The Wildwater Walking Club

by Claire Cook

  His silver baby must have turned out to be scratch free, because he gave me one more mean look and started walking away.

  “Sorry,” I said to his back.

  “That’s an understatement,” he said, without turning around.

  By the time I got to O’Malley’s, I really needed a drink. Carol had staked out the head of our usual table and was flanked by several Wednesday regulars. I ran my eyes quickly around the table. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until I started breathing again when I didn’t see Michael.

  “Well,” Carol said perkily. “If it isn’t Reeny, Reeny, Redundancy Queeny.”

  “Hi, everybody,” I said. I sat down, leaving an empty chair on one side, just in case Michael showed up. Not that he would. Not that I cared.

  A waiter was just delivering drinks, so I ordered a glass of wine.

  “So what’s it like to be a free woman?” somebody asked.

  “Great,” I said. “I’m loving it.”

  “You look good,” Beth from Accounting said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t know you wore dresses,” Lena from Marketing said.

  My wine came and I took a big gulp. The conversation had already moved on. They were talking about a big interdepartmental meeting they’d just had, and I suddenly felt like I’d been away for a century instead of a week and a half.

  “You’re awfully quiet, Noreen,” somebody said eventually. “Tell us what you’ve been up to.”

  I took another sip of wine and put the glass down on the table. “Well,” I said. “It turns out I’ve got some nice neighbors. We’ve started walking together. We’re even thinking—”

  “Must be nice,” Josh from Customer Relations said. “Hey, did you hear what happened in IT yesterday?”

  Their conversation floated in one of my ears and right on out the other. It was as if I couldn’t even process the words I was hearing. I hadn’t been myself since I’d set foot on Balancing Act property.

  But if I wasn’t myself, then who was I? The old Noreen certainly wouldn’t have behaved like that in the Balancing Act store. The first rule of negotiation, in this case a simple, if slightly illegal, shoe exchange, is not to volunteer too much information. Bring the shoes up to the register, give the salesperson a confident, non-adversarial smile, and tell her matter-of-factly that you’re making an equal exchange.

  And that guy in the parking lot. I mean, come on. When you’re dealing with an asshole, you keep your mouth shut. You make him do all the talking. You don’t start hemorrhaging apologies all over the place. And what the hell was I doing, hallucinating Michael and throwing a box of sneakers across the parking lot like a love-sick teenager?

  It had taken me a long time to learn to thrive at Balancing Act. I’d spent the first few years under the control of a really tough supervisor. I kept thinking I could please her if I worked just a little bit harder, came up with an even more brilliant idea, flattered her some more. But the more I tried to please her, the more she withheld her approval, and somehow it always ended up feeling like it was my fault.

  She completely controlled me. She said jump; I asked how high. I didn’t make a single decision without wondering what she would think of it. Just the thought of my quarterly employee evaluation was enough to send me into a full-blown anxiety attack.

  And then one day, in the midst of some snowballing departmental crisis, she really let me have it. We were sitting in her office, and there were no witnesses. She took off her reading glasses and placed them in front of her on the desk. She launched into an angry tirade about how she’d created me, how I’d be nothing without her. She belittled my past efforts, ridiculed the project I was working on, minimized everything I’d be likely to bring to the table in the future.

  The odd thing was that as she ranted, I suddenly got it. She was a bully, plain and simple. Because she’d never shoved me into a locker, or held me upside down by my ankles and shaken the change out of my pockets, I just hadn’t been able to see it until then. It was a huge epiphany for me, maybe one of the biggest of my life. In that instant, I stopped trying to please her, and she lost all power over me.

  I think she knew it, too. Bullies need people to control, and when they can’t play the game with you, they find another victim.

  I continued to do my work, but I stopped worrying about whether or not she liked it. Eventually an opportunity presented itself in another department, run by a more nurturing, less abusive boss. I grabbed it and never looked back. In the years since, I’d run into other bullies, and I’d gotten pretty good at defusing them.

  My behavior today felt like major backsliding. Was it possible I’d lost my edge in less than two weeks? Maybe without a job, all your skills just withered up because you no longer had a place to practice them. I looked around the table again, and I felt a total disconnect. It was like I was sitting with perfect strangers, and not only did I not recognize any of them, but I didn’t even recognize myself. Maybe without a job, I didn’t have a self.

  One of the women, Sherry, was pushing her chair back from the table and saying something about having to get going because she was meeting someone for dinner. She stood up, placed some bills on the table, and looked over at me.

  “Nice to see you again, Noreen,” she said. “Call me if you want to hang out sometime.”

  I liked Sherry. She was about my age and had started working at Balancing Act maybe a year or two after I did. We sometimes shared a table in the cafeteria at lunch, and we’d gone to the movies and shopping together a few times over the years. She was a nice person, with a dry wit, and I’d always enjoyed her company.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I will.”

  The minute Sherry was out the door, Carol leaned forward. “I know who she’s meeting,” she actually sang.

  “Who?” somebody asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to kno-ow?” Carol was still singing. She was in her glory.

  “I heard from a friend of mine in her department that she’s thinking about taking a buyout while the VRIF is still on the table,” somebody said.

  “Come on, who?” somebody else said.

  “Come on, Carol,” somebody else said. “Play fair. You brought it up, so now you have to tell us.”

  Carol leaned back in her chair like it was a throne. We all waited. She tilted forward again, placed one elbow on the table, and rested her chin on the palm of her hand.

  “Michael Carleton,” she stage-whispered. “You know, Michael-don’t-call-me-Mike from Olympus. They’ve been sneaking around practically since the takeover.”

  Day 11

  462 steps

  I STARED UP AT THE CRACK IN MY CEILING, THEN TURNED my head just long enough to watch 8:00 A.M. come and go in slime green on my alarm clock. My entire body ached, as if a Mack truck had driven through my bedroom in the middle of the night and flattened me into my mattress.

  I barely remembered the drive home from O’Malley’s. While everybody talked about Sherry and Michael, I’d just sat there, feeling numb right down to my toes. I’d forced myself to wait until they’d moved on to another subject. Then I told everyone I had to get up early the next day, said my good-byes, and got the hell out of there.

  I should have been relieved they’d never caught on to Michael and me. I should have been worried about Sherry, too, and whether Michael was going to manipulate her into taking a VRIF she didn’t really know if she wanted. Maybe it was even in his Olympus job description: Eliminate overpaid female senior employees by seducing them and then nudging them out to pasture before they know what hit them.

  I could have been quietly making plans to warn Sherry myself. Or I could have brought a rumor to the table for the group to feed on for dessert. Said something cryptic about Sherry not being the first, that I’d heard Michael was Olympus’s secret weapon, that somebody really should do something about him. They would have swarmed like vultures, with Carol stepping up immediately to spearhead the Save Sherry/Kill Michael project. />
  But I didn’t. As they picked up their forks and dug into the juicy gossip on the table before us, I just sat there like a lump and never said a word. Because the embarrassing truth was that the only thing that pierced the numbness was a blinding flash of jealousy. I couldn’t believe Michael liked Sherry better than me.

  My doorbell rang at 8:07 A.M. I ignored it, rolled over, pulled the covers up over my head.

  At 8:10 A.M., it rang again.

  “Shit,” I said out loud. I kicked off the covers, yanked the hem of my T-shirt down until I was relatively decent, and stumbled to my front door. I opened the door a crack but kept the chain lock fastened.

  Rosie and Tess smiled up at me from my doorstep.

  “Not feeling well,” I said. I orchestrated a pathetic cough and started to shut the door again.

  Tess grabbed the door handle from the other side. “Fever?” she asked.

  I had the feeling that if I said yes, she’d whip a thermometer out of her back pocket just to be sure.

  I shook my head.

  “Any sign of infection?” she asked. “You know, swelling on one side of your neck or green mucus or anything?”

  I shook my head again.

  Tess smiled. “Okay, you’re good to go. Throw your shoes on—whatever it is, the endorphins will help.” She looked at her watch. “You’ve got three minutes.”

  My eyes teared up. “I just can’t do it,” I said. And then I slammed the door.

  I SPENT MOST of the day in bed. I didn’t want to think. I wanted to bury myself in sleep, remain unconscious, oblivious, pain-free. And it worked pretty well, at least for a while.

  At 3:22 P.M., I had to pee so badly I finally got up. I took a shower, because it was such a great place to cry. The water washed my tears away almost as soon as they appeared, which somehow gave the whole thing an element of control, as if shower crying was slightly less tragic than stand-alone sobs would have been.

  I was eating a bowl of cereal when the doorbell rang. “Geez,” I said out loud. “Not again.” I took another quick bite, then dumped the rest of my cereal down the garbage disposal.

  Tess and Rosie were standing on my doorstep like they’d been there all day.

  “Haven’t we done this once already?” I asked.

  Tess pulled a piece of white rope out from the round beige pulley she was holding. “Don’t make me use this on you,” she said.

  I smiled. Behind them I could see a wheelbarrow filled with a bunch of small plants and three shovels. I pushed my door open. “Come on in,” I said. “I just have to put some shoes on.”

  I probably should have looked for an old pair of sneakers, but it’s not like I didn’t have backups. I sat on the couch to tie my Walk On Bys.

  “Have a seat,” I said. “Thanks,” I added. Not to get goopy, but I couldn’t believe they’d cared enough to come back.

  Tess and Rosie stayed by the door. “No problem,” Tess said. “I wasn’t sure if it was serious enough to bring wine.”

  “Or chocolate,” Rosie said. “I could run home for some.”

  “Wine over chocolate,” Tess said. “Any day.”

  “Not me,” Rosie said. “I’m a total chocoholic in a crisis.”

  “Okay, we need a tie breaker,” Tess said. “Come on, Noreen, wine wins hands down, doesn’t it?”

  “Tough call,” I said. “If you two hadn’t shown up, I’d probably be dipping chocolate in my wine right about now.”

  I stood up. “Thanks,” I said again.

  Tess opened my front door. A flash of white cut in front of me and made a beeline for my kitchen. Three smaller blurs of brown were right behind it.

  I screamed. “Are those chickens?”

  “Rod Stewart!” Rosie yelled. “Sorry,” she said to me in a quieter voice. “Do you have a box of cereal handy?”

  I pointed to my kitchen. My hand was trembling, I noticed, and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

  Rosie came out of my kitchen, shaking the box of Special K I’d left on my counter. The creatures followed her like the Pied Piper across my living room and out the front door. “I’ll just run them home,” she yelled. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  Tess was checking out my living room. “Great window treatments,” she said.

  “Were those chickens?” I asked again.

  “Yup,” Tess said. “The brown ones were hens, but I think Rod Stewart’s probably a rooster.”

  “Why is he called Rod Stewart?”

  Tess shrugged. “You think he looks more like Barry Manilow?”

  I followed Tess out to my backyard. A ladder I’d never seen before was tilted up against the back of my house. Maybe it was all that sleeping, or maybe it was the chickens, but I was feeling a little bit like Alice after she’d fallen through the rabbit hole. Not that I would have recognized a rabbit hole if I fell through it.

  “We’re going to go with a retractable,” Tess was saying. “That way you can get it out of the way fast if you have to. We’ve got sixty feet of clothesline to work with, so I think we’ll put the mounting bracket right outside your kitchen window, and the hook on that tree over there. The line will run north to south, which will give your clothes maximum sunlight, so it’s the perfect setup. Electric dryers account for ten percent of home energy use. It’s crazy. That is your kitchen window, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.”

  “A deal for me,” Tess said. “It only cost nineteen ninety-five, plus tax.”

  “Don’t forget labor,” I said.

  “Speaking of which,” Tess said. She adjusted the angle of the ladder. “Hold this for me, okay? Unless you want to go up.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  I was so focused on holding the ladder tight I didn’t see Rosie come back with the wheelbarrow. Behind me, a shovel hit the ground with a thud.

  I jumped.

  “Whoa,” Tess said. “I’d like to live through this clothesline installation.”

  Rosie put her hands next to mine on the ladder to help me hold it steady. We tilted our heads up to watch Tess juggle a screwdriver, some screws, and a mounting bracket above us.

  “Sorry about that,” Rosie said. “I don’t think they liked their manure leaving the yard without them. But now that they know where you keep your cereal, just be careful when you leave your door open. You know, when you’re bringing in groceries, that sort of thing.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Rosie shrugged. “They’ll do anything for breakfast cereal. If it happens again, just shake a box, and they’ll follow you anywhere.”

  Like I didn’t have enough to worry about without adding fear of chicken invasions to the list. Maybe I’d just put my house on the market.

  “Do they have a brand preference?” It seemed like something I should know.

  “Well, Rod’s not too fussy, but the hens prefer Kashi Good Friends, though they just did a number on your Special K, so maybe it’s a new favorite. By the way, the hens kind of stick together, so we call them the Supremes.”

  “Oh, that’s perfect,” I said. “They’re so cute.” I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I thought I’d try it on for size.

  “Sometimes they’re cute,” Rosie said. “As long as nobody messes with them. They had a bad rooster before Rod, and they ganged up on him and killed him.”

  “What did he do?” I whispered. I was back in my house-on-the-market zone again.

  Rosie shifted her hands on the ladder. “Besides fertilizing the eggs, a rooster’s job is to scout for danger, to keep the hens safe from predators, even to lay his own life on the line to protect them if he has to. The last rooster just didn’t really give a shit about them. And hens don’t take disloyalty lightly.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s so impressive.”

  “Yeah,” Rosie said. “You can learn a lot from chickens.”

  Tess started making her way down the ladder, pulling a lengthening white cord wit
h her.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now we just attach a screw hook to the tree, loop this doohickey at the end of the clothesline over the hook, and you’ll be officially breaking the law. If you need to get it down in a hurry, just unhook it from the tree, and it will retract automatically. You’ll have to reach out from your kitchen window to feed the line down to someone on the ground, or borrow my ladder, to set it up again, but there’s really no way around that.”

  As soon as the clothesline was attached to the tree, we carried the ladder back to Tess’s house and moved on to the garden.

  Rosie pushed my box of Special K out of the way and picked up a shovel. “So,” she said. “I’m envisioning an informal lavender patch. I brought starter plants in three varieties—Grosso, Hidcote, and Munstead—to give you a good mix of color, form, and height. You can add to it once we see which kinds do best in your yard, and also which ones you like the most. Sound okay to you?”

  “Sure, whatever you think,” I said.

  Tess picked up a shovel, so I did, too. We started turning over the soil in an area in front of some bushes that Rosie said would give the plants winter protection from the wind as well as good southern exposure. I’d never once thought of my house in terms of direction, and suddenly I had both a clothesline and a garden facing south.

  Rosie stopped digging and leaned on her shovel. “The trick to taking care of lavender is not to overlove it.”

  “The trick to taking care of anything is not to overlove it,” Tess said.

  I had a sudden urge to write that down.

  “So true,” Rosie said. “Anyway, lavender doesn’t like a rich soil, so we’re going to go really easy on the chicken manure. Drainage is key, which means we’ll build up the bed and add sand, plus throw in some time-released lime to make the soil more alkaline.”