The Insatiables Read online

  “You guys need to be nicer to Molly,” she finally said. In fact, she almost shouted it, as if to make sure everyone around us could hear her. The sudden increase in volume caught me off guard.

  “What?” I said.

  “Molly,” Jamie repeated. “You need to be nicer to her.”

  “Why do you think we aren’t being nice to her?” Celeste said.

  “She told me Halley has been giving her a hard time about agenda booklets for the San Francisco meeting,” Jamie said, still at full volume. “You know, it’s not the end of the world if we don’t have agenda booklets.”

  My face reddened as she walked away.

  Celeste looked bewildered. She peeked into Molly’s cubicle to make sure she wasn’t there, then returned. “You gave Molly a hard time?” she said.

  “Are you kidding? Come on. She gave me a hard time!”

  Celeste laughed, then whispered, “Did you hear they’re thinking about making Jamie a Vice President?”

  “Vice President of what, secretaries?” I felt the air change, and I knew immediately that I shouldn’t have said it out loud.

  Half a second later, Jamie reappeared around the corner of our cubicle. I fought the urge to punch myself in the face. Even Phil Collins looked disappointed in me.

  “Celeste, one more thing,” Jamie said, not looking at me.

  “Sure,” Celeste said, turning.

  “Anthony wants the company plane to depart San Francisco airport at 7:30 a.m. I made all the arrangements with the FBO, but I need you to manage the limo.”

  “Okay.”

  “Repeat it back to me.”

  Celeste smiled with teeth. “Set the limo for six people plus luggage March eighth to arrive to the FBO at 7:30 a.m.”

  “Thanks,” Jamie said, then left again.

  After counting to ten and standing up to check the hallway, I whispered, “Do you think she heard what I said—about secretaries?”

  “Yep,” Celeste said.

  I raked my fingers through my hair.

  “Don’t worry about it. I don’t think she liked you before.”

  “What?” I blinked. “Really? I mean I know we’re not exactly friends, but you think she actually dislikes me?”

  Celeste rolled her eyes and turned back to her computer as I stewed in my thoughts. Another tiny betrayal to add to our growing list.

  4

  A couple days of slow but persistent rain transformed once-snowy yards into messes of muddy slush. I sat in my beater car outside my parents’ house listening to the end of a song I liked on the radio before traipsing in for dinner. There was peace in suburban Ohio’s winter shadows, the low muffled rumbling of the car engine, gusts of wind creaking through plastic siding. My winter boots squished through the small patch of grass that led up to the white wood stairway I’d helped my dad refinish the previous summer. The front door squealed to announce my arrival. Guthrie howled a quick greeting and licked the tips of my fingers.

  I shrugged out of the warm shell of my coat and threw it on the bed in the room I used to share with my sister, the one with the big stain on the carpet from the time I threw up blueberry pie when I was seven, and framed needlepoint pictures of princesses and ballerinas hanging on either side of the pink lace-curtained window. My sister’s bed was still there, but mine was eight miles away in my apartment. The living room was still littered with Santa Claus figurines, snow globes, and fake holly candle holders, which we would soon wrap in paper towels and place back in musty boxes to be stacked in my grandparents’ storage shed.

  My mom’s oven-mitted hands pulled a bubbling Pyrex dish of potato casserole from the oven and set it on top of the stove, dribbling two drops of gravy onto the yellow linoleum below. She always forgot I hated gravy. “Forgot” was the generous interpretation; it was more likely she thought if she fed it to me enough, I’d change and start liking it. Anyway, I always scraped it off.

  Rusty steak knife in hand, my mom sawed through the casserole’s gummy layers, a look of concentrated determination on her face. This was the mode in which she operated most of the time. But there was always something else lingering there, just under the surface. You’d catch brief glimpses of it, and then it would flicker away. Stitches of something resembling melancholy, maybe even a bit of resentment, the origins of which I never knew.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

  “No, it’s done,” she said. “Dinner!” she called to the others.

  The rest of the family emerged from in front of the television to crowd around our little dining room table. We passed the thin metal spatula from person to person, scraping the sides of the casserole dish as we scooped big slices into our bowls. Then we all spooned hunks of casserole down our gullets in silence. We weren’t the kind of people who savored and celebrated food, nor did we view food as simply fuel. We didn’t commune over our food either, unless it was a holiday. No, our relationship with food was more of a quiet animal voraciousness. The hot globs when they hit our mouths triggered some primordial comfort mechanism, and we shoveled more in, hoping to really feel something. Dinner was always a sort of silent pursuit. Eventually we had our fill, and that was something too.

  After we’d carried our dishes to the sink and my mom had wrapped the leftover casserole in aluminum foil and wedged it into the refrigerator, we all retired back to the television once more.

  “Oh, Gene Crandel died,” my dad said over the top of the obits section. His right hand stirred a cup of coffee, into which he alternately piled spoonfuls of sugar and milk. He kept stirring it and stirring it, but he never drank it, and it eventually got cold.

  “About time,” my mom said, looking up. “Poor guy—how long has he had emphysema?”

  “N!” my brother shouted at the television.

  “Six years?” my mom continued. “I hardly remember seeing him without that oxygen tank.”

  “His granddaughter just got married,” my dad said. “What was her name?”

  “Holly,” my sister chimed in, eyes still glued to the tube.

  “Shotgun wedding, from what I heard,” said Mom.

  “Yep,” my sister said. “She always was kind of a slut.”

  “Damn it, just buy the vowel!” my brother said.

  “Language, Luke,” said Mom.

  I shifted in the chair so my sister could pass through to the kitchen for a new bottle of artificially flavored peach tea. Her eyes held a vacant, unconcerned expression, and I wondered how much of it was natural and how much was contrived.

  “Did you hear Nancy Carson’s daughter is having a baby?” my mom said.

  “Boy or girl?” Lindsay asked, settling back into her spot on the floor.

  “They don’t know yet; they just found out. She’s been having all sorts of infertility problems, so it’s a miracle she’s even pregnant.”

  “It’s ‘strawberry,’ you idiot,” my brother said.

  My dad clucked suddenly and looked over at my mom. “Before I forget, Linda, we need to go to Sam’s tomorrow and pick up that mattress.”

  “I have to go to the post office in the morning. Can we go after that?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “didn’t you just buy a new mattress a couple weeks ago?”

  “Yep,” my dad said. “It’s too soft.”

  For as long as I could remember, my dad, the retail menace of Dayton, Ohio, had had this funny habit of buying things, deciding he didn’t like them, and returning them or exchanging them for something else. He would exchange multiple things in succession until the store manager would finally tell him they couldn’t take back any more of his purchases. He’d thusly narrowed his valuable patronage mostly to Sam’s Club, because “they’ll take anything back.”

  “I thought this one was a keeper,” I said.

  “Well, it seemed okay in the store, but my
back is still killing me, and I know it’s because it’s too soft.”

  He continued reading the paper, the table lamp casting a yellow haze over his shoulder.

  “See that?” my dad said to the TV. A teaser for the nine o’clock news described two fatal Cincinnati shootings as the day’s top stories. “I swear, the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. Halley, you really ought to come with us to the shooting range next time. Your sister came, and she liked it.”

  “Dad got me a pink gun,” Lindsay said. She pulled a wood-handled hair brush dozens of times through her hair, and then began meticulously clipping it back in barrettes.

  “I don’t care if I ever go to Cincinnati again,” my mom mumbled fearfully.

  My dad pointed at the TV as if the perpetrators themselves were standing in front of us. “You kids are growing up in a different world. When I was your age, this kind of stuff didn’t happen. My mother let us play outside until it was dark, and she never worried. Everything was better back then.”

  That was probably true—the part about my grandmother not worrying—as my dad grew up on a family farm with no television, where he and his siblings entertained themselves by throwing live chickens at each other. His father, my grandfather, had been a well-respected grower of non-alfalfa hay. They’d had a modest but high-quality operation that supplied small, green bales to horse breeders. Every year at baling time, my dad and his younger brother and older sister were dragged out of bed at three o’clock in the morning when the moisture was just right. They rubbed their adolescent eyes, pulled on their work boots, and dreamed of a day when they wouldn’t have to do this shit anymore. Then, to everyone’s horror, that day arrived.

  The year my dad turned seventeen, Dayton was hit by a storm that perforated the roof of the hay barn, allowing water to seep onto the new bales, unbeknownst to my grandfather. The excessive moisture caused bacteria to grow, generating heat inside the bales, which spontaneously combusted one night while everyone was sleeping. The barn “went up like a tinderbox,” as my grandfather used to say. They lost everything: the barn, the house, the hay, the equipment, and what was left of the field. They got out just in time to salvage their own lives and the lives of their two Australian shepherd mutts, Corky and Sparky, whose terrified barks had saved them all.

  The insurance money was enough to rebuild the house and to allow my grandparents to semi-retire, but they never did revive the farm. For extra money my grandmother took a part-time librarian job and my grandfather worked as a handyman. But their children, who had always taken their futures for granted—the inevitability that the farm would be passed down to them and to their children and their children’s children—never quite recovered. They had to reimagine their lives, their places in the world. My father, at the age of forty-eight, was still trying to reimagine his.

  After high school, he’d taken a job in the packing department of the peanut butter factory. This was meant to be a short-term thing, to buy him some time to decide what to do with himself. But then he met my mother, the former Pork Festival Queen of Montgomery County—and a real catch, according to my dad—and soon they were having a baby—me—and all grand plans were put on hold. Put on hold, but not put out of mind. For as long as I could remember, my dad came home smelling like roasted peanuts, talking about his plans. Businesses he wanted to start, investments he wanted to make, houses he wanted to build, adventures he wanted to have. He didn’t talk about them in a pitiful, helpless sort of way. He always spoke as a person whose whole life was still ahead of him, full of opportunities ripe for the picking. He read stories of the rich and famous and imagined himself as them. America was a smörgåsbord of dishes, and all he had to do was choose one, reach out and grab it. He loved that about this country.

  But years passed, and he didn’t choose a dish. He didn’t start a business or make those investments or build a house or have the adventures. He settled into the hectic rhythms of a low-income paterfamilias. And as time went by, the chasm between the grand world of his imagination, all wholesomeness and opportunity and Norman Rockwell paintings, and the world he lived in, with its meth-heads and murders and thwarted social mobility, became bigger and bigger and bigger. The chasm didn’t disillusion him, it made him angry. These people, these criminals and terrorists running amok, were ruining his promised land.

  And as we settled in to watch the final round of Wheel of Fortune, Lindsay with her fresh bottle of tea, my dad having moved on to the sports section, my mom clipping coupons, and Luke trash-talking Pat Sajak, I realized that herein lay my biggest fear, which I could never say out loud: if I did nothing I might wind up just like this, living my whole life and dying in front of the television in Dayton, Ohio.

  5

  Fast forward through many more hours of family time in front of the TV. Hundreds of bullet-pointed emails. Thinly-veiled threats from Molly. Lectures from Jamie. Hallway nods from Gus. Hotel contracts. Catering orders. Motor coach schedules. Activity registrations. March was there in a flash. And somewhere between San Francisco’s juice bars and funky shoe stores, there I was, heaving and cramping, bargaining with a disinterested god.

  I crawled on my hands and knees to the mini bar for a cold bottle of water. The liquid felt hard and foreign in my stomach, like gravel. Phil Collins watched from his travel aquarium with sympathetic eyes as I thrashed, annoyed with my body’s unwillingness to cooperate. That familiar hotel smell hung in the air, particle board and carpet cleaner and high-end french fries. Outside on the street there was shouting, muffled car horns. The heavy moaning of two people next door. The world passing by, unaware.

  The ring of my cell phone woke me up. Celeste.

  “Hey,” she said. “You sound like you’re sleeping.”

  “I have the California death flu.”

  “Oh,” she chuckled, “that sucks.”

  “Are you laughing at me?” I said. Traitor.

  “No. Well, not at you being sick. It’s just that you’re not going to like what I called to tell you.”

  “Oh no, what is it?” It was more of an accusation than a question.

  “My flight just got canceled,” she said. “There’s a snowstorm in Chicago. I can’t get there ’til tomorrow.”

  “Fuck.”

  Celeste laughed again. “It cracks me up when you drop the f-bomb.”

  It wasn’t funny though. The alarm of all the pre-meeting tasks I needed to complete—packets to stuff and banquet staff to meet and miscellaneous errands to run—rang loudly through my throbbing skull. I pushed the bed pillow onto the floor so I could rest my face on the flat, cool mattress.

  “Tell me what to do,” I said. “Clive gets in this afternoon. I can’t get out of bed without barfing.”

  “Drink some tea—that’ll perk you up a little. Then get to a pharmacy. They can probably give you something for nausea.”

  I would need to lie around for a couple more hours to psych myself up for that.

  That afternoon, I left Phil Collins to hold down the fort while I went out in search of medicine. The sun shone brightly, and I dug to the bottom of my bag for a pair of aviator sunglasses that would cover half my face from the piercing light. A reassuring breeze blew across the hotel lobby entrance. I’d done the thing where I wore pajamas in public, but no one could tell because I had a trench coat over them. At least I convinced myself no one could tell. They probably could. This was California, after all.

  When I got to my rental car—a red Fiat 500 I’d deposited in a nearby parking lot in my haste to find a bathroom the day before—there was a parking ticket under the driver’s side windshield wiper.

  “God damn it,” I mumbled as I calmly threw it on the passenger seat.

  I started the engine, pressed the clutch, and tried moving the gearshift to R, but it wouldn’t quite lock into place. I tried a little more forcefully. My dad’s old car had been a manual, so I wasn’t a total novice
at this. When I’d arrived at the rental car check-in desk, a hostess with black-framed glasses had said there was a big auctioneers convention in the city and their branch was almost out of cars, so she offered me this stick-shift Fiat instead of the automatic the travel agent had booked. I was glad to have a car at all. Lucky for me, the commute from the airport to the hotel had required forward motion only.

  I fiddled with the shifter for at least ten minutes, trying to make it work. No dice. But I realized I’d parked on enough of an incline that I could idle backward out of the space in neutral. Victory! I imagined Gus congratulating me on my infinite resourcefulness. I was definitely Level 2 material.

  San Francisco vibrated with bohemian coffee shops and foggy morning bicycle rides, but I didn’t care about that now. I prowled the streets in work mode, only processing utilitarian details like a computer programmer who sees the world in zeros and ones. Soon I spotted my target: a red-awninged pharmacy. I briefly considered leaving the car in the middle of the street while I went inside, opting to play the dumb tourist card if I had to, but then I noticed an underground garage on the next block. Swallowing back nausea and sweating with fever, I spiraled down the garage’s narrow labyrinth of turns and parked in a place that looked to have a sufficient incline I could idle backwards out of.

  I walked through the pharmacy door and was blasted with the smells of gauze and disinfectant. The woman behind the counter, whose gorgeous bronze skin stood in sharp contrast to her white lab coat, looked less like a pharmacist than an actress playing a pharmacist in a movie. I was immediately sheepish about the sweatpants I was wearing.

  “I need something for nausea,” I said.

  “Aisle five,” she replied, barely looking up.

  I fetched the drugs, paid, and returned to the parking garage, relieved to make it back to the judgment-free safety zone of the rental car. Until I realized that I could not, in fact, idle backward out of my parking space. I uttered a string of expletives that would’ve driven my mother to drink. The engine ran quietly as I sat thinking, staring at concrete walls. I considered taking a short nap. I tried to shake the car backward by throwing myself against the seat. I mentally pleaded to the rental car gods to miraculously illuminate my dim mind to the ways of the manual reverse gear. The attempts were futile, and I started to fear I would actually break the shifter off. The only thing I could think to do was Flintstone my way out. I began to think the pathetic, self-pitying thoughts of the ill Western traveler. Will I ever be well again? Will I ever make it out of this godforsaken place? Maybe I’ll just sit here and die. Door open, I pushed my feet against the parking garage floor. At first the weight of the car held it stubbornly glued to the spot, but it gradually, inch-by-inch, began to roll backward, all my weight pushing against it, narrowly missing a neighboring Mercedes. Noxious exhaust fumes filled my nostrils. Moisture saturated my temples, and I rested for a few seconds, fighting back the black spots that danced in front of my eyes. I put the car in gear and swirled up the garage’s serpentine twists, finally emerging into the sunlight again. And as I cruised down the street back to my temporary bed, I felt as if I had escaped something really terrible.