Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “Hello?”

  “In here.” I found Brenda standing in a tiny kitchen the color of old teeth, furiously scraping the last dregs of mayonnaise out of an enormous glass jar onto a slice of bread. A coffeepot hissed on a hot plate in the corner. A Bluetooth earpiece glowed against her cheek like a sapphire bullet. The kitchen was so cramped, the refrigerator door banged against the countertop every time she opened it. “But I did pay it.” She pivoted over to the sink and twisted on the faucet. “It’s set up as an automatic withdrawal. Straight from her account.” Glancing at me, she winked, then pantomimed shooting herself in the head.

  “Check the account again,” she said sharply. “Not seven-eight. Seven-A. As in ‘Apple.’” Nudging the refrigerator open with her hip, she leaned in and took out a bag of miniature carrots, a tangerine, and a clump of something meat-ish, then dumped them all on the counter.

  Ten years had been a long time. Still, I was shocked. Brenda’s face was husk-like now, as if all the juiciness had been suctioned out of it. Her hair was shorn close to her scalp, giving her a piebald look. And her frame, at least fifteen pounds lighter, was overwhelmed by a shapeless, lavender smock and slate blue, industrial-looking pajamas. Day-Glo plastic clogs, the color of parking cones, were jammed on her feet.

  I’d never been big on social media—truth be told, I used it mostly to network for the Privileged Kitchen and, okay, to spy on my kids—I had a fake account for that—Kayla McMullins, age sixteen, obsessed with One Direction and bubble tea—but in the years since I’d gotten sober, I’d occasionally worked up the courage to google Brenda, hoping to reconnect. Yet nothing had ever come up for her personally—no Facebook page, no LinkedIn. Until this moment, that hadn’t struck me as terribly significant. But clearly, I had missed something big.

  “Sorry,” Brenda said to me. “This is the third time they’ve put me on hold. And some sadist put ‘That’s What Friends Are For’ playing on a loop.” Her eyes registered my own disheveled appearance. Was I imagining it, or was there a flicker of pity on her face? “Why don’t you put that in the corner?” She nodded toward my guitar case.

  Turning around, I nearly tripped over a little boy barreling into the kitchen. He was darker-skinned than Brenda, dressed in a gray school uniform and laced oxblood-colored shoes; a young Hispanic woman hurried behind him, fussing with an Avengers backpack. She had a belted coat thrown hastily over what looked like pajamas, wild dark hair falling into her face. “I know, we’re late. What do you think? Should I Uber it?”

  “Hold on.” Brenda clicked off her earpiece, swept the food on the counter into a vinyl pouch, and knelt before the boy. “Eli, I want you to remind Ms. Halperin that you get lactose-free milk today, okay?”

  The boy reached into the bag and took out a box of raisins. He shook it like a castanet. “Hey. Morse code. I can send a message. S-O-”

  “Eli, did you hear me? Sweetie, put those away.”

  “Do you read me, roger? Copy over and out!” he announced in that earnest way children have when they’re testing out a new phrase.

  Noticing me, he grew quiet. His eyes, as they scrutinized me, were dark and liquid; they seemed to take up the entire top of his face. I could see whole worlds alive and afloat in them, molecules, tiny galaxies. He was, I thought with a pang, around seven or eight, at that age full of ricocheting energy and wonder, when I’d enjoyed my kids the most.

  “Say hello, Eli,” Brenda nudged.

  Kids are like dogs; if they dislike or distrust you, they let you know it immediately. Sidling over to Brenda, he glowered at me. “Are you a doctor?”

  “No. Sweetie, Donna is an old friend of Mommy’s. Now, go with Marisol. And hurry. It’s already ten to nine.”

  “Come on, Eli,” the Hispanic woman said in a singsong, coaxing voice designed to mask her irritation. “Otherwise, I’m going without you.”

  Brenda herded him toward the front door. “Now, you’re going to be good today, yes?” She kissed him on the forehead. “You’ve memorized your times tables? Okay. Au revoir, mon petit chou-chou.”

  “Au revoir, maman.”

  She stood on the threshold beaming and waving until the sound of their footsteps receded down the stairwell. Then she locked the door with a definitive series of clicks.

  “Brenda,” I said, stunned. “You have a kid.”

  “Surprise.” She plopped down across the sofa bed and massaged the bridge of her nose. “Alors. Sometimes I feel like I have three of them.”

  I sat down heavily beside her at her feet. “My God. How did I not know that?”

  “Ten years is a long time, sweetie.”

  I felt profoundly disoriented. I did not know where to even start. “And that woman?” I tried to sound casual, though my mind was pinballing: Was she a nanny? A lover? Brenda had not been a lesbian in college, but after Joey, who the hell knew what people really were.

  “Marisol?” Brenda said breezily. “Oh, I met her at the hospital. I let her crash here between her shifts, and she helps out with Eli whenever I just can’t move anymore.” Heaving herself up, she shuffled over to the coffee table and began stiffly gathering up discarded food containers.

  The hospital?

  In the daylight of the living room, I could now see how sunken Brenda’s eyes looked when she was not smiling. Little patches of ashy skin dotted her hairline and jaw. Her hair hadn’t been trimmed at all, it occurred to me. Rather, it was growing back.

  “Oh my God, Brennie,” I said. “You’re sick.”

  Brenda stared at me, her face morphing from disbelief to bemusement. “No, sweetie,” she said after a moment. “I’m just exhausted. I’ve been on call for sixteen hours straight.”

  “What? I thought you left the Channeling Channel?”

  “Not there.” She nodded toward the buildings just beyond her window. “Mount Sinai.”

  I stared at her and she stared back, willing me to comprehend. Finally, it clicked. “No!” I barked. “Shut up!”

  Brenda grinned. “Can you believe it?”

  “Oh, my God! You’re DR. PEEBLES now?”

  A prim, triumphant look came over her face.

  “Oh my God,” I said again. “But I thought you hated medicine.”

  “Well, I never hated it.”

  “But when? How? Brenda!”

  She made a pppffffttt sound. “Let’s get you some coffee, shall we? I need tea. I’m exhausted and wired at the same time.”

  “Dr. Peebles!”

  “Yeah. I know.” She shook her head disbelievingly as I trotted behind her back to the kitchen. “I had to retake three semesters of undergraduate science first because everything I’d learned at Michigan was about fifteen years out of date.” She filled a kettle with water. “Let me tell you. Organic Chemistry is a helluva lot harder in your thirties than when you’re nineteen.” She set a box of Kashi cereal hastily on the table and a carton of rice milk and a bag of craisins. “Sorry about this ‘birthday breakfast.’ Fresh Direct hasn’t come yet.”

  “But?” My brain felt like a collision. “Brenda. You were rich. You were famous.” A muscle in my left calf began to spasm. I started jiggling my leg, trying to get it to stop.

  Brenda twisted on the gas with a tick-tick. A ring of purple-blue flame whooshed on the stove. “Madame LaShonda Peyroux was a joke, Donna. You knew that.” She set the kettle down on the burner. “But somehow, I went from delivering the punch line to being it. No matter what I tried to pitch, all the networks were interested in having me do was a reality show. ‘LaShonda Peyroux’ back ‘home’ in Kingston, cooking jerk chicken. Telling fortunes. Auditioning reggae singers in talent contests. Tell me that’s not the most insane and insulting thing you’ve ever heard?” She yanked open a drawer.

  “Well,” I said. “I guess.”

  “All this ‘reality television.’ Donald Trump. The Kardashians. Soon people won’t be able to tell what’s real or fake at all anymore.” With a clatter, she rooted around for a strainer.

&
nbsp; Her phone vibrated. She glanced at it. Yanking the kettle off the stove, she poured boiling water into a china teacup.

  “Once I adopted Eli?” She tossed two spoons onto the table. “Oh, I was just done. I thought, ‘Barack Obama’s running for president; Oprah has her own media empire. But I’m playing some sort of psychic mammy on cable? This voodoo Aunt Jemima?’” She shook her head with surprising violence.

  “Oh, Brennie, no,” I said quickly. “You really helped people. I saw.”

  “One evening, I was in my dressing room, tying on my ‘Rasta’ kerchief, and I saw a stamp on it: ‘Made in China.’ And I looked at myself in that big, movie star makeup mirror, trimmed with all those blazing white bulbs. And I heard a voice as clear and as loud as if I had channeled it myself: YOUR. MOTHER. WAS. RIGHT. And I thought: There has got to be a far better way for me to serve humanity than this. Right then and there, I called my lawyer. ‘I’ll pay whatever’s necessary to break my contract,’ I told him. And I did.” She pried open a tin on her little table. “Biscotti?”

  I shook my head, trying to absorb it all. “Yeah, well,” I said after a minute. “I certainly know what it’s like to be a shitty role model for your kids, Bren.” I gave a mirthless little wave. “Drunky McDrunkenstein here. World-famous kitchenware shill. Voted ‘Biggest Embarrassment’ by not one, but two teenagers.”

  “Ha.” Brenda looked at me—not pityingly but with deep, knowing appreciation. And there it was. Our old connection. Shylock and Dreadlock. The years falling away, but also fattening us, giving us heft and deep, renewed reserves of love and goodwill. She cocked her head. “It’s good to see you, milady.”

  “It’s good to see you, milady.”

  “You know, I can’t tell you the last time I had a real conversation with someone my own age that wasn’t medical.” Stirring her tea, she smiled sadly. “Not a lot of people understand where I’m coming from, Donna. A black, single mother in her forties doing a medical residency? I’m like a unicorn. That’s what I was thinking this morning when I realized it was your birthday. I was remembering how we’d just pour out our hearts to each other and laugh our asses off. How we just ‘got’ each other, you know? And then, twenty minutes later, voilà! You called out of the blue.”

  “Oh, Bren. I was driving, and I saw this sign for a fortune-teller. A literal sign! And I was just, like, ‘I have to call Brenda immediately!’”

  Yet deep inside me was that insistent throb, like a bass line: I need, I want, fill me. “But you don’t do readings at all anymore? Not even for, like, friends?” I took a big gulp of coffee, which was a mistake, because my throat was still scorched from the chicken wings; I coughed and tried to smile. “I mean, Brenda, I know you did it all very tongue-in-cheek, but you do have a gift.”

  Brenda pulled out her earpiece and tossed it on the table.

  “Donna. Tell me. Why are you here, exactly?” She twisted her tea bag around on her spoon and garroted it with its little string. “Did you really just decide to go on a drive?” Before I could answer, she continued, “Because I’ve got to tell you. You smell of beer. And piña coladas.”

  “Oh, no. That’s just Febreze. ‘Aloha Hawaii.’ I sprayed it on my pants.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “After, okay, I spilled beer on them.” I set down my coffee. “I was this close to drinking, Brenda.” I held up my thumb and forefinger. “I even had a mug in my hand. But I dropped it. And I took this as a ‘divine intervention.’ Ha-ha.”

  My teeth were starting to chatter, I realized. The coffee was bolstering the Adderall. “Yeah. I wouldn’t believe me, either. It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. I am a ridiculous person, Bren.” Suddenly I started to tear up. “I’ve been sober five years, six months, and sixteen days now. But it just doesn’t get any easier, you know? I hate going to meetings because everybody, they’re always like, Oh, my sobriety is the best thing ever and Oh, life is so much better! But me?” I wiped my eyes on the back of my wrist. “You’re never supposed to say it, but I loved being an alkie. I felt funny, and alive, and like I had some of my old edginess back. Now, I’m just in pain all the time. I feel insatiable, Bren. Why is that so great? Why is that such a virtue?”

  She looked at me. “So,” she said carefully, “you left Joey?”

  “What?” I set down my mug and sat upright. “So you do remember! I knew it!” I pounded the table. “You foresaw this whole thing!”

  She looked at me oddly. “Sweetie. You just drove nonstop from Michigan to New York City covered in room deodorizer. Alone, on your birthday. It doesn’t take a genius.”

  Her phone vibrated again; she glanced at it. “Shit.” Snatching it up this time, she typed something rapidly. “Dammit.”

  “Brenda?” I leaned forward. “Our last night at U of M, you did this really big, past-life regression for me, going all the way back to ancient Babylon? And you told me that in the middle of my life—I would have, like, this big, sudden crisis—but you also saw something I was supposed to do, maybe to avert it or to fix it—though you never got around to saying exactly what it was—okay, I think we were high at the time—but now, I know it sounds crazy, but I was just wondering if maybe you remembered any of it—”

  Her phone pinged again. “Donna, look,” she said quickly, her eyes on her screen. “I’m sorry. But I do not do that stuff anymore.” Grabbing her phone, she said into it, “Yeah, I just saw. Tell him not to worry.”

  “But, can you recall even just a little?” My voice was rising. “I mean, just to even humor me? Or, didn’t we record it?” Vaguely, I remembered a red Panasonic tape player. “Wasn’t there a tape?”

  Brenda set down her phone and looked at me, dead-eyed. Her annoyance was suddenly palpable. She pushed back her chair. “Look, I’m sorry, D., but this is my one day off in like, months, and I’ve got fifty thousand things to do.” She picked up her phone as if it were evidence. “And now, I’ve just gotten something else added to my list.”

  “Oh God.” Suddenly, I realized how repellent I was being, how presumptuous it was to think I could just show up on her doorstep like this. “I’m so sorry. I have no business doing this.” Struggling to my feet, I picked up my dirty cereal bowl to put it in the sink, then saw there was no room. “I’m just a massive wreck, is all.” As I whirled around looking for someplace to set it down, my spoon clattered to the floor and I banged into the table. “Shit, shit. I am such an asshole.” I looked at her plainly. I was shivering again for some reason. “Oh, Bren. Can you forgive me?” I fanned myself with one hand. “Goddamn perimenopause. I’m, like, waterworks here.”

  Brenda cocked her head. Slowly, she reached over and pressed her hand to my cheek. “Look, Donna. I’m sorry I never wrote back. I always meant to. I just got completely overwhelmed with medical school, and Eli.” She sighed, not unkindly. “It was obviously very difficult for you to write. And it meant so much to me. It really did, Donna. I did understand. Our lives had become such opposites.”

  I squinted at her. I’d missed a segue somewhere.

  Then, it came to me: Step Nine: Make amends to the people I’d harmed. When I’d first started in the program, I’d actually written Brenda a letter. How had I possibly forgotten? My brain seemed to have a damaged hard drive—or had sobriety wiped it clean?

  Brenda knit her hands around the back of her neck and stretched extravagantly. “That last time we were hanging out together, in Chicago? You were talking to me, Donna, about your kids. And you said to me, ‘I would die for them, Brenda. Who the hell would you die for in your life?”’

  “Good God, I said that? That’s horrible. That’s a horrible thing to say to someone.” I recalled again that nightmarish evening, my jealousy drenching everything like a knocked-over martini. I winced as I saw myself barking at a patron who’d politely asked me to please lower my voice. Brenda finally announcing, I think we’re done here, and me saying, Not me, sister.

  “Well,” Brenda said carefully, “it was memorable. But. It
did get me thinking, Donna. Who would I die for in my life? Who would I ever love or want to protect so fiercely? Maybe, sure, the ‘biological clock’ kicked in. But I think, frankly, you’re the one who first planted the seed.”

  “Wow.” I leaned back, considering this. It was the first time that any of my drunken behavior seemed to have amounted to any good.

  Brenda yawned again. “Look. Where are you headed next? Do you have a plan?”

  Embarrassed, I shook my head. I realized that up until that moment, there was still a little part of me that was hoping against hope that I might stay with Brenda a little while—that she still had a luxury condo with a guest room where I could squirrel away and clear my head for a little while. Oh, I was a fool. “Is there maybe a cheapish hotel nearby?”

  She made a ppffftt sound. “Not really.”

  “I guess, all I was hoping for, Bren, was some sort of a clue. When you did that reading for me? Maybe, okay, it was a goof—but your prediction, it really did stay with me. And I keep thinking, why? There has to be a reason, right? And now my life has pretty much imploded, just as you’d said it would one day, so I was just hoping to find out. Is this actually part of some greater plan that you might have foreseen—even by accident? Is my marriage salvageable? Am I supposed be on a path to something better now? I mean—I just feel, Brenda, that piece by piece, I sort of bargained myself away over the years. And now, I don’t know what to do. Literally. Once I get out of the parking lot here, I don’t even know if I turn left or right.”