The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank [33]
At the door, she says, "I don't think it's so bad." I nod, not exactly in agreement. Her devotion to her brother, to all of us, takes my breath away.
T H E
W O R S T T H I N G A
S U B U R B A N G I R L
C O U L D I M A G I N E
Keep a calm atmosphere and children won't worry.
—From The Sailor's Handbook,
Edited by Halsey C. Herreshoff
I
My father knew he had leukemia for years before telling my brother and me. He explained that he hadn't wanted his illness to interfere with our lives. It had barely interfered with his own, he said, until recently. "I've been very lucky," he said, and I could tell he wanted us to see it this way, too.
This was an early spring weekend in the suburbs, and the three of us sat outside on the screened-in porch. My mother was in the background that afternoon, doing the brunch dishes and offering more coffee, weeding the garden and filling the bird feeder. It was warm but not hazy the way it can be in spring; the sky was blue with hefty clouds. The dark pink and red azaleas were just beginning to bloom.
—•—
Back in New York, I called my father before I left work. He was just getting home from the office. "Hi, love," he said. I knew he was in the kitchen, sipping a gin and tonic while my mother cooked dinner. His voice was as strong and reassuring as ever.
I tried to sound normal, too. Busy. When he asked what I was doing that night, I glanced at the newspaper open on my desk—a writer I'd heard on public radio was reading at a bookstore downtown—and I decided to go, so I could say so to my father.
After we hung up, I stared out of my window into the windows of the office building across the street. This was the year everyone started saying, "Work smart instead of long," and the offices were deserted, except for the tiny shapes of cleaning women in their grayish-blue uniforms, one or two on every floor. The woman would go into an office and clean. A second later the light would go out, and she would go on to the next office.
I heard the cleaning woman on my own floor, emptying wastebaskets and moving her custodial cart down the hall.
Her name was Blanca, and she was my social life.
—•—
I'd been a rising star at H—— until Mimi Howlett, the new executive editor, decided I was just the lights of an airplane.
The week she arrived she took me to lunch. At the restaurant, people turned around. Some knew Mimi and waved, but others just looked at her because she was beautiful enough for them to wonder if she was famous, and she carried herself as though she was.
I couldn't help staring, either—it was like she was a different species from me. She had the lollipop proportions of a model—big head, stick figure—pale skin, wintergreen eyes, and a nose barely big enough to breathe out of. That day, she was wearing a fedora, a charcoal-colored suit with a short jacket and an ankle-length skirt, and delicate laced-up boots. She might've been a romantic heroine from a novel, The Age of Innocence maybe, except she was with me, in my sacky wool dress, a worker in a documentary about the lumpen proletariat.
Her voice now: it was soft and whispery, the sound of perfume talking, which made her very occasional use of the word fuck as striking and even beautiful as a masculine man expressing nuanced and heartfelt emotion.
She began by telling me how sorry she was about my former boss, Dorrie, who'd been fired. She did seem sorry, and I hoped she was.
Then we talked about our favorite books—not recently published ones, but what we'd grown up reading and the classics we'd loved in college.
She'd gone to Princeton, she said, and asked where I'd gone. When I told her the name of my tiny college, she said that she thought she'd heard of it, adding, "I think the sister of a friend of mine went there."
She didn't mean to be disparaging, which only made me feel worse. Sitting across from her,