Losing It

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“‘It’s a forgotten art,’ is what he always used to say,” she said.

“Gosh,” I said, thinking about walking around hot, flat, gridshaped neighborhoods wearing a business suit.

“How long do you think you’ll be staying with your aunt?” she said, turning back to me and reaching for an olive. We were now standing in the kitchen, where some snacks had been laid out.

“A few months, until the end of summer.”

A wistful look came over her face. She looked into the distance. “You’re lucky.”

“What do you mean?”

“To get to spend so much time with Vivienne. She’s such an adventurous soul.”

“Yeah,” I said, somewhat confused.

“We were all so impressed when we heard about Bora Bora.”

“Bora Bora?”

She nodded, popped a cube of cheese into her mouth. “You know, not that many people would do what she did—just go and live there by themselves for a year. It takes a lot of guts. She’s hilarious about it, too. The coconut pantomime? You should ask her about it. I wish I could have gone.”

“Yeah,” I said, impressed. “I will.”

Someone came up to us and said it was probably a good time to start thinking about serving the cupcakes and our conversation ended.

I talked to a few more people, and then wandered around a little with a cup of juice. I was studying some framed pressed flowers when I happened to look over and see Aunt Viv talking to a group of the women. She was holding up a decorative crystal goblet—the light glinted through it—and telling a story. She was talking quickly. Her hair was coming out of her braid a little, and her face was flushed. It was something funny; the people listening were giggling and paying close attention. I could see that in this context, with these women, she had a kind of power. She was presiding, divvying out attention and eye contact while they all stood around with open faces. Everyone burst out laughing at the same time, and she looked around in a happy, calculating way.

Later, in the car, I asked her about it.

“So you went to Bora Bora?”

“What?” she said, looking over at me, bemused.

“Didn’t you live there for a year?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Karen said—about the coconut pantomime?”

“Oh.” She reddened. She became visibly flustered. She started messing with the radio dial and accidentally hit the turn signal, which started clicking.

“This thing,” she said, annoyed, poking at it, and then the windshield wipers came on.

“So you went there?” I said, prompting her again, once she’d turned them off and a few moments had passed.

She nodded quickly without looking at me. The atmosphere in the car became warped and strange. We sat in silence the rest of the way.

It was only later that night, thinking back on the incident and trying to decipher her behavior that I realized what had happened. Aunt Viv had acted exactly like someone caught in a lie. She’d never gone to Bora Bora. She’d made up a story and then forgotten about it until I brought it up. I thought of the imperious way she presided over her friends at the party, how she basked in their admiration; her obvious pleasure as she conducted the moment, and the look of triumph on her face when they burst out laughing. I could see embellishing a little bit, but what kind of person would make up a story that outlandish completely out of nowhere? What did Viv want the world to think of her?

Four (#u60715742-d190-5519-81b0-477bfe02aca0)

I stared at a colossal man named Ed Branch. He was like a mountain in a swivel chair. His huge face appeared to be melting, his cheeks sagging, the shiny skin under his eyes dripping down in two wide, flat drops. He was smiling at me in a jovial way. I took a sip from a glass of water on the heavy mahogany desk in front of me. There was a framed picture of an equally robust person—his wife, I assumed—caught unawares and laughing with a watering can, her face plump and happy, and I imagined they regularly had bawdy, baseboard-pounding sex, and then every once in a while she would watch him doing little boyish things, and her heart would burst.

And then there was Wes, sitting next to him. Wes seemed like a nice guy, too. He was young, grave, and ex-military. He had a knee-jerk politeness about him, old-fashioned and Southern. I wondered if that meant he’d be the same in bed, attentive to your every need with perfect decorum. Or maybe that consideration could turn cold and sharpen into cruelty. I wondered if this was something you could tell about a person.

“What was it you said you did at this Quartz Consulting?” said Ed. His hand absently wandered over to a nut bowl.

I was interviewing with them for a job at a firm called Kramer Branch, a week after I’d arrived in Durham. My third day there, with Viv gone again, the house quiet, I was stretched like a piano string. Everything had sputtered out—the essay I started writing; it was too hot to go for a walk. I tried reading in different rooms, but I couldn’t get into a book. I ended up in the sunroom, feeling half deranged, looking at a dusty craft manual on weaving. Finally, in defeat, I pulled over my laptop and started looking for part-time work. Plus, I thought, how was I ever even going to meet people? I needed to get out of this house and into town.

This job, part-time afternoon receptionist, was the first thing that had come up for which I looked remotely qualified, and I’d only have to come in after one o’clock every day.

“I facilitated communications by sourcing available online assets about solutions on higher education and applied them to a dynamic Web portal,” I said. “I was the social media pulse of the entire company.”

Wes and Ed looked at each other uncomfortably.

“Well,” said Ed, “what we really need here is someone to answer the phones for the afternoon shift. Run the odd errand.”

“I think I would thrive at that,” I said.

Two days later I was in my business clothes, making the twenty-minute drive back there for my first afternoon. The offices were in an old dry-goods store next to the train tracks, repurposed and outfitted with beige carpeting and wallboard and new windows in shiny plastic sashes. I walked inside, letting the glass door sigh shut behind me. Midday light came through some blinds and striped the floor. It was quiet except for an ambient electric drone. I looked around—maybe everyone had gone to lunch. I walked past a fraying taupe sofa and a glass coffee table with dingy magazines and up to the front desk, behind which was sitting one of the oldest people I’d ever seen in my life. She had sparse, short gray hair. She was wearing a patterned prairie dress with a frilly collar. Her face was an elaborate network of wrinkles and she looked wind-beaten, like she’d spent her life wandering through desert cliffs. She was trying to pull some cotton out of a huge bottle of vitamins, and her glasses were about to fall off her nose, and everything about her seemed to be teetering on the verge of disaster and I wasn’t sure if I should help or intervene in any way.

I stood there and waited for her to notice me. She teased out some strands of cotton.

“Excuse me?” I said. No response.

“Hello?” I said, and then, after a moment, “Can I help with that?”

Still nothing.

I stared at a plushy stuffed dog sitting up and hanging its legs over the edge of the table.

I was about to go knock on a door when I heard someone bustling down the stairs. It was a woman with a helmet of gray hair wearing flowing pastel vacation clothes. “Hi there,” she said. She arrived in front of me and extended her arm and about fifty bangles slid down. “You must be Julia.”

“Hi, yes,” I said, shaking her hand.

She turned to the old lady.

“Caroline,” she said.

Nothing.

“Caroline!” She banged on a desk bell a bunch of times.

The old lady looked up. “Jeannette,” she said loudly.

Jeannette took the vitamins from her and yanked out the cotton and gave them back. “This is Julia,” she said loudly. “She’s our new afternoon receptionist.”

“Hi,” I said.

We stared at each other.

Jeannette and I went up the stairs. “She’s James Kramer’s mother,” she said. She glanced at me sideways and rolled her eyes. “She used to be a judge. Down in Florida? Now she helps out around here.” And then, as an afterthought, as if she felt bad: “A lot of grit there. A lot of wisdom.”

“Sure,” I said.

We walked around and she pointed out all the things I would have to do each day. I was to keep track of the supply closet, water the plants, make sure the conference rooms were ready when there was going to be a meeting by putting coffee out, answer the phones at the front desk for a few hours, dust a row of glass clocks that were awarded at a yearly conference, run a package up to the titles office on Green Street now and then, and other low-grade tasks. Since there wasn’t much to say about the job, most of our conversation centered around the cruise Jeannette had just taken with her husband.

“Did anyone jump overboard?” I said.

She shrieked with laughter. “No, hon,” she said.

“Was all the food free?”

“It was, it was. And get this, there was a different ice sculpture in the shrimp every night. I said to Ken, I said, ‘What do they do with the old ones? Lick ‘em?’”

I laughed. “That’s right,” I said. “They just lick them down.”

“They say, ‘Now lemme get that shrimpy ice thing. I wanna lick it!’”

We both cracked up, with her elbowing me in the ribs a little. I thought I had found a kindred spirit, and later I would be a little crestfallen to realize that Jeannette had this dynamic with pretty much everyone and would laugh at anything you said as long as it was under your breath and in a secretive manner.

I met Wes again. He was on the phone and gave me a polite nod. Ed Branch was tenderly pruning an office plant. I was introduced to a paralegal roughly my age named Allison Block. She looked up from her salad in a friendly way and shook my hand over her desk. I met James Kramer for the first time. He was on the phone and waved us away.

Just like that the flurry of activity was over and I was sitting at the front desk, by myself, in the quiet. I could see a pebble walkway through the glass front door. I was on the ground floor of the building, and something about the awning outside, and the way the light slanted in, gave the impression of the room filling up with shade from the ground up, like an aquarium would with water. Everything was becoming submerged: the taupe sofa, the coffee table, a picture in a heavy brass frame. I swiveled around in my chair. I checked my e-mail. I contemplated quitting, if not tomorrow then the day after that. Because what was I doing in this staid, afternoon-y place when what I should really be doing was working at a restaurant or something like that—a place with people my age and alcohol and energy and lines that could be crossed? I probably would have made up some excuse and found a way out, if it wasn’t for what happened the next day.

It was about three in the afternoon and I was sitting there, looking through a calendar featuring North Carolina’s flora and fauna when Jeannette swished by and asked me to take a file up to one of the lawyers, someone I hadn’t met before.

His office was upstairs and at the far end of the building, next to a line of windows that overlooked the train tracks. It was deserted in that part, except for an abandoned copy machine and some dusty boxes of files and a secretary’s desk to the side of the door, where I saw that Caroline, the old lady, was now sitting. She appeared to be dozing in her chair, the same prairie dress bunched up around her neck, her head lolling to the side. I crept past and knocked. No answer. I knocked a little louder.

I was about to walk away when something stopped me. I stood and looked at Caroline and the crumpled way she was sitting. Her head was lying back against the chair. Her mouth was open. She was positioned like a rag doll that had been thrown from across the room and happened to land that way—one hand resting in her lap, the other dangling down by her side. Her legs were lolling open under her dress. She looked deflated, inanimate. My eyes rested on her chest, searching, I realized, for the rise and fall of breath. I didn’t detect anything and my heart started beating faster and I was just raising my hand to cover my mouth when there was a voice behind me.

“She’s not dead.”

I turned around. It was a man a little taller than me. He had a ponytail. He looked to be in his forties and had thick brown eyebrows and a forehead that cropped out over the rest of his face.

“Oh, sorry” I said. “I wasn’t—”

“No, no, it’s fine, I do that a lot, too. Not stare at her,” he said quickly. “But, you know, wonder if she’s dead.”

I turned back around. I squinted.

“Are you sure she’s not?” I said.

“Well, ninety-nine percent.”

We stood there.

“Man she’s old,” I said.

“Yeah.” He leaned back on his heels. I felt him look me up and down. “She’s basically a wizard at this point.”

We stared for a moment longer.

“She’s a great woman,” he said, as if he felt bad. “Very wise.”

“Sure,” I said.

He turned to me, smiled in an open way, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Elliot.”

“I’m Julia,” I said.

We turned back.

“Why does she have all those seashells on her desk?” I said, pointing to a chalky pile of shells and rocks.

“It’s just … Don’t ask. Her grandson. I don’t know.”

“Is she your secretary?”

“Technically, yes.”

We continued to stare.

Caroline’s eyes snapped open.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“I’ll just be getting back to my office,” Elliot said loudly.

“Elliot Grouse?” I said. “Here.” I shoved the folder at him and we quickly walked in opposite directions.

Back down at the front desk, I kept thinking about the interaction. I ate some mints from the mint bowl. I swiveled around. I ripped off a bunch of pages from the flora-and-fauna calendar. Elliot. Elliot Grouse. He had big eyebrows and sleepy eyes and features that sat low on his face. I answered the phone. I searched through the drawers and sharpened all the pencils. It was something about the way he’d looked at me. There was an ingredient there that I needed to isolate.

I finally put my finger on it—it was appreciation. He’d so appreciatively appraised me and shaken my hand and smiled. It was a smile that was approving and receptive and open to all possibilities.

I felt jittery. I ate another mint. I turned the floppy, plushy dog over and over in my hands. There was something there, definitely, I thought. Maybe this was going to be easy. Maybe it wouldn’t be hard to pour myself into the opening that smile had given because there was a touch of desperation there, too, on his part, I could tell. I thought of his ponytail and his wet appreciation, and the way he looked at me as if I were smeared across the universe and he was dazzled but also wistful.

He reminded me of this couple I’d seen on a tour of the Air and Space Museum in D.C. They both had really long hair and the guy was wearing a cape and holding a stuffed animal, and the woman was wearing a bustier like a medieval wench would wear and they were just drinking each other in the whole time. A sense of hostility and suspicion rose against them from the rest of the group, but I was fascinated. The woman wore dark red lipstick and was overweight but walked as if she had gold coins jingling in her limbs. You could tell they were just really happy to have found each other and they didn’t care what anyone thought and there was nothing either of them could do that would be embarrassing in front of the other person.