by Aphrodite Jones
Unemployment had its perks.
For one, Alex didn’t have to leave the house on certain days. Days when the weatherman – his breath visible on screen, his body bundled into a ski jacket, his once perfectly manicured coif fighting a losing battle against the wind – advised his audience that it was “certainly a day to stay indoors, folks.”
A piece of advice immediately followed by the collective sigh of thousands of men and women silently bemoaning the fact that staying indoors when you had a boss like theirs, piles of paperwork on desks like theirs, a family to support like theirs, was just not an option.
The snow was not entirely unexpected; they had been predicting it for a few days. Enough time for Alex to make sure there was fresh milk in the house. She didn’t drink milk – not with her coffee, not with her cereal – but having it in the house, fresh, in case she was snowbound seemed of the utmost importance.
She also stocked up on crossword puzzles. Upon being let go from her job she decided she needed a hobby. They always intrigued her – who were those people with hobbies? People who, when given a decent amount of free time, opted not to turn on the TV and instead gathered up their fishing gear, placed stamps in acid-free books or looked for rare birds in trees with expensive binoculars? (Alex always opted to turn on the TV.)
Then Alex experienced a steady diet of daytime television. And she found that, when ingested in mass quantity on a daily basis, television could be, dare she say it, mind-numbing. The infomercials; the soft-lens soap opera with contrived dialogue and body-snatching evil twins; the talk show with that very funny lesbian host whose wit unfortunately was not enough to make her guests the least bit entertaining; the robotic studio audiences clapping on cue as another contestant came on down.
She turned the TV off for good (for good meaning, of course, until primetime) the minute she found herself crying over Louise from Wichita. Louise, weeping on national television for the son who rejected her after her sex-change operation. Louise, who second guessed her decision, who couldn’t forgive herself, who went on the show in hopes that the caustic host and his (very lucrative) brand of tough love would help her to function again, to see herself as a human being.
“A human being!” Alex repeated, rubbing the snot from her nose onto the sleeve of her Syracuse sweatshirt. She could barely catch her breath. And that’s when she had what Oprah calls an ‘a-ha moment’ (there was too much Oprah, too, during those first couple weeks of unemployment). That’s when she decided that she needed to turn off the TV and take up a hobby.
A pile of New York Magazines, dating back a year – perhaps two – were stacked next to her coffee table. The back page featured a crossword puzzle. And thus a hobby was born, one that would allow her to spend just as much time nestled into the overstuffed couch with a cup of (black) coffee as daytime TV had, but now with intellectual purpose.
*
“You’re going to start looking forward to the mail like never before,” George told her when he took her out to lunch, her first lunch as an out-of-work children’s television producer.
“Doubt it.”
“No, really. It becomes, like, a sick obsession. Suddenly you find yourself getting excited about the new J.Crew catalog and…well, let’s just say that the day I received my jury duty summons…that was a great fucking day.”
Her cousin George had been unemployed too. For a month. But unemployed for George, who did something in a suit somewhere downtown, meant a hefty severance package. It meant Grand Theft Auto for hours on end. It meant drinking until 4:30am on a Sunday just because he could. It meant scouring online personal ads and taking off in his car with his boys for a long weekend because “fuck it dudes, I don’t fucking have a job!”
For George, unemployment was the month-long vacation that was three years overdue. For Alex, it was a reflection of the fact that something she had created had failed and now she had nothing to show for it but a dwindling savings account and a box of swag (figurines, sticker books, bath toys) that hadn’t even come close to their projected holiday sales. She stole some of those leftover products from the storage closet before she left her network office (windows facing Times Square, ergonomic chair, 50 inch flat screen TV) for the final time. She knew full well she’d never open the box, that it would sit in her attic until her (currently nonexistent) children went through her belongings after her death, deciding what to divvy up. “Who wants the shit from that show mom worked on?” “Oh God. Not me.” “This is our mother we’re talking about! This is her legacy.” (She hoped one of them would be sensitive. At least one.) “Ok fine, FINE. I’ll take it home. Gary, put it in the van.” (She always assumed one of her boys would be named Gary.)
George was wrong, unsurprisingly. Alex never looked forward to the mail. Nothing good ever came through the regular mail. Email, yes. Shipping confirmations for her new pod coffee maker came via email. Notes from friends with attached pictures from that night last week when they got fucked up at that bar and Danny started singing “Sweet Caroline” to his wife (named Nancy) while dancing on a table came via email. 20% off at Banana Republic came via email.
Only bills, Val-U-Packs and letters from the Democratic National Committee soliciting money came via regular mail.
It got to the point where the postman had given up trying to stuff all the mail into Alex’s overflowing mail ‘basket’ (hung in lieu of a traditional mailbox during a fit of domesticity that occurred when she briefly considered cohabitating with a then-boyfriend and thus read Martha Stewart Living religiously as a crash course in how to homemake. A fit of domesticity that ended the minute her then-boyfriend left her for that girl he dated in high school whose waist was about three inches smaller than Alex’s. She never did get around to taking down the basket). Instead the postman resorted to plopping a rubber-banded bundle onto Alex’s doorstep because fuck this girl who doesn’t ever leave her house, I don’t give a shit if the doorway is blocked with piles of mail.
She stumbled over the bundles when she went to go get the emergency milk and crossword puzzles and, on the way back in, decided that the civilized thing to do would be to pick it all up and sort through it. Plus, it was still an hour until Law & Order and she had already done all the dishes and killing time had become the bane of Alex’s existence. Sorting through the mail would help.
Of course she didn’t get to it until the next day, until the snow started, until she had finished a phone conversation with her mother (“Alexandra, you are very talented, I do not understand this having no job” “Mom, it’s really expensive to call Greece, can you call me right back?”), until she had broken her own “no daytime TV!” rule and watched Supermarket Sweep reruns, until she had read five pages of Madame Bovary. Until, really, there was nothing else to do.
She almost threw it out because envelopes of that size, business envelopes, were usually pre-approved credit cards and, frankly, Alex didn’t need the temptation.
Then she noticed the last name on the return address. V. Grigoriadis. A last name she usually only saw on a return address label once a year, at Christmas, the envelope containing a picture of two boys, close in age, in matching sweaters, smiling at something off-camera, most likely their mother making silly faces in hopes that the photographer would catch them mid-giggle. “Happy Holidays! Love, the Grigoriadis Family,” the Christmas tree icon negating the attempt of the ‘happy holidays’ at universal, non-denominational well-wishing.
It was two months past Christmas.
She tore open the envelope. George was right; suddenly she was excited. Excited about the mail. Excited about the prospect of her bland day being disrupted by something remotely interesting. Even if it was just a letter containing news of how Tyler now refused to eat anything yellow and how Tristan started kindergarten and how Vera Grigoriadis’ mother-in-law was still completely devastated that her grandsons’ names weren’t Greek, to the point that when she called the house she no longer even spoke to Vera, only asked if Peter was around and if he was not, hung up.
There was no letter enclosed.
Only photographs.
Not photographs of Tristan and Tyler.
Photographs that Alex had to stare at long and hard in order to begin to understand.
Photographs that, upon understanding their content, forced her to sit down smack in the middle of her kitchen floor.
Quite a few minutes later she found herself sifting through the garbage for the envelope she had carelessly discarded. She dug it out of the trash bag, wiped off the French Roast grinds with the back of her hand and was surprised to find that it was plain. White. Standard. The handwriting neat, measured. Nothing that would give any indication of a sense of urgency. Nothing that would give the Grigoriadis’postman pause before putting it into his sack. Nothing that would incline him to knock on the door, offer his help, for he has a wife too, and a daughter, and how could he not do something, you know?
Alex didn’t know what kind of sign she was expecting to find. But still, she was surprised to find nothing.
*
Alex vehemently resisted. The idea of attending meetings after church on Sundays, of not being able to strip off her stockings immediately after communion in the backseat of her father’s Cadillac as he drove them home, of having to sit around for an extra hour and discuss dances and food drives and a bonding trip to the ice skating rink appealed to her even less than going home and cramming a weekend’s worth of homework into a few Sunday night hours.
But, as always, Alex’s mother’s wishes were non-negotiable. And so there Alex was every Sunday, itching her stockings, sitting at a stained coffee table in the dank basement of the church, watched over by a crucifix tacked to the wall behind her, discussing the Hellenic Society of New Jersey’s winter ball and whether or not St. Nicholas of West Orange’s Greek Orthodox Youth Association should charter a bus for the event.
The discussion got heated. Alex continued to itch. She inadvertently rolled her eyes as the GOYA president, a pretty girl with an unfortunately placed mole, ranted that she had the final say because, hello, she was the president. Mid eye-roll Alex caught the eye of a slight, attractive brunette across the table who returned Alex’s sentiments with an eye roll of her own.
Two Sundays later they hoisted themselves out the window of the church’s basement bathroom, having decided that a feast of rice pudding and gravy fries at the diner next door was much more appealing than yet another round of Who Gets the Final Say.
Neither one of them ever attended another GOYA meeting.
Over the years – through college, through post-college malaise, through first jobs and shitty boyfriends and mice-infested apartments and marriage (Vera) and broken engagements (Alex) and, yes, unemployment – their relationship was very stop and start.
There were months when Vera called Alex weekly, usually when she thought Peter was cheating, when she thought she was a bad mother, when she wanted to know if Alex could send her some videos of the show because “the boys just love it Alex. Can you sign the covers, by chance?” (Alex was always inclined to check eBay for “Smallz World Videos Signed by Creator, $30″, because Vera had always been a tad enterprising and, really, how many autographed videos did Tyler and Tristan need?)
Then Vera would disappear back into her life, into her Connecticut McMansion, into her rollercoaster marriage, into her playgroup dates and book club meetings and Alex would barely blink an eye because that was Vera and Vera would inevitably turn up again.
*
“Did you get my email?” Brent, the Ex. Who did not entirely feel like an ex, because, as Alex would often ask her girlfriends, what ex still calls everyday? And brings by take out Indian on his nights off? And sends her email forwards of production jobs he thinks she might be interested in?
“I haven’t checked.”
“Jesus, Alex. Looking for a job is a full-time job and you should approach it as such.” That tone, that condescension, was one of the things Alex reminded herself she hated every time she began to get sad again over the fact that he was no longer attracted to her.
She really couldn’t fault him or his flaccid penis for no longer showing interest when she took off her clothes. Hell, she was no longer attracted to herself. The weight she had lost when she was Little Miss Busy Children’s Television Producer – the result of not eating, too much stress and over-caffeination– had once again made its presence known in the form of a stomach that now had rolls when she sat, of thighs that once again rubbed together when she walked, of arms that no longer looked sexy in a sleeveless shirt. Her chest, however, had never looked better. She suspected that was one of the reasons for Brent’s continued presence in her life.
“I’m enjoying some time off, Brent,” she said with an exaggerated sigh.
“You going to be around tonight?”
She was relieved he asked. Relieved she didn’t have to do the asking because, in all truthfulness, she was still the dumpee. And the dumpee did not, under any circumstances, ask the dumper if he wanted to come over because then it was viewed pathetic as opposed to friendly.
“Yup.”
“I’ll be there at eight.”
*
At first Alex hid the photographs. In her breadbox (empty), then in her freezer (also empty) and then between her mattress and the box spring.
This is ridiculous, she thought, pulling them out, carefully avoiding looking at them. She threw them on the coffee table casually, as if they were vacation photos. If Brent happened to see them then what was she going to do? Not explain? She’d have to. You know, if he happened to see them.
It was six thirty when she sat down on the couch, fondled the cordless phone in her hands. She turned it on and then realized that her phonebook, the one containing Vera’s number, was in the kitchen. She turned the phone off again, twirled it around by its antenna. Took a deep breath.
Fuck. Vera, fuck.
It was a cry for help, obviously. Obviously. Right? Or was it? No, it had to be. Who sent pictures of their own bruised flesh, of an arm that more closely resembled an eggplant swelled to its full ripeness, of a leg marred by a circle of broken blood vessels the size of a small frying pan as anything other than a cry for help?
Alex’s initial reaction down there on her kitchen floor – hands shaking, adrenaline pumping – had been to call the police. She even stood up to get the phone. Then rationalization took over. She knew dialing 911 would connect her to her own police station and then what? Would she ask to be connected to the Stanford, Connecticut police because she was fairly certain that domestic abuse had occurred a state away at some point in the past? And no, she didn’t know whether or not it was occurring at that exact moment but the fact was that it had occurred and someone needed to stop it and who else but the police?
Five minutes of deliberation and she put the phone down again. It rang a moment later and Alex had answered with a hurried “hello?!” half-expecting that it was Vera and half hoping it was the (obviously psychic) Stanford Police.
It had been Brent. And so she decided to wait until eight o’clock, to wait until Brent.
*
Nick Psomas had been the only one worth going to the dance for. In fact, he was the sole reason that Alex and Vera applied copious amounts of mascara at Alex’s mother’s elaborate vanity, elbowing each other for more room, smacking their lips to spread freshly applied lipstick, taking caps off fancy glass bottles of perfume and sticking them underneath one another’s noses.
“You look like leetle whores,” had been Alex’s father’s Greek-accented assessment after they emerged from the bedroom and sauntered down the stairs. Vera and Alex snickered as he drove them to the Whippany Manor.
Walking in, Alex felt like a whore. In a good way.
“You see him?”
“Who, Nick?”
“Jesus, Vera. Keep it down. I thought we agreed on a code name.”
“Oh, right right. No, I do not see Butter.”
Vera walked into the hall slightly ahead of Alex, just far enough ahead that Alex was able to catch the wave of male heads that turned in Vera’s direction, following her ass, her legs across the room. Vera was unaware. Alex wanted to vomit.
She knew then that no amount of lipstick or mascara or fancy perfume in the world was going to turn Nick’s head in her direction instead of Vera’s. So, really, she shouldn’t have been surprised later on that evening when she caught Nick and Vera groping each other against a fake-ivy covered plastic pillar placed in the corner of the dance floor. Vera, again, was unaware. This time, Alex actually did vomit, in the empty upstairs bathroom of the Whippany Manor.
She had the same sickening feeling when Vera got married first. Suddenly, returning to her then-apartment on the Upper West Side after the wedding in Greenwich, nothing would do. The paint was chipped, the landlord hadn’t fixed the water damage, her clothes were frumpy, her face was broken out, her shoes were scuffed, her make up was old and most likely harboring bacteria and miniscule bugs that every issue of Glamour warned about. In comparison to the glow of Vera’s life – the new husband, the house they designed together, the plethora of wedding gifts, the honeymoon in Tahiti – Alex was left feeling very Ugly Stepsister. Or, she thought as she drank wine from the bottle while still wearing her ill-fitting pink gown, Ugly Bridesmaid.
*
Brent never showed up. Something about his car and his headache and his early call time the next morning.
Which left Alex sitting on her couch. Staring at the photos she had casually splayed on her coffee table. Missing Law & Order.
“This is stupid,” she said out loud. “I’ll just call.”
*
It had been Vera she turned to when two pink lines appeared on the first plastic test strip. And then the second. And then the third. She sat on the toilet at work, checking each one again and again against the photos on the box. Two pink lines. She had been aiming for none.
After staring at the Xeroxed memo from the office manager taped to the back of the stall door (“Ladies: If you sprinkle when you tinkle, please be a pup and wipe up!”) until the words were a blur of black scripted typeface, she left the office. Without her coat, without her purse, without finishing the second draft of the script for which there was a meeting at 9am the next morning.
For once she welcomed the Times Square tourists and the anonymity that their throngs afforded. The August heat – so oppressive that New Yorkers spent hours traveling to beaches in air-conditioned cars on weekends just to escape it – was also welcome. The humidity, the elbows of people jostling past her, the screech of tires on hot gravel – it all served to stave off the paralyzing numbness that was slowly, but surely, taking over.
Funny, she thought as she climbed aboard a near-empty train headed for Connecticut, she made her living creating and running a television show for pre-schoolers. Now that she had her own budding pre-schooler occupying territory inside her body, she suddenly despised them.
“Here. Drink this.” Vera pushed a beautiful etched, gold-rimmed goblet full of expensive vodka and palm-tree shaped ice across the mosaic tabletop, towards Alex.
“I’m pregnant, V.”
“Not for long. Drink up.” Vera clinked her own goblet against Alex’s and took a slow gulp, savoring the vodka. Alex winced. Vodka, sans mixer, was not usually something to be savored.
“Bottoms up,” Alex paused and looked down at her flat belly. “Sorry baby.”
By the time Vera’s husband arrived home, a son hanging off of each arm, greasy bags of Thai take-out in each hand, cell phone precariously balanced between his shoulder and his ear, Vera and Alex were trashed, rolling around on the plush carpeted floor of the family room off the kitchen, eating gooey Swiss Rolls and stale Twinkies from Vera’s “kiddie stash.”
“Fuck, I haven’t had a fucking Twinkie in so fucking long,” Vera smiled, chasing the cream-filled sponge cake with a sip of a merlot that they had chosen from the Griogoriadis’ extensive wine cellar.
“Vera.” Peter deposited his blonde offspring at the kitchen table and placed his hands on his hips, glaring. “What are you doing?”
“Baby killing!” Alex offered, mid-bite of her third Swiss Roll.
“Vera. Ela tho.” He spoke in Greek, forgetting that Alex understood. Come here.
Ignoring the cries of his children for “Pad Thai, Daddy! Pad Thai!” he ushered his wife up the spiral staircase, his hand wrapped tightly around her upper arm.
“Daddy’s an asshole,” Alex whispered to the kids, who looked up at her with intrigued puzzlement.
She spread out their food and their chopsticks and tried to feel something for these tiny, hungry people. Tried to decipher whether or not she truly wanted one of her own. Tried to will her maternal instincts to kick in, damn it.
Instead, she was grossed out by their peanut sauce-covered faces and annoyed by their demands for “Fruit punch, I want my fruit punch!” and “Dessert! Dessert now!”
By the time Vera re-appeared, eyes rimmed red and black from tears mixed with mascara, she seemed sober and distant. Peter had, apparently, scared the drunk right out of her.
“I should call you a cab,” she practically whispered, half-heartedly wiping off Tyler and then Tristan’s faces with a baby wipe.
Standing on the front steps of her house, Vera momentarily let her guard back down. “I love you. Call me if you want me to go with you. I’ll get my mother to watch the boys.”
Alex had nodded and slipped into a cab, a crisp fifty-dollar bill from Vera tucked into her fist.
Alex had called, two weeks later. Left a message on Vera’s cell. “I have an appointment next week, Thursday. You think you can make it? I need you. You’re the only one I’ve told. I haven’t said a thing to Brent. I think we’re breaking up anyway. Fuck. Oh, and the show was cancelled. I lost my job. God, things are looking great, eh? Call me back.”
She never heard from Vera, had had no contact with her up until the arrival of the photos.
*
It was that same voicemail that she reached – shaking and anxious – once she dialed Vera’s phone number.
“Hi, you’ve reached Tristan and Tyler’s mommy! Leave a message!”
“Hi, uh, V. Hi. It’s – it’s Al, it’s me. Just, uh, yeah, hi. Call me back. I uh, got your, um. Call me.”
She hung up the phone and slammed it down onto the coffee table, next to the pictures.
She stared at the one on top – the circular bruise on what appeared to be a leg. Purple and black and ugly and horrifying and kind of beautiful, like an otherworldly sunset, if you stared at it long enough.
Which Alex did. She stared at it for a whole half an hour, until the phone began to ring. Too late for her mother to call from Greece, too late for Brent, too late for telemarketers.
“Hello?”
“Alexandra?”
“Vera.”
“Alex.”
“What. What the fuck.”
Alex breathed in sharply, her ribcage tightening.
“So, you got them.”
“Yeah.”
“And what did you think?”
Alex began to examine her chipped toenails, fighting back tears. She alternately wanted to reach through the phone and embrace her tiny friend and alternately slap Vera’s pretty face, adding to the plethora of bruises, for putting her in this situation against her will.
“I think…I think. What do you expect me to think, Vera? I get these – these photos and there’s no explanation and there’s nothing and I’m just fucking going out of my mind here, thinking that maybe he killed you and also thinking what kind of sick person takes pictures of their own bruises and thinking whether or not I should invite you and the boys to stay with me until you sue that motherfucker for everything he’s worth and….” Alex stopped, startled.
Vera was – no. It couldn’t be. Laughter?
“Pete! Pete! I knew it! I knew she was the perfect person to send them to.”
In that moment, Alex’s blood burned inside of her. She pictured it – red and boiling, like in a cartoon.
“Excuse me?” She got out eventually, despite the sudden dryness of her throat.
“Oh Al. Sweet Allie.” More giggles. “I’m – well, you see, I’m in this play. And the make-up artist has to do these bruises because I play this beat-up hooker and…I just thought I’d play a little prank.”
The silence on Alex’s end quickly sobered Vera up. “I’m…Oh gosh, Alex, I’m sorry. And also flattered. Flattered that you care so much.”
“Well, what does that say about you and your husband that there was no question in my mind that he did that to you?” She was aiming to hurt. Hard.
“Oh don’t go there. Please don’t go there. I just – I heard from your cousin George, he’s working with Pete now, that you were out of work and bored and I had these photos from the play, close-ups that the artist took for his book and he had extras, and I just thought…”
“You thought wrong. You thought so wrong.” Alex hung up the phone. It rang a few more times that week, that month. She never answered, only returned the calls that her mother, Brent or George left on her answering machine. She ignored Vera’s pleadings. She ignored Peter’s pleadings.
She ignored their eventual cheap attempt to smooth things over by having Tyler – or was it Tristan – say “Pwease forgive mommy, Aunt Alex.”
“Aunt Alex is looking for a god damn job.”
And so she did.
