“This is Alison Gran—shit.” She pushes number seven on the phone, waits for three beeps, listens to the commands, and starts again. “This is Alison Gray. Please—shit.” She pushes the button. “You have reached Alison Gray at HomeStyle magazine. I’m either away from my desk or on another line. Please leave a message.” She presses number five and sits back in her chair. Good. Done. Next?
As if on cue, a young woman with wispy blond hair pokes her head around the door. “Alison—great, you’re here. Staff meeting in ten minutes in the conference room. We’re going over the holiday issue.”
Alison smiles—Christmas in July. Welcome to the upside-down world of magazine publishing. In December they’ll be testing barbecue sauces and staging a cookout on a California beach. She looks around her office. It is cramped and spare, with a window overlooking the dirty, exposed organs of the short building next door, but she knows she is lucky to have it. Not to mention the job—it isn’t a great time in publishing to find a full-time position. Three months ago, when she’d called everyone she knew in the industry to see what was available, it had seemed hopeless. One acquaintance, looking over her e-mailed résumé, essentially told her there was no chance. “Twenty-six-year-olds are being hired at your level,” she said. “And the thing is, magazines want to hire young. It keeps things fresh. You have some good experience, but it’s a little—well—outdated, isn’t it? Unless you work for a parenting magazine, you’re kind of out of the loop. Even there, I’d say it’s a long shot. Have you considered getting an MBA?”
Great—so she was over the hill and underqualified. After going back to bed with a pillow over her head for several hours, she’d flung the covers off and sat up. She had spent ten years in this profession, damn it. She wasn’t going to let one snippy—okay, completely demoralizing—comment stop her. She resolved to call everyone she could think of, friends of friends of friends—whatever it took. She needed a job.
In the end it was Renee Chevarak, Alison’s old boss, who gave her a break. Renee was now editor in chief of HomeStyle, a magazine that was about everything its name implied. “Of course I remember you!” she said when Alison finally convinced Renee’s assistant to put her through. “You were the only assistant I ever had who actually knew how to file. Where the hell have you been?”
“I took a little hiatus,” Alison said. “Had two kids … but now they’re older, and—”
“You’re going stir-crazy.”
“Something like that.” Renee’s glib tendency to sum people up with one-liners—which Alison had once found irritating—now came as a welcome deflection.
“So what are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Alison said frankly. “At this point I’d be willing to consider just about anything.” She told Renee about the senior editing jobs she’d held at other magazines, and then the freelance assignments.
“You know,” Renee said thoughtfully, “I have something here that might be perfect for you. I’m introducing a new feature called ‘Focus’ that will have a different theme each month—Focus on Family, Focus on Rituals, whatever. I need an editor who will come up with ideas and commission pieces—see the whole process through, beginning to end, every month. How does that sound?”
Focus on Health Insurance. Focus on Mortgage Payments. “What a great idea,” Alison said, remembering Rule No. 1 about Renee: her brilliance needs to be acknowledged before the conversation can move forward. Then she remembered Rule No. 2: parrot her words back to her—it lets her know you’re listening, and validates her ideas. “I think that might be perfect for me.”
“All right, then,” Renee said. “When can you start? Just kidding. There’s an editing test you have to do. Not a big deal—you could probably do it in your sleep. And you have to go through several interviews, with human resources and with my staff, before you get to me.” She paused. “I should say ‘if.’ But don’t worry—I’m pretty sure you will.”
Alison’s heart sank. For a fleeting moment it had seemed as if getting this job was going to be miraculously easy. Now it looked as unlikely as any other prospect. She’d get strawberry jam on the take-home exam; the prepubescent staff would take one look at the bags under her eyes and her five-year-old suit and they’d start saying how much they appreciated her coming in and that they’d be in touch.
“Oh, to hell with it,” Renee said suddenly. “I’m the boss here. And I’m in a bind. Come in tomorrow to talk to me. I want to make this happen. How soon could you start?”
Bad clothes, old shoes, no babysitter. (Dolores was out of the picture; Alison had reluctantly concluded that her mother was right.) Self-inflicted haircut. In dire need of a total physical makeover. How long would it take to get ready, six months? “When do you need someone?”
“Yesterday. Hey—any chance you’ll be in the city this afternoon?”
“Uh—sure,” Alison said, flipping through babysitting options in her head: If Robin—dear Robin!—could take Noah and pick Annie up at the bus. . .
“Good. Come by the office at two o’clock; I can carve out a little space then. Now, if this works out I’ll have to put you on a one-month contract basis. You understand. Just to hedge my bets.”
Alison wanted to jump through the phone and kiss her. After what she’d been through, she appreciated Renee’s bluntness. She needed someone who’d be straight with her, who wouldn’t make her guess. She’d had more than enough of that.
Now, in her tiny office, Alison glances at the clock, turns on the computer, and opens the manila folder on her desk marked focus. It is full of clipped newspaper articles, fabric swatches, Renee’s notes on Post-its—“Focus on Enviro/Mental?”—digital photos, and glossy ads torn out of magazines. Clearly, the Focus section is supposed to be what passes for high concept in the world of shelter magazines, capturing some fairly obvious national trend after it becomes prevalent enough not to seem peculiar, but before it becomes stale. At the same time, the rubric should be broad enough as to be almost generic. And Alison will need to make these “predictions” six months ahead.
She thinks about her own life. What is important to her now? Certainly, her criteria have changed. Six months ago she was a vaguely dissatisfied housewife with young children; now she is a terrified single working mother trying to remake her identity. Focus on Aftercare? Focus on Take-out Pizza?
As an editor at mainstream women’s magazines, Alison had always had an uncanny ability to pinpoint what readers wanted. A writer she worked with once turned to her in a meeting and said, “I’ve never met anyone so in touch with Middle America. Frankly, you freak me out.” It was a joke—but it wasn’t. Alison could never have passed for one of those tart-tongued New York editors weaned on sushi and cosmopolitans. At the last magazine she’d worked for, she became famous for a quote her boss had posted in the lunchroom: “We’re doing a feature on comfort food? I am comfort food!”—Alison Granville.
Focus on … She looks at her watch again. 3:13, two minutes until the meeting. Right now Annie is switching activities at summer camp—3:15, arts and crafts; Alison has the schedule posted on her bulletin board—and Noah is waking from a nap at the Sunny Side Up Child Care Center. At 5 p.m. Alison will be standing at the elevator, rushing to catch the train home. Leaving early had been her main requirement in taking this job. She didn’t quibble too much over salary or benefits; she just wanted to be home by six. A nice girl, Rayonda, a student at the local community college, picks Annie up from the bus at four-thirty and then gets Noah at day care at five. By six o’clock Rayonda has usually put fish sticks in the toaster oven and microwaved frozen peas, so that when Alison walks in the door she and the kids can sit down together.
On weekend mornings in Rockwell, Alison often goes on long walks with Robin—power walks, Robin calls them. Alison drops her kids off to watch cartoons with Robin’s kids and groggy, coffee-slurping husband, Robin clips her pedometer to her moisture-wicking T-shirt, and off they go down the street. On these excursions they pass other clusters of power-walking women who call out cheery greetings; Robin seems to know them all by name and asks specific questions such as, “How is Trevor liking St. Luke’s?” and “Did Liz come through with the Rangers tickets for the auction?” Clearly Robin has dozens, even hundreds, of friends. A whole world exists in this town, Alison is beginning to realize, that she knew nothing about. Trotting along (Robin walks so fast!), Alison feels vaguely like a wildebeest on the plain encountering other beest from the herd. Once she might have recoiled from such associations, but now she is comforted by the idea. There is a herd, and she is a part of it. Not only a part of it—she is the sidekick of an alpha female. (Alison thinks about high school, where she inhabited the same role. Does nothing ever change?)
Her life isn’t perfect. It is far from perfect. But it isn’t as awful as Alison had imagined it would be. In some ways it is not only better than she’d feared, but it is also better than it had been when Charlie was home, when she thought things were fine between them. It has been shocking to realize how absent Charlie was from their day-to-day lives; some days, now, the children barely notice his absence. Many of the things Alison thought she needed him for—taking out the trash and recycling, paying the bills, small home repairs, sex—she finds she can do just as well on her own.
Maybe not just as well. But well enough to counterbalance the wrenching loneliness she feels some nights, the tiredness in her bones, and the dull awareness that she has to summon the strength the next morning to do the whole routine all over again—waking before daylight to shower and dress and get the kids to camp and day care and herself to the train, spend a long, stressful day in the city, and come home to two tired children at night. Alison doesn’t spoil the kids anymore; she simply doesn’t have time. Annie sets the table for dinner, helps clear it while Alison does the dishes, runs the water for bath time, and helps her brother get ready for bed. After bedtime stories and good night kisses, Alison is ready to collapse into bed herself.
Late at night she thinks about the child she never knew, as real to her as the ones she does. Her own anguish is only a small piece of what his parents must suffer, and yet it has taken her on a journey toward something deeper and more profound than she has ever experienced. Each moment of loss, she has come to believe, contains within it the possibility of a new life. When the unimaginable happens, and your life changes irrevocably, you may find along with the pain a kind of grace. And in the place of certainty and fear—the fear of losing what you had—you are left with something startling: a depth of empathy, a quivering sensitivity to the world around you, and the unexpected blessing of gratitude for what remains.
Now, when the children are asleep, the house is quiet. Alison pads around softly in her bare feet, straightening pillows, changing lightbulbs, restoring order, and feels oddly at peace. Charlie’s needs, stresses, and preoccupations had taken up so much space. It is lovely not to hear him stomping around upstairs, or to have to think about what to feed him, whether his laundry is clean, whether his seemingly endemic distractedness is a cover for irritability. Will he snap if she asks him a question? For a long time they coexisted in this house without sharing much of anything. Now he’s across the river, making a new life for himself with the only other person in the world who knows Alison as well as he does.
It makes her heart lurch, when she thinks about it. And just under the sadness are more complex emotions, anger and jealousy and hurt. So Alison tries to concentrate on the here and now. It is three-fifteen on a Monday afternoon, and she has a new job. In New York, as a senior editor at HomeStyle magazine. That’s pretty good. Even better, she has a theme, just in time for the meeting: Focus on Quiet. A favorite book, a sleeping child, the tick of a clock in a still room, solitude. Peace. She stands up, closes the folder, and makes her way down the hall to the conference room.