Why is there poop on the wall again?” Lucy yelled.
She didn’t expect an answer. She just wanted the universe to hear her. To hear that this was her life, a life of discovering poop on the wall. Again.
Because, really, is there any good answer to that question? Why was there poop on the wall? Because Lucy was a mommy. Because she had a five-year-old son with some challenges. Just because, really. Because, full stop.
Actually, not full stop. This is why there was poop on the wall: Because sometimes, when Wyatt went to the bathroom, he accidentally got some poop on his hand. And then he did what he considered the most efficient thing. He wiped his hand on the wall next to the toilet. Apparently, with his sensory issues, having poop on his hand was the equivalent of a neurotypical person having, say, acid on his hand. Think about it, Wyatt’s occupational therapist had said to Lucy. If you had acid on your hand, your brain might stop working normally. You might forget what your mother had told you a million times. You’d get rid of it the quickest way possible.
Which was all well and good, but for some reason, Wyatt never thought to tell her about it when it happened, so she was frequently surprised to find poop on the wall. She would sit down, intent on enjoying a rare moment of solitude, trying to eke out the most possible enjoyment she could get from a few minutes alone on the toilet, armed with a Real Simple or a Pottery Barn catalog or the free local newspaper, grabbing the tiniest of tiny pleasures for herself, a pleasure so tiny even calling it a pleasure was pathetic, and she would turn her head and find herself staring at a smear of drying-out shit.
Shoes that tied were the first thing to go.
Lucy needed shoes she could put on without using her hands, with a writhing, screaming, occasionally biting child in her arms, shoes she could tip up with her toes and slide her feet into without so much as bending a knee. Flip-flops when at all possible, clogs or Merrells the rest of the time.
Then it was earrings. Earrings were so long gone, the holes in her ears had closed up. Next it was eyeliner, then mascara, then returning phone calls, then going to the dentist, then looking in a full-length mirror before she left the house, then lip gloss, unless she found some in the bottom of her purse while she was stopped at a red light. There was more, of course. Pedicures, thank-you notes, RSVPs, Christmas cards, flossing, stretching, remembering birthdays, exfoliation. Basically, Lucy was down to nothing but deodorant, toothpaste, and a ponytail five days out of seven. She was lucky she was thin and had cheekbones and good skin.
Lucy had planned to move to Chicago after college, because that was where her friends were all headed, but her father had pronounced in that way of his, “If you’re going to move to Chicago, you might as well move to New York.”
It was good advice. The only time to move to New York City is when you’re fresh out of college, unless you happen to be rich. If you’re rich, you can move to New York whenever you want.
Lucy could still remember the moment she met Owen like it was yesterday. It was one of those disgusting East Coast summer days, where everyone was sweating and midtown Manhattan was perversely heaped with piles of garbage everywhere you looked. Lucy had just turned twenty-six and she’d gotten an interview for the job of her dreams. She arrived at Rockefeller Center on time, but there was a hang-up at security and her pass wasn’t there. She waited. And she waited some more.
By the time she finally got into the elevator, it was two minutes to one. The elevator was slow and hot and seemed to stop on every floor. Lucy was sweating—a combination of nervous sweat and residual city sweat—and she kept looking up at the elevator numbers and then down at her watch. All of a sudden, she felt a strong, cool breeze coming from her right. She turned her head and saw a tall man in a gray suit fanning her with the Metro section of his New York Times. He fanned her, wordlessly, while the elevator made its way up the next eighteen floors.
“Don’t worry,” the man said to Lucy as she stepped out of the elevator. “Whatever you’re doing, you’re going to be great.”
Lucy got the job.
She started out as a junior line producer for a morning network news show. It was a great job, but it was challenging. It wasn’t just making the trains run on time, it was making the trains run on time in a world where there were no tracks, no trains, no trial runs, no do-overs, and no excuses. She remembered the time she was covering a protest against the war in Iraq and one of the lazier grips told her he couldn’t manage the setup she wanted because the power cord couldn’t reach the outlet. “Anything can reach anywhere,” Lucy pronounced, and she marched across the street and bought three extension cords. Her boss, witness to this all, immediately gave her a promotion and a raise.
She lived in a world of concrete, solvable problems: Get a camera and the weatherman and a backup power source to a safe-but-seemingly-dangerous spot to cover the hurricane. It was difficult, it was stressful, and it was prestigious and relatively well paying, but it wasn’t particularly creative. Lucy thought about that, often, after she quit her job and moved up to Beekman. If she had been a writer or an artist, a photographer or a filmmaker or a poet, perhaps she could have found a way to wrestle some meaning out of the pockets of free time allotted to her. She could have pretended to write a screenplay in the spare room, could have joined the glassblowing collective, could have carried around a notebook and written down all of her interesting thoughts. Instead she had entered a world of problems that didn’t play to her strengths. She wasn’t the least bit tidy and she could find no satisfaction in housework. And then there was Wyatt, her lovable, impossible, unsolvable cipher.
Owen never forgot her face. That’s what he always said, how he explained it, how it was that he spotted her two years later, sitting at a bar on the Lower East Side.
“You were sweating in an elevator at Thirty Rock two summers ago,” Owen said to her. “I fanned you with my New York Times.”
“That was you?” said Lucy.
“It was me,” he said. “I’m Owen.”
“I’m Lucy,” she said.
“Hey, dude,” Lucy’s date, a hipster with a beard so long he looked like a lumberjack who’d gotten lost, said to Owen. “Uncool.”
“I hear you,” Owen said to the guy. “And I get where you’re coming from. But I’ve been looking for this girl for the past two years, and unless you two are married or she’s carrying your baby, I’m giving her my phone number.”
Owen and Lucy had been together ever since.
*