. . .
One morning, almost two years ago, the head of the publishing house where I worked called me in when no one else was around. Red-faced, he blurted out the news, said the department was restructuring. I was leaving. He labeled the severance “generous” and passed me a white form I was to sign. “You’ll want to do that as soon as possible,” he told me. “If you want to get the severance.”
Back in my office, I reviewed the form calling for everything but organ harvest and the renunciation of God and country. It was lengthy. I got a little emotional. I felt like Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? When I tried to call my authors to tell them what had happened, I froze. Within moments, the publisher was back at my door.
“Have you signed the form yet?”
I didn’t respond. My head was full of voices; I went outside to try to get it together. As I passed the publisher’s office, the question came again: “Have you signed the form yet?’
I stayed in bed for days, listening to the voices fling curses. I hadn’t worked hard enough. I hadn’t gotten it right. Work was all. I am nothing, nothing without work. No one is. Not without work. Harry worked hard; Bill worked hard; Mammy worked hard; Betty worked hard. Shut up.
I considered possible options (migrant opportunities, Bedouin lifestyle, armed retaliation, drug mule). When I told my mother about the “restructuring,” she kept using the term “firing” and it stung. “I wasn’t fired,” I kept saying. “I was restructured. I now have an atrium lobby.”
I went to the Miracle Room and screamed at a few street people. I didn’t use drugs, though I wanted to. After all the years, I still wanted to escape. Work was what I had, who I had always been. It was where I was most comfortable. It was gone.
. . .
This morning, trying to fit all the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, I listen to Betty on the phone with Betsy, a close friend whose calls perk my mother up like nothing else. Betsy is seventy or so; to Betty she is practically a teenager. She gets invited to lots of parties. My mother is flattered by the attentiveness of one so young and popular. And wealthy. Betsy has money, land.
Betty has been scared that Betsy and her husband will move to Florida where they have a condo, but now my mother is laughing, suddenly very pleased. Betsy, diagnosed last spring with breast cancer, has completed treatment, and overhearing Betty’s responses, I sense happy news.
“I love you too, Betsy,” says my mother. “I love you too.”
It is strange to hear her say these words out loud. It stops me for a minute because my mother is so open and sounds so cheerful.
Betsy’s eldest daughter was once considered the prettiest girl around, but she got involved with a man—“from Joplin,” Betty says, if that explained everything—interested in her parents’ money. There were ugly scenes, gossip, my kind of relationship. Finally the couple divorced and Betsy’s daughter has never remarried. Betty calls this is a tragedy. People forced to live by conventions are always the first to enforce them. I think this applies to my mother. A practical investor, she bought stock in the usual choices because they ordinarily pay off without risk or pain. She never imagined they could betray her or that anyone close would break them.
Never a practical investor, I have always gone for the crazy horse.
I am alone. I don’t have a regular job now. Betty believes I am a bit of a tragedy, like Betsy’s daughter and this makes my mother angry. She would never admit it, even to herself, and she would never hurt me, but I feel her disappointment sometimes. I’ve done my time with it, this sense of letting her down.
“Did you hear Betsy’s news?” Betty asks. “She’s going to be okay.”
“I guess she and Ed can go ahead and move now.”
My mother’s face falls. I have lobbed a little bomb. I have to do something to change my mood—something you don’t purchase by the gram or liter.
After scanning the Internet, I head to a recovery meeting in Hannibal, on the Mississippi, a hilly place where, in the minds of schoolchildren, Huck and Tom will always wander. River towns seem to always draw drunks and druggers, and this one hosts an especially large number of group homes for addicts, alcoholics, and the mentally ill. At the meeting, a woman is standing at the bottom of the steps of the church, wearing old black tennis shoes with black socks. Her hair, a tumbling tower, is strewn with little butterfly barrettes to hold it up. Her name, she says, is Mary. She is seven years off alcohol. When I tell her I am from New York, she says, “Jesus. That far.”
When I say I am staying with my mom, Mary responds, “Gotcha . . . Here?”
“In Paris.”