Forget About It Read online

  Lydia wrote something else down. I couldn’t quite get a read on her, but I had to think if she was taking notes, then she liked my ideas at least a little. I kept going.

  “Now, new visual: Picture an assembly line with big boxes and a child sitting in every box as they move down the conveyor belt. The V-O comes in: ‘At KidCo, we don’t make kids . . .’ And then we cut to a shot of a kid going down a slide, falling into a basin of colored balls. ‘We just make kids happy.’”

  Lydia smiled for the first time. Probably in weeks. I thought it was because she liked them. She liked me! I felt like Sally Field at the Academy Awards when she said “You like me! You really like me!” I was ready to burst. But then her smile turned derisive. Almost pitying. “Well,” she said, “it’s good that you’re keeping yourself active. It’s probably too late for any of this to have an impact, though . . . we’ll see. But keep dabbling, because you never know . . .”

  “Okay,” I said, completely deflated, still standing there, somewhat shell-shocked.

  “You can go now.”

  I was dismissed. But that was all right, because I knew that deep down she was impressed. This had to be the beginning of my new career.

  * * * * *

  After work I met Cat at the gym for our biweekly torture session on the treadmill. Cat was in much better shape than me, so it was always good to have her running next to me for motivation’s sake. Cat was my oldest friend, next to Todd. She was more like my sister than my sister was, but that wasn’t difficult with a sister who still attempted to put my finger in warm water when I came home for the holidays, trying to get me to pee my bed. I told Cat what had happened at work that day.

  “That’s awesome! I see a promotion in someone’s very near future.”

  “You think so?”

  “Definitely! Those are really solid ideas. There are some big changes about to happen in your life. I can feel it.”

  Cat could always “feel” things. She also “saw” things. Not things in the future, but things that weren’t there. People, to be more specific. Cat saw movie stars, TV personalities, and celebutants about five times a day. We’d be walking down the street and she’d insist that we just passed Jon Bon Jovi.

  “That was a woman,” I’d say.

  “Oh.”

  As excited as she’d get for each of these sightings, she always took it in stride when I informed her that it was not, in fact, Elvis (I mean, c’mon, he’d been dead for like half a century). I don’t know why she tried so hard to spot famous people. It may have been partly an antidote for her work as a therapist—constantly hearing the mundane ins and outs of her patients—and also because she was so happily married it was ridiculous, so seeing some hot star was her attempt to spice things up a little. Generally speaking, Cat was the most levelheaded person I knew.

  Cat got married a year and a half after moving to the city, and she and her husband, Billy, had an amazing apartment in SoHo. Professionally, she was a prodigy, with a specialty psychology practice in an office on the ground floor of their building. She did a small amount of one-on-one and group therapy, but her largest client base came to her for dramatherapy and psychodrama, spontaneous role-playing during which her clients acted out fears, traumas, memories, et cetera.

  “Keep going!” Cat said as she increased her speed to 7.5 on the treadmill, a speed I’d only read about in fitness magazines.

  “When I get promoted, can I stop coming to the gym?”

  “No.” She cheered, “You’ll be invigorated!”

  I started slowing down my treadmill.

  “Don’t do it,” Cat warned, sensing correctly where things were headed. “Let’s role-play right here. It’ll be fun.”

  “Oh no . . .” I said. “No, no, no.”

  In an effort to jolt myself out of my comfort zone and get a different part of my brain working, help myself both creatively and personally, nurture my spontaneity, and maybe just maybe develop skills that might one day vault me to sitcom superstardom, I’d foolishly let Cat talk me into doing a role-playing exercise a while back.

  She was a great teacher, but I was a terrible student. Partly because it was Cat and—professional as she tried to be—with our knowing each other inside and out, I wasn’t able be someone else without feeling totally embarrassed, and partly because I just couldn’t let my guard down. It seemed I was destined to stumble through life unable to make Jordan Landau anything more than . . . Jordan Landau.

  “You got the promotion. You are confident and successful . . .” she went on.

  “Five point two . . .” I said as I slowed it further. “Four one. Three seven . . .”

  “No role-playing exercise, no more actual exercise even—however . . . I’m going to exercise my right to go have some Ben & Jerry’s. Right now.”

  Cat looked disappointed, but somehow I’d manage. I deserved it. This wasn’t pity ice cream . . . this was celebration ice cream! I’d seen that glimmer of a smile on Lydia’s mean face, even if she belittled me seventeen seconds after it. I knew she saw something in those ideas. I’d finally had a small victory at work! This was victory ice cream!

  When I got outside, I could still see Cat through the window, and she me. She was watching me as I tried unsuccessfully to hail a taxi. And just when I had one, flashing his lights, signaling that he was mine, a girl ran out in front of me and stole it. Cat and I had a long history of cab debacles and I could sense her willing me to snatch it back, to be more assertive. I never had it in me to fight back when someone stole a cab from me. Part of it was my admitted distaste for confrontation, but the other reason was that life’s too short to sweat things like that. People are going to steal your cab, and if that’s their worst offense, consider yourself blessed.

  I decided I had no business taking a cab anyway, so I took the M15 bus back down to St. Marks, and I stopped at the deli at Astor Place to peruse the ice cream section, which was seriously lacking. I debated between Brownie Batter, which is chocolate with the fudge brownie bits in it, and plain old vanilla. What I really wanted was vanilla with the brownie bits in it. The chocolate with the chocolate was just too much. Vanilla with brownies would be perfect.

  I actually wrote a letter to Ben & Jerry’s once and suggested that they create this flavor. Free of charge. I wasn’t asking for royalties or a credit or anything. It would be reward enough for me just to have my flavor in existence. I mean, sure it would be nice if they named it after me, but with the names they chose—Chunky Monkey, Cherry Garcia—God knows what my flavor would be called. Jordan’s Junkfood? Jolly Jordan? Worse, Chunky Jordan? No, they could just leave my name out of it.

  Ben & Jerry’s wrote back to me eventually, with a form letter (apparently I wasn’t the first person to suggest a new flavor to them), and thanked me for my suggestion and included a coupon toward my next purchase of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I’d had wild fantasies about a truck pulling up one day and these really incredible-looking guys coming out one after the next with crates of Gorgeous Jordan ice cream. A parade of ice cream hunks bearing brownie chunks on a vanilla ice cream red carpet. They’d be coming to surprise me because Ben & Jerry’s had perfected my flavor and they wanted me to be the first to have it. And my ice cream hunks would be shirtless, of course, and sweating as they carried the boxes from the truck to my apartment. At which point it would only be right for me to invite them in for some ice cream, and well, you can guess the rest. (Before you guess the rest, I need to clarify that there wouldn’t be an orgy taking place or anything—I’m not that kind of girl. I’d just pick the best one out of the bunch. Now you can guess the rest.) Anyway, they never showed up, so the coupon toward my next purchase would have to suffice.

  I took the coupon to Ernie One-Brow, the guy with the Frida Kahlo unibrow who usually manned the counter at Delion. Consolation: He was sweating profusely when he grumbled about the coupon and angrily made change.

  Anyway, I decided on Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and since I was already ther
e, I got a pint of Peanut Butter Cup too. Just for emergencies.

  Crossing the street at Broadway and West 4th, I saw Lyric Lady coming toward me.

  She sidled up to me and leaned in, “‘Know it sounds funny but I just can’t stand the pain . . .’” And she stopped. Waited.

  I looked off and thought for a minute, I sang it in my head a couple time, and then BAM! “‘Girl, I’m leaving you tomorrow,’” I answered back. She looked at me and pursed her lips a little, eyes squinty, then she went on her way contentedly.

  As I got out of the elevator on my floor, I had the great displeasure of seeing Tiger Schulmann Spandex Cock Guy, bending over into our trash room, dropping a stack of newspapers into our recycling bin. That thing was monstrous. Truly frightening. I practically ran past him so I wouldn’t have to ward off another offer for private self-defense class.

  Once safely inside my apartment, I immediately started to storyboard my ideas for KidCo. If anyone wanted me to take it any further or if it got brought up in a meeting, I wanted to be ready.

  I hadn’t even noticed that my answering machine was blinking. It said that I had one message. The automated voice that I’d come to know so well. The one that pronounced my name in a stilted rendering, with the accent on the wrong syllable.

  “Hello, Jordan Landau, this is Cindy from Citibank. This is a very important call. Your account is sixty days past due. Please return this call Monday through Saturday between 8 A.M. and 8 P.M. Eastern time.” And then she gave the number, which I could never make out on the machine.

  Did you ever notice that it’s rarely good news when your bank calls? It’s never “We just wanted to express our amazement at your rapidly ascending balance!” Or “We just want to say thanks for being you.”

  My financial situation was pretty much in the shitter. You’d think a college degree would get you somewhere, but the job market was so bleak when I graduated that I took what I could get with promise of a salary increase. I was still waiting for that increase. I just didn’t know how to bring it up. Every time I almost did, I got squeamish, started sweating, and chickened out.

  Yet I’d be damned if I was going to go crawling to my mother and stepfather for relief. I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. That sort of thing being humiliation and guilt and lectures from one of the world’s all-time spendthrifts about being more frugal. Self-reliance and personal responsibility are a good foundation. Back them up with a reluctant, condescending creditor and you’re on your way to true financial independence.

  6.

  fresh air will do you good

  It was Saturday, and I had planned weeks earlier to have lunch with my mom. I took the train out to Long Island and was seated next to a guy who had quit smoking that day and felt the need to talk about it incessantly.

  “It’s not the first time I’ve quit,” he said after he’d finally stopped talking, and I thought that we were finally done.

  “Hmm.” I nodded.

  “Yeah, I quit once before . . . I mean, I’ve quit a thousand times before but one time for real.”

  “Yeah, quitting is hard.” I thought a definitive statement and a look out the window would give him the cue that we we’d covered the topic.

  “But obviously I picked it back up again. And you know when? Like four months later. I’d quit cold turkey. And I was fine. Completely fine. Then I was walking down the street and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I needed a cigarette and I needed one that instant. I couldn’t even wait until I got to a store or passed someone I could bum a smoke off. I just stopped right where I was and looked around at the ground. Sure enough, there was a butt. A beautiful butt.” I could tell he wasn’t going to stop. Smoking or talking. Ever. “I reached down and picked that butt up and oh man . . . it was heaven.”

  I got off the train an entire stop early and walked to my mom’s house, which took an extra half hour. We lived in an affluent suburb—not nearly so much then as now. Home values are so high that they’re inducing a kind of paralysis in some of the neighbors, like with a stock that keeps rising. You don’t want to jump out now, because you’ll kick yourself if it goes up more the day after you’ve sold.

  Walking through the neighborhood, I had memories of my childhood. I passed the Andersons’ house and remembered how awed I was by their Christmas decorations and how they always outdid every other house on the street. When I passed the Dickersons’ house, I thought about the rumor that Mr. Dickerson was having an affair, which was so widespread that if he wasn’t, he might as well have been. And I still scowled when I walked by crazy Mrs. Cooper’s house—the woman who used to say that she’d have our dogs shot if we didn’t stop them from barking.

  When I got there my sister, Samantha, shot me a look that rivaled the best Mean Girl Junior High dirty looks. Both she and my mother looked completely surprised and none too pleased to see me. My mom regularly vacillated between wanting me around and wanting no part of me. But only since I’d graduated college and moved out. Prior to that, she always wanted to have me under her roof—not because she liked my company but more as a method of control. I was a part of her, certainly not her favorite part but a part nonetheless. An appendage. So my leaving somehow felt like an amputation—because it was always about her. Sam was still living at home, taking one class at the community college to justify it.

  “Hey, Jordan,” said Samantha as she looked at our mom, seemingly wondering what the hell I was doing there.

  “Hey,” I said back. My mom just kept looking shocked to see me.

  “Jordan, honey, what are you doing here?”

  “We’re going out to lunch today, remember?” I said, more annoyed than hurt. She almost always forgot when we had plans. And I swear she wasn’t forgetful about anything else, but when it came to me . . . I don’t know.

  “Are you sure, J.?” she said, looking skeptically at me. “I told Samantha I’d take her shopping today.” Sam was twenty years old, and she still couldn’t buy as much as underwear without my mother’s presence. And wallet.

  “Yeah, and we’re late!” chimed Princess Bitch.

  “Well, I just took an hour-and-a-half train ride and walked forty minutes to come see you, as was the plan. Well, not the walking part. That was because of a psychotic nonsmoker, but the train was the plan. We had a plan, Mom,” I found myself whining and hated it. Why did she drive me to this? Why did I let her?

  I took out my day planner and even showed her where I’d written it down weeks earlier as proof.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie. I penciled you in for tomorrow. I’d tell you to come shopping with us but . . . you really don’t like to shop. Do you like to shop? I don’t think . . .” She trailed off. No, she didn’t think. At least not where I was concerned.

  “I’ll shop.” I sighed. The truth was, I didn’t mind shopping. I just didn’t like shopping with them. Whenever the three of us shopped, they always got two of everything, same size, different color. Two Juicy Couture sweatsuits, size zero; two pairs of size twenty-four dark wash jeans; two pairs of size twenty-four light wash jeans; two this, two that, two, two, two, two, TWO.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t fit into their shared wardrobe that bothered me as much as the feeling of not fitting into my own family and having it so glaringly amplified.

  My mom and Samantha shot each other a look. Mom’s was telepathically asking Sam if it was okay if I tagged along. Sam’s was telepathetically begging Mom not to let me. I knew she didn’t want me to come shopping with them, and believe me, I didn’t want to either. But seeing how annoyed Samantha was at my inclusion made it that much more enticing.

  We were riding in the car, Mom driving, Sam riding shotgun, and me in the back. Mom and Samantha were gabbing away about inane crap while I sat getting whipped by my hair—all of the windows were open and my hair was blowing all over the place and all over my face. Samantha was planning her to do list.

  “I’m obsessed with the new Jimmy Choo’s! Everyone was wearing them in this
week’s US Weekly.”

  “But doesn’t that mean that by next week they’re going to be out?”

  “No,” she said. “Well, yeah,” she added. “But, Mo-om! They’re so cute!”

  I couldn’t take the hair in my face any longer. “Do you think you guys can maybe roll up your windows please?”

  “It’s a beautiful day, honey, enjoy it. You’re always holed up in that city apartment. The fresh air will do you good.”

  If it wasn’t already unbearable enough, as my mother was uttering the last word of her sentence and I was opening my mouth to object—a bug flew in the back window straight into my mouth. I started freaking out, making faces, flailing around, spitting . . . all of which my mom caught in her rearview mirror.

  “Jordan! What’s the matter with you?” Sam started laughing at me and shook her head.

  I’d managed to get the bug out of my mouth, but I was fingering my gums just to make sure. The bug was gone. My hair was a rat’s nest. I looked into my mom’s eyes, still locked on me in the rearview. “Nothing’s the matter.”

  “Honestly, Jordan, the way you act so crazy sometimes, I find it hard to believe that you’re my daughter.”

  “Maybe she was adopted,” Sam offered. “Was Jordan’s dad so big boned?”

  “She wasn’t adopted, Sam, and yes, her real father was tall.”

  I sank farther into the backseat as the Sister Sledge song “We Are Family” taunted me in my head.

  We were in the shoe section at Bergdorf Goodman when Samantha dropped the bird bomb.

  “So you know I’m going to Cancun with Amy and Alex next week, right?” she said to what I assumed to be our mom but she was looking right at me.