Heroes of the Frontier (13 page)

Even before Evelyn, the work wasn't fun anymore, wasn't even tolerable. One day Josie arrived at the office to find a note taped to the door. “How
could
you?” it asked in a sturdy all-caps hand. The note terrorized her for weeks. Who'd written that? What did it mean? Was it about Jeremy or someone complaining about overbilling? Josie grew skittish. She started to mumble. So afraid to give advice, to impart wisdom that might get someone killed in some lonely Afghani valley, she had begun saying next to nothing. The anxiety of influence! In her country, at this particular deranged moment, a dentist had the power to send a man to his death. A dentist! She had said wildly encouraging things to Jeremy about his ability to change the world, and he was shot dead. Then, she had gone the other direction, marked a box “negative” and that had, Evelyn or her carnivorous family claimed, led to that sick woman's cancer. Well, enough. It was better to say nothing, to avoid all people. She was done with all mouths, beginning with her own.

“Don't worry,” Raj said. They were walking through her empty office. Everyone was gone. Raj would soon take over, rehire most of the people. She loved him for it. “Josie,” he said, holding both her hands like they were about to square dance, “the lost will always prey on the competent. Just as someone drowning will pull down someone merely treading water.”

The last meeting with Evelyn and her people—it was an ugly thing. Months had gone by since the first subpoena, and the old woman had lost thirty pounds. She couldn't talk, and her once kind eyes had grown hard. Josie wanted to feel for her, but felt nothing. She wanted to be gone. Evelyn accepted the terms, took the money, her son-in-law watching her sign the papers with those withered, yellowed fingers.

And Josie was free.

“That's why your face was numb?” Sam slurred. They'd refilled their cups twice during the tale.

“I don't know,” Josie said. “Sure.”

Josie looked into the black night.

“Is this the way you're supposed to live?” Josie asked.

“What does that mean?” Sam asked, and stood, and looked into the night, trying to see what Josie was seeing.

“Do you feel like you're doing what you're supposed to be doing? That you're using your time here properly?”

Josie laughed, to undercut what she'd just said, but she knew, even in her stupor, that this was the central thought that had occupied her mind for the better part of twenty years. Wherever she was, she could be content, and could do her work, or feed her children, or temporarily love a man like Carl, and live in the town she lived in, in the country she'd been born in, but a thousand other lives presented themselves to her daily and seemed equally or more worthwhile.

Sam didn't answer. Then Josie realized she hadn't said the words out loud. Josie had wanted to say them, but now the moment had passed and she couldn't.

Instead she said, “It's okay,” and by that she meant that they, Josie and Sam, should be better to each other. We all should be better to each other, she meant to say. Evelyn shouldn't have gotten cancer, and shouldn't have taken Josie's livelihood in recompense, and why was it again that she hadn't heard from her father in eleven years and that Jeremy was dead? How was that acceptable?

“What were you looking at?” Sam asked.

“It's okay,” Josie said again, and then said, “I think it's time to sleep.”

But she didn't sleep. She went down to the basement and lay on the foldout couch there. Her business was gone, and there were no plaques, no thanks. Her employees blamed her, not Evelyn Sandalwood, not the cannibalistic legal climate, not the abyss that was moral order, but Josie, for the demise of the practice and the loss of their jobs. Tania had scolded her for not having the proper insurance. Tania!
Who she'd insured!
All these young women—they came to Josie looking for work, yes, but more important, they wanted insurance. A dentist's office surely had the best coverage. They had unknown lists of pre-existing conditions and they could not help themselves—they asked about insurance in the first ten minutes of any interview. Josie took care of Tania and Wilhelmina and Christy, took care of all these people and none of them lost money. All the money to be lost was hers, and they took their pay and considered themselves cheated. There was no reason to run a small business and employ people. These people had been brought up to feel aggrieved at any employer, to feel cheated by every paycheck. Josie had repeatedly brought up the idea of a co-op, a system whereby everyone at the practice shared the profits and shared the risks. No one wanted any part of that. They preferred to be aggrieved.

She closed her eyes.

And was met by the face of that certain zealous woman at the school, the one with the scarf, always some scarf, who thought Josie was some kind of shirker. “How can we get you more involved around here?” she'd asked, her crazed beady eyes and wild black hair like a broom of brambles. No, no. New thought. Jeremy. Not Jeremy. Someone else. Not Carl.
I read a book about html!
Carl once roared, the only time Josie had ever heard him yell.
I read it cover to cover!
This, for him, was a kind of work. This justified his sloth. This might have been the greatest thing he'd ever done outside the bathroom. Remember the time he bought two twelve-packs of toilet paper? He had to; he went through a roll a day. No. No more Carl. Josie swept him away. Patti? Whatever happened to Patti, that friend of hers from nursery school? Patti was good. Patti was funny, ribald, knew the bullshit when it was bullshit. With a shock of recognition, Josie realized it was her fault—Patti had reached out repeatedly last spring and Josie had what? Forgotten to write back? To call. No, Patti had moved. Divorced and moved. Why couldn't she remember these things? Running a business murders your ability to be the kind of friend people expect or deserve. Days and weeks go by and there can be no keeping up. Her best friends were her oldest friends, who did not expect constant contact. Everyone else was disappointed.

That was the primary response she provoked in others: disappointment. Her employees were disappointed in their hours and pay, her patients were disappointed in their care, in their cavities, in the fact of their dirty mouths, their soft teeth, in their slippery insurance plans. The suggestion box, the staff's idea, had been a disaster.
Kinda disappointed. Very disappointed. Super disappointed
. She put away the box, had a few happy years, then the customer-review websites appeared, jesus, so many aggrieved, all these anonymous patients avenging her every slip, every imperfect moment. Disappointed in her bedside manner. Disappointed in the diagnosis. Disappointed in the magazines in the waiting room. Every disappointment a crime.

We live in a vengeful time. You didn't get the orange chicken you ordered
or
the sticky rice? And now you're already home? Meaning you'd have to drive all the way back to get the orange chicken and sticky rice you ordered? Injustice! And thus avenge. Avenge the proprietor's crimes! This was our contemporary version of balance, of speaking truth to power. Avenge the proprietor on thy customer-review site! Right the imbalance! Josie had done it herself. Three times she'd done it, and each time it felt so good for two or three minutes, and then felt base and wasted. It meant nothing to the world. Forget it. How had she stayed in business that long? I'm disappointed, too, she wanted to say. Disappointed in your halitosis, by your hard-on when Tania leans over you, pressing her breasts into your pubescent shoulder. Disappointed in the way you hold the armrests as if I'm hurting you, fuck you, I'm barely touching you. You crybabies. You big babies. Bramble-haired mom was disappointed. Evelyn most disappointed of all. Oh shit: It was a show:
Disappointed
:
The Musical
.

Think of it: the audience leaves
Disappointed
. What'd you see? How'd you like it?
Disappointed
. That would be the ad!
After This Show, You'll Leave Disappointed
. It couldn't lose. Lying in the basement, apart from her sleeping and drooling children, her eyes now open, Josie thought about getting a notepad. No, she'd remember. It was better than
Norway!
Every song in
Disappointed: The Musical
a litany of complaint set to a jaunty score. The set a kaleidoscopic orgy of colors and products, the unimaginable array of things and conveniences available to us, all somehow falling short, all letting us down. Products to be disappointed in. Our friends: disappointing. Our parents: disappointments. Airlines: disappointing. Our nations and leaders, all disappointments. The show would make the disappointment four-dimensional. The actors would sing and dance in phenomenal outfits that would somehow fall short. The seats in the theater would be comfortable, sure, but could be better. At intermission there would be refreshments, but they would be not up to par, and the time before Act II not quite long enough to enjoy these beverages. Ticket prices: not quite outrageous, but definitely a disappointment. Availability, also disappointing. The show would be too long.

But Evelyn would be the star. Whoever played her would be in her seventies, but her opening number would be about all that she had to live for, the thousand possibilities ahead of her. We'd see an aging woman, and a woman who was not quite able to bound around the stage—and she'd be smoking, too, and possibly not even moving so much at all, perhaps just sitting on a stool—and she would sing a song as if a vivacious new arrival to the big city: all the things she wanted to do. But then. But then, she sees the dentist, who is somehow oblivious, somehow causes her cancer—that would be the end of Act I—this dentist causes cancer by not catching it. Her second solo number would be a tragic song about lost horizons, about finite time, about disappointment. The show-stopper would be that song “Every Disappointment Is a Crime,” and for it Evelyn would be joined by her children and grandchildren, all lamenting her fate, but expecting some measure of satisfaction when justice is served, when the negligent dentist is punished and cast away—perhaps some trapdoor in the stage? The show would end that way, with the dentist descending at the same moment Evelyn ascended—she would rise to heaven, amid a sweep of cornets and French horns, and then of course she would be disappointed there, too.

JOSIE WOKE TO THUMPING
from the rooms above, and knew these were the sounds of Sam and the twins eating and dressing and, Josie prayed, leaving soon. She had no clock nearby and didn't want to know the time. She wanted only for these people to vacate the house before they woke up Paul and Ana. Sam had to work in the morning, she had said, lead a group from New Jersey, and the twins would be at school, so Josie and her kids would be left alone till the afternoon.

The front door closed with civility, then the screen door with a cannon bang, and Josie put a pillow over her head. Then the door opened again, the screen banging three, four more times. It was some kind of joke, Josie thought. But finally it was quiet, and Josie was very warm, and briefly thought she would fall asleep again, only to find, when she closed her eyes, the face of Jeremy, and his mother, and her accusatory eyes. Presented with the choice between waking up far too soon, or closing her eyes again to fight off these faces and their accusations, she threw aside the blankets and pillows and got up.

The first floor was silent and clean. Sam and her children left no mess, no sign they had eaten or in any way inhabited these rooms just moments before. In Josie's home, dishes were not cleaned after dinner; it seemed better to leave them until the morning, as if to clear and clean them too quickly would be to prematurely erase the memory of a fine meal. Josie walked around, and, her mind awakening slowly, thought with some small pleasure that for twenty minutes or so she might be able to explore the house without being observed or interrupted. Sam had no coffee, so Josie brewed tea and walked through the kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers.

The organization was astounding. There was a cabinet for glasses, another for plates and bowls, and no interloping had occurred in any of them—no rogue tumblers or platters. There was a drawer for plastic bags. A cabinet for pots. The silverware drawer had silverware in it and nothing else—no carrot grater, no corn holders. Those outliers had their own drawer. In vain Josie looked for the drawer or bin or closet where all the uncategorizable things were held, or hidden during desperate cleanings, but found nothing. The refrigerator, though an older model, was clean and bright, and inside were plastic tubs of leftover pasta and garden burgers. The milk had been somehow conjured from hemp, and the orange juice had been squeezed and bottled in Homer. A half-eaten banana had been carefully entombed in plastic.

Josie stood in the doorway to the living room, sipped her tea, and contemplated the strangeness of being in a house at all. Josie and her children had been away from home for only a few days and already this, this large house with its sturdy walls, walls so strong pictures and mirrors could be hung from them, was some foreign and unfathomable temple to solidity. Josie found herself touching the walls, leaning against them, lavishing in their strength. There was a fireplace that appeared to get use, a tidy wall of quartered logs on one side, a smaller pyramid of kindling on the other. On the mantel were some old family photos that Josie recognized, one of Sunny and Helen and Josie and Sam, an unsurprising array of the twins' school photos and lacrosse trophies, and a large plaque that Josie passed over quickly the first time, only to realize, when she returned to it, that it had been created to commemorate Sunny's retirement. How did
Sam
have
that
?

From above, she heard two small feet drop to the floor, and guessed from their nimbleness that it was Ana. In the mornings Paul was slower to re-enter the world. It would be better, Josie thought, if her children had a father like Zoe and Becca's: heroic and faraway, rather than nearby and cowardly. It was far better and Josie tried to stifle the envy that was washing through her. How did Sam afford a place like this by giving birding tours for three months a year? It was ludicrous and not fair. Why should her fatherless children be so beautiful and strong? Why should she have arrived at effortless solutions to everything while Josie's head was in a vise?

“Mom?” Ana called from above, having no concern for her sleeping brother.

“Down here,” she said, and Ana tromped down the stairs.

Ana was hungry, so Josie found yogurt and they ate a cup together. They found grapes and crackers and ate them. They found eggs and Josie made omelets. While eating her second helping, Ana noticed the play structure in the backyard and ran to it. Paul was still asleep, so Josie went back to the fridge, found chocolate kisses and ate six of eight. She opened the front door, hoping to find some answer to the question of her unhappiness that day, but found only the morning newspaper.

She brought it back to the kitchen and paged through it while keeping an eye on Ana, who was busy finding weak spots in the play structure. Josie knew she would break some part of it, and knew also that Sam's kids were far too old to play on it. With Ana, Josie did calculations daily: How likely will it be that she breaks this? What will it cost in time or money to repair it? She scanned the structure, looking for the worst Ana could do, and arrived at the conclusion that it would involve the thin chains that held the swings to the thick posts above. The chains were the structure's weakest point and Ana knew this, and was already pulling wildly on them.

Josie refilled her cup with tea and turned her attention to the local weekly newspaper. The cover stories concerned a city employee who had made away with twenty-five thousand dollars in quarters he'd pilfered, over three years, from parking meters. The paper was astonished, wounded, but Josie thought: that is some extraordinary planning and follow-through. That man had some talent. A few pages later, the Announcements page graphic featured two words in large letters:
Births,
accompanied by a rattle and bottle, and
Police,
with a picture of handcuffs. These two words and pictures were next to each other, tilted jauntily, and were above what was mostly a police blotter of extraordinary clarity.