Pencil Him In

With a groan she put her head on the counter. She had not set out in this world to be an advertising executive. But she was one. A damn good one. And the only place in the world that she wanted to be was Arsenal.

Her childhood had been filled with a hundred moves. A thousand little changes over that span of years that made Anna feel as though her whole life was built on quicksand. The only concrete thing, the only real thing besides her sister was Arsenal. Ten years of work and steadfast devotion to the woman who gave her a chance to build her life and the odd twenty dollar bill when things got tight.

She had just gotten to a place with Goddess that would ensure Arsenal would always be in her life. It was all she wanted, something real to keep her going.

“Oh, come on,” Marie laughed. “You know, I still remember the day when you told Mom you weren’t going to move away with her again.” Marie was leaning against the counter again. Anna sighed heavily hoping to push away the pain that always accompanied that particular memory.

“She had that crappy car, that…” Marie paused, trying to remember.

“Hatchback,” Anna supplied, her voice muffled as her head was still on the counter.

“She had gotten fired again, remember? And we were going to go south…some relative that we hadn’t already hit up….”

“Her aunt in Arizona,” Anna said.

The memory was there, no point in trying to push it away. Anna, Marie and their mother, Belinda had lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment off Haight-Ashbury—an apartment that smelled constantly of fried chicken and wet dogs. But they had stayed in that place for a year. Anna finished her whole senior year there. She made friends. Sort of. She fell in love with California. With staying put. When Belinda had come home and said they were moving again, Anna felt sick. And she felt very mad. Her mother was so lazy, she would rather leave than do what it took to keep a job and stay. There was always a free lunch someplace else.

“It’s the last time,” Belinda had told them and Anna knew her mother believed it. Belinda if nothing else had faith and that faith had kept them going for years. Through small towns and big cities, East Coast and West Coast. Endless “uncles” and “friends.” Endless crappy one-bedroom apartments.

Belinda fed them faith and, hungry for anything, Marie and Anna ate it.

But that day when Anna and Marie walked out of the dumpy apartment into the cool and sweet-smelling California air, Anna took one look at her mother who was so willing to destroy the fragile roots she had put down, and Anna set down her bag.

She had no more room in her stomach for faith.

“I’m eighteen and I’m staying,” she had said.

Anna lifted her head from Marie’s counter and found her sister smiling at her. “I thought you were nuts then,” Marie told her quietly.

“Well, you got in the car with her,” Anna laughed, though the memory felt like rocks in her stomach.

“But I came back a month later,” Marie whispered.

Anna’s smile was wide and real and she reached out to pat Marie’s head. “The best day ever was when I opened my door and there you were sitting on your old suitcase.”

“What did I say?” Marie asked, because this was an old game for them. As two women against the world, they traced their connections.

“Arizona is hot,” Anna repeated. They both smiled.

“You are the woman who found us places to live when we had no money.” Marie reached out and twined her fingers with Anna’s. “You got me through high school and yourself through college. You kept us in oranges and peanut butter cups. There’s nothing more you have to prove, Anna. Take a break. So, you take some yoga classes, you meet Camilla for tea. Big deal. This has nothing to do with your worth as a person. This is about you relaxing. You can do anything you set your mind to. This is a cakewalk to someone like you.”

Set your mind to it.

She sighed heavily as she understood Marie was right. She had certainly survived worse things than getting a life. She would just have to put her mind to it. The heart was a messy organ, tears and hummous everywhere. Anna’s brain, however, was well used to cleaning up the mess.

Put your mind to it. Exactly.

“What I need,” Anna said, slowly realizing that this wasn’t a complete disaster. It certainly wasn’t going to be as hard as creating Goddess Sportswear out of a crazy woman’s daydreams. It wasn’t going to be as hard as paying her sister’s way through culinary school. It wasn’t going to be as hard as watching her mother drive away for the last time. “Is a plan,” she said, dusting crumbs off her hands.

She thought hard for a few moments trying to create a todo list. She tried to give herself a clear objective. A task. But there was nothing there. Just day after day of tea and yoga.

“It’s going to be okay, Anna, you’ll see.” Marie slid a plate filled with tart and salad in front of her.

Anna shrugged and dug in. She felt better. Not great, but better. Part of her still believed she was very small in this world and the sky was, in fact, falling.

ON THE FIRST DAY of unemployment Anna was staring up at the ceiling over her bed at 5:30 a.m. There were thirty-two cracks in her ceiling that she had never noticed before and if she stared at them long enough—which she had been doing since five o’clock—the cracks started moving, making shapes, spelling words.

Right now the cracks were spelling “get a life.” It was better than the “loser” she’d read there at 3:00 a.m.

She flopped over onto her stomach and closed her eyes trying hard to fall back to sleep.

You’re unemployed, she thought. You can sleep all day.

After a few moments of trying to call up sheep to count, Anna gave up and flopped back over on her back, considering as she had been since yesterday evening, what exactly “getting a life” entailed.

She still lived in the first apartment she’d moved into after she could afford to get her and Marie out of that smelly one-bedroom up on Haight. Marie had just graduated and Anna had gotten a promotion from receptionist to Camilla’s assistant. Marie, instead of sticking around, had decided to go to Texas. Or was it Minnesota? Anna wondered.

Well, whichever it was, Anna was still rattling around in an ancient, one-story, two-bedroom condo close to University of California at Berkley because she’d had no time to even look for a new place. But the apartment suited her. She was very rarely here anyway.

Maybe it’s time to move on, Anna thought. Maybe I should buy a house. The soft pastel houses of Sausalito lit up her brain for a moment, but Anna quickly got rid of that idea. A house meant commitment and upkeep and responsibility. Maybe she’d think about it when this sabbatical was over, but right now she simply wasn’t ready to make those kind of long-term changes.

No matter what Camilla wanted.

Cosmetic changes, that’s what she was looking for. She liked her life as it was and she would jump through Camilla’s hoops long enough to get back to that life, while giving the appearance of change without really changing. Smoke and mirrors. Anna smiled just thinking about it.

Looking around, she realized she didn’t have one single thing on the wall. Not a poster or a picture, not even a bulletin board. Nothing. She should get some home decor. Camilla had a modern art collection with some kind of weird chrome sculpture in her living room. Camilla had, at one time, tried to get Anna to care about the crap she had up on her walls but Anna had been occupied with Goddess Sportswear’s quarterly numbers and, if she remembered correctly, she couldn’t be bothered.

Anna grinned and decided she would take some time, which she had plenty of, and buy some crap that Camilla might like and put it on her walls.

“Step one,” she told her ceiling. “Get crap.”

See how easy this was going to be?

Camilla had long been telling Anna about the inherent relaxing and mind-expanding properties of “having a hobby.” For Camilla a hobby was something entirely creepy, like pottery and Tai Chi. Those were two of the things on Camilla’s list.

Anna grimaced at the idea of all those weirdos in the park swaying in the breeze. And pottery? Who was Camilla kidding? A bunch of middle-aged women sitting around playing with mud. Anna would rather take up dentistry. She looked up at the ceiling. The hobby question would require more thought.

Anna let out a big sigh and reluctantly turned her mind to what she was sure was Camilla’s big hang-up.

Don’t you want a family?

A boyfriend. In Camilla’s eyes Anna needed nothing more than a boyfriend to marry her and give her babies. Camilla had said so only about four million times in the years Anna had been at Arsenal.

“If I get a boyfriend—” Anna jabbed her finger at the cracks in the ceiling “—it’s game over. I win.”

A boyfriend. Anna didn’t particularly want one. She certainly wouldn’t mind some of the naked benefits that came with having a boyfriend. She wouldn’t really even mind having someone to drink Sunday morning coffee with. In bed. And then some being naked.

That would all be fine. It was the other stuff Anna didn’t want. She and Jim had had a fun and happy relationship for about a year. A year that she had thought was pretty normal. They went to movies, out to dinner. They laid on a blanket in the park on Sundays. She had felt normal, and while not exactly in love, she did like Jim. But as she got promoted at work, her job demanded more time and things between them fell apart and everything about Jim began to bother her.