Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You Read online

  “They made short work of me,” she says.

  The walking papers quickly become a placemat for a Diet Coke, and we laugh at the thought of the boss coming back out to an empty office and marvel at Gillian’s full-of-glee Mary Poppins attitude at being terminated. We half expect her to break into song, but instead she breaks out a sheet from the packet that reveals the job description and age of every employee being fired today. “I only had a chance to look at it quickly,” she says, putting her finger on the list.

  There’s Artie. There’s Gillian. There’s … me.

  No one else.

  “Now that I know I didn’t get fired I’m kind of sorry I drank the tequila,” Josie says. “I don’t feel so hot. Maybe they’ll let me go home early.”

  My cellphone rings. The boss. I ignore it, but I know this is a summons I can’t escape for long. Instantly I am separated from those who fled here beside me. Those sitting directly across the table are now simply workers on lunch break arguing over pizza toppings—mushroom or pepperoni?

  I am a fugitive.

  the smell of fresh-cut grass

  I don’t want to go home. It’s all a blur, but somewhere between helping Josie carry a pile of office-worn Bratz dolls to her Audi and recovering from smacking my head directly into Gregg’s during our getaway, I had made an erratic cellphone call to my wife, Anna. Blurting the words “They’ve come for us. All of us!” and her responding, “Who? Who’s come for you? What the hell are you talking about?” is vivid in my memory, but beyond that I’m not sure what I said. And now I don’t want to say anything.

  I drive away from the office building but only travel about two miles down the road before I pull over, park beneath a huge banyan tree, and start walking toward a small shopping center. I am a master at stalling, even in moments of crisis. I have done this before, allowing procrastination to cushion me from the inevitable.

  When my two children were younger I was bludgeoned by a phone call at work from the sheriff’s office, notifying me that there had been a car accident “involving your wife and son … and daughter.” The lieutenant spoke in generalities—where the accident occurred, what hospital they were transported to—but didn’t reveal specifics. I asked no questions beyond directions. The hospital was thirty minutes away and I wanted that extra half hour of not knowing. I stayed behind the slowest cars. I prayed for lights to turn yellow. I wanted to stretch the highway like taffy, but no matter how much I tried, the hard facts were not going to allow me a soft landing. My mind was racing. Anna had been taking them to pick strawberries. She would have driven the only single-lane highway that goes out west of town. She would have been flying. She had been talking strawberries with a passion all week. She is passionate when it comes to fruit.

  We survived that. We will survive this. This is not that kind of bad, I keep telling myself. But how is Anna going to take it? I’ve felt our marriage teetering as it is. We’ve never had a ton of money to go out on the town with, but we’ve made up for it by doing everything together, even if it was just shopping for produce at the Green Market every Saturday morning or slaughtering overgrown shrubbery in the backyard on Sundays. We even sorted the laundry side by side. But lately Anna seems to be always racing. She writes the lists of what we need to accomplish in any given week, rips it in half, and it’s “OK, you go this way and I’ll go that way” with a kiss on the cheek. And even that kiss has become more fleeting. We are still a team, but now it’s more like a relay team full of well-timed handoffs and speedy getaways. We’ve changed, even from the way we were a year ago. But don’t get me wrong; neither of us behaves as if we are stewing in some sort of misery. If I suddenly pulled Anna aside and blurted some soap-opera line like “What has happened to us?” she’d certainly only laugh and say, “What the heck are you talking about? Finish putting the groceries away, you goofball. I’ve got to go online and pay bills.”

  Our relationship has become steeped in the action of what needs to get done next, but if some chore isn’t written on the erasable board on the fridge our relationship starts to lose its energy. Things rarely come spontaneously anymore. When it comes to sex I always have to initiate it now. She hardly ever turns me away but I just wish the need would come from her on occasion. In bed, I sometimes lie there in the dark fighting the urge to reach over and touch her. I lie still, just hoping she will come to me, but she never does.

  Anyway, if I had to sum it up, I’d say that on good days, ours is a union that is settled in for the long haul despite our differences. On bad days, I feel our marriage is set to autopilot on an aircraft that’s skipped a few maintenance checks. The AP knob is a bit iffy and unreliable and if the captain spends one more minute reading a Fareed Zakaria essay in the lavatory, we’re going down.

  Anna is so analytical. Will she immediately see nothing but dollar signs and financial collapse? She works as a tech for a solid family-owned medical lab but they offer lousy benefits and my pay made up almost two-thirds of our total income. Our debt far outweighs savings, and both our children are now in their teens and extremely needy. I can still hear Kristin’s voice from this morning, going on about how she’s been accepted for the high school’s dual enrollment program and will be able to get college credit for two classes. “Dad, all I need is a hundred and sixty-eight dollars for this macroeconomics book.” Ahh, I’m afraid we’re all about to get the economics lesson of our lives. Gregg is right. I don’t want to know what Post-its cost in the real world.

  When I get home, do I walk in the door and make some kind of royal announcement? Stand atop the stool in the kitchen we all use to reach the cinnamon on Sundays and say, “Gather ’round, family, I have some big news”? Do I let it creep up on them like the cat-on-the-roof story? “The economy has been awful and …” No, they would guess too soon. I’d barely have the economy tripping over the gutters before Andrew, my fourteen-year-old son, would blurt, “Dad, you lost your job, didn’t you?”

  When the boss ushered me into the office to face my demise I immediately started to go through a checklist in my head, trying to decipher why I was chosen. Age? In context, I’m only a little older than Keanu Reeves but not nearly as old as Prince. Performance? I could see my Lucite “Staffer of the Year” trophy from where I was sitting. Money? All things considered, I thought I came pretty cheap.

  The strip mall is new, too new for someone who just lost his occupation and wants to stare at window decorations for forty-five minutes while getting up the nerve to go home and face his family. Half the space is unoccupied and the few open businesses are small eateries already winding down from the lunch rush. I stop to read a menu, but I can’t get past the potato vichyssoise, leek, and butternut squash soups before I start zoning out. My eye catches a HELP WANTED sign two doors down and I immediately skip to coming through the door at home with a good news/bad news scenario. The bad news: Lost my job today. Good news: I start hostessing at Sushi Rock on Monday.

  A waitress clearing outside tables looks at me suspiciously and I don’t blame her. I’ve got sort of an exceeding hairline that makes me appear sinister. People are afraid I’m going to reach up and pull my woolly mop down like a ski mask and stick them up. They really are. Two women told me that in a bar once.

  I also have these spindly chicken legs. Well, they’re actually more like free-range chicken legs, which are a little more muscular than chicken legs because they’re … you know … running free. I sometimes think I’m a bit of an odd-looking earthling, but I’m probably just being self-conscious because people have said that once they get used to the sight of me (takes about two weeks) I’m actually “vaguely attractive.” Still, I always give people who eye me warily the benefit of the doubt, especially if I sneak up on them.

  The sidewalk ends. As I round back behind the shopping center toward the car, I am mesmerized by a heavy-equipment operator chiseling away at a slab of concrete. The iron claw he’s commandeering is gently nicking at the stone, barely breaking off a quarter-inch at a time.
A tall, bushy-haired worker standing cross-armed about ten feet away puts a hand up to halt me. “It’s not a safety thing,” he shouts. “You just need to watch this guy work. You don’t want to miss this. He’s a marvel.”

  “I was already admiring his skill,” I yell back.

  “Nobody handles the J784 Skit-Kat like this guy. I’d let him make love to my wife with that thing,” the worker says, his protruding belly jumping with glee, as if to celebrate a wonderful remark by its owner. I like when bellies are friendly. I’ve encountered far too many angry ones in my lifetime.

  When I get back to the car, it is circled by three landscapers with blowers raging. And my windows are open. Even on one of the worst days of my life, I love the smell of fresh-cut grass, but not on my steering wheel.

  I lean up against the tree and slide down to the ground, the jagged bark scraping against my back. My knees are touching my chin when I get a phone call. I spring up and see it’s a company number. “Maybe they want me back,” I say aloud, and honestly believe it. But it’s only Eileen, curious about my disappearing act from Rotelli’s and wanting to know, “Are you still alive?”

  I am.

  bed of confusion

  Anna is standing at the closet, still dressed in her work clothes, when I find her in the bedroom. Her eyes immediately go to the stack of papers gripped in my hands.

  “It happened” is all she says.

  Between the erratic phone call and my early arrival home, no doubt remains, no big explanation necessary.

  “What are we going to do?” I say.

  Her expression softens and she walks over to where I’m frozen in my tracks, takes me by both arms, and sits me down on the end of the bed. I have seen her do this with our children when they are so stricken with emotion they appear as if they are about to seize up.

  She flops down beside me and before you know it we are flailing the papers back and forth. It is like one of those scenes when a couple on the run pulls the heist of a lifetime and they empty a sack of cash onto a hotel bed to roll around in the dough, only we are steeped in the massive paperwork of my “involuntary separation.”

  To protect themselves, the company smothers you with details and it is hard to navigate toward what really matters. We are flopping about and sloppily attaching clothespins to any documents that seem as if they may be pertinent to the immediate future. This will be my instruction manual for the next several months and we are actually the antithesis of the renegade couple on the run. Our life is about to come to a complete halt.

  But there is still so much motion—stuff falling on the floor, pulling and tugging—“Let me see that.” “You already saw it.” “Give it back.”

  Long-limbed and coltish with penetrating blue eyes, people say Anna looks like a shorter or taller Amanda Peet, but no one seems to know how tall Amanda Peet is, so they’re not sure which. Honestly, they could even be the same height for all I know.

  “What does this even have to do with us?” Anna says, holding up a blue sheet titled “Required Taxes You Must Pay in North Dakota and Rhode Island.”

  “Who even knew Rhode Island and North Dakota had something in common,” I say.

  “Here’s the date for the last day dental will be covered,” she says, highlighting the day with a pink marker. “It’s coming up fast.”

  “I’m going on that exact date.”

  “Looks like the medical will last a little longer.”

  As I roll over, one of Anna’s clogs digs into my back and I almost fall off the side of the bed. When I right myself, all I see is color. Stretched across the bed, Anna is still wearing her lab scrubs emblazoned with starfish, octopus, sea turtles, the friendliest-looking moray eel you’ve ever seen in your life, and bubbles, hundreds of bubbles. She is passionate when it comes to fish. We have an aquarium in almost every room of the house and the cranberry gravel in the one on her bureau matches our bedroom carpet. Her wardrobe is awash in bright pinks and greens and blues.

  “Your closet looks like a clown’s closet,” I say, looking across the room at the rows of hangers.

  “Clowns don’t have closets,” she says. “They have trunks.”

  There was a time when Anna wore black to work on Mondays as sort of an inside joke, but it didn’t fit her personality. “And it was scaring the ducks by the lake behind our building,” she said at the time.

  Her work with blood and specimen handling always sounds like a grind to me, except on that rare occasion when she calls to tell me something like “We just got Jimmy Buffett’s blood in for a test. Everybody’s holding it up to the light like they expect to see cheeseburgers and coconuts floating in it.”

  As Anna flings a handful of papers in my face I flinch, but she laughs. I feel like I’m drowning in this mess, but she’s swimming in it. All I want to do is follow her upstream. That’s all I ever want to do, but I can never match her colors. Maybe I’m paranoid, but I think deep down she’s come to that realization. Or perhaps not so deep?

  I’m suspicious of Anna’s initial reaction to my job loss because she can often be all sunny and accepting of things on the surface, but then make an abrupt turn. Maybe this is a bad example, but at a wedding reception in the fall of 2006 she purposely tripped this guy Tim McCardle. McCardle is one of these guys that not only make racist remarks but also have to try to bring you in, like we’re all on the same side. Simple stuff like “Hey, Reiner, one more Haitian comes out of the kitchen and we’re out of here, right?” Most people just ignore him, but Anna, who had been all smiles up to that point, decided to stick out her foot and send him reeling onto the parquet floor with a splat that split his nose open. We fled before McCardle even knew what hit him, but when we got outside I saw our car had been moved to directly in front of the catering hall. It was all premeditated and planned. Right down to the getaway. “Damn straight. I’ve been setting that up for two years,” Anna said. She really seemed to get off on it. On a side road, only a couple of miles from the catering hall, she abruptly pulled over and we ended up having sex in the car. It was kind of a turn-on for me, too, having your wife trip a bigot. But, like I said, this isn’t the best example because these calculated moves of hers aren’t always so righteous and honorable. A better example will come to me.

  I’d had this job even before I knew Anna. I was about eight months in when I first encountered her at a bus stop and saved her from one of those parrot guys—you know, the ones who walk around with a macaw on their shoulder that’s crapping down the back of their shirt. They’re just hoping, praying, that some pretty girl will walk up and ask, “What’s the birdie’s name? What kind is it?” They’re all over down here in Florida, these guys: bus stops, the beach, McDonald’s. It’s very sad the way loneliness walks around in warm climates. All-year sunshine and efficiencies with no AC make this place a petri dish for desolation.

  On that afternoon, Anna was wearing flat shoes and a ground-scraping gauzy dress and I could spot from fifty paces away that she was obviously a bird lover. Maybe not the big, squawking, talking Polly-wants-a-cracker kind, but certainly a fan of the more elusive of the species, the ones that skitter through the brush giving you a quick glimpse of a yellow chest or a burnt orange plume. She was smiling at the macaw guy but was obviously trapped, so I stepped in and asked the requisite questions. They hate it when a dude asks the questions. I blocked Anna from view and asked, “What’s the birdie’s name? What kind is it? Why do you let it crap down the back of your tropical shirt like that?”

  And off he went, disappearing quicker than you can say, “For my next trick, I’ll need a volunteer.” When I turned to nod at Anna, she was giggling and said—I do not lie—“You’re a lifesaver.”

  In all my years, no one else had ever said to me, “You’re a lifesaver.” Half the time the people I save from the macaw guys look at me as if my pitiful rescue act is less than a step above the birdman’s lonely cry for help, but not Anna. She was not only appreciative of my valor; she wanted more. She asked me i
f I could pull the top of her water bottle up. It had been driving her nuts. She’d been pulling and tugging at it, and there were actually these two tiny drops of sweat at the border of her ginger-colored hairline from the struggle. As I watched, they slid down to the middle of her forehead and then stopped running as if they’d crystallized. When I reached for the bottle, she said, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  She shouldn’t have. I couldn’t get it open.

  I lie back on the bed. I’m exhausted. “A half day of unemployment and you’re going to become an afternoon sleeper?” Anna says.

  “And now we’ve got Andrew in that private school,” I say. “I can’t stop thinking how everything adds up.”

  “We’ll deal with it.”

  “I’m just … I know so many people are going through this but …”

  “Nothing happens until it happens to you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just clean this mess up before you fall asleep,” she says before heading to the kitchen to boil up some tea. “Put the pages back in order and I’ll put it all under the microscope after dinner. I want to go through all the fine print.”

  Propping myself back up on one elbow, I scan through three pages of Outplacement Services and then skip ahead to something called ISP Funding Rights. I don’t know what ISP is, but the people who head it up are called “fiduciaries of the ISP.” And they operate under the ERISA. What the hell is the ERISA? If we as a people were at some point to draw the line at using an acronym, I would think it would be at ERISA.

  I feel a little dizzy and one arm is shaking. I’m not sure if it’s from the awkward way I’m propped up or a fear that this is not just the end of my job, but of other things, things I don’t even know about yet.

  The whole situation reminds me of the sensation parents go through when they lose track of a small child in a large department store. The heart immediately gallops, the sweat pours. It takes only a second before you think you will never see that child again. I swear that’s how I feel, that I will never find a good, decent job again.