three

Stan tore around the corner, narrowly missing an old woman in the crosswalk.

“Would you watch out?” Laurel yelled. In the backseat, their boy began to cry. “Oh, don’t cry, Sebastian. Look, Mommy’s okay. Mommy’s smiling! Mommy’s not mad at Daddy. Stan, turn around and smile at Sebastian to show him we’re not angry.”

“I can’t turn around, I’m driving the goddamn car.”

“Don’t swear in front of him, you moron.”

The light turned green, Stan hit the gas, and the Subaru tore off, tires squealing. Chunky baby chew-books in assorted stages of fug flew around the backseat. He sailed through two red lights, cut off slow elderly drivers, and passed on the double-line all the way to the sitter’s house, his menace undercut by the BABY ON BOARD sign.

The sitter was not pleased that they had shown up half an hour before their scheduled time, but she was not surprised because it had happened before.

Laurel unbuckled the boy from his child seat and rushed him to the front door. “Sorry! Stan had an early meeting and forgot to tell me until this morning—he’s such an idiot—and our other car is in the shop, and I have to be at work by—”

“Come on, Sebastian.” The sitter grimaced and took the boy’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” Laurel repeated, silently adding, Please don’t take it out on my child. She smiled sheepishly at the woman but felt like kicking in the door and running through the streets foaming at the mouth like an escaped mental patient. Laurel’s days had mutated into hours-long fixations with pleasing the sitter and dying to be cut some slack.

Sebastian wandered into the house without a backward glance and plopped himself in front of the television.

Laurel cleared her throat and tried to smile at the sitter, who was trying to close the door in her face. “Thanks. Um, just reminding you, Stan and I prefer that Sebastian watch only public TV, and only for an hour or so.”

“Oh,” the sitter said. “Which station is that?”

Before Laurel could answer, the door closed in her face and she jumped back in the car. “Drive; drive!” she screamed at her husband. She swore softly to herself, then loudly, as no little ears were in sight. It was depressing how much better that made her feel.

Once she arrived at work, her mood plummeted from the temporary high brought on by unrestrained profanity. She was only two minutes late, but she’d already missed one call, and her boss stood waiting at the reception area. She opened her mouth to explain, but he held up a hand to stem the flow of excuses.

He said, “What does any of that have to do with me? I hired you to be a receptionist; all I ask is that you’re here on time to answer the phone.”

Before she turned on the computer, she caught sight of her reflection in the dark monitor and nearly wept. She looked half dead, and the appearance of her hair—a tangled underbrush greasy at the roots and desiccated at the ends—made her want to split her scalp down the middle and peel back the sides of her head like a rubber mask.

She had only eight more hours to go and would earn nine dollars each of those hours, and when she thought of it that way she could not believe seventy-two dollars was worth scalping oneself, but of course, as Stan said, you had to add it up, day after day, and then it would start to make sense.

At this same time, Stan himself was adding up the hours of his day and doodling hangman nooses on his desk blotter. No one was more surprised than he to discover that he was actually good at his job, which was the most depressing thought he’d had in weeks. To have aspired to a career in revolutionary tract publishing, or rock music, or fringe-documentary making, only to discover that you could not make a living at any of those things and were in fact perfectly cut out for middle management was enough to send you for the Leonard Cohen records and a glass full of Drano. Anyway, he rationalized, the bass guitar was too heavy and he always got a kink in his neck after playing, though it was nothing compared to the gargantuan hod of pulsating fat forming between his shoulder blades as he sat, hunched, shrimplike, at his computer.

He’d been promoted four years ago, right before Sebastian was born, and he’d beat out all those dolts in the production services department, too. Like that was something to be proud of.

He relayed the thrillsville news of the promotion to his wife. “Well, I guess I now serve as the single point of accountability for all major cross-functional projects sponsored by the Operations Group, effectively interfacing with the Enterprise Program Management Office and other functional Program Management Offices. I also manage project activities affecting or involving the Operations Group that are part of larger, non-Operations programs.”

She said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

He said, “I’m a project manager.”

“Did you get a raise?”

“Yes, I got a raise, but I have no”—he searched for the phrase—“no cultural capital.”

She said, “We can’t live on cultural capital. Can I quit when the baby comes?”

He told her no, of course she couldn’t quit, he wasn’t the president of the company for Christ’s sake. He knew Laurel entertained the notion that one day she could quit working and become a full-time poet, a “spoken-word artist,” who would recite verse in a bored, black-turtleneck voice at some squat palace or spontaneous freak-gathering spot in Chicago. Life with her postpartum blues was a picnic next to life with a poetry slam participant. This was not callousness, he reminded himself, this was survival. And callousness, too.

Stan opened up his e-mail and went to the calendar, blocking off dates during July for the dinner party and August for the Downers Grove reunion. He was surprised Laurel had agreed to his idea of the party, given that she had never met any of his old friends and was not a big fan of people in general. But, he supposed, she occasionally wanted to please him and perhaps wanted to meet some of these people he had talked about over the years.

“Do whatever you want, jackass” is what she had said. Stan and Laurel had been married for six years, and the irony of their names was not lost on them.

He’d contact the DGS alumni coordinator later and get the addresses of Craig and Carolyn, Will, and Verity. He expected that, like many of their classmates, they had all probably moved to Chicago after college, and he momentarily felt the dull ache of jealousy. Oh, he knew they’d rag on him for still living in Downers Grove, for his “failure to launch” (the phrase they used for those poor bastards who never left town), but they’d see that he was no longer a mess, that he had a son and had been married for six years, and that suburban life was just as enriching as the city, was just as fun, was just the same seething cauldron of marital accusations and disappointments as anywhere else in the world.