29

When the BBC handed me my walking papers, I went to a therapist, a service provided by the company, which practiced only the best and most advanced Human Resource techniques. I said this already, right? If Rashima’s husband hadn’t endorsed her I wouldn’t have bothered.

I’d been down this road before and I was getting used to the process. Maybe everyone in Recession World was. As my newspaper back home was slowly dying, they had brought in professional vultures to sit by the windows and talk ever-larger groups of people out of jumping whenever more layoffs were announced. Private counseling was offered to those who wanted it and golden parachutes were offered to those who didn’t deserve it. We had one jumper in all that time, actually an overdose, a hyper girl in marketing who, in turned out, was only pretending to be engaged to some made-up boyfriend or other because she thought it made her seem more stable or more interesting or something. That was one of the worst stories ever, and her death (which in fact was mourned by no one, her entire family having been lost in some foreign war or another) amped up the already rampant paranoia of the place.

I survived several rounds of layoffs at that paper before it was at last my turn on the wheel of fortune. Toward the end I stopped believing, as we were told repeatedly, that these group therapy sessions were part of the corporation’s deep paternal concern for its employees. By then I had stopped believing in a lot of things, and only the youngest employees were dumb enough to believe they had a sort of second family in the corporation, where we celebrated diversity on a daily basis. Anyway, the counseling was meant as a safety valve in the case of employees who were ready to explode—the therapists served as a sort of early warning detection system in the cases where someone left destitute might be at home sharpening the knives with a former supervisor’s fat neck in mind.

Anyway, I went to the three BBC sessions. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to maintain a semblance of normalcy, to board the train to visit an office in the city before returning home to the hopeless task of finding a job comparable in pay and prestige to the one I’d lost. I was sensible enough to realize how lucky I was—thanks to Will, I wasn’t destitute. He was not a make-believe husband, and I had a roof over my head and food in the fridge. And several business suits dry-cleaned and ready to wear to interviews, should there be any of those. To keep busy I developed hobbies: I started to take more interest in the kitchen arts, in baking pies and cakes and experimenting with gourmet meals, as a way to compensate for being at home all day and not bringing home the bacon. To make it up to Will. To stop what soon became his harping on the subject. I began to frequent the local kitchen shop, buying lemon squeezers and other gadgets I never knew I needed. I ended up with three types of garlic press.

As it turned out, Will was less interested in my cooking than in my monthly paycheck, which came as a huge surprise to me. Didn’t all men secretly want someone like our neighbor Heather waiting for them at home? Well, maybe not someone like Heather, but someone whose only focus in life was cooking and sewing and in general tending to her man’s needs, especially in the bedroom? But it was about this time his interest in sex became sporadic, too.

All this was especially galling because, in the very back of my mind, with the encouragement of the therapist, I’d started to think of the layoff as a blessing in disguise. We could try for that baby now. No pressure, lots of time. All I needed was a willing partner. I had even, in an idle moment, visited a few baby naming sites; I was thinking Natalie White had a nice ring to it. But something told me not to mention that plan to Will just yet.

The name of the therapist whose job it was to Marie Kondo the closets of my mind was Dr. Dray. I thought of her as Dr. Dre: I would settle into the chair in her office and put on earphones, metaphorically speaking. I usually left her presence with the sense of a burden shared and lightened. I never got around to telling her about my plans to add to my family, somehow, but she had a calming demeanor and I left feeling that things would be all right. The feeling lasted about an hour and then it wore off, like painkillers, and I was again left alone with myself.

I did tell her I had started a regular fitness routine, without mentioning it was part of my plan for a healthy pregnancy. I had already cut back on my drinking, figuring this was not the time to let some depressive episode with alcohol get its nails into me.

She gave me a prescription “to treat your anxiety.” I didn’t have it filled right away, of course. I looked it up online and saw it might harm the baby. Besides which, I wasn’t anxious. Scared and majorly pissed off, yes. The juddering waves of anxiety came later.

Anyway, this was the same woman who thought my walking every day might be “obsessive.” I ask you.

We wasted an inordinate amount of time talking about my stepmother, it seemed to me. Thank God it was three sessions and I was done.

I loathed everything about my stepmother, beginning with her name. I tried for all of five minutes to like Tralee but it was doomed from the start. She was like the Yoko Ono of Four Corners. What was my father thinking?

Another saying of my grandmother’s was that the first woman to the front door with the casserole gets the widower. My father had been a widower for about twenty seconds when this predator, all boobs and hair spray, swooped in with a whole lot more on offer than tuna casserole. She was white trash out of Carolina in a big way. It took me longer than it should have to realize she’d been in the picture with my father for a long, long time before my mother died, biding her time and waiting like the spider that she was.

He sent me to live with a big Catholic family for my last year of high school, so he could live with Tralee. The O’Brians had seven kids and he figured they wouldn’t notice one more. He was right. I soon moved out and got a shared apartment and a job at the local deli. Later I put myself through college with a combination of the scholarship and working at Hollywood Green Productions, which as I’ve said proved to be my launching pad into the BBC.

Was I angry? You bet I was. None of it would have happened if my brother had been alive. My father would have stuck around for him, not dumped him on that tribe of well-meaning religious nuts.

It’s pronounced Trah-lee, if you’re wondering. She could be sweet but only when she was getting her way. My father was besotted with her and I came to believe he was some sort of masochist.

This was not just my opinion: everybody in my parents’ little town saw what was going on—what had been going on for years. Everyone hated her, especially the women, and many hated him. Just take my word for it. As a couple, they were shunned. I can only think he was reverting to type, sinking to the easiest level, letting Jack Daniels do all his thinking for him.

She always wore a diamond big as Texas from her third husband on her right hand. That’s right—my father was husband number four. Spineless and at a loss as my mother’s health failed, he grabbed onto Tralee like a drowning man. They eventually got married in a hole-and-corner civil ceremony befitting the occasion. My father, with his usual impeccable timing, died soon afterwards. They were married just long enough to screw up my life.

I was not invited to the wedding but I wouldn’t have gone in any case. I had some fun considering what I might send them as a gift, but—no.

Tralee had two grown daughters, Marla and Brandee. Seriously. Because “Streetcar was my favorite movie ever.” She was not aware A Streetcar Named Desire had ever been a play and she was shocked when I told her. (Was I sure? Yes, I was sure. She was delighted to learn Brando had starred in both versions.) I thought she should have named her daughters after characters in Star Wars, like Jabba and Jar Jar. I don’t think Will would have married me if they’d been blood relatives, or if he’d met them or even seen photos of them. They were embarrassment enough at second hand.

At some point I had to return to the US to deal with stuff it was costing me a fortune to keep in storage. I had time to kill before my return flight so I decided to go see the new beach house my stepmother had bought with my father’s life insurance money. With what should have been my money. I still don’t know why I did it. It was salt in the wound. An impulsive giving in to curiosity, it was also a final gesture; I knew I’d never see her again. I guess I was hoping I’d find her failing, finally succumbing to one of her many illnesses, melting like the bad witch she was.

Will wasn’t with me, of course. I had only just met him, and—well, see above: Tralee and her daughters would have had him running for the hills.

When I called she sounded suspicious, paranoid—why would I want to see her, after all? Maybe to steal something I could use in a satanic ritual to make her bleached hair fall out? But after filling me in for a few minutes on her medical conditions, she told me I could come for lunch. I declined lunch, but I arrived to find she’d made tea and Ritz crackers with artistic little swirls of Cheez Whiz—sharp cheddar with pimento. Yum. I drank the tea.

She was older, and, of course, when you finally face the dragon in her doily-dotted cave, not as scary as you’ve built up in your mind. She was moving slower and seemed to have trouble focusing, if the nail varnish was anything to go by—it looked like she’d painted her nails in the dark. We spent half an hour talking about her vast array of fascinating medical problems; I hoped even half of what she claimed to be suffering from was true. Pretending to listen, I scanned the room for belongings she’d stolen from me and my mother. Every vestige of my childhood had disappeared, to be replaced by tacky crap that looked like it had all come from a garage sale.

Finally she surprised me by moving on to a topic beyond her high, but not high enough, LDL cholesterol levels. She asked me if I was seeing anyone. I told her a bit about Will, keeping it vague. I told her him name was James le Blanc in case she looked him up. I wanted this woman nowhere near my life.

Tralee said, “Well played. A highness, no less.”

I nodded. I could not be troubled to explain British titles to this peasant. I sat staring into her gleaming little blue-lined eyes as she replayed the story she had already once told me of her third husband’s dying wish—his heartwarming desire that Tralee should find someone to take care of her and their two little orphans when he passed. That she should not mourn him forever (as if). 

So touching. And doesn’t this Make-a-Wish scenario sound familiar? I mean, please. Did he also desire that my mother should suffer so horribly, waiting at home for my father to come give her her medicine? 

So this monster and I sat and drank tea and I watched her lick the Cheez Whiz off the crackers as I wished arsenic was easier to come by. She wanted to reminisce over pictures of the funeral. Of course I declined. The person buried in that box was not my father, not the hero he’d been. He’d thrown all that away.

She always had a parting shot.

“I think you’re making a big mistake,” she said as I rose to leave. “He’s miles out of your league. You should stick with your own kind.” She said this not particularly with spite, but more as a point of information.

It was this kind of thing … I don’t know how I stopped myself from choking her or throwing something at her head, maybe one of her bargain purchases from the Shopping Channel. There was a heavy glass paperweight on the table I stood next to and my fingers itched to throw it at her like a baseball. Then I realized it had belonged to my mother. I pocketed it instead. At least the visit wasn’t a total loss.

If Will was out of my league, my father was for sure out of hers. How fucking dare she? I literally bit the inside of both cheeks until I tasted blood. Then I spun round and stalked out the door without another word.

These memories, these blasts from the past. What was the use of them, and why did Anna’s death seem to dredge up all this crap? It was nothing to do with her …

Ken, for instance, the guy Oscar was so exercised about—why think of him now? I’d allowed him to move into my place in London to save money, which proved to be one of those false economies you could kick yourself for, like buying the second-hand car that leaves you stranded when you could have afforded better. For a while after I tossed him out, Ken became a bit of a stalker. He had thought his moving in was a prelude to forever, it seems. But I met Will and that was that. Bad timing, that’s all. Too bad. Ken had to go.

I didn’t remember a whole lot about him, to tell you the truth, apart from the way we parted. He’s a vague, large blonde shape in my memory, a sort of Ken-doll in looks and name. He had some adventure TV show about exploring the Amazon jungle that he was trying to sell to the BBC. I suppose I was really only seeing him because he was American and I had fallen into a sort of nostalgia for people who sounded like Ken, who looked and acted like him: all puppyish exuberance and not a lot of forethought. But then Will came along, handsome in that pale, long-nosed British way; Will had a British passport and a title. And, oh my lucky stars, Will was smitten with me.

I spent half a day, while Ken was out, packing his belongings for him to save on the drama—he didn’t have much, as his major stuff was back in the US. He walked in to find his bags stacked in neat rows by the door, his coat folded on top of the largest case. I even had my phone ready in my hand to call him a taxi. Yes, I waited until he got home, even as I wondered if that was wise. They always say it’s when things end that the guy gets violent, if he’s going to. But I’d never seen a sign of that sort of temper from Ken. I almost wondered if he wouldn’t have been more interesting to me with that edge. The edge that Will had, in spades. Poor Ken. He couldn’t help it that he was boring.

He bleated for about five minutes, and finally said, “Did you ever love me?”

Why pretend? I shook my head.

“No. Of course not. I don’t think you’re capable … ” His voice wavered, and he must have sounded pathetic even to his own ears. But his gaze never left my face, in that hopeful, puppy-dog way of his: Surely I was joking and we would go for the walk I’d promised after all? I looked away, the way you turn from a car wreck once you realize it is way worse than you expected.

“No, not really,” I said, to make sure he got this. “I didn’t really love you. And before you say it again, whether you loved me or not doesn’t matter, don’t you see?” More quietly, I repeated, “It doesn’t matter. It’s just over. It never started.” Really, I thought to spare us both further embarrassment, truly I did, but Ken did not seem to take it that way. I suppose I should just have just left him alone to sort himself out for an hour, but I wanted to feel I’d behaved well, cutting him free to find someone else: It just didn’t work out, blah blah blah. Best of luck for the future.

I also didn’t quite trust him not to set the place on fire, lovable or not.

As I’d told Oscar, I don’t know what happened to Ken.

Or maybe I don’t want to remember.