Going in Circles

by Pamela Ribon

  I was angry. I was sad. I was cracked. And for some reason I knew without a doubt that I needed exactly what I had just gone through hating: isolation.

  4.

  Next item on today’s plan: get to work.

  My job is the most monotonous, unenviable, lame, boring job in the entire world.

  I love it.

  I love it so much, I wish I could kiss it. I would take it out at night and get it really drunk and whisper in its ear, “You stupid, stupid waste of my life. Oh, how I need you. Never leave me, you soul-sucking zombie factory.”

  I’m a technical writer for a software company. This means I help create entries for the Knowledge Base, our web-based tech support. When I was happier, in the year or so I worked here back when my life wasn’t broken, this place was the source of all my misery. I would drive to this fist-size building with my stomach clenched in knots, unsure how I was going to make it through the next eight to ten hours. I knew if I remembered I was a real person, one with flesh and blood and a beating heart, sitting in this puke-green shoebox of an office with no other function than to write words that described how computers worked, I might have driven straight into a tree.

  These days, the fact that my job doesn’t really need me to be an active participant in it—and actually goes better when I have exactly zero emotions or original thoughts—helps me to live the majority of my life in an intentional coma, an encouraged numbness that requires absolutely nothing from me other than to keep my fingers moving.

  Another thing I love about my work is that there’s one right way to do it. There’s no wondering, no questions to ponder. My job is to provide answers in a clear and precise manner. When I’m really in the zone with my writing it doesn’t even feel like it’s me typing the words. I become a machine, a word producer. A human manual. I am a collection of answers.

  I do have one emotion when it comes to work: sympathy for my office mate, Jonathan. Being in the unlucky position of having his desk exactly three feet behind mine, he’s had to deal with my personal issues for a long time. Proximity has forced him to overhear every phone call, every deep sigh, every tear that has plopped onto my desk. He knew when I had spent the entire day crafting an email to Matthew instead of working on copy. He heard me break down when I called my realtor to ask how exactly I would go about getting my name off my own deed. He pretended not to notice the time I broke down sobbing at my desk after someone wandered past our office whistling INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart.”

  The first time I apologized for my behavior was the only time he allowed it. “I’ve been through this before, Charlotte,” he said. He’s on his second marriage—one that he says “looks to be sticking.” I haven’t met her, but from the picture on Jonathan’s desk, she seems fake. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean she looks like Jonathan designed her. He ordered up the pretty, skinny, blonde with the white teeth, pill-free sweaters, and arms-that-never-flap. Even her name is too much. Cassandra. Who’s named that, honestly? Not even Cassie or Cass. She’s so pretty that people still call her by her full name. Cassandra. People call me Char. Like someone who’s been scorched.

  Actually, people around here have apparently taken to calling me The Ghost. That’s what Jonathan told me the other day. Frankly, I think that’s a better name for the tiny girl down the hall with the sullen face who always dresses like she’s just come back from a funeral. Francesca is her name. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what you’d call the tiny Goth girl down the hall with the sullen face and funereal clothes. She gets to keep her name, too. The gorgeous and the pseudo-tragic, they get to own their elaborate, fancy full names. Not me. Jonathan said even sad-faced Francesca calls me The Ghost. That can’t be good. When you’re bumming out people who spend all day intentionally trying to look sad, you must look pretty damn pathetic.

  • • •

  As soon as I remember that my mother called this morning, I try to forget it. For a fraction of a second it starts to work. I almost rewrite the morning away, changing it into a completely different experience. This morning I got up, jumped out of bed, went to the gym . . . and then on my way to work I saved a child from being hit by a car. Something fantastically honorable and noble like that, something that would either excuse or erase the fact that the truth is I’m the kind of girl who lets her mother’s phone call go to voice mail and then completely forgets about it for the next three or four hours.

  I can’t rewrite the truth away. I have to check my voice mail.

  I do it with my eyes closed, as this somehow shelters me from harm. Because it’s not just a phone message from my mother. It is a reminder that no matter how much of a victim I might try to play sometimes, there’s no escaping the fact that I am a terrible person.

  Charlotte Goodman is a terrible person. Only a terrible person would leave her husband and not tell her mother about it. That’s right. Charlotte Goodman’s own mother doesn’t know that her daughter is probably about to get a divorce. Worse than that, Charlotte is the kind of rotten daughter who will lie to her mother, to her face, and act like she still lives in the house where she hasn’t been in months.

  In her defense, the only person possibly more terrible than Charlotte Goodman is Elaine Goodman, the woman who raised her. This is because Elaine has two emotional settings: none and all.

  When Charlotte didn’t make the high school cheerleading team, Elaine got rid of Charlotte’s beloved dog, Shoelace, blaming the pet as a distraction from her daughter’s future.

  For most mothers, a daughter’s engagement is cause for celebration. Not so with Elaine Goodman. When her daughter got engaged, Elaine’s first reaction was to say, “Oh, thank God. I truly feared the only time you’d ever say ‘I do’ was when someone asked, ‘Do you want more potato chips?’ ”

  Charlotte was only five when her mother told her she’d grow up to be an awkward-looking woman, as years ago her father got her then-pregnant mother drunk and took her on a roller coaster, hoping to get rid of the baby.

  One of those stories isn’t true, but I don’t want to say which one my narrator made up. The answer won’t be flattering, and besides, this way I don’t have to dwell on the two terrible stories that are completely true. Otherwise my daily plan will have to include “Find a Way To Sue Your Mother for Emotional Trauma.”

  It isn’t that we don’t love each other, my mother and I. It’s more like we try to keep our love for each other a secret. We never hug. We don’t say “I love you.” We do tell each other when we’re disappointed in each other, because that’s important. Criticism makes you a better person for other people. Plus, if you find a couple of hours when you have less disappointment in each other than usual, you can note the banner day in your relationship.

  This is why I haven’t told my mother about my marriage. I don’t think I’m prepared to handle the criticism. I figure as long as I keep Mom in the Emotional Zero zone, everything should be okay. We will both pretend that neither of us has any real thoughts or feelings about anything. Like we always do. We will discuss the weather, other people’s problems, anything interesting we got in the mail, and—if things get really crazy—one will tell the other about a newfound breakfast place where you can get a phenomenal glass of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice.

  My parents have been married for thirty-five years. This is how they handle problems or conflict: they don’t. There are no problems. Problems don’t exist. There are situations. There are unfortunate moments. There are mistakes. There are bad patches. They are only referenced as past events, and even then they are glossed over to the point where I cannot tell you a single thing that my parents have fought over. I can barely remember times when it seemed they weren’t getting along. They never looked like they were in love, really. I can count on one hand the number of times I saw them kiss, and each time it was an accident when they thought they were completely alone. Their love was intentionally kept away from my view. Like it was none of my business. They were Mom and Dad—two people in
charge of keeping me adhering to the rules of growing up. Basically, I have no idea what it looks like to be a married couple. But if someone needs me to take a kid’s bike away for the weekend because she jumped on the bed, then I know exactly what to do.

  If I tell my mother that I couldn’t handle half a year of marriage, there’s no telling what might happen. She could set my hair on fire. This is not a random hypothetical. This is something she actually did to her cousin when they were six and fighting over a spoon of raw cookie dough.

  Mom’s voice mail:

  “Charlotte. I asked your father and he said he hasn’t heard from you in a while. You shouldn’t do things like that. He’s old and will be dead before you know it and then you can spend all the time you want not talking to him.

  “I got these shorts the other day but I don’t like how they make my knees look, so let me know if you’d want them and I won’t return them. You’ve got thicker legs, so your knees might not look as funny in them.

  “Oh, and you’ll have to talk to your father again because now he’s insisting on having some kind of production for my birthday next Friday. Anyway, it’s the four of us. Dinner. Tell Matthew that work’s no excuse this time, and he can’t skip out again. Bring a couple bottles of that wine you brought that one Christmas, the one your father liked but you drank most of.

  “Okay, that’s all. I’m hanging up now.”

  Charlotte Goodman takes a walk around her office building and wonders if anybody would really mind if she just ran away and disappeared. Maybe she’ll go to Iceland. Make a brand-new start in Reykjavik. She’ll be a modern-day Björk, a pioneer out there in the cold, reinventing herself. She’ll take an interest in modern design, or sewing parkas, or whatever it is that Björk does.

  To be honest, I’d rather go to Italy than Iceland. But I can’t go to Italy, because that’s the place where Matthew and I were supposed to go. Are supposed to go. I don’t even know the tenses anymore. I’m not sure. I just know it was the honeymoon we were saving up for, one that we haven’t taken and now most likely won’t.

  I couldn’t have been happier with the way we had our wedding—just friends and family, hosted by our best-couple friends, Pete and Petra, in their backyard. We had already thrown all of our money into buying a house, a lovely little one-bedroom we nicknamed The Fort. It felt like our secret hideout. We treated it like one, too; the day after our wedding we made tater tots and hot dogs and sat on the floor of our kitchen to eat them, like we were having our first meeting in our clubhouse.

  “For richer or poorer,” Matthew had said, raising a tater tot as a toast.

  “Let this be the poorer,” I added, knocking a ketchup-smeared potato bud against his.

  We spent that first weekend as a married couple in bed, making love and eating hundreds of tater tots.

  In this memory, Matthew looks larger than life in my head. All the best parts of him are illuminated, highlighted. I see his strong hands, the small upturn of his nose, his glasses. That’s how I know it’s not a true composite; Matthew had gotten Lasik surgery before the wedding. But the Matthew who wore glasses is the man I fell in love with, and when I see him in my most cherished memories, I see him in his specs, pushed up too high on the bridge of his nose, always smudged on the lower right corner from his constant straightening. Black square frames that gave him a look of superiority that he often used to his benefit.

  I didn’t know how to tell him that after the surgery, I missed his glasses. He was so excited to be able to see everything, that there was one less thing for him to fiddle with, to worry about. He could wake up in the morning and jump right out of bed, if he wanted to. I loved how excited he could get about things. It didn’t happen often, but when it did he had this little-kid face, full of wonder, so happy that something he had planned had worked out even better than he had assumed it would. That was when he was at his happiest—when he was absolutely as correct about something as possible. It’s how he used to feel about us.

  I still think we weren’t a mistake, being together. At least not at first. When we first fell in love I kept feeling like I’d found something I’d been looking for. We had so much in common. Lots of things in common. We liked the same books, movies, music. We thought of visiting the same places. That’s how Italy came to represent the place we’d go once we got hitched. Our dreams meshed into one, our goals singular. It was no longer, “I’ve always wanted to go to Italy.” It would become, “We went to Italy together.”

  I can’t go to Italy now, no matter how much I want to disappear. Like the books and photographs and that one blue hoodie we traded back and forth, ideas and places and emotions are also being divvied up right now. Regardless, I can’t afford to go, as I spent half of my savings moving into my own place, and the other half I’m going to need while I find out what’s going to happen to me.

  Matthew would be rolling his eyes right now if he could hear what I am thinking.

  One night, right before we’d gotten engaged, we were in bed talking about what the next year might be like. There was a possibility we’d do some traveling, or we’d spend most of our money attending his cousin’s destination wedding. That was when my work was first starting to take off. Not my job, which was a way to pay the bills, but a possible career in something I’d never thought I could make a living doing. An actual future for what it was I’d rather do.

  I make miniatures. Well, I used to, anyway. It started when I was little, with my dollhouse. We couldn’t afford to buy a lot of doll furniture to begin with, but that didn’t bother me. What I wanted was for my doll to have the same things in her house that I had in mine. I spent hours at the kitchen table with colored pencils, construction paper and glue, making sticky, lopsided couches and toaster ovens. My early origamilike representations were sufficient enough to get the point across, but would be destroyed by the end of one afternoon of Today Barbie Has Hot Sex with the Cable Guy.

  I stole the little plastic inserts from pizza boxes used to keep the cardboard from meshing with the cheese. For me, they were perfect bases for coffee tables. Where some kids saw broken sunglasses, I saw the possibility of a full-length mirror, or a vanity. A juice-box straw was a fantastic find; it could be fashioned into a lamp, a shower curtain rod, or—for the more adventurous doll—a poolside stripper pole.

  My mother, of all people, was the one who encouraged me to keep making miniatures. I think it was mainly because it kept me quiet and out of the way for hours on end. Still, she was the one who took me to the crafts store on weekends. I loved that grown-up feeling, mom and daughter entering the store together with projects in mind. I was so content being just like all the other women wandering the aisles of crafts supplies, browsing through seemingly infinite possibilities, each lost in her own artistic world. I wasn’t tagging along like those other little kids, those babies, bored and whiny, who could be mollified with a coloring book and a package of puffy stickers. I had a real reason to be there, to touch the rows of unfinished wood, to sift through yarn balls and doll parts. I was a creator.

  Once back at home, I’d work until my little fingers felt spiked with splinters from breaking hundreds of Popsicle sticks into what I thought of as wood scraps. I ruined the carpeting in my bedroom with Krazy Glue mishaps.

  It was all worth it for my mom’s thirty-fifth birthday present. I made her a shoe-box version of our dining room, with her table and her centerpiece and all the chairs, including the one with a broken leg spoke. The pink wallpaper was perfect, complete with the swirly white flowers just above the chair guard. The chandelier was fashioned out of a paper clip and cotton swabs. No dolls, no representations of people. Just the room, empty and silent, clean like company was coming, waiting to be useful. The way my mother liked to keep it.

  I remember her reaction as she perched the old sneaker box on her lap and peered inside. She looked afraid to move an inch, like she might jostle something out of place. She held my hand so tightly I almost allowed myself to tell her she wa
s hurting me. But then I saw the look on her face, and even though I was young, I knew that look wasn’t because she was proud of me, but because I had surprised her. I had done something she hadn’t known I was capable of. I had made something way better than a turkey hand drawing or a traced picture of a duck.

  Mom grabbed my face by the chin and stared into my eyes. I stared at the tiny dark line between her eyebrows, the present her face had bestowed upon her for her thirty-fifth birthday.

  “God has given you a gift,” she said, her thumb too rough against my jawbone. I could feel her nail digging into my skin, but I didn’t dare move. “Don’t waste this.”

  All that seriousness directed at a ten-year-old. Mom was always hard on me, wanting to make sure I did things the way she thought they should be done, that I knew my life wasn’t just important to me, but represented everything she had given up in her own life to have a baby. Always these stories about this child who stole her dreams, this horrible burden she was suffering with this kid someone apparently forced her to create and then raise.

  Oh, wait. That’s me!

  I might have let the miniatures remain something I had done in the past if it hadn’t been for Matthew. I guess that was because it seemed like a useless talent. I could make tiny things. Big deal. Then one weekend my mother asked me to clean some stuff out of the garage and I found some of the miniatures I’d done in high school. They were very “I’m a sad teenager” pieces, things like miniature cemeteries glued to algebra books. Matthew thought they were fascinating, and insisted on putting them out on display. When people would come over, he’d ask, “Can you believe she can do that with her hands? I can’t do anything like that.”

  It was that same feeling I’d had when Mom paraded me around the crafts store. It wasn’t so much validation as it was the confirmation that I was special. Someone I loved thought I was unique. And being unique confirmed what I needed to be true: that I wasn’t replaceable.