A Clean Slate

by Laura Caldwell

  “I need to use the powder room,” Laney said in a too loud voice. “Kell?”

  “Sure,” I said, grateful beyond belief.

  “Are you all right?” Laney asked once we were in the safe confines of the tiny pink bathroom. She gripped my shoulders and peered at my face.

  “I was just surprised, that’s all.” It was true, and I was also surprised to find that I didn’t feel like falling apart. I didn’t feel like crying or shrieking. I had just been so startled to see him, the guy whose kids I thought I’d have, whose underwear I thought I’d wash for the rest of my life. How strange it was to have known him so intimately—to know the way he squeezed his toothpaste tube into a triangular roll and the way he liked to have his forehead rubbed when he had a headache—and yet not to have a relationship with him anymore.

  Laney hugged me, then proceeded to give me a rousing pep talk about not letting him get to me, how I was gorgeous and smart and starting a new chapter in my life that didn’t involve him.

  By the time we made it back to the bar, I was better. We ordered another round, and I was just starting to enjoy a chat with Jess about their honeymoon plans when Ben interrupted.

  “Can I have a second?” He shot me his meaningful look, the one he’d probably given me on my birthday before he’d handed me my walking papers instead of a diamond solitaire.

  Jess patted me on the shoulder as if to say good luck, then left us alone.

  “So.” Ben looked me up and down again. “You must have had some day.”

  “A great day, actually. A little shopping with Laney.”

  “And a new haircut.”

  I said nothing. Did he really want to talk about my hair?

  “You really look amazing.”

  “Thanks.” I hated myself for being flattered.

  “Well, anyway,” he said, with another doggy shake of his head, “Therese asked me to speak to you about today.”

  I looked over my shoulder at his girlfriend who was pretending to be engrossed in a conversation with Steve, but I could sense her antennae pointed in our direction. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”

  “This coming over to my place really has to stop.”

  “I know. It’s done. It won’t happen again.”

  He gave me a look of patent disbelief. “Seriously, Kell, Therese is getting upset. This can’t keep happening.”

  His mouth continued to move, talking on and on about how poor little Therese could barely sleep, how I needed to get on with my life, et cetera. The more he talked, the more I wanted to laugh, because right then the thought of waiting for Ben at work or calling him repeatedly or buzzing his apartment was ludicrous to me. He’d dumped me, the asshole, and although I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around that, I wasn’t stalker material. I couldn’t believe I’d ever gotten close to it.

  Finally I interrupted him, putting a hand on his arm. “I can’t even remember doing those things you’re talking about, but I promise you, it won’t ever happen again. I’ve had a little memory problem….” I let my words trail off, suddenly unsure whether I wanted to admit to anyone other than Laney my loss of memory. Would people think me crazy? Was I crazy?

  “What are you talking about?” He actually looked concerned, his gray-brown eyes worried and blinking, and that expression got to me. I found myself telling him the whole story of my day, explaining that I had no recollection of us breaking up or the way I’d been unwilling to let him go.

  “Are you joking?” he asked a few times, his eyes skeptical now, as if this might be another one of my crafty ploys to get him back.

  “It’s true. I can’t remember my birthday or anything after that until today. But I feel okay.”

  “Well, shouldn’t you go to a doctor or something? Get yourself checked out?”

  I made a show of holding out my arms, looking down at my legs. “Everything else is intact, so…” I shrugged.

  “I don’t know.” He fingered the dark-brown freckle on his right cheekbone. That freckle had always made him self-conscious, because it resembled a speck of dirt, and people were forever telling him he had something on his face. But I used to love that spot. I’d kiss it whenever he walked in my door.

  “You do look good.” His eyes trailed over me again.

  I wanted to make a snappy retort, something like Yes, I look damn good and you’re not getting any of it, but I kept quiet.

  “So how’s Bartley Brothers?” I didn’t want to talk about us or my memory any longer, but wanted to occupy Ben for a while, just to piss off Therese. “How’s Attila?”

  “Demoted. He’s pushing paper,” Ben said.

  “No!”

  Ben nodded. “Lots of people are getting moved around or let go.”

  “Yeah, so I heard.”

  “Well, obviously. You’d know that since you…”

  “Got fired.”

  “Right.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  “So tell me what happened to Attila,” I said.

  Ben launched into a story about Attila being investigated for insider information right around the time of the budget cuts. From there, our conversation was easy, catching up on all our co-workers—my ex-co-workers—Ben telling me stories about trades gone awry, and bringing me up-to-date on the market.

  We were laughing about another Attila story when Therese sauntered up to us and placed a proprietary hand on his arm.

  “Benji,” she said—and I couldn’t help it; I snorted. Benji was a nickname he hated, the name Ben’s brothers used to make fun of him. Both of his brothers were much bigger. They excelled at football and other bone-crunching sports, while Ben had been relegated to running and tennis.

  Ben sent me a look as if to say, Shut up, please. I tried to quell the giggles.

  “I’m ready to go,” Therese said, shooting me little knives with her eyes. “It’s getting way too uncomfortable in here.”

  “How about one more and then we’ll head out?” Ben said.

  Therese’s bottom lip dropped a little. I got the impression that she wasn’t used to Ben saying no to her. “I want to go now. We’ve got to be at my mother’s for brunch tomorrow, remember?” She sent me a look of triumph, clearly expecting me to be crushed by this news. Strangely, I wasn’t. In fact, I felt so much better now that Ben and I had had a normal conversation.

  “Sure,” Ben said, “I was just updating Kelly on what’s going on at Bartley.”

  “Great. Did you tell her that you made partner?”

  Ben sent a quick, guilty look in my direction.

  My good mood, my ease at talking to Ben, evaporated like steam. “What? When?”

  “Last week,” Therese bragged.

  I fought hard not to smack her.

  “Is that true?” I said to Ben. I was the one who was supposed to make partner first. Me. Ben had started at Bartley two years after me. I was next in line. How had I gotten the ax while he was elected to goddamn partnership status? I felt my neck go red.

  Ben nodded sheepishly.

  “He deserves it,” Therese said. “He’s worked really hard and—”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Could you shut up for one minute?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she sent a glance at Ben as if to say, Are you going to let her talk to me like that?

  “Kell,” he said. “Take it easy. It just happened. I didn’t even know it was coming.”

  Something about the way he had said that, the way his words got incrementally softer at the end of the sentence and the way his mouth became tight, told me that he had damn well known it was coming. He probably knew back in May. For a horrified moment, I wondered if he’d known that I was going to be fired, too. I stood there, completely stumped for words, wishing my temper would take over and do something rash that I would later regret—something like head-butting Ben—but nothing came. Finally, Therese tugged on his sleeve.

  He drained the rest of his beer. “I’m sorry, Kell. Good to see you.”

&nbs
p; I searched my brain for a witty comeback, something that would erase the smirk from Therese’s face, but once again I came up blank. A pregnant quiet enveloped us.

  “Ben, let’s go,” Therese said.

  He hesitated, still standing before me as if he might say something else.

  “Oh, please,” Therese said, before he got the chance. She clamped a hand on his arm and dragged him away.

  When they reached the door, Therese disappeared through it, but Ben turned around and for the longest moment held my eyes.

  My temper flared after Ben left, obviously the wrong time, but I was immune to a cure, and so I sat at the bar, boring poor Jess and Steve and Laney about the manipulative machinations of Bartley Brothers and the treachery of Ben, all the while trying to douse my anger with cocktails. Laney eventually wrenched the conversation away from me and back to Jess and Steve’s wedding, and they were happy to prattle on about place settings and invitations and the band vs. DJ debate until we got the “last call” shout from the bartender.

  After Tarringtons closed, and Laney had convinced me that no convenience store in the city sold margarita mix, she and I lay snug in her king-size bed, gossiping maliciously about Therese, giggling about Ben not recognizing me, and rehashing—at least fifty times—my conversation with him. Although still pissed off about him being made partner ahead of me, about him possibly knowing that I would be fired, I felt much better now that I’d gotten my dose of rage. And oddly enough, I felt a tipsy contentment around me. It’d been eons since Laney and I had had a late-night chat like this, a fact that made me sad. It was Laney who’d been with me every step of the way though the traumas of high school, the newfound freedom of college and the often painful days of early adulthood, and yet it was Ben I’d ended up spending so much time with. Ben, who’d eventually decided that the time meant nothing.

  “He is such a fucker,” I said, the margaritas making my tongue loose, causing me to repeat myself over and over.

  Laney gave me a light smack on the arm. “Stop already. It’s unhealthy. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Name it.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right with this no-memory thing? I mean, you’ve had a lot going on today, and it’s all right to fall apart.”

  I turned on my side to face her. “I feel better than I ever have.”

  “Well, don’t think that you have to put on a tough act. You can still fall apart if you want.”

  “Nope. I’ve done enough of that.”

  Laney was silent for a second, and I could hear the whoosh of cars passing by her building. “It’s just that something was definitely wrong. Something more than Ben and the job,” she said.

  “It was obviously something that didn’t matter.”

  “Maybe.”

  Her tone made me feel a little chilly, and I buried myself deeper under her duvet. What was it that I hadn’t told anyone? Did it matter now? On one hand, if whatever it was could explain why I couldn’t remember this summer, I wanted to know it. For some reason, I truly wanted to learn why this odd memory loss had happened to me. But on the other hand, if I remembered those five months, wouldn’t I just slip back into that depression? I wanted the whys and the hows of the situation, but I feared the details. I felt as if my memory was a house of cards, wobbly and shaky and hollow inside. I was afraid that if I came too close to that emptiness, that missing time, everything would fall in on me.

  “Look, Lane,” I said, “I’ve already spent too much time on whatever it was, and maybe that’s why I feel so good now, because I let myself be depressed until I couldn’t be depressed anymore.”

  “Shouldn’t you try to figure out more about what was going on with you during that time? I could help you, you know. We could go talk to Ellen or somebody, maybe do some research.” Laney’s voice sounded so sweet, so helpful and slightly worried, and it made me tremble a little inside.

  I squeezed her arm, as much to reassure her as myself. “It’s okay. As far as I can tell, nothing good happened during those months, right?”

  “Right,” she said, a hint of doubt lingering in her voice.

  “Right.” I rolled over, turning my back to her. “And what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

  6

  On Sunday, I suffered an intense headache. I usually didn’t feel so bad after a night of drinking, but I probably hadn’t been drinking much for five months. I tried not to think about the headaches Laney had told me about, the ones I suffered during those months I was holed up in my apartment.

  After Laney plied me with ibuprofen, she and I joined Gear and the rest of his High Gear band to watch the Bears game at a little corner pub. I’m not sure what I expected of Laney’s latest boyfriend—maybe heroin at halftime?—but he wasn’t exactly the stereotypical dude in a heavy metal band. Oh sure, he had the requisite tattoos on his arms (barbed wire on the right, some Chinese lettering on the left) and he wore a ripped black T-shirt and black army boots, but Gear was warm and friendly, too, which surprised me.

  “So this is the infamous Kelly,” he said when Laney introduced us.

  “Infamous? I hope that’s a good thing.” I held out my hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He smelled like shaving cream and cigarettes.

  “You’re infamous because Laney Bug is always talking about you.”

  “Laney Bug?” I looked over my shoulder at Laney, who groaned a little, probably realizing that she would never be able to live down this nickname. I could almost see us at age ninety, me taunting her, Oh Laney Bug, can you bring me my tea, please?

  The rest of Gear’s band weren’t quite as outgoing or sweet, but we spent a happy afternoon with them eating pizza, watching football and screaming at the TV when the Bears messed up. I drank a few beers in a hair-of-the-dog effort, and didn’t think about anything else for hours—not Ben or my town house or my lack of employment.

  Monday morning, I rolled over in Laney’s bed and stretched, feeling, once again, intensely headachy from the alcohol. Apparently, I couldn’t hold my liquor like I used to. I heard the hum of Laney’s hair dryer from the bathroom, followed by the clatter of makeup on the tile floor and Laney’s curse.

  “You okay in there, Laney Bug?” I yelled, stretching my legs under her comfy duvet.

  “Late,” she called back, ignoring my use of her new nickname. “Totally late.”

  A second later, she tore out of the bathroom, yanked open her closet and stepped into a pair of shoes.

  “What time did you get up?” I asked.

  “Six.”

  I turned and squinted at her bedside clock. It was eight-thirty. “And what have you been doing?”

  “Answered e-mail, did a Tae-Bo tape, returned a few phone calls.”

  “Okay, now I feel like a lazy ass.”

  “You need to take it easy.” She picked up her purse by the bedside and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay as long as you want, all right? And call me at work if you need anything.”

  “Thanks.” I watched her run into the kitchen and grab an apple out of a bowl. “Have a good day!” I called, but she was already out the door.

  With Laney gone, the apartment seemed empty and vast. I swallowed some Advil, then took one of the books from her shelf, a memoir about a woman who’d followed the Grateful Dead. I figured that maybe I’d lie in bed all day and read. The book wasn’t that interesting, though, at least not after the first three acid trips, and within an hour I was antsy. I knew I should probably go back to my own apartment, but the thought brought only a queasy feeling.

  To thank Laney for everything she’d done for me lately, I ignored the pain in my head and the nausea in my stomach and cleaned up her place. Then I made myself a bowl of granola and decided I’d just spend a lazy day in front of the TV.

  The first few hours went okay, especially after my headache eased. I watched the news and business stations, trying to catch up on the market, studying the Bloomberg as I used to for the ticker symbols that signaled the retail stocks.
There were a couple of surprises, a few stocks that were way higher than when I’d followed them, and I found myself analyzing the rest of the market and how it might affect these companies. After a while, though, I didn’t care all that much. It was a relief just to flip the channel.

  Next, I tried the talk shows and the soaps, which kept my interest for a whole forty minutes. What, exactly, was I going to do with the rest of my day? A better question—what had I done when I was home for five months? I couldn’t fathom it.

  A thought came to me. Laney had said that I had more than enough money to live on because of the severance pay from Bartley Brothers and the sale of my town house. But what if I’d somehow spent that money during those five months? Laney had assumed I was holed up in that high-rise, but what if I’d actually been blowing the cash on God-knows-what, maybe a sailboat or a Porsche for Ben or a diamond engagement ring for myself?

  I found Laney’s cordless phone, dialing the number for my bank’s automated system. Leaning against the kitchen fridge, I punched in my social security number, relieved that I remembered it, then my banking code, which came just as easily. A second later, an inflectionless voice informed me that I had a nice chunk of money in my account, more than I’d ever had at one time. Laney had been right, after all. I hadn’t blown it. I didn’t have to work right now if I didn’t want to.

  But what did people do if they didn’t work? I put the phone on the counter with a clunk. Most women I knew who were officially unemployed were unofficially working their asses off in their own homes, raising their kids. I didn’t have kids, obviously. Wasn’t even on the path to eventual children. So what to do?

  I could do anything I wanted with my life, I realized. It was mine to shape. I suppose that had always been true, but before, I’d felt the invisible constraints of the need for money, or my relationship with Ben, or the partnership track I thought I was on. Yet none of those concerns existed anymore.