A Window Opens: A Novel (15 page)

Elliott laughed his big guffaw. “Attorney-at-law! That’s my son!”

“I’m proud of him. I mean, it will be even better when he gets some clients, but . . .”

I’d already plowed through half a bowl of shrimp crackers and was eager to change the subject. The truth was, Nicholas and I were both pretending not to worry while casually agreeing to eliminate formerly basic amenities like cable and home delivery of the
New York Times
. The one night a week my mom came over to make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner was now one less night we had to pay for dinner—or pay Jessie, whose hourly rate suddenly felt like a tremendous luxury. We’d decided to cut back her hours; two afternoons a week, Nicholas came home early to pick the kids up from school. The idea was that he’d continue to work from home, but he seemed to spend a lot of time sampling microbrews from Oregon. I had never before paid close attention to when my
paycheck was deposited; now I resisted the temptation to take it to a check-cashing place around the corner from Penn Station.

“And the kids? Those cuties.”

“They’re great. They’re adjusting to everything really well; they love having Nicholas around more.” I didn’t mention Oliver’s latest observation: “Daddy doesn’t get as mad at us when we’re having fun. And
he
doesn’t make us clean up.”

“And you? How are you adjusting?” Elliott furrowed his caterpillar-thick brows.

My eyes smarted. There was something about the combination of his resemblance to Nicholas and the pleasure of being able to understand what he was saying in such a loud restaurant—a luxury I didn’t have with my own dad. I pressed a finger tight to my lips before answering, “It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine.”

“Well, Elliott, now look what you’ve gone and done. Can’t you let Alice get used to her big job before grilling her?” Judy defused the moment, and we dug into our udon noodles.

•  •  •

I’d driven by the corporate campus many times, but now my blue employee pass allowed me into MainStreet’s inner sanctum for the first time. It consisted of a handful of eight-story waterfront buildings bedecked with solar panels and flanked by special short water fountains for dogs, which were welcome to come to work with their owners. All shrubbery was cleverly groomed with a patriotic theme. In the short walk around the place, I spotted topiaries in the shape of Uncle Sam, the Liberty Bell, and of course, a giant dollar bill.

My first meeting on Monday morning was a general orientation for all new hires— over two hundred of us—in a conference room with a mural on the back wall that said Shop Local. MainStreet prided itself on being the most dog-friendly company on earth, so I wasn’t surprised to find canines of all shapes, sizes, ages, and breeds in attendance alongside their humans. They were all remarkably well behaved, unlike sweet but
incorrigible Cornelius. I cringed, imagining him plowing down colleagues in his rush to gobble up the dog biscuits on the breakfast buffet.

The presentation focused on the unique culture established by our company’s boy genius leaders. We learned that employees took great pride in being wacky; if we passed a special test, we could even win a yellow ID lanyard indicating our wackiness. (I made a note in my notebook: “Investigate wacky test.”) We saw a video clip of our leaders’ speeches at a ribbon cutting for Heritage Towne: “We don’t just sell merchandise, we sell the future.”

MainStreet employees referred to the Cleveland office as “Big Daddy.” And Genevieve was right: most of the women did wear blazers. The men wore hoodies, and ninety-eight percent of them also had beards. Others had ponytails; many had both. People at MainStreet dove deep, jumped on a call, explored topics from a 30,000-foot perspective, and opened their kimonos to each other. When MainStreeters moved into a different “space,” they weren’t referring to a new office.

During orientation, we received strict instructions to leave an empty seat at the table in every meeting we would attend during our time at MainStreet. “Why?” I whispered to the guy next to me, a Metadata Specialist who had just relocated from Dubuque.

“For the customer,” the guy whispered back, straight-faced, while frantically copying down the Venn diagram our instructor was sketching on the Smart Board.

“Wait.
What? 
”

“The empty chair is for the customer. So he always has a presence in meetings.”

“Or her,” I said, reflexively. “You mean like Elijah?”

Even though every person in the room had endured the same grueling hiring process, our leaders still conducted a thorough review of the Tenets of Winners—with the unfortunate pronunciation of “tenants.”

I’d been classified as a Level 6 employee; it turned out, the highest level was 10, but there was no Level 9—just to make the leap from 8 to the pinnacle seem all the more insurmountable. For help with procedural questions, “best practice” was to check the wiki; if you still didn’t have
the answer you needed, you could file a “trouble ticket.” Trouble tickets “lived” in GatheringPlace and were organized by six-digit numbers. Your manager would be cc’ed on any trouble ticket you filed, so new employees were cautioned to file them sparingly or risk flagging themselves as poor problem solvers. Winners Answer Their Own Questions (WATOQ) was the most sacred of all the Tenants.

•  •  •

The hotel room was divine.

I started each day with room service muesli ($22) and, at night, celebrated another day of acclimation by devouring strawberry shortcake topped with a sprig of mint ($15). Orientation was exhausting and baffling, but in the absence of my normal hour-long routine of bath-books-bed, I had enough time to sneak in a long walk and visit my favorite bookstore in Larchmere. I was careful to pay for my purchases with a personal credit card; despite MainStreet’s contributions to Cleveland’s economy, I knew the bookstore owner would not take kindly to plastic printed with Scroll’s telltale white logo.

Like Susanna, many independent booksellers had been vocal in their opposition to our reading lounges. When I mentioned this to Genevieve, she said, “Progress is impossible without change. People who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.” When I repeated her astute observation to Nicholas, he pointed out that Genevieve owed a debt of gratitude to George Bernard Shaw.

By the end of the third day of orientation, I started to feel homesick for the sticky chaos of Flower Street. I half hoped I’d be invited to join a pub crawl organized by a new hire who wore lobe-expanding earrings—but, alas, his chosen revelers hopped on a shuttle bus to Ohio City with nary a glance in my direction. (Maybe it was my reading glasses?)

Back at the hotel, I called home and Jessie answered. “Alice, is that you? Hang on a sec.” Her voice sounded cheerful and warm, as if I’d caught her in the middle of a fun jam session instead of the cacophonous
symphony of early evening in our house. I depended on a glass of wine to get me through these hours; Jessie cranked up the Beatles and encouraged dance parties in the dining room. “I just tire them out,” she’d say. “That’s the name of the game.”

Now I heard Oliver’s basketball pounding in the driveway and I imagined Georgie nearby on the swing set, deep in conversation with herself. The oven door creaked shut, and then Jessie was back. “Sorry, just grabbing the chicken from the oven.” She sounded out of breath, which made me happy in a twisted kind of way. See, it’s not so easy after all. “So, all is well out there?”

“Yes! I miss you guys! And Jessie, thank you for holding down the fort. I can’t tell you how much—”

“Stop. It’s my pleasure.” Plain as the view of the Cleveland Public Library from my hotel window, I pictured Jessie swatting away my gratitude. I had one friend whose au pair live-tweeted tantrums and another whose nanny dosed her charges with Smarties and kept the good stuff—Adderall—for herself. In my mind’s eye, I got down on the fake sisal rug and bowed down before Jessie. “Stop it,” she’d say. “I love your kids! And this is not rocket science.”

So why did I sometimes feel so out of my depth?

I closed the drapes and started flipping through a leather binder of hotel amenities: gym, sauna, dry cleaning, 24-hour bar.

“Jess, is my husband, around by any chance?”

There was a pause, then Jessie’s muffled aside to Margot—“Is your suit on? Susanna will be here in five”—then the clomp of Margot’s turquoise Converse across the kitchen floor. I could picture the scene so clearly, right down to the tiny skull hanging from a leather string around Jessie’s neck.

“Alice, I’m back! Anyway . . . Nicholas? He’s going straight from his office to basketball. He said he might go out after that.” Now the water was running; I knew Jessie was busy, but I still wasn’t ready to end the conversation.

“Okay, maybe I’ll
catch him in the car. How was Oliver’s science test?”

“Great. He had a little trouble with the vocabulary section, but he said the true/false was easy. Listen, can we talk later? Cornelius is jumping up on the counter—”

“Of course. Go. Give them kisses for me.”

I didn’t wish I was there, exactly, especially with chicken on the menu (unpopular), but I still couldn’t believe I
wasn’t
there. I’ve never tried scuba diving but I imagined this was how it felt to discover you were underwater and still breathing.

Susanna:
Just drove by your house & saw N walking M&O across the street. Cute scene. Everyone dressed, happy, carrying a lunch.

Me:
You have no idea how much this means to me! Xoxoxo

Dad:
So? Are you running the place yet?

Me:
Hardly. Lots of stuff to learn, tho. Now watching the sunset over Lake Erie.

Dad:
Learning a lot?

Me:
Yes. It’s pretty exciting!

Dad:
Good for you. I’ll be first in line to hobnob with the literati.

Me:

Dad:
If only I could do anything out loud besides buzz. LOL.

Day 5. My final appointment in Cleveland was a meet-and-greet with the (mid)western branch of the Scroll team. There were about fifteen people in the room, all fitting the profile of the typical Scroll employee, down to the vintage footwear (running the gamut from Tretorns to wingtips) and tongue-in-cheek haircuts (bowl cuts, mullets). When I arrived, there was already a row of people seated along the periphery of the room, although there were still two empty seats at the conference table. I made a split-second decision to claim one; we were only
supposed to save a seat for
one
customer, right—not for his mother, too? Age before beauty.

The chairs were the excessively ergonomic kind, threatening to topple over when I leaned back, so I sat there, ramrod straight, waiting for the presentation to begin. When the room darkened, the Smart Board came to life with numbers and graphs, and a disembodied voice delivered a presentation on the projected Scroll customer.

According to market research conducted in MainStreet shopping malls, she was between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five. She lived in an urban or semiurban environment with her partner and one child or more and a “substantial pet,” classified as a dog or a cat, which she pampered with organic treats and high-end accessories. She drove a practical car but splurged on extras: navigation, roof rails, remote starter. She washed her hair with economy shampoo but splurged on designer face cream. She shopped for apparel at Anthropologie and Banana Republic, and for home goods at Williams-Sonoma, Room & Board, and West Elm. She subscribed to an average of three publications. She consumed an average of three books a month, selected on the basis of friends’ recommendations, positive reviews, and “other,” which the disembodied voice described, somewhat patronizingly, as a combination of serendipity and gut instinct.

I felt like I was watching a nature program about myself.
She dwells in that gray area between family obligation and a desire to satisfy her own sense of adventure. Here she is now, coming in for the kill. Watch as the mom sinks her unmanicured claws into the dad’s neck. He has failed in his mission to gather food for their young, so she must feed them tacos instead
 . . .

Before I left for the airport, I lined up with all the other new hires to collect a trophy for completing the orientation program. It was a hefty piece of hardware, topped with a bronze scroll, engraved in a font reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence: Alice P. I hadn’t done anything to earn this distinction (other than show up and eat expensive sugar cookies), yet I felt a surge of pride when I shook Chris Pawlowski’s
damp hand. Until this point, the only trophy I’d ever received was from my high school swim coach (Best Team Spirit), granted at the same ceremony where Will won a scholar-athlete award that came with a cash prize and a plaque so heavy, our dad pretended to drop it on the way out to the car.

Naturally, like all young athletes of their generation, my kids had more medals, trophies, and certificates than shelf space for all the hardware and accolades. Our sunroom bookshelf (Billy by Ikea) was laden with bobble-headed softball and T-ball players cast in low-grade metals, propped up on plastic squares painted to look marble. Now I had my own barely earned prize to add to the collection.