“Did you seriously think that I’d be okay with this?” Patti grabbed another handful of Charlie’s clothes from the bureau drawer and stuffed them into the already full suitcase. “Did you seriously think it wouldn’t be a problem?” It started out as a whisper, but started to get shrill towards the end.
“Come on, Patti,” Charlie implored. “Keep your voice down.” Elizabeth was sleeping just across the hall. At least he hoped she was still sleeping.
“Keep my voice down?” she demanded. “I’ll keep my voice down when you keep your thing in your pants!” Another armload of socks and underwear flew through the air between them.
“I know, I know. I don’t know what to say. I made a mistake.”
Patti whirled around, her eyes afire. She opened her mouth, and then closed it again. For a second Charlie couldn’t tell if she was going to say something or just spit at him. “Forgetting to put gas in the car is a mistake, Charlie,” she said. “Losing money at the track is a mistake. Cutting yourself shaving is a mistake. Fucking your secretary is not a mistake.”
Patti never, ever used profanity. Once, just after they’d been married when they were moving into the new house, she had dropped a wine glass and cut her thumb, badly. Bright red blood streaming down her arm and dripping onto the carpet from her elbow, she had muttered, under her breath, “Damn.” And afterwards, as she was getting twelve stitches in her hand in the emergency room, she had apologized. For losing her temper, she said.
In an instant, all the anger seemed to drain out of her. Her face, contorted into a grimace and engorged, had gone slack. The blood had drained from her cheeks and her forehead, though her ears still glowed. She had a half dozen of Charlie’s socks in her hand, and she let them fall to the floor. She turned her back to him and sat on the edge of their bed.
Charlie waited for a second, unsure of what to do next. When she didn’t say or do anything, he stepped forward, gingerly, and put his hand on her shoulder.
“Get out,” she said without heat. “Take your clothes and whatever else you need for tonight and get out. Call me tomorrow.”
Unable to think of anything else to do, Charlie zipped his suitcase, grabbed a few toiletries, and drove to the nearest hotel. He showed up at work the next morning an hour late, disheveled and unshaven. He waited until he knew she’d be home and then called. But it wasn’t Patti who answered.
“Who is this?” Charlie asked.
“Andrea,” said the woman on the other end of the phone. “We’ve never met. Patti and I work together.”
“Can I speak to my wife, please?”
“No. She said she doesn’t want to talk to you. She said to tell you that she’s hired a lawyer and that you should call him on Monday. Here’s the number.”
It took them a mere three months to settle the divorce, three months during which Charlie lived out of a suitcase at the Carlton Inn and Suites. Patti’s lawyer—lawyers, actually; she had retained a whole firm—were brutal, accusing Charlie of everything from marital infidelity, which was certainly and irrevocably true, to being an unsuitable father. Charlie, who spent the whole period in a state of shock punctuated by increasingly more frequent periods of drunkenness, was unable to mount a defense against the attacks. In the end, and against the advice of his attorney, he decided to settle on Patti’s terms. She got the house, she got their savings, she got virtually everything … and she got custody of Elizabeth.
At the beginning of July, the word came down. While he was out to lunch—where he bravely limited himself to one double scotch, since he was working—a note appeared on Charlie’s desk. When he got back to the office, he went upstairs.
The rest was just a blur, really. Charlie’s work had been consistently sub-par since his marriage broke up, they said, and it was true. His relationship with a subordinate had jeopardized the working environment on the tenth floor, they said, and that was true, too. Charlie expected at some point that they would ask him if he had anything to say for himself, but they never did. Nine months after becoming the youngest editor in the history of Millard Ketchum and Sons, Charlie walked out the front door for the last time.
It was in mid-August that Charlie, broke and desperate, had finally swallowed his pride—along with two fingers of bourbon, for encouragement—and asked for a job application at the Gaston & Grey on State Street. He walked into the store on the hottest day of the summer, which was a bad idea right off the bat. Charlie had never been skinny, and six weeks of drunken slothfulness hadn’t done a thing for his carriage. When the mercury spiked above about seventy-six degrees he had a tendency to sweat. The walk from the train station had turned his armpits slick, and he felt wetness on his back, and that was almost too much to bear. If the rent hadn’t been due, he would have called the whole thing off and gone straight home. Instead, he walked the aisles for an hour browsing the latest best sellers and the new releases and waited for his body to get its God-damned act together just for five minutes, please.
The girl behind the service counter, old enough to have voted in the last election but not the one before, had raised a pierced and bangled eyebrow but said nothing, tearing a sheet off of a pad and handing it to him along with one of a dozen identical ball-point pens. That’s what kind of place this was: they had long since turned over the problem of job application production to a third-party outside contractor. They probably received cases of those pads every month, printed and backed and glued by machine and trucked the hundred miles from the printer’s to the store. All that effort, all that automation engaged for the sole purpose of humiliating middle-aged, unemployed men like Charlie.
The application included a space for him to explain why he left his last job. Gross misconduct, he could have written. Failure to perform. Screwed my secretary. All of which would have been true, albeit more of the story than Charlie wanted to tell. Instead, he simply wrote: Downsized. A lie, but a polite and plausible one, one that the bastards at Ketchum, despite all their betrayals, had agreed to abet.
He handed his application back to the waif at the service counter, and she gave it to a red-headed twenty-something whose name tag—name tag, for chrissakes—read “Madeline.” She skimmed it, front and back, and sneered. Anybody else would have called it a friendly smile, but Charlie saw the look in her eyes, and he knew it was a sneer. She stuck out her hand. “Charlie?” she said. “I’m Madeline.”
Charlie tried to shake her hand, but he fucked it up. His handshake had never been his strong suit, but at least he knew how to execute one when the occasion called for it. Madeline’s hand was so much smaller than his, though, he ended up sort of cradling her fingertips in his sweaty palm while pumping her arm like he was hoping to strike oil. Heat rose in his cheeks. It’s come down to this, he thought.
She led him back to the Employees Only area where she offered him something to drink (double scotch, neat, and keep ‘em coming he didn’t say), then she showed him where to sit. He leaned his elbows on the table and it wobbled, so he put his hands in his lap instead. Madeline put his application on the table in front of her and started at the top.
“You’re not exactly the sort of applicant we usually get,” she said. “This is more of a part-time kind of place. She scanned his application, showing no outward signs of being impressed one way or the other by it. “Why did you leave Millard Ketchum?” she asked. She pronounced it wrong, put the accent on the first syllable. Mill_ard, like _Will_ard. _It’s pronounced Mill_ard, he didn’t say, _and it was founded in 1893, and who are you to question me about it, you little freak? Instead, he swallowed hard and said the magic word: “Downsized.”
It worked like a charm. She asked him a few more questions, questions that might have sounded innocent but it was all in the tone of voice she used, you know? And then she told him, twice, that the best they could offer him was a job in sales at seven-fifty per for about thirty hours a week, and each time he said that would be fine and each time he felt like putting a God-damned bullet through his temple. “We’ll call you,” she said, and then he had to walk all the way from the back of the store to get out and he felt every single pair of eyes on him as he did and so by the time he made it to the front door his forehead was already slick before he even stepped out into the oppressive summer afternoon.
“So it would just be really, really cool if I could give your Thursday and Friday shifts to Benny.”
Charlie blinked, hard. At some point in the last couple of minutes Madeline had walked in and started talking to him. Evidently it was more than just her usual pointless chatter. “You mean this Thursday and Friday?” he asked.
“Yeah-huh,” she said, her fuzzy pigtails bobbing as she bounced on her heels. “Cause, you know, Benny really needs the extra hours this week.”
“You mean you’re going to take my shifts and give them to Benny and you’re just asking me so we can pretend that I have any say in the matter at all?”
“What?”
Charlie donned his best, broadest smile. “That’s fine,” he replied, loading the last of the books onto his cart and heading for the door. “Give Benny my Thursday and Friday and I’ll work Saturday.”
Madeline’s eyes lit up. “Coool,” she said, drawing out the word. “Thanks, Charlie.” He waited until the door clacked shut behind him before rolling his eyes.
Charlie preferred to stack books when there weren’t any customers around; customers meant questions, “do you have” and “where can I find” and “I’m totally illiterate and can’t understand the concept of books arranged in alphabetical order, so can you explain it all to me?” The mystery section was packed—well, packed by Charlie’s standards anyway, two idle browsers thumbing through the latest whodunits. So he took a hard left and wheeled his cart over to the children’s section.
Whichever committee designed the standard floor-plan from which all Gaston & Grey stores were built had decided, probably on the advice of some highly paid people who attached entirely too much importance to this kind of thing, that a section of each store should be walled off and designated the Children’s Corner. Inexplicably, it was called the Children’s Corner whether or not that section actually occupied a corner of the store. In Charlie’s store, which had previously been a warehouse in the garment district and therefore required a certain degree of flexibility on the part of the standard plan, the Children’s Corner was smack in the middle of the back wall. Whereas the rest of the store was decorated in dark, muted shades of brown and green, the children’s section looked as if some maladjusted soul had stuffed a pipe bomb full of crayons and set it off. The colors in the Children’s Corner were astounding. Kids loved it, which naturally meant that adults were just barely able to tolerate it. Between the colors, the bright lights, and the incessant squeals and shrieks, the Children’s Corner always gave Charlie a low-grade headache.
On this particular day, though, Charlie was uncommonly lucky. The children’s section was completely deserted. He pushed his cart up to the first row of shelves and began sliding picture books into place. The books in the Children’s Corner were arranged in order of the age of their intended audience. On the far left were the picture books, brightly colored squares with cardboard pages, durable enough to withstand the onslaught of tiny, sticky, slobbery fingers. On the far right was Young Adult Fiction, wholesome Newberry Medal winners that teenagers could really relate to because the characters in those books were just like them, only they didn’t drink or smoke or swear or have sex quite as much. Charlie had just finished with the picture books and had started on the reading primers when he heard a small voice from behind him.
“Which one has the giraffeses?”
“Well,” said her mother, “let’s see.” Charlie glanced over his shoulder. She was four years old, maybe a little older. Hair the color of coffee with milk that had probably never been cut, ever. Eyes of the richest brown imaginable, each one about the size of a silver dollar. Wearing a purple coat so thick that it made her seem nearly as wide as she was tall. Her mother undoubtedly lived in one of the grotesquely overpriced loft apartments Charlie walked past every day: six feet tall if she was an inch, with blonde hair down to her waist and the sort of figure that must have required extensive surgery, or a full-time personal trainer, or more likely both. She stooped to scan the nearest shelf. Her daughter, evidently unimpressed with her mother’s efforts, decided to rephrase the question.
“Mommy,” she said very seriously. “I think we should find one with giraffeses. Quickly.”
Her mother looked Charlie’s way and he turned back to the books, but it was too late. “Excuse me,” she said. “Do you have any books with giraffes in them?”
Charlie looked down at the book in his hands at that very moment. Short and Tall. On the cover was a picture of a pan-ethnic little girl straddling the neck of a smiling cartoon giraffe. He held the book out to the woman. “Try this one,” he said.
The woman’s eyes lit up, not at Charlie but at her daughter. “Look at this,” she said in a sing-song voice. Charlie didn’t even get a thank-you.
“Giraffeses!” the little girl squealed at the top of her lungs.
“Giraffeses!” her mother replied in a whisper.
“Giraffeses!” the little girl stage-whispered back, taking the hint. She and her mother then sat down at one of the several low tables provided in the Children’s Corner for just this sort of occasion and read the whole story, cover to cover. Little girl goes to the zoo. Sees a giraffe. Notices that the giraffe is on the lanky side while she, herself, could best be described as petite. Little girl fixates on this difference, and spends the rest of the day pointing out things which are tall and short. Not exactly Pulitzer Prize material, Charlie supposed, but from the sound of things the little girl was enjoying it well enough.
Although Short and Tall was unlikely to set the literary world afire, no critic no matter how heartless could accuse its author of being needlessly verbose. Almost as soon as it began, the story was over. “Time to go now, honey,” said mommy.
The little girl expressed her disapproval of mommy’s suggestion by screaming. “No!” she cried, hitting that register reserved only for squealing brakes, fingernails on blackboards and the voices of unhappy little girls. Charlie’s headache spiked instantly from a low-grade two to a blinding eleven and rising. She put up a struggle for a minute, letting fly with another defiant scream before turning on the waterworks. Mommy, who was apparently immune to embarrassment in public, dragged the little girl all the way to the front of the store and right out onto the street. Charlie would have sworn if anybody had asked him that the kid didn’t take a single breath the whole way, that she just got redder and redder until finally disappearing through the door, swallowed up by the crowds of shoppers outside.
Fucking brat, Charlie thought.
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