Polaroids
The fucking puppy must’ve shit on the carpet again — I can smell it before I even see it. I grab some paper towels and
go to scoop up the still-warm pile, and I’m moving too quickly to notice that coffee is sloshing up through my travel mug’
s vented lid, so some of it ends up dribbling down my wrist as I weave back through the living room over the plastic tool
bench and around a half-assembled fortress of Legos to dump the wad in an overflowing trash bin.
Sarah is already 10 minutes late, Leo is in the air somewhere over Tuscon, and Jesse is sitting there scowling on the
couch, still wearing his Eagles pajamas, while Paul lines up coasters on the edge of the coffee table and then, as I walk
by, sends them crashing onto the hardwood floor. Amanda is still locked in her room upstairs despite how many times I’
ve already pounded on her door.
I think about how to ask Jesse, in my sweetest mom voice, why he’s not wearing the outfit we picked out last night.
Before I can open my mouth, though, he furrows his brow and starts in on me. “Why does Paul get to stay home?” he
whines. “I wanna stay home with Sarah and Benji!” That name. I hate that dog’s name, but we’d said that Jesse got to
choose it — that particular bribe was key to coaxing him out of the outbursts that kept landing him in trouble at school
— and you can’t go back on a promise like that.
“Paul’s still a little boy,” I say, bending over the couch, thinking I should plant a kiss on his forehead. I go on to tell him
that he’s a big boy, and big boys go to school.
“You talk to us like we’re all babies.” He wrenches himself away, twisting under the reach of my lips, and as he rises to
his feet he mutters under his breath, “No wonder dad’s never around.” He looks me dead in the eye as he finishes the
sentence, too.
Before I can catch myself, I’m around the couch and smacking him in the face, not hard, but enough to get him
howling. And of course it’s then, inevitably, that the front door flies open and Sarah strolls in, dropping her backpack
to the floor and glancing around to take in the scene. Her mouth opens, then she purses her lips, pauses, crinkles her
nose instead.
“Puppy again?” she asks.
* * *
I scoot around Susan and out the door, heading to the Acura with my brain already revving for the Kontner
presentation — how they should rebrand their health bars and aim them toward active senior citizens — when I find,
wedged under my windshield wiper, a Polaroid that’s still a milky gray as its image begins to develop. The photo that
emerges is blurry, but it’s unmistakably my palm, I know it, open and in motion, about to make contact with my son’s
face.
* * *
I’m pasting together a PowerPoint for a local high-end boutique that makes a killing selling reissues of sneakers I wore
to my own eighth-grade dance. I’d tucked that first photo, the one of me slapping Jesse, inside a copy of Wired without
giving it too much thought. In the last week, Paul got the flu, I had to write and rewrite copy for an Asian fusion
restaurant expanding into the suburbs, and Amanda had a dance recital at school that I left work early to get to, only to
have her storm off the stage when she caught a glimpse of me in the audience. But as I sit here, sorting images of 13-
year-old hipsters with fake nose rings posing on scooters, 9-year-old hipsters with fake tattoos sitting on park benches
eating ice cream, and as I ponder what sort of edgy but accessible message I can graft onto these embarrassing
images, I end up shaking loose another Polaroid, which is somehow mixed in with those proofs, this one of a vase my
mom had given us for our wedding. It’s a grainy image but enough of a close up that I can see a serpentine crack
running up the back of the ceramic, the side that is, I realize, always turned to the wall.
When I get home, missing dinner again, Susan is in the kitchen, cleaning up for the boys, who are perched on the
couch in front of Sponge Bob Squarepants. Paul is absentmindedly bouncing a Spider-Man action figure beside him on
the sofa cushion while his brother’s eyes flash between the TV and the hand-held computer game he’s playing, his
tongue sticking out the side of his mouth in concentration. They don’t even look up as I brush through the room.
I ask Susan where Amanda is.
She shakes her head. “Haven’t seen her. She called to say she was having dinner at a friend’s house.”
Which one, I ask, which friend.
She shrugs, bending to fit plates into the already-packed dishwasher. “I didn’t ask. She called from somebody’s car,
and Paul was crying, so honestly I wasn’t paying too much attention. Do you want me to call her back? Her number’s
in my phone.”
Mumbling not to bother, I walk back into the living room, rummage through my briefcase for my cell, and dial Leo
instead. Today he delivered a seminar on high-stakes negotiations to a group of investment bankers in San Diego,
but by now I know he should be on his way back to his hotel. He picks up, and before he can get into any small talk, I
ask how our vase got broken.
“What vase? Which one?” He’s being brisk with me, I can hear a TV on the background, the sound of glasses
banging against a wooden table top, and I realize he’s at a bar, probably with the big-shot bankers and their limitless
expense accounts.
You know, the one from Mom, I press. I go on to explain how I mean the one she gave us for our wedding, how the
glue job is too good for one of the kids to’ve done it.
He sighs, probably takes a sip from a Scotch on the rocks. “That happened when we moved in. It was like that when I
unpacked it after the movers left. Look, I glued it back together. Things were crazy. I didn’t want to bother you.” As he
talks, I’m picking up the scattered action figures — Batman, The Flash, some guy in a generic blue jumpsuit — and
dumping them into plastic bins, stalking around the living room for any Lincoln Logs or Matchbox cars out of place.
“Well,” I spit at him, “it looks like shit. This whole place looks like shit, and it smells like shit, and it makes me feel like
shit to be here.”
“Look, I can’t get into this right now,” he says, “I’m with clients, and by the time I get back to the hotel, you guys’ll be in
bed. Can I just call from the airport tomorrow?”
I jam my thumb down to disconnect the phone, throw it to the floor, and kick it into the wall hard enough for it to leave a
tiny dent in the plaster. Susan’s looking at me with wide eyes, but the boys never once glance up from the TV.
* * *
“I’m really sorry,” Walt says, “but the acquisition…” He trails off, pauses to tinker intently with an errant paper clip, then
finally goes on. “It’s not going like I’d hoped.” He runs his finger along the edge of his desk, absentmindedly knocks
over a picture frame — I can see him on the beach, he and his wife both perpetually tanned and aerobicized, child-free
and sipping daiquiris. “So Trantner & Hatch is just going to go with their own creative team. You know how it goes.”
No, Walt, I don’t, I say. I’ve worked for you for almost 10 years.
He looks up, glances out the window, finally settles for a moment of eye contact. “It’s not up to me. We’re the little fish
here. This is out of my hands.”
What about him, I want to know. Is he losing his job, too?
His gaze shifts over my shoulder. “Hard to say. Look, Norah, there’ll be a solid severance package. And who knows
what’ll happen once things settle down…” At that he trails off, or maybe I just stop listening.
* * *
In one photo, Paul is gazing up at me imploringly, holding out a tiny Darth Vader figure for my approval, but I’m looking
off to the side, trying to skim a quick section of the Sunday Times that balances on my knee. Surely I only did this for a
moment — a quick glimpse before going back to playing with him, and I can’t even remember what the article was
about — but now there it is, out of context, a moment frozen and me forever a neglectful mother.
They come in no discernable pattern, but they pile up, literally, over the course of a few months, and as I pour over
them, I notice things about my house — the mismatched end tables left over from our first apartment, the pizza stains
on our white Pottery Barn chair, the scrapes and scuffs across the linoleum floor we’ve never replaced in the kitchen,
our bedroom carpet discolored from Benji’s piss.
The photos that are too blurry to determine, these I read as runes, tracing the contours of shapes and shadows with
my fingers until I feel self conscious, wondering if this vaguely fleshy landscape in one is my cheek, perhaps, staring
glazed at a rerun of Grey’s Anatomy, or my flank, maybe, as I winced while Walt drunkenly fucked me in a hotel room
after a conference happy hour a few years ago, my dress up around my waist, me self-consciously trying to see in the
reflection of an art print to determine if he could see my stomach jiggling with loose skin.
* * *
Interviews are just as I remember from years earlier. Nasal receptionists doling out half-assed directions in
expressionless voices. Industrial parks where I squint in the midafternoon sun reflected back from dozens of silent,
glaring windshields. An application filled out in the waiting room that duplicates the information from the painstakingly
assembled resume. The meeting with HR in which I recite reasons for leaving every job I’ve ever had. Downsized.
Creative differences. Stuff happens. No, I say over and over again, I am a team player, but yes, I can still think
outside the box.
I learn that my work is too edgy. Too bland. Too corporate. Ahead of its time. Behind the curve, too out of touch. I
can learn, I say. I’m adaptable. And then the doors almost literally hit me on the ass as I leave.
I reach for my sunglasses in the glove compartment and end up with a photo that depicts me sitting across the table
from Keith, the creative director with whom I’d just interviewed over cappuccino at the local Starbucks, and I’m sitting
there in my interview suit, leaning in to feign interest in the shit he’s spewing, and I’ve got a smear of lipstick across the
front of my teeth. I check in the rearview mirror — it’s still there.
* * *
Now, by the time Susan comes to take care of Paul, I’ve hussled the other two off to school — enduring the
indifference of Jesse and the curses of Amanda, who I have to physically poke and prod to get out of bed — and then
there are Paul’s tears as Susan wrenches him from my leg and finally gets him upstairs to his playroom or outside to
the park.
Once I’m sequestered in my office, I sit down and try to scour Monster.com, fire off some chatty emails to former
contacts, or troll corporate websites looking for openings. The first few days of unemployment, I decided I’d walk the
dog instead of simply letting it run around the fenced-in backyard, but quickly I learned how much I hated walking it, its
toenails skittering across the pavement, its excited yapping and jumping up on my leg whenever another dog, a car, a
human being entered his sight.
Benji stays in the backyard when the weather is fine, then, and today I’m thinking vaguely of picking up the phone and
working my way through some of the more obscure contacts in my address book, but instead I hop in the car and drive
to Wawa to pick up a newspaper for the first time in ages, feeling old fashioned and almost quaint in the process.
As I scoot aside my laptop and unroll the paper on my desk, trying to savor the feel of the newsprint as it smears my
fingers, out drops a crisp shot of Jesse, the spitting image of his father, pulling a cigarette from a pack of Camel Lights.
But Jesse is wearing clothes I don’t recognize, and as I look closer I realize he’s somehow not my fifth-grade son but a
young man of at least 13 or 14. I realize, too, it’s Leo’s old leather flight jacket that he’s taking the cigarette from, but
Leo quit smoking back when Amanda was born.
A few minutes later, I hit the Entertainment section and there’s a picture of Amanda writhing in the back of her
boyfriend’s Pathfinder, one palm pushed up under her halter top, the other hand struggling with the buttons on her low-
rise jeans. The light of the shot is crude, but I recognize the outfit as the one she wore last night, and I remember how
smug she looked this morning, and I have to admit, the crispness of the detail in the shot is remarkable.
* * *
Over steamed vegetables and tahini on a bed of organic brown rice, Leo is asking about the job hunt. “Those papers
are stacking up,” he says, glancing over at the kitchen counter, “I hope they’re helping.”
I tell him that the paper feels very solid, that combing through them feels more methodical than toggling around on a
computer screen.
Leo’s talking about how important it is to be sure that the papers get recycled, and so I start thinking about how I forget
what he looks like after he’s on the road for awhile. It’s not like I can’t picture him at all when he’s away, but the man
who arrives home is always somehow different than what I expected —- sometimes shorter, sometimes taller, but
almost always a bit heavier than I’d remembered.
“Well, just be open to whatever comes along with these interviews, you know? Beggars can’t be choosers,” he says by
way of wrapping up, and I reply that beggars don’t often eat organic chicken from Whole Foods or vacation in Cape
May.
What I don’t tell him is that I’d realized I had two hours to spare before I had to be home to take over with the kids and
send Susan off to her night class, so as I was crawling back past the discount liquor stores, topless bars, and sprawling
mega-marts of Jersey, I gave up and ended up turning off at a random exit and driving, taking any side road that
appealed to me in the moment, until my mind went blank and I was completely, blissfully, lost. And I don’t tell him that I’
ve been doing this sort of thing for a while now — getting into the car, or onto the subway, and then just going.
* * *
In Atlantic City, I roam the slot machines and take in the blue-haired older ladies with their walkers and oxygen tanks
alongside the younger generation of more glamorous, feral-looking divorcees who roam the gambling floor in pairs or
small packs. Once, Leo and I spent a weekend at the Borgata, one of those newer upscale hotels that’s part of the city’
s supposed revitalization, and we’d made the rounds of the new high-end restaurants, too. Today’s Atlantic City has
frayed carpet, though, picked-over steak buffets and seagulls nosing at the garbage washed up on the sand.
My tour bus breaks down halfway back to Philly. After the driver has taken a quick look at the engine, he comes back
in and says, succinctly, “It’s bad.” But he’s called for help, he says, and the charter company is sending another bus to
pick us up as soon as possible. We wait for nearly two hours, and by the time I get home, Susan’s fuming because she’
s missed a meeting with her thesis advisor, Paul’s got snot running from his nose, and Jesse has disappeared upstairs
into his room for the rest of the night.
Later, when Leo calls from Austin to check in and suddenly asks if there’s another man, I giggle. He wants to know
what’s going on with me, why I let the house look like such shit even though I’m not working. He wants to know, too,
why I don’t really talk to the kids. “Susan told me Jesse is having a tough time in math”, he says, and he knows that
Amanda has a Saturday detention for talking back to a teacher. He’s on the road so much, he says, that he could
really use some help from me. I end up telling him I have to go make dinner. Then I hang up so I can find a menu and
order pizza for the third night this week. Inside the menu is a photo of me, probably 16 years old, in the dressing room
at Macy’s, trying on gowns for the winter dance at school. I’m using the multiple mirrors to study my ass, and just
outside the door, my two best friends, Jena and Cindy, can be seen making gagging motions at one another, gesturing
at the dress I’m wearing, the one they ultimately coaxed me into buying.
* * *
I’m digging in the medicine cabinet, looking for an exfoliating mask that Amanda seems to’ve used the last of, when I
find another photo, this one of solid blackness. I shake it and wait, but nothing comes into focus. Then, after another
long moment, I know what I’m looking at. When I was seven, my class took a trip to the Lerner Caverns in Virginia, a
long enough bus ride for us to miss a whole day of school. After choking down our lunches on the picnic grounds, we
fidgeted through the museum attached to the caverns — a display case of arrowheads, a couple of examples of
beadwork from the long-gone Cherokee tribe, a tableau of tiny soldiers recreating local Civil War battles — and then
followed Mrs. Morris, our teacher, into the attached gift shop. After we’d bought our post cards and pet rocks, a stout
young tour guide led us to a wooden stairway on the far wall of the shop, and we followed the stairs down into the
seemingly endless caverns. I know we used the buddy system, but I have no idea whose hand I was holding — it could’
ve even been Jena or Cindy. I do recall, though, the fish with bulbous, blind eyes that skated away from the guide’s
flashlight, and I remember the clammy slickness of the walls. And then, at the deepest point of the descent, the guide
gave us a brief speech about total darkness.
“Mostly we don’t really know what dark is,” he said. “We’re used to light from buildings, the stars, whatever. But down
here, there’s none of that, just whatever we bring in ourselves. And if we shut that off —” And with the click of his
flashlight, be brought about the dark. What I remember next is sitting by myself on the long bus ride home, how my
classmates mocked me for screaming so loudly just because someone had turned out a little light.
* * *
Amanda says, “How do you know I skipped school today? What are you, spying on me?”
Jesse says, “Why are you such a bitch?”
Amanda says, “What is this, a prison?”
Leo says, “What am I going to do, tell a client I can’t make it on short notice?”
Susan says, “You know I have a life, right?”
Amanda says, “Are you crazy?”
Paul says, “Why don’t you stay home with me today?”
Leo says, “What’s wrong with you?”
* * *
A photo album had seemed too formal, I’d decided early on, so I keep the photos — now almost 50 — in a thick manila
envelope tucked between my copies of The Etiquette Advantage in Business and The Chicago Manual of Style, hidden
right here in plain sight. Now I don’t even take them out anymore to study them, spread them out on my desk and try
to arrange them in a pattern that makes sense. I just open the envelope and wedge each new photo in with the others.
* * *
I roll over to check the alarm, see that it’s just after 2:00. Leo, jetlagged from a European flight, went to bed around
dinner time, and he’s sleeping with his mouth open, wearing his ratty old Wharton t-shirt that I’ve tried to throw away at
least twice. Down the hall, I peek in on the two sleeping boys, but Amanda, I notice, isn’t in her room, and her window
is open. I shut it, lock it, then change my mind, reopening it and even tying back her blinds to help with her re-entry.
By the time the sun comes up, I’m at a highway rest stop, and there’s a photo waiting for me tucked inside the sleeve of
my vending machine coffee. This one shows Jesse standing beside my bed, staring at the indentation in the mattress
where I should be sleeping. As I walk back across the parking lot, I pull the envelope from my oversized purse and
dutifully place this photo in with the others.
I get within 10 miles of the caverns before I have to stop and ask directions, and then, after collating the advice of
three different gas station attendants, I finally pull in to the parking lot of the diner across the street. The air is
unseasonably thick stepping out of the car, the heat low on the cement. The kudzu and cicadas of my childhood are
everywhere, and for a moment I just stare down at the clouds that blanket the valley below, wondering how I wound up
so high in the mountains over the last hour or two without realizing it.
The lunch rush is over, and the waitresses are resetting the tables and gossiping about last night’s American Idol. I
scarf down a Salisbury steak, a side of hush puppies, and two cups of watery coffee, and I chuckle imagining Leo, the
eternal food snob, here with me.
My waitress chats about the heat, the lull in business before the busy summer tourist season. “Ever been to the
Caverns across the street?” she asks once the conversation starts to trail off. “Something to see if you’ve got the
time.” I thank her and order a slice of blueberry pie to go, tip $10 on a $7 check, and take the slice to the picnic
grounds outside the caverns where my class ate our brown bag lunches ages ago.
The museum attached to the gift shop looks unchanged — if anything, it’s just shabbier — and the gift shop consists of
nothing more than a rack of picked-over post cards and a cooler of off-brand sodas. Just as I remember it, on the far
wall of the shop is an open archway, blocked by a turnstile, leading down to the entrance to the cavern. A young
mother — younger than me, I think, by more than a decade — stands between two children, girls maybe five and
seven years old.
“So slow today there aren’t any official tours,” the man at the shop counter says. “But I’m about to take them down.”
He gestures toward the mother and her kids. “$2.00 with the off-season discount, if you’re interested.” I slip two bills
into the clear plastic box in front of the turnstile and push my way through. The man, now apparently our tour guide,
hands me one of those oversized mining helmets with a light mounted on top — a new touch, I think, since my last time
here. He solemnly reaches to each of our foreheads and switches on the lights, and then a minute later we’re winding
down the stairs and finally beyond the stairway and into the caverns themselves. He’s talking — reciting, really — and
it strikes me that the speech might even be identical to the one I heard years ago. “Somewhere down here”, he’s
saying, “are paintings of an earlier civilization. These paintings depict scenes of domestic life such as harvesting
crops, slaughtering animals.” I’m wondering if this is the same tour guide from decades earlier, sliding my fingers along
the familiar dampness of the walls. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the bobbing lights of the mother and her
daughters ahead and to my left. My hand finds a gap in the wall, the air cooler and somehow hitting the back of my
throat in a way that makes me catch my breath in a quick, sharp inhalation.
One of the kids, probably the five year old, balks, says she wants to turn back. The tour guide is trying to maintain
order, asking the child not to panic, imploring the mom to do her part in sorting out the situation, but I don’t hear her
voice at all. Then he’s calling out to me, asking if I’d mind heading back with the whole party and then coming back
down after he and I have accompanied the mom and daughters back to the top of the stairway.
I hear his voice rising as he calls for me again, and the beam of his light traces along the opening to the larger cavern
that I’ve started to move across. The light skitters along a shallow pool, projects obscene shadows of stalagmites on
the wall. But by then I’ve turned off my own beam and set the helmet aside, tucking underneath it my purse swollen
with my wallet, cell phone, and that enormous manila envelope, and I’m feeling my way around a corner and into what
feels like an even more expansive passageway, the cooler air tightening the back of my throat, my fingers reaching out
for more cracks in the walls to guide me along.
The fucking puppy must’ve shit on the carpet again — I can smell it before I even see it. I grab some paper towels and
go to scoop up the still-warm pile, and I’m moving too quickly to notice that coffee is sloshing up through my travel mug’
s vented lid, so some of it ends up dribbling down my wrist as I weave back through the living room over the plastic tool
bench and around a half-assembled fortress of Legos to dump the wad in an overflowing trash bin.
Sarah is already 10 minutes late, Leo is in the air somewhere over Tuscon, and Jesse is sitting there scowling on the
couch, still wearing his Eagles pajamas, while Paul lines up coasters on the edge of the coffee table and then, as I walk
by, sends them crashing onto the hardwood floor. Amanda is still locked in her room upstairs despite how many times I’
ve already pounded on her door.
I think about how to ask Jesse, in my sweetest mom voice, why he’s not wearing the outfit we picked out last night.
Before I can open my mouth, though, he furrows his brow and starts in on me. “Why does Paul get to stay home?” he
whines. “I wanna stay home with Sarah and Benji!” That name. I hate that dog’s name, but we’d said that Jesse got to
choose it — that particular bribe was key to coaxing him out of the outbursts that kept landing him in trouble at school
— and you can’t go back on a promise like that.
“Paul’s still a little boy,” I say, bending over the couch, thinking I should plant a kiss on his forehead. I go on to tell him
that he’s a big boy, and big boys go to school.
“You talk to us like we’re all babies.” He wrenches himself away, twisting under the reach of my lips, and as he rises to
his feet he mutters under his breath, “No wonder dad’s never around.” He looks me dead in the eye as he finishes the
sentence, too.
Before I can catch myself, I’m around the couch and smacking him in the face, not hard, but enough to get him
howling. And of course it’s then, inevitably, that the front door flies open and Sarah strolls in, dropping her backpack
to the floor and glancing around to take in the scene. Her mouth opens, then she purses her lips, pauses, crinkles her
nose instead.
“Puppy again?” she asks.
* * *
I scoot around Susan and out the door, heading to the Acura with my brain already revving for the Kontner
presentation — how they should rebrand their health bars and aim them toward active senior citizens — when I find,
wedged under my windshield wiper, a Polaroid that’s still a milky gray as its image begins to develop. The photo that
emerges is blurry, but it’s unmistakably my palm, I know it, open and in motion, about to make contact with my son’s
face.
* * *
I’m pasting together a PowerPoint for a local high-end boutique that makes a killing selling reissues of sneakers I wore
to my own eighth-grade dance. I’d tucked that first photo, the one of me slapping Jesse, inside a copy of Wired without
giving it too much thought. In the last week, Paul got the flu, I had to write and rewrite copy for an Asian fusion
restaurant expanding into the suburbs, and Amanda had a dance recital at school that I left work early to get to, only to
have her storm off the stage when she caught a glimpse of me in the audience. But as I sit here, sorting images of 13-
year-old hipsters with fake nose rings posing on scooters, 9-year-old hipsters with fake tattoos sitting on park benches
eating ice cream, and as I ponder what sort of edgy but accessible message I can graft onto these embarrassing
images, I end up shaking loose another Polaroid, which is somehow mixed in with those proofs, this one of a vase my
mom had given us for our wedding. It’s a grainy image but enough of a close up that I can see a serpentine crack
running up the back of the ceramic, the side that is, I realize, always turned to the wall.
When I get home, missing dinner again, Susan is in the kitchen, cleaning up for the boys, who are perched on the
couch in front of Sponge Bob Squarepants. Paul is absentmindedly bouncing a Spider-Man action figure beside him on
the sofa cushion while his brother’s eyes flash between the TV and the hand-held computer game he’s playing, his
tongue sticking out the side of his mouth in concentration. They don’t even look up as I brush through the room.
I ask Susan where Amanda is.
She shakes her head. “Haven’t seen her. She called to say she was having dinner at a friend’s house.”
Which one, I ask, which friend.
She shrugs, bending to fit plates into the already-packed dishwasher. “I didn’t ask. She called from somebody’s car,
and Paul was crying, so honestly I wasn’t paying too much attention. Do you want me to call her back? Her number’s
in my phone.”
Mumbling not to bother, I walk back into the living room, rummage through my briefcase for my cell, and dial Leo
instead. Today he delivered a seminar on high-stakes negotiations to a group of investment bankers in San Diego,
but by now I know he should be on his way back to his hotel. He picks up, and before he can get into any small talk, I
ask how our vase got broken.
“What vase? Which one?” He’s being brisk with me, I can hear a TV on the background, the sound of glasses
banging against a wooden table top, and I realize he’s at a bar, probably with the big-shot bankers and their limitless
expense accounts.
You know, the one from Mom, I press. I go on to explain how I mean the one she gave us for our wedding, how the
glue job is too good for one of the kids to’ve done it.
He sighs, probably takes a sip from a Scotch on the rocks. “That happened when we moved in. It was like that when I
unpacked it after the movers left. Look, I glued it back together. Things were crazy. I didn’t want to bother you.” As he
talks, I’m picking up the scattered action figures — Batman, The Flash, some guy in a generic blue jumpsuit — and
dumping them into plastic bins, stalking around the living room for any Lincoln Logs or Matchbox cars out of place.
“Well,” I spit at him, “it looks like shit. This whole place looks like shit, and it smells like shit, and it makes me feel like
shit to be here.”
“Look, I can’t get into this right now,” he says, “I’m with clients, and by the time I get back to the hotel, you guys’ll be in
bed. Can I just call from the airport tomorrow?”
I jam my thumb down to disconnect the phone, throw it to the floor, and kick it into the wall hard enough for it to leave a
tiny dent in the plaster. Susan’s looking at me with wide eyes, but the boys never once glance up from the TV.
* * *
“I’m really sorry,” Walt says, “but the acquisition…” He trails off, pauses to tinker intently with an errant paper clip, then
finally goes on. “It’s not going like I’d hoped.” He runs his finger along the edge of his desk, absentmindedly knocks
over a picture frame — I can see him on the beach, he and his wife both perpetually tanned and aerobicized, child-free
and sipping daiquiris. “So Trantner & Hatch is just going to go with their own creative team. You know how it goes.”
No, Walt, I don’t, I say. I’ve worked for you for almost 10 years.
He looks up, glances out the window, finally settles for a moment of eye contact. “It’s not up to me. We’re the little fish
here. This is out of my hands.”
What about him, I want to know. Is he losing his job, too?
His gaze shifts over my shoulder. “Hard to say. Look, Norah, there’ll be a solid severance package. And who knows
what’ll happen once things settle down…” At that he trails off, or maybe I just stop listening.
* * *
In one photo, Paul is gazing up at me imploringly, holding out a tiny Darth Vader figure for my approval, but I’m looking
off to the side, trying to skim a quick section of the Sunday Times that balances on my knee. Surely I only did this for a
moment — a quick glimpse before going back to playing with him, and I can’t even remember what the article was
about — but now there it is, out of context, a moment frozen and me forever a neglectful mother.
They come in no discernable pattern, but they pile up, literally, over the course of a few months, and as I pour over
them, I notice things about my house — the mismatched end tables left over from our first apartment, the pizza stains
on our white Pottery Barn chair, the scrapes and scuffs across the linoleum floor we’ve never replaced in the kitchen,
our bedroom carpet discolored from Benji’s piss.
The photos that are too blurry to determine, these I read as runes, tracing the contours of shapes and shadows with
my fingers until I feel self conscious, wondering if this vaguely fleshy landscape in one is my cheek, perhaps, staring
glazed at a rerun of Grey’s Anatomy, or my flank, maybe, as I winced while Walt drunkenly fucked me in a hotel room
after a conference happy hour a few years ago, my dress up around my waist, me self-consciously trying to see in the
reflection of an art print to determine if he could see my stomach jiggling with loose skin.
* * *
Interviews are just as I remember from years earlier. Nasal receptionists doling out half-assed directions in
expressionless voices. Industrial parks where I squint in the midafternoon sun reflected back from dozens of silent,
glaring windshields. An application filled out in the waiting room that duplicates the information from the painstakingly
assembled resume. The meeting with HR in which I recite reasons for leaving every job I’ve ever had. Downsized.
Creative differences. Stuff happens. No, I say over and over again, I am a team player, but yes, I can still think
outside the box.
I learn that my work is too edgy. Too bland. Too corporate. Ahead of its time. Behind the curve, too out of touch. I
can learn, I say. I’m adaptable. And then the doors almost literally hit me on the ass as I leave.
I reach for my sunglasses in the glove compartment and end up with a photo that depicts me sitting across the table
from Keith, the creative director with whom I’d just interviewed over cappuccino at the local Starbucks, and I’m sitting
there in my interview suit, leaning in to feign interest in the shit he’s spewing, and I’ve got a smear of lipstick across the
front of my teeth. I check in the rearview mirror — it’s still there.
* * *
Now, by the time Susan comes to take care of Paul, I’ve hussled the other two off to school — enduring the
indifference of Jesse and the curses of Amanda, who I have to physically poke and prod to get out of bed — and then
there are Paul’s tears as Susan wrenches him from my leg and finally gets him upstairs to his playroom or outside to
the park.
Once I’m sequestered in my office, I sit down and try to scour Monster.com, fire off some chatty emails to former
contacts, or troll corporate websites looking for openings. The first few days of unemployment, I decided I’d walk the
dog instead of simply letting it run around the fenced-in backyard, but quickly I learned how much I hated walking it, its
toenails skittering across the pavement, its excited yapping and jumping up on my leg whenever another dog, a car, a
human being entered his sight.
Benji stays in the backyard when the weather is fine, then, and today I’m thinking vaguely of picking up the phone and
working my way through some of the more obscure contacts in my address book, but instead I hop in the car and drive
to Wawa to pick up a newspaper for the first time in ages, feeling old fashioned and almost quaint in the process.
As I scoot aside my laptop and unroll the paper on my desk, trying to savor the feel of the newsprint as it smears my
fingers, out drops a crisp shot of Jesse, the spitting image of his father, pulling a cigarette from a pack of Camel Lights.
But Jesse is wearing clothes I don’t recognize, and as I look closer I realize he’s somehow not my fifth-grade son but a
young man of at least 13 or 14. I realize, too, it’s Leo’s old leather flight jacket that he’s taking the cigarette from, but
Leo quit smoking back when Amanda was born.
A few minutes later, I hit the Entertainment section and there’s a picture of Amanda writhing in the back of her
boyfriend’s Pathfinder, one palm pushed up under her halter top, the other hand struggling with the buttons on her low-
rise jeans. The light of the shot is crude, but I recognize the outfit as the one she wore last night, and I remember how
smug she looked this morning, and I have to admit, the crispness of the detail in the shot is remarkable.
* * *
Over steamed vegetables and tahini on a bed of organic brown rice, Leo is asking about the job hunt. “Those papers
are stacking up,” he says, glancing over at the kitchen counter, “I hope they’re helping.”
I tell him that the paper feels very solid, that combing through them feels more methodical than toggling around on a
computer screen.
Leo’s talking about how important it is to be sure that the papers get recycled, and so I start thinking about how I forget
what he looks like after he’s on the road for awhile. It’s not like I can’t picture him at all when he’s away, but the man
who arrives home is always somehow different than what I expected —- sometimes shorter, sometimes taller, but
almost always a bit heavier than I’d remembered.
“Well, just be open to whatever comes along with these interviews, you know? Beggars can’t be choosers,” he says by
way of wrapping up, and I reply that beggars don’t often eat organic chicken from Whole Foods or vacation in Cape
May.
What I don’t tell him is that I’d realized I had two hours to spare before I had to be home to take over with the kids and
send Susan off to her night class, so as I was crawling back past the discount liquor stores, topless bars, and sprawling
mega-marts of Jersey, I gave up and ended up turning off at a random exit and driving, taking any side road that
appealed to me in the moment, until my mind went blank and I was completely, blissfully, lost. And I don’t tell him that I’
ve been doing this sort of thing for a while now — getting into the car, or onto the subway, and then just going.
* * *
In Atlantic City, I roam the slot machines and take in the blue-haired older ladies with their walkers and oxygen tanks
alongside the younger generation of more glamorous, feral-looking divorcees who roam the gambling floor in pairs or
small packs. Once, Leo and I spent a weekend at the Borgata, one of those newer upscale hotels that’s part of the city’
s supposed revitalization, and we’d made the rounds of the new high-end restaurants, too. Today’s Atlantic City has
frayed carpet, though, picked-over steak buffets and seagulls nosing at the garbage washed up on the sand.
My tour bus breaks down halfway back to Philly. After the driver has taken a quick look at the engine, he comes back
in and says, succinctly, “It’s bad.” But he’s called for help, he says, and the charter company is sending another bus to
pick us up as soon as possible. We wait for nearly two hours, and by the time I get home, Susan’s fuming because she’
s missed a meeting with her thesis advisor, Paul’s got snot running from his nose, and Jesse has disappeared upstairs
into his room for the rest of the night.
Later, when Leo calls from Austin to check in and suddenly asks if there’s another man, I giggle. He wants to know
what’s going on with me, why I let the house look like such shit even though I’m not working. He wants to know, too,
why I don’t really talk to the kids. “Susan told me Jesse is having a tough time in math”, he says, and he knows that
Amanda has a Saturday detention for talking back to a teacher. He’s on the road so much, he says, that he could
really use some help from me. I end up telling him I have to go make dinner. Then I hang up so I can find a menu and
order pizza for the third night this week. Inside the menu is a photo of me, probably 16 years old, in the dressing room
at Macy’s, trying on gowns for the winter dance at school. I’m using the multiple mirrors to study my ass, and just
outside the door, my two best friends, Jena and Cindy, can be seen making gagging motions at one another, gesturing
at the dress I’m wearing, the one they ultimately coaxed me into buying.
* * *
I’m digging in the medicine cabinet, looking for an exfoliating mask that Amanda seems to’ve used the last of, when I
find another photo, this one of solid blackness. I shake it and wait, but nothing comes into focus. Then, after another
long moment, I know what I’m looking at. When I was seven, my class took a trip to the Lerner Caverns in Virginia, a
long enough bus ride for us to miss a whole day of school. After choking down our lunches on the picnic grounds, we
fidgeted through the museum attached to the caverns — a display case of arrowheads, a couple of examples of
beadwork from the long-gone Cherokee tribe, a tableau of tiny soldiers recreating local Civil War battles — and then
followed Mrs. Morris, our teacher, into the attached gift shop. After we’d bought our post cards and pet rocks, a stout
young tour guide led us to a wooden stairway on the far wall of the shop, and we followed the stairs down into the
seemingly endless caverns. I know we used the buddy system, but I have no idea whose hand I was holding — it could’
ve even been Jena or Cindy. I do recall, though, the fish with bulbous, blind eyes that skated away from the guide’s
flashlight, and I remember the clammy slickness of the walls. And then, at the deepest point of the descent, the guide
gave us a brief speech about total darkness.
“Mostly we don’t really know what dark is,” he said. “We’re used to light from buildings, the stars, whatever. But down
here, there’s none of that, just whatever we bring in ourselves. And if we shut that off —” And with the click of his
flashlight, be brought about the dark. What I remember next is sitting by myself on the long bus ride home, how my
classmates mocked me for screaming so loudly just because someone had turned out a little light.
* * *
Amanda says, “How do you know I skipped school today? What are you, spying on me?”
Jesse says, “Why are you such a bitch?”
Amanda says, “What is this, a prison?”
Leo says, “What am I going to do, tell a client I can’t make it on short notice?”
Susan says, “You know I have a life, right?”
Amanda says, “Are you crazy?”
Paul says, “Why don’t you stay home with me today?”
Leo says, “What’s wrong with you?”
* * *
A photo album had seemed too formal, I’d decided early on, so I keep the photos — now almost 50 — in a thick manila
envelope tucked between my copies of The Etiquette Advantage in Business and The Chicago Manual of Style, hidden
right here in plain sight. Now I don’t even take them out anymore to study them, spread them out on my desk and try
to arrange them in a pattern that makes sense. I just open the envelope and wedge each new photo in with the others.
* * *
I roll over to check the alarm, see that it’s just after 2:00. Leo, jetlagged from a European flight, went to bed around
dinner time, and he’s sleeping with his mouth open, wearing his ratty old Wharton t-shirt that I’ve tried to throw away at
least twice. Down the hall, I peek in on the two sleeping boys, but Amanda, I notice, isn’t in her room, and her window
is open. I shut it, lock it, then change my mind, reopening it and even tying back her blinds to help with her re-entry.
By the time the sun comes up, I’m at a highway rest stop, and there’s a photo waiting for me tucked inside the sleeve of
my vending machine coffee. This one shows Jesse standing beside my bed, staring at the indentation in the mattress
where I should be sleeping. As I walk back across the parking lot, I pull the envelope from my oversized purse and
dutifully place this photo in with the others.
I get within 10 miles of the caverns before I have to stop and ask directions, and then, after collating the advice of
three different gas station attendants, I finally pull in to the parking lot of the diner across the street. The air is
unseasonably thick stepping out of the car, the heat low on the cement. The kudzu and cicadas of my childhood are
everywhere, and for a moment I just stare down at the clouds that blanket the valley below, wondering how I wound up
so high in the mountains over the last hour or two without realizing it.
The lunch rush is over, and the waitresses are resetting the tables and gossiping about last night’s American Idol. I
scarf down a Salisbury steak, a side of hush puppies, and two cups of watery coffee, and I chuckle imagining Leo, the
eternal food snob, here with me.
My waitress chats about the heat, the lull in business before the busy summer tourist season. “Ever been to the
Caverns across the street?” she asks once the conversation starts to trail off. “Something to see if you’ve got the
time.” I thank her and order a slice of blueberry pie to go, tip $10 on a $7 check, and take the slice to the picnic
grounds outside the caverns where my class ate our brown bag lunches ages ago.
The museum attached to the gift shop looks unchanged — if anything, it’s just shabbier — and the gift shop consists of
nothing more than a rack of picked-over post cards and a cooler of off-brand sodas. Just as I remember it, on the far
wall of the shop is an open archway, blocked by a turnstile, leading down to the entrance to the cavern. A young
mother — younger than me, I think, by more than a decade — stands between two children, girls maybe five and
seven years old.
“So slow today there aren’t any official tours,” the man at the shop counter says. “But I’m about to take them down.”
He gestures toward the mother and her kids. “$2.00 with the off-season discount, if you’re interested.” I slip two bills
into the clear plastic box in front of the turnstile and push my way through. The man, now apparently our tour guide,
hands me one of those oversized mining helmets with a light mounted on top — a new touch, I think, since my last time
here. He solemnly reaches to each of our foreheads and switches on the lights, and then a minute later we’re winding
down the stairs and finally beyond the stairway and into the caverns themselves. He’s talking — reciting, really — and
it strikes me that the speech might even be identical to the one I heard years ago. “Somewhere down here”, he’s
saying, “are paintings of an earlier civilization. These paintings depict scenes of domestic life such as harvesting
crops, slaughtering animals.” I’m wondering if this is the same tour guide from decades earlier, sliding my fingers along
the familiar dampness of the walls. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the bobbing lights of the mother and her
daughters ahead and to my left. My hand finds a gap in the wall, the air cooler and somehow hitting the back of my
throat in a way that makes me catch my breath in a quick, sharp inhalation.
One of the kids, probably the five year old, balks, says she wants to turn back. The tour guide is trying to maintain
order, asking the child not to panic, imploring the mom to do her part in sorting out the situation, but I don’t hear her
voice at all. Then he’s calling out to me, asking if I’d mind heading back with the whole party and then coming back
down after he and I have accompanied the mom and daughters back to the top of the stairway.
I hear his voice rising as he calls for me again, and the beam of his light traces along the opening to the larger cavern
that I’ve started to move across. The light skitters along a shallow pool, projects obscene shadows of stalagmites on
the wall. But by then I’ve turned off my own beam and set the helmet aside, tucking underneath it my purse swollen
with my wallet, cell phone, and that enormous manila envelope, and I’m feeling my way around a corner and into what
feels like an even more expansive passageway, the cooler air tightening the back of my throat, my fingers reaching out
for more cracks in the walls to guide me along.
Chris McCreary
Chris McCreary is the author of two books of poems, Dismembers and The Effacements, and his short fiction has appeared in journals
such as New Review of Literature. Along with Jenn McCreary, he co-edits ixnay press, a small publisher of innovative poetry; in addition, he
reviews fiction and poetry for venues such as Rain Taxi and Review of Contemporary Fiction. He teaches English and creative writing at a
private high school in the Philadelphia area.
such as New Review of Literature. Along with Jenn McCreary, he co-edits ixnay press, a small publisher of innovative poetry; in addition, he
reviews fiction and poetry for venues such as Rain Taxi and Review of Contemporary Fiction. He teaches English and creative writing at a
private high school in the Philadelphia area.
