“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. I’ll bring him downstairs and get him settled. Adieu.” She air-kisses me.
“I’ll be back by six…maybe earlier.”
I get into the elevator and watch Daisy walk away with Holden. I remind myself that this is the deal, and it is the best deal in town, free childcare with someone who loves us like her own family, luxury accommodations, wooden toys, a unicorn bounce house, aLittle Princemural. My ears pop as I ride the elevator down eighty-seven flights. My stomach sinks, the distance between me and my baby growing…growing…growing. I am falling, and he is there, upstairs, having an epic day without me.
—
It is past ten when I finally get to the office. Everything is exactly as I’d left it. Stacks of receipts, a scrunchie I thought I lost, an IBM desktop computer, a coffee mug still stained with the outline of my ChapStick. Holden arrived a couple of weeks early and I hadn’t had time to clean out my desk. I was afraid to open the drawer, worried half a Halal Guys shawarma might be in there.
Veronica comes by my desk carrying stacks of file folders. “Welcome back,” she says with an undercurrent of disapproval. An undercurrent ofYou’ve been off for six months and you get in at TEN?Veronica is the office’s senior grant coordinator. She has a master’s in social work. Her makeup doesn’t work under this lighting. She does not have children, but I imagine that when she sees me taking six months off and getting in at ten, she thinks the game is rigged against childless women, who live in Jersey City and take the PATH train and transfer to the subway at Thirty-Third Street and still manage to get into the office by nine. Veronica is not wrong. If I can take six months for my baby, why can’t she take six months to read sexy dragon novels at a time-share in Jamaica? The game is rigged against Veronica, against all of us.
Veronica sometimes talked about a niece in Staten Island who she never gets to see because of her “idiot sister-in-law,” but for the most part, I assume she has no interest in my child. But still, she asks to see a picture of Holden. I know this is one of those obligatory middle-manager things to do, but I still appreciate it. I go overboard and hand her my cell phone with an entire stream of baby pictures, not realizing that this is probably a microaggression.
“He is precious.” Veronica keeps scrolling, probably calculating how long she has to pretend to care before she drops a pile of backlogged grant applications on my desk. She hands my phone back. “You look like twins in this one.” I try to see which photo she’s talking about, but Roman texts (“Burritos tonight??”), and my thumb moves. It’s just a series of selfies of Holden and Daisy.
Veronica hands me a couple of files. “So, NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is looking for funding for scientific research related to making people healthy…” Veronica’s mouth is moving, but in my mind her words slur, as if I’m hearing them over the subway intercom. My old life speaking to me from a distant, glitchy place.
It is all coming back. Each week, Veronica dispenses our assignments with the verve of a game-show host. “This grant needs to explain how Wurtzel Educational Systems would acquire software to optimize best practices in teaching reading skills to seniors.” And…“The Youth Development Grant is one of the most competitive and sought-after CDBGs, so write a proposal that captures its essence.”
“I’ll take door number two, Veronica.”
She hands me several stacks of grants, with sticky notes indicating when each letter is due. I had to get the first draft to Veronica. The second draft went to Phil, the executive director of operations. I don’t mean to brag, but I was the best writer they had. Most of my colleagues only lasted eight months, a year, maybe, before they movedback to their hometowns or got a job at one of the nonprofits that they’d gotten to know through grant writing. I had no desire to work at a nonprofit or move back home. I was a writer. Or, at least, I used to be.
When I was fact-checking atDomino, I’d had the privilege of writing a blurb about a florist in Des Moines before the magazine imploded, along with fifteen other titles. It was a bloodbath. At night, I took a creative writing extension course in a loft in SoHo. The teacher, Leo, was a balding forty-something man who had the very specific swagger of a white man who went to Horace Mann and worked in publishing in New York in a certain era, when Horace Mann and white men and publishing still meant something. He edited a prestigious literary magazine and got an intern pregnant, imploding his career and reputation. But that didn’t mean Leo didn’t have a lot to teach us kids about the craft. I was attracted to Leo at first, everyone was, and we had sex a couple of times, a rite of passage for any Media Bistro student. But by the time I got to know him, I saw this sad, smart man who reeked of squandered potential. We stayed in touch, and he encouraged me to get back to writing. Turned out, Leo was a good guy in an industry full of bad ones.
He’d been the one who referred me to Job Genie Global, a temping agency that helped place “creatives.” Was I a creative? I didn’t even know anymore. I went in for an interview and said I wanted to be a journalist and they said they’d see what they could do. I never expected them to find me a gig writing features forThe New Yorker, but I also didn’t think they’d place me in an office that cranked out form letters.
The Elevate Comprehensive Grant Writing Company paid twenty-five dollars an hour and was supposed to be temporary. I thought not caring about my job would mean that it wouldn’t consume me. I could do this by day, and by night I could work on my poetry and short stories and creative writing and still try to get clips to get a foot inthe door in journalism. But then I got sort of sucked into the predictability—not just the paycheck but the comfort of not having to pour your soul onto the page, of not having to be told that you don’t have the clips or the Ivy pedigree. Of not being told that you’re not good enough. So I dug in, gave the job I wasn’t supposed to care about all my waking hours, and tried to be good enough at this. As the Japanese like to say, “Whatever you are, be a good one.”
“Dear Ms. Zucker, The Eating Zone would like to present our proposal for your review. We hope that you will partner with us to encourage children to adopt a healthy pescatarian diet. We are requesting $25,000 to help cover the cost of encouraging more public school cafeterias to serve tilapia. We are excited for the opportunity to partner in promoting the sustainable, fatty-acid-heavy diet proven to improve mental health, increase lifespans, and preserve our precious environment…”
“Dear Ms. Kess, Here at Horses for Heroes, we understand the critical role that horses play in our lives. We enjoy helping heroes of varying backgrounds bolster their confidence through working with horses. We appreciate the opportunity to provide the enclosed proposal for review by the EQUUS Foundation.”
Phil hired me full time and offered me a starting salary of fifty-five thousand dollars a year, more than I could’ve made on the lowest rung on the journalism ladder. Phil wasn’t that bad. The mild sexual harassment had even stopped ever since he started having an affair with Jen in accounting. Jen was a divorced forty-two-year-old mom who wrote her name on the Activia in the communal fridge. Jen toldme in the bathroom one afternoon that she preferred married men because they were grateful and didn’t want to hang out on weekends. Phil was older than her typical boyfriends, but he could still lift heavy furniture and take her to a steak house without getting a swollen toe.
Now that I am back at work, staring down the barrel of a stack of grant letters that need to be written, I realize that there is a much simpler explanation for why I ended up spending my late twenties and early thirties in this job rather than becoming what I was meant to be. “Because I am a fucking pussy.”
Veronica’s neck pivots from the fax machine. Ted, my cubicle mate, stands up, his forehead scrunched. “Are you okay, Emily?” Shit. I hadn’t realized that I’d said that aloud. “Oh, yeah.” I bury my head back in my paperwork, but then some inner force (maybe the B12shot?) kicks in, and I stand back up. “You know what, Ted? I’m not okay. I was supposed to be awriter—a poet, or at least a journalist—and instead I am in this cubicle, begging people for money off a template, while my baby has anepicday with my very hot, cool, talented, adventurous best friend, who is also somehow a baby whisperer.”
At least, that is what my inner voice said. In reality, I put on my best Sears-portrait smile and say, “All good. Just working on this Heroes for Horses account.”
Ted draws a heavy sigh, sitting back down. “It’s Horses for Heroes.”
“What?”
“The nonprofit. You said Heroes for Horses. Just saving you from having to redo it.”
At lunch, an employee at Chopt asks me if I want to “get artistic with my salad.” Yes, let’s go full Jackson Pollock, throw in the artichokes and an extra protein. He then chops all of it together until my nineteen-dollar salad is pureed to within an inch of its life. This is what I used to eat in my old life. Before Holden. Before Daisy. This salad that I will take back to my cubicle and eat while I scroll picturesof Holden or compare the Strategist’s cheapest under-eye creams and wait until they go on sale, and then get back to writing my grants. I call Roman. He hits dismiss, texting, “Meetings. What’s up?” I try Daisy, but she doesn’t answer. She texts me a photo of Holden, a huge smile on his face, in the Lamborghini of Little Tikes Cozy Coupes. He is behind the wheel, in aviator glasses and a leather bomber jacket, a jacket that I don’t remember buying him. He looks like somebody left that guy fromTop Gunin the dryer too long. Another image comes in. Cooking class. Holden sitting in a silver baking bowl, in a diaper, covered in flour. He is looking away from the camera, a whisk in his hand, pure joy and a single, perfect ringlet on his face. I could eat him. I zoom in to see if he is clean, as if I could smell him through the image. I zoom in to see if we still have the same exact eyes.
I’m working my way through the stack of grant letters, not quite disassociating like I do with Carleigh, but definitely feeling outside my body. I find the next letter, a grant application for the Coalition for Procrastination Awareness. “Dear Mr. Jay, I’ve put off writing this letter…” I am cracking myself up. Ted looks up again. I scrunch my lips,Sorry. But I can’t stop laughing. “We respectfully request a grant of $50,000—whenever you get around to it.”
Why didn’t I do this before? Why did I stick to the form letter? This—this is better. The hours disappear. By five thirty p.m., my inbox is empty. My brain almost feels…light. Veronica watches me pack up. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. She always stays until six, takes the subway to Thirty-Third, transfers to the PATH. Her look saysMust be nice.I don’t care. I shut down the IBM, slip into my coat, and head into the blur of Midtown. I walk toward 527 Park. That’s where Holden is. My favorite person.
And suddenly, walking fast through the throngs, I have that feeling again—like I’ve forgotten something. Or someone. But no. I’m just being dramatic. Probably.
Chapter Twenty-Six
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