The Smart One (6 page)

“Do you know what you want?” the waitress asked. She had a harsh voice, kind of rough, really, and Martha hoped she hadn’t pinned too much on the idea of becoming a singer.

“I’ll have a mocha,” she said. “But with skim milk.” She was trying to cut back on her calories this week.

The waitress nodded without writing anything down, then turned to head back to the counter. “Wait,” Martha called. “Can I also have a muffin? Or coffee cake? Whatever’s back there.” She shrugged like she didn’t really care what she got, like she was just realizing that she hadn’t eaten breakfast and should order something. Of course, she
had
eaten breakfast. She’d had a bagel and then a big bowl of cereal, but that was hours ago. No sense in starving herself to lose weight. That’s not how it was done.

“Is cranberry okay?” the waitress asked. Martha nodded. She’d really wanted chocolate chip, or cinnamon, but cranberry would do. Yes, cranberry would do just fine.

Martha rooted around in her bag, hoping that for some reason she had the Dr. Baer notebook in there, even though she knew it was in her nightstand. She hadn’t used it in so long. She did manage to find an old to-do list and a pen. She uncapped the pen and smoothed out the paper, which had been folded up into a tiny square. Now she was ready. Ready to write down all of the horrible things that Dr. Baer had said to her and to deconstruct them.

But when she wrote down,
You need to push yourself
, it didn’t have the same effect. The problem was that when you wrote something down, you couldn’t hear the tone of voice. And really, it was Dr. Baer’s tone of voice that was the biggest problem.

At the top of the page, she wrote,
Tone of voice was disapproving and harsh
. There. That explained it better. Then she continued.
Go back to nursing
, she wrote.
Challenge yourself. Stop hiding
.

The waitress came to deliver the coffee and muffin, and Martha made a show of moving her paper over and giving the waitress a look like,
Do you believe this? Look what I’m dealing with
. But the waitress just set the oversized coffee cup and the plate down, and placed the bill on the table next to her.

“Anything else?” she asked, but she was already walking away before Martha could answer.

Martha read over her list. She really couldn’t believe the nerve of Dr. Baer, suggesting that she go back to nursing. After that nightmare of a job pushed her over the edge? All of those patients that didn’t have enough care? It was too much. Way too much. She had a job now, and it was a good job, even if Dr. Baer didn’t see it that way. Sure, it had gotten a little boring, but that was to be expected. And yes, Dr. Baer was right when she said that Martha was in a more stable place now. And maybe she was even right when she said it might be a time for Martha to challenge herself. Maybe.

“I hate my job,” Martha had said, as soon as she walked into Dr. Baer’s office that day. “Retail is killing me.” She threw her bag on the floor and waited for Dr. Baer to say something comforting, something about how hard it was to wait on people, but that it taught you patience and taught you how to treat others. But Dr. Baer had just sighed, leaned back, and said, “Tell me why you hate it.”

And so Martha had. She’d talked about how rude the new workers were, how she couldn’t stand the way the customers talked to her. “I’m a college graduate,” she said. “I could be a nurse if I wanted to.”

“So, why don’t you?” Dr. Baer asked her.

“I’m … well, you know why.”

“I know why you stopped nursing six years ago. I don’t know why you don’t do it now.”

“I have a job,” Martha said. “It’s not easy. And some days I complain about it.”

“You don’t just complain about it some days. It seems you complain about it most days. Almost every day, in fact, in recent months.”

“Because I hate it,” Martha told her. “But I need a job. I don’t have a choice.”

“It sounds to me like you do have a choice. You’re making the choice to be there. So, if you’re complaining about something, then make another choice.”

“It’s not that easy.”

Dr. Baer kept pushing. She kept asking her questions about the job, asking her why she hated it, telling her that it sounded like she was avoiding things. It was really rude, when you got right down to it. That was the only way to describe it.

At the end of the session, Martha had cried a little bit. She was tired of defending her job and then trying at the same time to explain why it was so awful. Because she did hate it, she did. But she couldn’t hate it completely, and she knew that too. J.Crew had saved her, and maybe that was pathetic but it was true. When it had felt like she was never going to be able to be productive again, when the world seemed really awful, she was able to go there and fold clothes.

It hadn’t always been easy, but she’d been able to get up and go, at first just for a few hours at a time, and when she got home, she’d go right back to bed. But at least she felt like she’d done something. And as time went on, it got easier, and then she didn’t have to convince herself to get up and go to the store. She just did it, and now it was almost effortless. But always, in the back of her mind, was the thought that she might slip back to that place, to that time when getting out of bed seemed almost impossible.

Was she fixed now? Was that what Dr. Baer was trying to tell her? It couldn’t be. No one in her life would ever consider her “cured.” At least once a day someone told her to lighten up. Every time she talked to her sister, Claire said, “Calm down. Stop worrying.”

But she couldn’t. That was the thing. Martha would have loved to stop worrying, but she didn’t know how. Maybe Claire thought it was
crazy, the way Martha always thought there was a murderer around every corner, or that she had stomach cancer, or that she was going to die in a car crash. But the thing was, those things happened. They happened every day to lots of people. And so she couldn’t understand how other people just walked through life, unconcerned, not even considering the possibility that tragedy could strike at any moment.

How did these people just assume that they were going to live a full and safe life, when all evidence pointed the other way? When there were so many ways for people to die, so many different ways that people could get hurt—just walking down the street, or even sitting at their desks at work—wasn’t it a miracle that anyone made it through the day at all?

As the session was ending, Martha had stood up and looked straight at Dr. Baer, to make one more attempt to try to get her to understand. And now, the last thing she’d said was playing over and over again in her head: “I can’t fold another pair of pants with whales on them,” she’d said. “I’ll die if I do.”

CHAPTER
3

In the Coffey house, there was always a list taped to the refrigerator. At the top, it was titled: THINGS WE NEED. When the list got too full, or most of the items had been crossed off, someone would tear it down and start a new list with the same heading. The title was always capped and underlined, as if to stress that yes, this is important, these aren’t just things we want, these are things we need.

Weezy couldn’t even remember when the list had started. She supposed it was when she and Will first moved into the house, over thirty years ago. They were so young then, barely out of college, and at that time they needed everything. But times were different, and they didn’t ask their parents for help or just charge everything, like kids would today. Neither of them even had a credit card yet, and they had a whole house to fill. So they made a list to prioritize what they were going to buy first. Weezy remembered their deciding to buy a bed and a couch, but waiting almost two years to buy a dining room table. Most of the house sat empty for those first few years, but the list always made them feel like it was only temporary.

It was on that list that Weezy told Will she was first pregnant. She’d gotten home from the doctor, so excited, and she’d added
A Crib
to the list.
So clever
, she thought. She stood back and looked at it and laughed and even jumped up and down a little bit. She was giddy the whole day, waiting for Will to come home and find out that they were going to start their family. It was almost perfect, the way she asked him to check the list to see if she’d added milk, and how he scanned it quickly, taking a moment to let it sink in, to believe what he’d read. He turned around to face her with a look of disbelief on his face. Neither of them
could believe it, really, that they were capable of something so amazing, so fantastic. They were so proud of themselves, as if no one before them had ever accomplished such a thing.

Of course, when Martha was two months old, and Weezy found out that she was pregnant again, there was no such moment. Instead, she’d sat on the kitchen floor and cried up a storm. She never told Claire this story. They were delighted when the baby came, of course, but on that day, newly pregnant with a fussy infant, she had cried. Holy moly, had she cried.

Once the list had been up there for so long, it just seemed necessary. Each family member wrote down whatever it was they needed, and it was all in one place. Today, the list contained the following items:
Grape-Nuts, lightbulbs, car inspection (Volvo), AA batteries
.

When Max was home, the list was filled with food:
Cheetos, Oreos, turkey, Honey Nut Cheerios
. Max still ate like a teenager, ravenous, shoveling food in his mouth like he hadn’t eaten in days. He was twenty-one now, going to be a senior in college, but he seemed younger to Weezy. His limbs still looked too long for his body, his smile a little sheepish, like he knew that he had grown up to be handsome, but he had no idea how or when it had happened.

Once, when Claire was in high school and in a particularly foul adolescent mood, she added
A Life
to the list. It was after they’d forbidden her to go on a weekend trip with a group of friends to someone’s unsupervised shore house. Claire had screamed in the way that only a fifteen-year-old girl can. She’d narrowed her eyes and accused them of abuse, and denying her the right to any fun at all. “Just because you have no lives,” she’d said, “and just because you are socially void, doesn’t mean that I have to be.”

Will had found the list in the morning while making coffee, and he’d brought it upstairs to Weezy, who was still in bed, and the two of them had laughed and laughed. “What a little shit,” Weezy had said, and Will snorted. They saved the list, thinking that someday they’d show it to Claire, maybe when she had a teenager of her own. “To show her what a horror she was,” Will said.

Martha had once added
Peace
to the list, during the first Iraq
War, and Weezy was touched that she had such a sensitive daughter. (She was also a little concerned about Martha’s obsession with war, natural disasters, and just horrible news in general, but she tried to focus on the sensitive part.) Claire had ripped down that list, saying that she didn’t want any of her friends to see it, because it was “beyond embarrassing.”

“Why do we even have this list?” Claire had asked that day. “Things we
need
? It makes us seem so desperate. God, we aren’t poor.”

Weezy loved lists. They made her feel powerful. Today she sat down with her coffee to make a list for the day.
Shore
, she put at the top. Then underneath that she wrote,
grocery store
. She put her pen down and took a sip of coffee. She’d been trying to get commitments from all of her children to go to the shore house for a week in August. She and Will would stay on for another week after, but she wanted all of her children there together. Was that too much to ask?

They’d all been responding in a casual way, “Sure, Mom, probably.” And now here it was, August 1, and she still didn’t have a real answer from any of them. Not even Martha, who was living with them. It was like none of them knew that things took planning, like they all expected her to just wait for them to make up their minds, and then rush around to get ready for it.

Weezy called Claire for the third time that week. As soon as she said, “Hello,” she could hear Claire sigh. “Mom, I told you I’d try. I’m not sure if I can take the time from work.”

“It’s less than a month away,” Weezy pointed out. She tried to stay calm. “Have you even talked to them about it? Have you asked? I’m trying to finalize everything.”

“I’ll ask today, Mom. I promise. But they might say no.”

“Well, see what you can do. Your sister would love to spend some time with you. And Max, too. He’s bringing Cleo. And your Aunt Maureen will be there for sure, although it’s looking like Ruth and Cathy can’t make it. Neither can Drew, which is too bad.”

“Max is bringing Cleo?” Claire asked.

“Yes. He asked if he could, and I said it was okay, of course.”

Claire stayed quiet for a few moments and Weezy wondered what
she was thinking. They’d all met Cleo last year, when Max had brought her for a visit. Right after they’d all been introduced, Weezy and Claire went to the kitchen to get drinks for everyone, and Weezy whispered, “She’s a bombshell.” It was the only word she could think of to describe Cleo.

“Mom.” Claire laughed. She’d started to say something, but then stopped and nodded. “She really is, isn’t she?” And the two of them had bent their heads together and giggled like girlfriends at the pretty little bombshell that Max had brought home.

Weezy had warned her sister before she came over for Thanksgiving. “Just so you know, Max’s girlfriend is quite a showstopper.” Maureen had laughed and said something about Weezy’s being a protective mother. “No, it’s not that,” Weezy said. “She’s just … she seems older. She seems, well, very sexual.”

Maureen had laughed again, but when she got to the house and met Cleo, she was visibly taken aback. She recovered, walked over to Cleo to introduce herself, and tripped just as she got near her. Maureen put her hands straight out, ended up pushing Cleo down on the couch to break her fall, and the two of them landed tangled together. They pulled themselves up and off of each other, and then sat side by side on the edge of the couch.