by Janis Thomas
No one notices me. No one seems to be affected by the presence of a lunatic, which I must be. Perhaps I’m not really here. Perhaps I am as much a fiction as Charlemagne/Charlie. The thought is both frightening and comforting.
The shop I seek is a few stores down, and the closer I get, the more my legs feel like lead.
When I gaze up at the awning, the painted letters of the sign swim in my vision, rearranging themselves into other words: Let it go. It can get worse. Go now. I squeeze my eyes shut, then open them.
PAW-TASTIC PETS, GROOMING, AND KENNEL
I approach the front window. The tips of my fingers are numb, my lungs labor to fill, my temples throb with a dull, rhythmic ache. Through the glass I detect chaotic movement—sprightly scampering, blurs of puffy fur and untamable, tangled curls, flashes of teeth and pink tongues, confetti newspaper strewn about in an effort to absorb the bodily functions of half a dozen crapping, peeing creatures.
I stop less than a foot from the window. And there he is, in the center of the frenetic activity, resting on his haunches while his compatriots scurry around him. His small body quivers with canine rage, and he glares at me with wet, chocolate-brown accusation. Charlemagne. Charlie.
My knees buckle, and I am falling. Down the rabbit hole.
“Are you okay? Oh my God!”
My surroundings slowly come back into focus. The street, the morning, the pet store.
I am not a fainter. When I was twelve years old, I was watching my neighbor trim the high branches of his tree with a chain saw while his eight-year-old son supervised from the ground. The man lost his grip on the power tool and down it went, buzzing through the boy’s forearm. I felt horror and empathy for the boy, even as the blood shot from the remaining ravaged limb. The father fainted dead out of the tree—broke his collarbone in the process. I remained clear-eyed and focused, called for an ambulance, and fashioned a tourniquet out of the long sleeves of my cotton sweatshirt.
But today I fainted over a dog.
The pet shop employee is a girl, eighteen at most, with a shock of bleached-blonde hair and two loud stripes of neon-blue eye shadow decorating her heavy lids.
“I was just changing the puppies’ water and I saw you out front looking in, and you were standing one minute, and the next minute you were on the ground.” Her accent is Pennsylvania. Her look is South Jersey. Her wide-eyed overenthusiasm is pure teenager.
I battle for my bearings and, with the girl’s help, gain my feet.
“Your stockings . . . they’re toast. Are you all right?”
I find my voice, buried under the debris of bewilderment and disorientation. “Yes. I’m all right.” I have never been so far from all right in my life, not even when my son’s diagnosis was announced. I wasn’t fine then. I was angry and confused and felt betrayed and wanted to kill myself and my husband and all of the medical staff who had taken part in his birth and were accomplices in that thing that happened to him. But even through the dread and disbelief, I knew who I was and where I was and what my life was and was going to be.
“I didn’t eat breakfast this morning,” I tell the girl, because she seems genuinely concerned and perhaps worried that her job is in jeopardy because some woman fainted in front of the pet shop on her watch.
“I forget to eat breakfast sometimes,” she tells me. “My ma always says that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, that you should never skip it, but all I need is some coffee and a few cigs—” She stops herself. “I mean, you know.”
I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
The girl looks me over and seems to be satisfied that I’m not going to collapse again. She glances into the window, then back to me. “Cute, huh? I tell you, these are the cutest, sweetest batch of pups we’ve gotten since I started working here. Mixes, all of them. Shepherd-terrier, I think. Won’t be too big, good with kids.” A sales pitch. “Look! That one likes you.”
I don’t want to look; I don’t want to turn my head. I know what’s waiting there for me. I can’t help myself.
Charlemagne stands on his hind legs, front paws against the window, staring at me through the glass.
“Isn’t he adorable?” the girl coos. “He’s my favorite. We had a family come in a couple of weeks ago. I thought they were going to take him, just fell in love. Said they were coming back, but they never did.”
I cannot swallow for the lump in my throat.
I wish they’d never gotten that godforsaken dog!
“You know, you still look kind of pale,” she tells me. But I’m barely listening. A woman has emerged from the shop next door. She is older than anyone I’ve ever known, the flesh of her face a mass of grooves and pleats and ridges, with white hair dancing around her cheeks. She is very short and very thin but not emaciated, and neither is she hunched over. She sets a placard on the sidewalk with nimble grace. This woman does not appear to have suffered at the hands of time.
Her eyes find mine and her smile is quick and full of mischief, and I almost believe she is a product of my imagination.
“That’s Dolores,” the girl says, disproving my suspicions. “She just opened shop this week.”
I nod absently and return my attention to the puppies. Charlemagne has moved away and his sudden disinterest is palliative. Air flows in and out of my lungs with much less effort than before.
“Well. I gotta get back in. You sure you’re—”
I put up my hand to stop the girl’s words. “Thank you for your help.”
She scurries back into the pet shop. My feet move of their own volition toward the shop next door. No thought, no intention, mere action. I gaze into the window and am transported to a Dickensian world. The front display boasts an antique carousel, a Madame Alexander doll, a wind-up monkey—his stuffed digits clasping time-worn cymbals—and a two-story dollhouse.
I stare transfixed at the dollhouse as unease whispers into my ear. The house is familiar. The banister, the porch, the second-story bathroom with the oversize shower stall and padded bathing bench, the twin bed in the third bedroom down the hall, its pink-flowered duvet faded and dull. The exposed beams on the ceilings and the sagging front porch. The house is set on a plank of wood, decorated with fake grass on either side of a black-painted driveway and tiny red bricks that mimic my herringbone walkway, although these are straight and level, unlike my own, because there is no tree in the middle of the yard with roots to corrupt them.
Aside from the absence of the tree, this miniature abode is too similar to my home for it to be coincidence.
Jackhammer heart. Thoughts slamming together creating a maelstrom of noise in my head. Sweat dripping down my back, under my blouse. Hands shaking. I am aware of all these things, and also cognizant of the time, slowly, swiftly passing.
Before I can check the tiny foyer tiles for cracks and the staircase railing for loose screws, the old woman’s face appears above the miniature terra-cotta roof tiles. She winks at me and my blood runs icy hot.
A horn blares behind me, jolting me. I tear my gaze from the woman, from the display, from the house that is mine and not mine, and I peer at the watch on my wrist. Eight forty-five.
I’m late for work. Again. The world has changed; reality has become a convoluted entity, the meaning of which I cannot decipher. But I’m still late for work. I hold on to that fact, that simple truth. It brings me to action, to forward motion, and I am thankful, because whatever forces are at play on this bright morning, whatever the outcome of this freakish surreal tangent, I need my job and the paycheck it provides.
FIVE
The PR firm where I work is housed on the first floor of a squat building with mirrored-glass walls and jaundiced ceilings. A takeout deli rents an alcove just off the lobby. A law firm and a family counseling practice take up space on the second floor.
When I walk through the front door, I see that Mr. Mosely is still out sick. A young man dressed in an ill-fitting suit stands behind the security counter in Mosely’s stead. I
hold up my ID card and the youngster waves at me as though he knows me. I wave back.
In my company, the employees’ day begins at nine, but Richard expects me to be at my desk by eight thirty, ready to do his bidding. I am his executive assistant. Minion, servant, slave. I’ve been here six years and should have been promoted at least twice in that time. I have not. I should have my own office and my own accounts. I do not. Richard contends, with his usual priggish buffoonery, that I can’t possibly be expected to take on more responsibility at work when I have a full platter of encumbrances at home. Richard is a wellspring of bullshit. I could do his job a thousand times better than he in a quarter of the time it takes him.
I went back to work when Joshua was nine and Kate was eleven. It was a necessity. Colin’s second book, a biography of Hemingway, was not well received, and the money we anticipated never materialized.
“Hemingway’s overdone,” Colin had said without a hint of defensiveness, without the slightest bit of regret that his failure was forcing me to completely realign my life. Colin’s life would change not one iota.
Prior to my employment at Canning and Wells, my world revolved around Josh and Kate and the care and nurture of family life. Grueling and demanding, with occasional moments of quiet joy, which were not always overshadowed by weary capitulation.
My first six months at work, I was plagued with guilt over allowing someone other than me to care for my son, to wipe his mouth and wipe his ass and bathe him and feed him and subdue him when the cramping spasms racked his body and soothe him during those times when his own profound sadness would overtake him. Those tasks were my responsibility. I still perform them, after work and through the night and in the mornings, with the help of Colin and every so often Kate. But in the beginning, I couldn’t stand not being there. I called home every half hour, whispering questions and concerns and instructions into my cell phone from the bathroom stall of the ladies’ room.
Soon, I realized that Joshua was okay without me, possibly better for my absence. Cerebral palsy doesn’t allow a person to skip puberty or adolescence, and as he matures, as his body develops, I detect a sense of embarrassment, of dread over the fact that his mother is forced to see him naked on a daily basis. I use clinical detachment when I bathe him, but a mother cannot completely ignore the scarlet splotches of shame on her son’s cheeks.
Sometime during that first year, I began to enjoy my time at work, tapping into the well of creative juices that had lain dormant for so long. My first boss, Xander Moss, was kind and without ego. He fostered collaboration and welcomed ideas from anyone, including the janitor on one standout occasion. But then, as though punishment for my sin—my sin of finding undeserved happiness and fulfillment outside my family, my marriage, my children—Xander retired and I was given Richard.
On his final day at Canning and Wells, Xander took me aside. He put his rough, wrinkled hand on my shoulder and gave me a warm, jowly smile. “I’ve put in a good word for you, Emma,” he said. “I was thinking you might take my position when I left, but Bill and Ed think you need a little bit more time. But they are aware. And so is Richard. They’ll do right by you. I promise.”
That was five years ago. Bill Canning and Edward Wells have not done right by me. They never will. I’m smart and talented and I work hard, but I’m also a woman of a certain age, not a young, leggy blonde, hungry and slavering to make her mark, ready to do whatever it takes to get ahead. I haven’t the energy or determination to climb out of the category I’ve been placed in by the powers that be. They see me as a moderately attractive middle-aged mom, working her ass off to make ends meet. That is what I am. Executive assistant. No more, no less.
Richard is seated at his monolithic desk when I arrive, his door open, his expression grim. He is looking/not looking at a report. His head jerks in my direction; the corners of his mouth turn down into a leer.
I removed my panty hose in the car in the parking lot behind the building, tearing them off my legs as though they were on fire. My naked upper thighs rub together as I make my way into his office, iPad in hand. My palms still burn from my fall.
“Emma.” He doesn’t glance at his watch. He doesn’t need to. “I assume you will be staying late this evening.”
I don’t answer. My mind is elsewhere. In a pet shop downtown.
“Sit,” he commands, and like a dog, I obey. I sit in one of the two plush chairs facing his desk, smooth my skirt over my raw knees, and cross my legs at the ankles. I glance at my bare calves and am relieved that they are smooth and hairless this morning, which is atypical since shaving is not a priority.
Colin resents my ambivalence toward self-grooming but disguises it with humor. He rubs his legs against mine under the covers of our bed and jokingly suggests we might start a fire, or asks where the extinguisher is hidden, or feigns alarm that my razor-sharp stubble will tear open his skin. Sometimes I laugh and roll over and spread my legs for him. But more often, I wrap myself in indignation that he would comment on such a trivial matter while our son lies in the next bedroom with useless limbs, unable to get comfortable ever, plagued by nightmares, both while he sleeps and while he’s awake.
Occasionally, I do neither. I jump from the bed on the heels of Colin’s joke and storm to the master bath, where I ceremoniously drag the rusted disposable Daisy over my legs, silently but unequivocally making a point. Which is what I did last night. Thank God. With any luck, my boss won’t notice my lack of hosiery.
“I need extra effort from you today,” he says. Richard Green is a man of points—pointy nose, pointy chin, narrowed eyes, and severe widow’s peak. He is fit for fifty, trim, but beneath his clothes I imagine he is a series of sharp angles.
“We have Peters coming at eleven, and I want to buff up this proposal. The language regarding cross-promotion with UltraFit is lacking. Talk to Jack and see what the two of you can do about it.”
I nod and make a note on the iPad. My digital handwriting is clumsy.
Canning and Wells doesn’t handle celebrities. We are not based in New York or Los Angeles, so we don’t attract actors or rock stars or athletes, the kind of stars who want and need face-to-face ego stroking and hand-holding. We work with small business, internet start-ups, restaurants, health clubs, privately owned resorts, a few national chains. We do the occasional nonprofit work for charities and causes, but only enough to look good to the IRS. We have sister firms in Texas and California with whom we partner for our national chains.
Richard oversees the marketing and business acquisition and retention department. We work closely with the other three: social media and web traffic, news and media coverage, and branding. Our social media department is made up of young hipsters who wear band-logo T-shirts and don’t comb their hair every day. Our news and media department is filled with middle-aged men who sport too-tight neckties and constant scowls. The branding department is a revolving door for employees—old, young, male, female, gay, straight—largely hired for their individual resemblance to a specific audience we might be targeting at the time.
“And I want to see Ralph in SM as soon as he gets in. The Twitter feed for Mmm Burger looks like a kindergartner wrote it. Check the daily. Your list is sizable today.”
Again, I nod mutely. Richard sets down his report and stares at me over his desk.
“Are you okay, Em?”
I despise it when Richard calls me Em. Em is my husband’s name for me, my mother’s name for me, not his.
“You look tired.” He gazes at my face for a few seconds, then his gaze descends to my body. His eyes narrow.
“Are you wearing hosiery today?”
“I was. I’m not now.”
“Hmm. And why is that?” He pushes his chair back and stands, then slowly moves around his desk. I smell the familiar, overpowering scent of mint as he approaches. “You know my dress policy, of course. I don’t ask a lot of my employees, do I? Panty hose are the proper accessory for ladies, yes?” He takes the seat beside me and
inspects my calves. “Most women your age can’t get away with bare legs, but you can, Em. You have wonderful legs.” The pointy tip of his tongue flicks over his bottom lip, then disappears. “Still, rules are rules. You are an executive assistant, my executive assistant, and your position at this firm involves certain . . . obligations. I expect you to remember that and behave accordingly.”
Goddamn him.
“I took a fall, Richard. The hose were ruined.” I force myself to remain composed, though his proximity makes me uncomfortable.
“That’s terrible. Awful.” He slowly reaches over and tugs at the hem of my skirt, inching it upward until my bloody knees are exposed. “I’m so sorry. Do they hurt badly?” He glances at the outer office, making sure no other employees have arrived, then gently lowers his palm onto my torn flesh. I don’t flinch because he wants me to flinch.
Charlemagne has dominated my thoughts, but the puppy’s image suddenly vanishes, replaced by the reality of my boss’s cold touch. I stare at his long fingers, swollen knuckles, the coarse dark hair sprouting up between the tumescent veins on the back of his hand.
This is not the first advance Richard has made. I am a safe and appropriate target for his wanton urges. I’m certain he would prefer to approach the twentysomethings with their high bosoms and tight skin, but Richard has his own twisted sense of propriety.
I am ashamed by all the ways I have allowed my boss to sexually harass me. The “playful” pats on the ass, the outstretched arms “accidentally” brushing against my breasts, the slow passes behind me in the break room, his front pressed against my back, his erection full and thick and unmistakable despite the layers of clothing between us. I could take my grievances to a panel of older, right-wing, cigar-smoking men, but the outcome of such a complaint would not benefit me or my job.
