felt like a very long time. He started massaging my temples. “I don’t give a crap about weeds.”

  “I know,” I murmured. I kept my eyes closed, and I was beginning to feel drowsy. I knew I should say something else, something more encouraging or helpful or interesting, but I was too heavy, too exhausted to think.

  I felt Will shift me so I was leaning against him, and I felt him kissing me. I kissed him back, and I pressed my body into him. I wanted him, more than I had ever wanted anything, and I closed my eyes and felt his hand on my pants, tugging at my waistband.

  “Jen,” I heard Will whisper, from what felt like very far away. “Jen, are you awake?”

  But I was too tired to answer him, too tired to show him how much I wanted him, so I didn’t, and I leaned against him and fell into a deep and blissfully dreamless sleep.

  When I woke up, it was still dark.

  The fire had burned down to tiny glowing embers, I had a blanket draped over me, and I saw Will had moved to the love seat.

  But I heard it, a horrible wailing sound, an alarm clock, no, a siren. “What time is it?” Will moaned, and I noticed the bottle of scotch was empty, that he must’ve finished it after I fell asleep, which worried me for a minute, until I heard the wailing noise coming closer. I stood up and walked into the kitchen to check the time. “Six,” I said, and then I went to look out the front window, to determine the source of the terrible wailing.

  Will walked up behind me, and when his hand touched my shoulder, I closed my eyes, remembering how much I’d wanted him last night. “I’m sorry I fell asleep,” I whispered. I leaned against him, and he wrapped his arms around me, and kissed the top of my head lightly.

  “An ambulance,” he said, just as I, too, noticed it, pulling up next door. “My God, at Lisa and Barry’s house. I hope they’re all right.”

  Lisa.

  * * *

  Will insisted on going with me to the hospital, even though I protested, even though I reminded him he would be late for work. “It doesn’t matter,” Will said, as he rifled through the cabinet for aspirin. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up a bottle of herbs.

  “Nothing,” I lied. “Here. The aspirin’s in the drawer.”

  He offered one to me, but even though I had a splitting headache, I declined. The headache felt like penance, felt like something I deserved. Because I knew, even before I got to the hospital, what had happened, what she had done.

  No, that’s not true, I didn’t know exactly what had happened because I hadn’t dreamed it. I didn’t know if she’d slit her wrists in the bathtub, taken too many pills, or jumped out her attic window. But I knew, because I’d been her, in a dream, for a few moments. I’d felt what she was feeling, the pain, the numbness, the incessant heaviness of doom.

  Will and I found Barry in the waiting room. He sat in a chair in the corner, his head in his hands, and it looked like he’d been crying. Will put his hand on Barry’s shoulder, and Barry looked up at us. He nodded. Then he shook his head.

  “What happened?” Will asked, and it amazed me the way Will’s voice exuded nothing but kindness. Here was Barry, a man who used to be Will’s friend, who used to play golf with him. Here was a man who’d not even extended to Will so much as a phone call, a kind wave when he’d been indicted, and here Will was in return. I put my hand on Will’s arm, to steady him, to steady myself.

  “It’s Lisa,” Barry finally choked out. “She’s—”

  “Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know,” Barry said. “She wouldn’t wake up. She just wouldn’t wake up.”

  Will sat down next to him, and I sat on the other side. On the TV hanging from the ceiling, Regis and Kelly came on, bantering back and forth about something I was only half listening to. I watched Kelly Ripa shake her hair off her shoulders, as she said something about her husband and one of her kids, and I thought, Now there’s a woman who really has it all together. Or did she? I wondered if, underneath it all, if there was something. Another man she wanted to kiss, a pregnancy she thought she hadn’t wanted, a mother-in-law who came between her and her husband. Did we all have it, that something that made us broken beneath the surface?

  “Mr. Rosenberg.” The sound of the doctor’s voice startled me, and I looked up. The doctor was a slight woman, very petite, almost childlike, and she did not look like someone who could withstand the rigors of medical training. She motioned for him to follow her to a more private spot in the room. “It’s okay.” Barry nodded at her, and then looked at me and Will as if he was afraid for us to leave him alone.

  She cleared her throat. “Your wife is awake now.”

  “Oh thank God,” Barry said.

  “We pumped her stomach.” She paused. “Seems she took an entire bottle of Valium. But luckily you got her here in time.”

  Barry shook his head, not able to process what I already knew. Will shot me a quizzical look. I turned away. “Why would she do that?” Barry said, and I marveled over how you could walk through life married to someone and not even know them, not even understand them in the slightest. Like Will and I had done. A few months ago, neither one of us had noticed that the other one was drowning.

  The doctor said something about a psych evaluation and about holding her in the hospital for observation. “Can I see her?” Barry asked.

  The doctor nodded, then looked at me. “Are you Jen?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s been asking for you.” She turned to Barry. “Maybe it’s better if you let Jen go in first.”

  I looked at Barry, whose eyes looked a little more downcast than they had a few moments ago. “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll wait.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “You heard what the doctor said.” He paused. “She’s asking for you.”

  I followed the doctor down the long white corridor to Lisa’s room. She didn’t say a word to me, didn’t tell me what to say or not to say to Lisa. When we reached the room and I thanked her, she only nodded.

  I stood at the doorway for a moment, staring at her. In her hospital bed, Lisa looked older and limp like a rag doll. She was hooked up to an IV and a heart monitor, equipment that had a familiar look in a hospital that had a familiar smell to the one my mother had been in after her mastectomy. Standing in the hallway, I felt t
welve years old again, and terrified, the sharp scent of the Lysol bringing tears to my eyes and making me feel a little dizzy.

  Lisa turned to look in my direction, so I walked into the room. “Hi,” I said, trying to make my voice sound steady and even, though inside, I felt it quaking.

  “Hi.” Her voice sounded scratchy, and she grimaced when she spoke.

  I sat down in the chair next to the bed, and she reached her hand out for me, so I held on to it. “Does Barry hate me?” she said.

  “No.” I shook my head. “No. I think you scared him.” I paused. “And you scared me, too.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes and ran slowly down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought, I thought …” She paused for a minute, an attempt to compose herself. “Yesterday was my due date.”

  “Oh, Lisa, I’m so sorry,” I said. “But you have to know it wasn’t your fault.”

  She shook her head. “That’s what the doctor said, but she didn’t know what I was thinking, that I wasn’t trying.” She paused. “A baby girl,” she said. “I could’ve had a baby girl.”

  I felt her pain, in my heart, in my gut, a cold, sharp sensation, an icy prong of fear that came in realizing that what you wanted and what you got were sometimes two separate things. “You could try again,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t even think Barry would want another baby. And I’m supposed to go back to work next year …” She let her voice trail off. “Everything is just so hard now.”

  We sat there not saying anything for a few minutes, letting her words hang in the air, until finally I said, “Did I ever tell you about my mom?” I knew I hadn’t. I never talked about my mother, not with anyone, barely even with Kelly.

  “No.”

  “She died when I was thirteen. Breast cancer.”

  “Oh.” Lisa wiped her cheeks with her free hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  I nodded. “Afterward, my father worked all the time. My sister went to college. I basically spent high school cooking my own Ramen noodles and eating them by myself in front of the TV.”