“Um, hello,” I said, lining up my mallet with the ball. “Lindsey has a BFA from RISD—do you know what a big deal that is?” I was ratcheting up the intensity in my voice for no reason other than it gave me momentary respite from how shitty I felt about everything else. I took another swing. The ball chopped up in the air and landed fairly close to the hoop. I felt, suddenly, quite pleased with myself. Swinging the mallet jauntily over my shoulder, I said, “Or are you just in a bad mood because Johnny’s sick again?”
Johnny, Jack’s shih tzu, had gotten a concussion on Wednesday from walking straight into a wall. Apparently his eye surgery had not gone well.
“No,” Jack said. “I’m just tired of having to put up with lazy prima donnas who can’t do one thing without having a hissy fit, falling apart, or feeling”—he dropped his mallet to better dramatize his air quotes—‘oppressed’—”
“Sounds like someone else I know,” I said, nudging Lindsey, who shook her head as if to say leave me out of this. But it was fun to make fun of Jack, comforting even, a welcome distraction from the atomic bomb Wolf’d just dropped on my life and my best friendship. I saw Annie’s ball roll the opposite way from the hoop.
She threw her hands up. “For crying out loud.”
“Sorry, what?” Jack said. “I can’t hear you from all the way up Celeste’s asshole.”
“You guys,” Lindsey said. “No fighting. It’s a holiday.”
“There’s millions of dollars inside that asshole, buddy,” I said sweetly. “So sorry you weren’t invited.”
He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean, millions of dollars?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. Apparently it was impossible for me not to stick my foot in my mouth wherever I went. “Figure of speech.”
“There you are,” Ben said, approaching our game out of nowhere with what seemed to be forced cheer.
“Sorry—just got back. Took longer than I thought,” I said. I snaked an arm around his waist and kissed him on the cheek. He accepted, but did not reciprocate, this affection. “Should we get going?”
He shrugged. His face looked sunburnt. “If you want.”
I frowned. “Okay. Oh, but Lindsey,” I said, snapping my fingers, “before I forget.” She was making one last attempt to get her ball through the hoop. “I got one of those twenty-percent-off coupons for ‘our place’ in the mail, if you know what I mean. You want to go tomorrow? Maybe go to brunch first?”
“Sure!” Lindsey said, beaming. Lindsey loved being invited places. Unfortunately her turning around to accept my invitation meant that she missed her croquet ball completely. “Oh no,” she said. Her voice rose a little. “I missed again. What is wrong with me?”
“It’s okay, Lindsey,” Annie said tenderly.
“I suck at this game.” Lindsey’s voice quavered.
“Your place?” Ben said.
I smiled up at him. “It’s a secret, ha ha. You can only know if you come with us.”
He pulled away a little. “I’m busy tomorrow.”
“Oh,” I said, hurt by the speed of his refusal. “Well. Some other time then.”
* * *
—
On the walk back to the car, Ben and I fell into an awkward silence. The mosquitoes had come out by then; one kept buzzing insistently in my ear. I was turning over what I wanted to say to him—what I’d done to Susan, what Wolf’d done to Susan, what I’d done to Ben himself earlier with my jealous accusations—but the realization that it’d be impossible to get all this out in one piece, or without falling to pieces, compelled me to stay quiet. A couple passed us on the sidewalk, holding hands, the woman with a baby swaddled across her chest. How did these other people do it? I wondered. These normal, well-adjusted people? How did they remain close to each other, close enough to stay in love, to have babies, without all the disrepair?
Ben broke the silence abruptly by telling me that when he was talking to Celeste, she’d been filling him in on the sale of PR to Omnipublic. As Nanü’s proof of concept, he’d been offered a 0.5 percent stake in the firm. “Pretty exciting, I guess,” he said, though not excitedly. “That kind of money could set a person up for a long time.”
“Uh-huh, sure,” I said miserably. Might as well keep throwing the shit on the table. “Listen, I want to say sorry about earlier. I wasn’t trying to run away. I just saw that Wolf had posted something on Facebook that seriously fucked me and Susan—”
We reached my car and began the drive across town. I told him what I’d done with Susan’s poems and how it’d just gone down at her apartment. He listened quietly, shaking his head occasionally, and once let out a very long sigh. The quieter he was, the more I felt it my duty to explain, even defend myself, though I knew deep down that my position was indefensible. My voice pitched up to a whine. “I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen! It was a stupid thing to do, but I was trying to make things better for her!”
We passed the turnoff to Ben’s street. Most of the time we slept at my place. “Actually,” Ben coughed slightly. “Do you mind dropping me off at my apartment?”
I felt my cheeks grow hot. “I just assumed we’d spend the night at—”
“I’m just tired,” he said tiredly.
I circled around the block and pulled up to his building. I put my hands on the steering wheel and looked at him. “I said I was sorry—please don’t hold it against me, my being stupid this afternoon—”
“I’m not holding anything against you.” He reached out a hand, put it on my bare arm, let it linger there. “I just need a night. I’ll text you tomorrow, all right?”
My eyes, those betrayers, filled with tears.
“Casey.” He squeezed my arm. “I’m not leaving. It’s just a night. Get some sleep. We haven’t been sleeping enough anyway.”
A few tears traced lines across my cheeks. I brought the back of my hand up to wipe them away. “I know. I know. It’s not a big deal. I don’t know why I’m so—”
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said sadly.
“I know.” My shoulders shook. Oh, why must the body always have its say. “I’m not trying to hurt you, either. It’s just hard, when—I just assume that—” But I couldn’t say it. What was there to say? He wanted me to trust him, and I could not. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t know how. No one starts playing Mozart when all they’ve been handed is sheet music and an out-of-tune piano with three keys missing.
I let my hair fall over my face. “Anyway, I understand. You should get some sleep, too.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” He squeezed my arm again. “Okay? Everything’s going to seem better tomorrow. You have equity, things can’t be that bad—”
“Oh, who cares about that.” I sniffed and wiped the snot from my nose.
Ben leaned over and kissed my cheek softly. “It’s okay. And even though you never believe me, you’re okay, too.”
* * *
—
The next morning, I picked Lindsey up, and after a long brunch during which we discussed astrology, yogic breathing, and the kitchari cleanse Lindsey was starting on Monday, we made for the suburbs like white people in the sixties fleeing integration.
What Lindsey and I loved best about The Container Store was how they had containers for things we previously didn’t even know needed containing. Life was very difficult. There was no way around it. But it got easier when shirts had boxes and spices had shelving and you never had any problem finding your can opener. Like the old wives’ saying goes: Success begins from the inside drawer, courtesy of The Container Store!
This particular Container Store was located in a ritzy outdoor mall development. Inside, I grabbed a cart from an impeccably stacked row while Lindsey opted for a mesh basket. “So,” she said as we made our way down aisle one, which was comprised entirely of colored hangers,
“do you want to tell me why we’re really here right now?”
Lindsey, bless her, was the kindest person I knew, was even kind when the rest of us were being assholes. I think because she’d been hurt a lot herself, she could intuit the hurt that lay buried underneath our assholery. Hell, maybe she could relate more to us in those vulnerable moments than she could when we were doing just fine. Some people at People’s Republic were driven crazy by her vocal endorsement of crystals, “clean” foods, and Transcendental Meditation, but I heard all that talk with a lot of understanding. Underneath it was pain she was trying very hard to get over. Like all injured people with enough money to support the habit, she could be a bit of a navel-gazer, but the great thing about Lindsey was that she was very supportive of my navel-gazing, too.
The words came out of nowhere and I think surprised both of us. “I think I need to leave PR.”
A pause. “Okaaaaay,” Lindsey said slowly, twisting the slim silver bracelet on her wrist. Lindsey’d had a lot of therapy, and she knew better than to react strongly to outlandish statements. “Why do you say that? Yesterday it was a sabbatical, now you want to quit?”
I burst out, “Well a sabbatical’s just not gonna cut the mustard! For one thing, yesterday I also lost my best-best friend, which I’ll fill you in on in a minute. For another thing, I just asked a Holocaust survivor to pose for advertisements for a racist company. For another-other thing, I told myself that twenty-eight was the year I was going to start pursuing my dreams instead of just working in advertising, and the year’s half over and I’ve barely done anything. And for another-other-other thing, I’m watching myself ruin the first good relationship I’ve ever had by, you know, sumo wrestling my enemies and accusing Ben of all sorts of terrible things. Everything feels upside down and something tells me that the source of it has to do not just with like, astrological forces, but with what we’re doing here, with Nanü and PR. It’s not right somehow. I can feel it. Can’t you?”
I told Lindsey about what’d happened with Ben the night before, with Susan and Wolf, about Mort and Tracy Mallard, about my brief and embarrassing foray into voice acting and how awful it’d been to see my mother in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, we circled around aisle one to an endcap of air fresheners, and then back around to the plastic storage aisle, where tubs of varying sizes and depths were balanced alongside matching lids. The Container Store cared so much about its customers that if you forgot to buy a lid and they forgot to remind you at the checkout, they’d give you a whole new bin and lid for free, plus a refund.
“Not to mention,” I said, “that the rumors are true—Celeste is selling PR to Omnipublic. She told me yesterday. Which is going to be fine, in the end,” I said quickly, seeing Lindsey’s Bambi-brown eyes fill up with worry. “You and I are going with her to Nanü along with Jack and Annie, so far as I know. Celeste loves you.”
“So far as you know?” Lindsey stopped in her tracks. “You mean you don’t know for sure?”
“I mean of course you are! I think. No one’s losing their jobs, that much I do know. Celeste was adamant about that. But don’t you think—there’s something fishy about this whole business?”
I saw her jaw set, unset. It would be hard to talk to Lindsey if she continued acting this way. Once she got frightened, there was no reasoning with her; she crouched and retreated into the animal version of herself.
“Don’t worry,” I said in a rush. “Don’t worry, don’t worry. You’re going to be fine, I promise.”
Part of me wanted to get back to what I was saying before, try to explain this strange, shimmering feeling I woke up with that morning as a result of the upside-downness of my life. An uncanniness, as the existentialists would say. Like if I held my hand in the air long enough it would start to dissolve into the atmosphere, molecule bleeding into molecule. But even between good friends—even with Lindsey—there were certain things you didn’t say. Part of what made me, me, I suppose, or made me feel at least a little solidity, was that a part of me remained unshareable.
“What are these for?” Lindsey was looking at a stack of oddly shaped bins.
“Those are to store your shoe trees in, when they’re not in the shoes,” I said.
I was interrupted by a woman next to us, round and red as a tomato. “My birthday’s in September and I told Todd I’m wishing for a closet,” she said loudly into her phone. An outdated Top 40 hit warbled over the loudspeakers.
A closet, a closet. I grabbed some sachets off the endcap and threw them in my cart. Was I wishing for a closet? Was that all that was wrong? Was that the source of my unhappiness? I supposed it could be. Oprah’s home improvement guy always says that clutter wasn’t just physical stuff in our closets; it was anything that got in the way of your best life. But perhaps by dealing with the physical stuff first, your best life would follow. This was also the principle advocated in trickle-down economics.
Lindsey wandered toward an aisle display that held what looked like giant plastic toadstools. “You know, it always surprised me you worked in advertising,” she said. She sat down on one of the toadstools and bounced a little. “I told you, I always thought you’d be perfect on TV.” Then she bounced too high and lost her balance and fell onto the floor.
“Lindsey! God! Are you okay?” I said, rushing to help her.
“Can I help you with something?” an unfamiliar voice said behind me.
I turned around and saw a man wearing a Container Store apron, headset, and walkie-talkie. “Yes!” I said.
The man’s nametag said ANTHONY. He looked at me expectantly, as if waiting for me to articulate what I wanted help with. But I didn’t know how, I was waiting for him to tell me what I wanted, so that I might follow his instructions accordingly. In the silence, I thought of what the woman had said back in aisle two. “Come to think of it, Anthony,” I said, rubbing my hands together, “I think I’m wishing for a closet!”
“A closet!” he said, mirroring my hand gesture. “Well then, come with me to our custom Elfa Design Center.” I followed him toward the back of the store. On the way we passed a cardboard stand with about a zillion copies of a book called Conscious Capitalism.
Back at the Elfa Design Center, with the help of a large laminated binder, Anthony educated me on the finer points of hidden home design. A place for everything, taken to the extreme. Shelves to hold a single sweater. Wooden racks to help shoes “breathe.” The most embarrassing materials of human existence—toilet paper, receipts, photos of people you no longer spoke to—could all be tucked away in a color-coded frieze.
I flashed to an image of my closet as it was—unmatched hangers, unsystematized blouses, spaghetti straps tangled up—and how it could be, and I thought: freedom is just another word for living clutter-free.
“Yes, yes, yes!” I said jubilantly. “I’ll take all of it!”
After signing up for a custom financing plan for my custom closet, which Anthony and I designed down to the last in-drawer bra separator, I found Lindsey staring at a wall of kitchen cabinet organizers: light wood, dark wood, white plastic, and clear plastic, all with varying heights. The point was to maximize cabinet space so you could fit as much stuff as possible in them. The Container Store was, among other things, a store that allowed you to acquire more stuff while pretending you had less. Lindsey had dragged her plastic toadstool over to this aisle and was sitting there, staring.
“Wait till you see what I got,” I said, crouching next to her. “What’d you find?”
“I don’t like it,” she said, shaking her head vigorously.
“Don’t like what?”
“Do you ever feel like,” she said, sort of flapping her hands. “There’s no room to be a person anywhere?”
I didn’t totally know what she was talking about, but this happened sometimes with Lindsey. What she was talking about seemed to be located in some long-ago moment that kept bleeding into
the present when the circumstances unlocked it. Lindsey had told me once that after her mother and stepfather would leave to go out drinking, she would spend the night organizing all the drawers and closets so that everything would be perfect by the time they got home. Sometimes, on stressful days at work, I’d catch her arranging and rearranging the items on her desk to get them at exact right angles to each other.
“Do you want to stay here?” I said, as gently as I could. I don’t think these blurred lines between memory and real life were easy for her. “Or should we go get some food?”
She looked toward me with a small, fearful expression on her face. “Let’s get some food.”
I helped her stand and carried the toadstool back to its display area. Sometimes I loved my friends the way I imagined a mother loved her children; I wanted to take care of them in the same elemental way. I was feeling peaceful as we headed toward the checkout, arm in arm. I had my new closet and my most tender friend, and we had decided to eat quesadillas together. Life had handed me lemons, and I’d dragged myself to the kitchen to make some lemonade. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, I’ll tell you what went wrong.
* * *
—
I can think of so many people I know, who, at least according to social media, have trouble-free lives with trouble-free jobs and trouble-free relationships they present with a real sense of satisfaction. Not me. My curiosity has something to do with the trouble I get into, sure. And, okay, a hot temper. But I have to think that troika of wild-haired Fates looked down at me the day I was born and, with a cackle, sent down a whopping dose of bad luck.
As Lindsey was swiping her credit card at the checkout, I saw Ben out of the corner of my eye. He was wearing the same cutoff shorts as the day before, with a green bandanna in his back pocket. “Oh!” I said, and started to jog toward him.
Then I saw that he was not alone.
In fact, he was with a woman. She was short, curvy, brunette, olive-complexioned. She wore a halter top and shorts and looked fabulous in both. She and Ben were standing in the plastic tub aisle, close together. She had one hand on her hip. They were pointing at different tubs. And they were laughing.
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 19
