Stuck in Downward Dog, page 7
“Excellent news for you,” I said.
“He wants to know if I get a discount for getting two procedures at once.”
“Not likely. You know what Marjorie’s like,” I said, just as Marjorie walked through the door. I looked at my computer clock to confirm that she was right on time, and I hadn’t even started making the coffee yet. Which she was well aware of, as she looked into the kitchen, looked back at me with a glare and then huffed into her office.
“I thought I’d ask. Oh, and thanks for e-mailing me the info about that eye cream with vitamin K. I swear, I had dark circles last week and this week already, they’re gone. Considering that Ronin is now teething, I hardly think it’s due to increased sleep. Now I just need a stretch mark balm recommendation, since I’m guessing the lipo isn’t going to get rid of them.”
I told Rhonda I’d look for a solution for stretch marks, since there were few treatments that worked, booked her in for her breast lift and lipo session and then logged onto my e-mail. I was fairly certain I’d found one of Marjorie’s other clients a stretch mark balm that did the trick.
It wasn’t in my job description to look for other body blunder solutions, and in reality Marjorie would probably fire me if she knew I did it, since it showed initiative—something not highly commended at the slavery clinic, where all I was expected to do was file, make coffee, get lunch, book appointments and make sure she got to her personal appointments, such as massages and dog-grooming, on time. Also, Marjorie wouldn’t make money if her clients decided to use a product instead of a procedure. But helping her clients made me feel appreciated—something that didn’t happen often with Marjorie, unless I lucked out on a lunch choice for her. Besides, I had a roster of only about four women who relied on me to keep them up to date on such cosmeceuticals.
I hung up, leaving the other blinking lights to their own devices, and hurried into the kitchen to start the coffee as Esther Bartos, a statuesque but slightly overweight Czech woman, clacked through the door in leopard-print faux fur stilettos, carrying her purse-sized pooch under her arm. I looked at the schedule (she wasn’t slotted in) and prayed I hadn’t made a mistake. The last time I forgot to slot in a patient, Marjorie “forgot” to give me my paycheck for three days—illegal, but not unheard of at the slavery clinic.
Then I saw Mrs. Bartos’s eyebrows. They were hanging over her eyes, indicating an obvious emergency. She puffed air at them to get a reaction, which, of course, she got out of me.
I knew the background: Mrs. Bartos had had an eyebrow transplant two weeks ago to rectify the over-tweezing obsession she’d picked up in her teenage years and had stuck with well into her fifties. Although the transplant was quite a successful treatment, the hair used was from the back of the head so you needed to trim your brows regularly since the hair grew out of control.
“This is ridiculous!” she exclaimed furiously, yanking on the micro-mini black leather skirt she should’ve stopped wearing twenty years ago. “I want to get laser hair removal.”
“On your eyebrows?” I asked, perplexed.
“Obviously. I need to reduce the rate at which this hair is growing! I mean, I knew my hair grew fast, but this is ridiculous,” she reiterated.
“You just need to trim it,” I reminded her. “If you get laser, you’ll be back at square one—with no eyebrows. If you want, I can trim them for you.”
“Where’s Dr. Wickham? You don’t know anything. You’re just a silly secretary.”
It’s always nice to have people walk in off the street and remind you that your life is meaningless. I told her to sit down, and then I dialed Marjorie’s extension to ask if she’d see her.
“Does she have an appointment?” Marjorie barked.
“Well, no, but her eyebrows are inching toward her nose by the minute, and your first appointment isn’t until—”
“I don’t care.” Marjorie hung up on me, and I looked at the clock. Only two hours to go until lunchtime. I kept my eye on Esther and pulled out a Twizzler. Esther had now taken a seat and was starting to flip listlessly through a copy of Vogue, while her chihuahua was chewing on a corner of the area rug underfoot. I hit line two and dialed Bradford’s number to complain.
“I told you, you need to get out of there,” he said. Something was clicking in the background.
“Are you typing while you talk to me?”
“I’m using my calculator,” he said curtly, “because I already got out of Marjorie’s claws and got a job I actually like and would like to keep, which means that I don’t have time to listen to you bitch to me all morning while you look at the clock and count down to lunch.”
I huffed and clicked on the Tetris icon inside the “Accounting” folder I’d set up as a foil. If he could multi-task, so could I. Did talking and playing Tetris count as completing Item Number 6—multi-tasking—on my OM list?
“Listen, I don’t mean to be harsh, but that job was supposed to be temporary, remember? So instead of playing Tetris, which really doesn’t do a thing for your social or career skills, why don’t you look for a job?”
I clicked off Tetris.
“Or, at the very least, call this number.” Bradford rattled off a number, which I hastily scribbled on a Post-it, and then told me to ask for Sofi at Mok, a moksha yoga studio on the Danforth.
Before I could ask what moksha was, Esther started to wail and I had to hang up the phone to assess what was going on. I couldn’t see Esther’s eyes through the combination of her bangs and eyebrows, but her head was bobbing up and down in a way that suggested either she had suddenly noticed the elevator-music rendition of The Cosby Show theme song playing in the clinic or she was crying.
I went into Treatment Room A, grabbed a pair of scissors from one of the drawers, then returned. Ten minutes later, Esther Bartos was hugging me, perfectly pleased with her trimmed brows. Maybe I had a hidden talent, after all, I thought, as she handed me a twenty-dollar bill and left, pup in hand.
Just as I was beginning to feel better about myself, the phone rang. It was Victoria. She couldn’t seem to find where I had put all the food in the house. “I’ve looked everywhere: your cupboards, your fridge . . .” If I hadn’t known her for twenty-eight years, I’d have thought she was a senile grandmother. “Is there somewhere I’m forgetting to look?”
“The grocery store?” I replied.
“I don’t understand,” she said, intentionally feigning naïveté, so that I had to explain that I didn’t (aside from the freak shopping-splurge-as-novelty event) stock the fridge. And that, in my cleaning spree, I had tossed all of Sam’s supplies since I never liked eating his organic, vegetarian provisions anyway, and now I didn’t have to. To which Victoria replied, “But where is your food?”
I reminded her that I had eaten a well-balanced meal of cereal, milk and raisins just this morning, and that was as well stocked as it got. Besides, despite my complaints that there was nothing to eat in the neighborhood near work, I much preferred taking a half-hour trip in my flip-flops to find interesting food over spending my spare time shopping for, preparing, and packing a lunch and then using up my lunch hour eating a soggy, too-warm or too-cold meal in the tiny kitchenette at work. So, aside from my cereal stash, I told her, which I planned to really cultivate now that I had the space and freedom to do so, there wasn’t much else—gastronomically speaking—that I needed to live as a single woman.
“You mean like a student,” she said. “There’s absolutely no reason why you should be eating takeout when all you need to cook a healthy meal is a little imagination and a pot. Which I also noticed you don’t seem to own.”
I hadn’t actually gotten around to cleaning out the cooking utensil drawers, so I had to take her word for it. Apparently Sam had taken the kitchen gear with him. I tried to explain to her that I didn’t need a pot, since I didn’t actually cook (and never really had, even with Sam, since he always ate dinner at work before coming home at nine o’clock), but she was too busy grumbling about the grime under the sink.
“I’m just trying to help you, Mara. You could be a little more cooperative.”
I told her I needed to get back to work, which was true as Marjorie had dumped a month’s worth of patient files on top of my Allure magazine, in which I’d been reading about a new anti-wrinkle hand cream.
Then my mother called, making it two calls at work in two days—totally uncharacteristic, which could mean only one thing: she was worried about me. But first, she wanted to know whether the people on the cover of her Harlequin Blaze romance had gone under the knife, and if I’d ever met a Harlequin model at the clinic.
“They haven’t gone under the knife, Mom. They’ve gone under the airbrush.”
“Oh, no, I believe you’re mistaken,” she insisted. “What about Fabio? He’s real, and I know those muscles are, too. I’ve seen him on TV.”
We agreed to disagree, and then she moved on, asking how I liked the cookies and my sister’s surprise visit. I told her that one of the two was palatable, and that it was a good thing she’d sent them because, until Victoria arrived, I apparently didn’t know how to fend for myself and often went for days without eating. This was meant to be a compliment to my mother’s baking and a complaint that perhaps I had gotten along just fine before Victoria arrived, but my mother, ever the problem-solver, said: “You should ask Victoria to teach you how to cook. She’s a great chef. She can help you make stew with your leftovers. You know, ‘Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.’”
“Who said that?”
“Oh some British churchman.”
Ironic, considering that my parents subscribed to the Church of Cable TV. Every Sunday morning at nine when I was growing up, my father turned on the service for shut-ins while my mother turned on the coffee maker. Then they made peameal bacon and chocolate chip pancakes side by side, while I colored the apostle scenes in my paint-by-number Sunday missal and Victoria painted her nails or pretended not to feel well so she could talk to her boyfriend-of-the-moment on the telephone in the bathroom. One hour later, we were better people for it, and sat down to a lovely Sunday brunch.
“What does that even mean?”
“That you should ask your sister how to help you use up your leftovers so they don’t go to waste. It’s like scrapbooking for the appetite.”
Apparently my mother was also delusional about my cooking habits—she thought I was cooking so much that I accumulated leftovers. Even if I had had more than leftover pizza or deep-fried chicken balls to contribute to a stew, I really hated stew. I told my mom I would take her suggestion under advisement, then hung up the phone and began deconstructing the pile of patient file folders on my desk. Each contained at least one appointment that needed to be entered into the computer, after which I had to create an invoice for the client, check whether they’d prepaid, paid on service or billed their account, and send out the invoice accordingly. Not brain surgery, just brain numbingly boring work.
Seven hours and twenty-three files later, I arrived home to find an envelope addressed to me, in Sam’s handwriting. The explanation note. I sat down on the front steps and prepared myself. What would he have to say? That he was sorry? That he had made a mistake? Or just what I did to make him leave? I slid my finger through the space at the top, ripped open the envelope—ungracefully—and pulled out the single sheet of paper. A check fell to the ground, and I picked it up to see he’d sent the rent money, as promised. I unfolded the unlined white sheet of paper and read:
M,
The movers packed the bed by mistake—but since I’m paying for a month’s rent I’m not using, let’s call it even?
Best,
Sam
Best? I lived with him for six months and that’s all I got? Besides which, if he really wanted what was best for me, he wouldn’t have left without a discussion. Without a word. Without me.
I folded the note and put it, the envelope and the check into my bag. Feeling alone and unwanted, I started to cry.
“You’re home!” Victoria said in a slightly accusatory tone. I sniffed and turned around to see her in the doorway. “We’ve got lots to do, come on in,” she said, as though she were inviting me into her own home. I stood up reluctantly and followed her inside.
My apartment was filled. Aside from the general layout and the location (still on Clinton, still below ground), very little looked the same. Sam’s futon was now in the living room where his couch had formerly sat, but instead of the stained green cloth, it had been draped with a creamy beige slipcover adorned with blue and yellow embroidered flowers.
“It’s Laura Ashley,” Victoria informed me, wiping her wet hands on the floral-print apron she was wearing. I wondered whether she was referring just to the slipcover or to everything she’d brought into my place (including her apron, the ribbon she had tied to keep her hair off her face, and her slippers, which all followed the floral theme). I nodded and smiled, then looked into the bedroom, where there was now a large, lovely-looking bed covered by a duvet in a flower print similar to the one on the futon. I was already feeling a bit woozy about all the florals in the living room, but I was looking forward to going to sleep that night in a real bed, even if it wasn’t my bed. I wanted to crawl under the covers and digest everything that had happened in the ten minutes since I’d arrived home from work. Although I had to wonder whether the bed was for my sister or me.
I followed Victoria into the kitchen, which now had an oblong oak table with four chairs, complete with blue dupioni silk seat covers with ties that made bows around the spindles, and matching silk placemats. Four more chairs, identical to the others, were stacked in the corner (I’d be one short for the party, but that was better than being short nine). Under the TV was a small table where the phone books had been; on top of the TV, Victoria had placed a silver DVD player.
Victoria had decided that, instead of waiting for me to get home, she would clean the apartment herself, using new cleaning supplies she’d purchased, since she didn’t approve of any of the supplies I’d selected the previous day. Hers were apparently much better for the floors, walls, countertops and especially the environment, a key factor for any Bloor West Villager, where it was very important to use biodegradable products—not because you actually believed in the environment but simply because your neighbors were not beyond snooping in recycling bins.
“I would’ve vacuumed, but I couldn’t find a vacuum anywhere.” She looked at me expectantly.
“I have a DustBuster.”
Victoria shook her head. “No wonder it’s so filthy in here. Honestly, Mara, there’s enough cat fur to make a stole. And it’s really hard on my allergies. I can hardly breathe. I had to put the animal outside. I hope you don’t mind.”
I marched to the back door and opened it to let Pumpernickel in. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t forcing her to stay with me, that she could return to her uncontaminated mini mansion at any time, but she had already moved on to other matters.
“I thought it would be more useful for you to learn how to cook,” my sister explained, and I realized then that she and my mother had planned the intervention long before Sam had even broken up with me.
Victoria had already purchased and stocked the pantry and fridge with supplies suitable for a holiday party for a hundred. She told me to put on my apron. Which, of course, I didn’t own.
“No apron? How do you keep your clothes clean?” she said in shock and then quickly undid her own apron and slipped it over my head, turning me around so she could tie it behind my waist. Then she began fumbling through the drawers for tea towels, which she fastened together with a few chip clips. She then used the ribbon that had encircled her head to hold the tea towels in place around her waist.
“There,” she said, satisfied with her makeshift apron.
I expected her to teach me how to cook lasagna or tuna casserole or some other easy one-dish meal I could make once and eat for days, but Victoria had other plans.
“I really had to stock your cupboards,” she announced. “You didn’t even have garlic or lemon juice or basil.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy a good home-cooked meal. I just liked someone else to do the cooking before I took the meal home. This wasn’t a result of laziness or lack of riches; it was a well-thought-out process that made complete sense, given my skill set. Cooking for myself had always seemed arduous and gave me no real sense of accomplishment or appreciation. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to think cooking was similar to scrapbooking. At least with arts and crafts there was a display factor that could make others ooh and ahh. Not so much with my version of chicken à la king.
“How much did you spend?” I asked, opening the fridge. Knowing Victoria, I was well aware that she might want me to reimburse her for the groceries. I now not only had twice the rent to pay each month, but a houseguest with high standards.
The fridge was stocked with barely edible items: red cabbage and green beans, asparagus and avocados, bean sprouts, Balkan-style yogurt, a jar of no-sugar peanut butter and a whole fish with head intact. Still, the contents were free of any reminders of Sam, and for that I was grateful.
Victoria waved her hand in the air dramatically and told me I could consider it a big-sister gift.
“I also noticed you had some no-name knives, so I brought my one-man Henckels out of storage, as well as a box of pots and pans we keep just for camping. I’ll leave them here until we need them, and if you decide you want to keep them, you can just pay me for them,” she said.
Victoria had a way of passing off condescension as a charitable impulse.
