Meternity Read online

  “Buckley! You made it!” I hear a voice calling me from the middle of the room, then see Ryan’s hand raised, holding a Guinness, waving me toward him. The men of all ages, and clearly a heavy mix of guys from the UK and other countries, part ways and allow me back as they look me up and down with a smile.

  “Of course I made it!” I say as Ryan bumps into me, causing us to crash into one another and spill a bit of his beer on me.

  “Very cool,” he says, his huge smile wide. “Want one of these?” He motions down at his brown frothy drink. “Or were you expecting mimosas,” he teases. I fake punch him in the ribs, and he nods at the barman, whom he clearly knows well, for a round of two more. Great, I think, he’s perfect in every way, but of course, a partier.

  As the game starts, the crowd of supporters sings and cheers so loud I can hardly hear Ryan as he attempts to explain how the season has gone, but pretty soon, the game’s started and the crowd turns silent. Ryan jumps and hollers with each false call. His enthusiasm is sexy and when Liverpool scores its first goal right before the first half finishes, he grabs me by the shoulders into a tight hug. “Buckley, did you see that goal?”

  Eventually as Liverpool wins 2–1 against Arsenal, the crowd, happy, now turns their attention away from the TV and in one collective swoop immediately starts ordering drinks.

  “So what’d you think of the game? Not bad, right?” Ryan hands me my drink from the bar.

  “Pretty good,” I say, smiling and thinking, is it bad that I’m the kind of girl who could spend her Saturday mornings in a bar full of sweaty drunken men, perfectly happy? More than a few guys are aiming to get even more hammered, and they start crashing into me, spilling drops of beer. Ryan notices, steering me out of the way toward the front of the bar near the windows.

  “It’s more than good. We won! We’re now number one in the Premiere League with just two more games to go! It’s incredible!”

  “Fine, congrats, then! Maybe not a metaphor for life, but slightly impressive.” I wink.

  “Are you kidding? They’re like Zen warriors.”

  “I just saw a bunch of hot guys with neck tattoos and man buns running around a field.”

  “It’s more than that,” he says, getting all strangely serious and making a wiping motion near his eye, which he tries to hide. “We’ll make a fan out of you someday. What do you say we get out of here?”

  “Sure,” I reply, a little tipsy.

  “How about we get out of this neighborhood. I’m always here. Wanna hit the Standard Biergarten for some grub?”

  I nod silently, just smiling, as he takes my hand to lead me outside toward a cab. I can swear that on his way out, some of his friends give him a look of approval and he nods one right back.

  In the cab, I survey our body language: he’s turned toward me, legs splayed and shoulders relaxed. It’s a good sign, I think. I hear my phone buzz.

  Ryan notices. “Work calls?”

  “Yes, unfortunately.” I roll my eyes as I reply to a text from Alix about her Facebook PTSD story if you haven’t lost the baby weight fast enough.

  “Wow. You’re a busy woman,” says Ryan, teasing, trying to get the phone out of my hands as it starts buzzing again.

  “Usually I’m not,” I say, finding myself reminded of JR and feeling a little irked by the charge. So what if I were? Looking at the kindness in his eyes as he says it, I decide to leave it.

  At the upscale beer garden, over beer steins and Wiener schnitzel, Ryan tells me he got his love of soccer from his dad, whose grandfather was from Cork, but had moved to Liverpool to work before finally immigrating to the States. As he’s telling me the story, I can tell there’s a bit of sadness in his eyes. When we finish up, it’s only 1 p.m. and I can’t be sure, but all signs point toward a perfect day as he leads me out.

  “Want to take a walk along the High Line?” Ryan’s eyes get glinty in the warm springtime sun. “I’ll tell you about its construction. My buddy’s firm worked on it.”

  “Sure!” I can’t remember when I’ve ever been on a date like this before.

  As we walk up, it’s pretty much perfect. He highlights the fun factoids he knows about the shrubbery’s eco-consciousness (“it’s all weeds that were originally on the old railroad tracks”) and how the wood has all been reclaimed. I can tell this is what lights him up, his passion. It’s exciting.

  At the north end, he pulls me to the edge where we gaze at the undulating curves of the Frank Gehry–designed building standing out along the West Side Highway. He reaches for my hand; once we’re there, we linger a bit. All of a sudden, strangely nervous about where this could lead, I drop it quickly.

  Ryan doesn’t seem to let it bother him. “So, did you have fun today?” His blue eyes sparkle in the warm sun.

  “Yes, actually. It’s nice to not have to think about work on the weekends for once.” But as if on cue, my phone chimes again, this time from Alix asking about another research detail on yoga breathing for toddlers. I quickly answer, typing away a response for a minute or so, and hit Send, letting out a tired sigh along with it.

  “Ah, I get it,” says Ryan.

  “What?” I say, strangely nervous.

  “You’re a classic overachiever.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “Well, inherently, it isn’t.” He pauses for a second. “If you’re doing it for yourself.”

  “Of course I am.” Now I’m feeling defensive.

  “Okay, then tell me how many emails you’ve answered so far this weekend on—” he takes a look at his watch “—Saturday at 1:30 p.m.”

  I give him a guilty look. “Only a couple.”

  “And how many new blog posts have you written?”

  “Exactly zero,” I say, suddenly getting his point. “But when your bosses pile work on you it’s not always easy to just say no.”

  “I know, I know, you’re destined for greatness,” he says, seeming to sense my reaction. “All I’m saying is that you can’t live for anyone else, Liz. You just have to live for yourself.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I say quickly, letting out a loud sigh. I wasn’t the one partying in a coke-filled haze in my twenties.

  “No, seriously, you’ve gotta stop trying to control everything.”

  “But, that’s the only way to beat the competition.”

  “Not always,” says Ryan, looking down. “Did you see how Liverpool played today? They were playing their own game. That’s how you win.”

  I know he’s probably right, but he still has no idea what I’m up against. I turn away and cross my arms, looking at the Hoboken side of the Hudson.

  “Fine. Maybe you’re not ready to hear it...but I’m around to help, anytime you need me.” He punches my arm teasingly, which makes me smile a little. We stand in silence for a few moments, he pulls me back into a bear hug. It’s nice. And feels important. Like he’s getting as much from it as I am. Then, he says, “You’ve got choices, Buckley.” He pulls me around toward downtown where the Freedom Tower faces us. “See that? It’s a symbol. You can always rebuild after nothing. Remember that.”

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse her—Cynthia—walking out of the Gehry building that sits facing the Hudson on the West Side Highway. She’s probably waiting for a car—I forgot that she lives down there.

  All of a sudden, I see her head turn in my direction, and I say, “I, uh, have to go now.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I can’t chance being spotted. “See you later, Ryan. I had fun.”

  “You don’t seem like you did.”

  “No, I did!” I tell him, as he’s staring at me with a dumbfounded expression.

  The abruptness stirs up a feeling in his eyes, though I can’t trace it. “Okay. I have some work ideas
to talk to you about. Wanna set up a meeting this coming Friday?”

  “Sure, just email me,” I reply, thinking maybe this really is about work, after all. I turn in the exact opposite direction from Cynthia and hightail it to the traffic lights to hail a cab.

  He looks at me blankly as the cab rolls away.

  Ten

  After yesterday’s emotional roller coaster, I’m glad to be heading to the suburbs for my mom’s birthday for the rest of the long Memorial Day weekend. Another night of boozing it up (and the potential of sending out hormone-and alcohol-fueled texts to Ryan) is not what my tender psyche needs right now.

  A few new Dunkin’ Donuts have moved into where some of the old diners used to be. But the ice cream shop where I worked summers as a teen is still there on Main Street. The bus pulls into a street behind a strip mall, heading toward my mom’s apartment complex. After renting for about five years after the divorce, she was finally able to buy this past year. She swears she’s much happier here in the small one-bedroom apartment “than living with your father” in our old house. But I wonder.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she says, embracing me with a huge hug, and at once I feel the two grapefruits that have replaced the softness. “Look at me! Fake boobs!” she proclaims, showing them off through her polyester cardigan sweater.

  She’s always “understood,” giving me the easy pass about not coming home for every treatment and the reconstructive surgery. But she didn’t really. And I didn’t really. I was there for the big events. The posttests, postdiagnosis. Chemo. Radiation. Hair. Mastectomies. But I can count, painfully, the moments I wasn’t. I could have come home to stay with her throughout recovery. I could have held her hand during all the appointments. My aunt Judy was there. And her best friend Ellen from school. But not me. Not always. And the fact that she lets it slide haunts me. Shames me. For this. What? A job where I am faking a baby?

  “A sixty-year-old with thirty-year-old boobs!” She laughs.

  “No, they’re great!”

  “Well, anyway, how are you? Did they reschedule Paris, or is it done?”

  “Done, but that’s okay, they have me pretty busy now, so too much to do anyway.”

  “Have you heard anything from your father recently?”

  “No,” I say quickly.

  “Lizzie, you really should get in touch with him. I know he’d like to hear from you.”

  “I will, Mom. I’ve just been busy at work.”

  She pauses a little stiffly. “Well, I finally boxed up all your old things, so you’ll have to take a look through and decide what you eventually want to take back to the city with you, and what you want to throw away,” she says. Though her place is small, she’s decorated it with cute odds and ends she’s found at HomeGoods.

  “Mom, you know I have no space for anything in my apartment.”

  “Well, then, you’ll have to part with it all, I guess. Now that I’ve downsized, there’s no room, Lizzie... So tell me. Anything new happening at work these days? Any promotions?” she asks, taking a seat on the beige sectional, while I sit down in the slipcovered recliner.

  “No, you know, the same,” I say, trying to figure out what to tell her. “I told you how I almost got to interview Marigold Matthews, right?”

  “Yes, sweetie, I love her on Crime Theory! And how about your dating life? Anything happening there? Are you sure you don’t want me to set you up with Margaret’s son’s best friend?” she pushes.

  “Mom, I’m fine. It’s okay, really,” I say, looking down.

  “Probably better, Lizzie. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t depend on a man for happiness.” Unable to voice my thoughts, I look down, which my mom notices quickly, giving me a soft look. “Have you heard from JR at all?” Something about him my mom had never liked.

  “No,” I say quietly.

  “Don’t worry, Lizzie, I know something good will happen soon.”

  I take a deep breath. “I just don’t feel it yet and I’m thirty-one.”

  My mom gets up and pours us both a cup of chamomile.

  “I never told you this, but your father and I tried for a long time to get pregnant. We were younger, but it took me almost two years to conceive,” she says. “At that time infertility treatments didn’t exist. Just judgmental friends and relatives and doctors telling me there was nothing I could do. Did I ever tell you that your father’s mother told me that maybe God was punishing me because I had been on birth control for the first few years I was married?” She lets out a snuffle.

  “Seriously?” I say, awestruck. “Granny Buckley said that? That’s so awful.”

  “I’m sure that’s where your father gets his stubbornness. Anyway, I’d always felt the same way you do. During my twenties, everyone told me I should be having children, but I kept putting it off. Then all of a sudden my biological clock started ticking and I just knew.”

  “Really?” I say hopefully. I readjust myself on the couch, tucking one leg under my bum. “I mean, I just haven’t felt that yet.”

  “Yes, but times were different. Women didn’t really have many other options. I enjoyed working in the school system—but motherhood was the norm. That’s something I’ve always admired about you, how hard you’ve worked and how far you’ve come,” she says, taking a slow sip of her tea. “Becoming a magazine editor is not something just anyone can do... I can’t wait to see where you’ll go next.” She pauses. “I’m very proud of you, Lizzie.”

  I bury my nose in the tea and avert eye contact, which my mom notices.

  “Don’t worry, Lizzie. The time will come.”

  We spend the rest of the day hanging out, and after dinner, I go through my old journals and scrapbook albums that my mom has boxed up. She put them in my new room, which has a small daybed and also functions as a den and office.

  At first it’s fun to look at all the old pictures. But then I see a few from my junior and senior year of high school. Even though I’d always had a close circle of friends, I’d always felt like an outsider among most of my classmates whose fathers worked at the investment banks and who would talk of going to St. Bart’s or on safari in Africa for spring break, while we were taking staycations before anyone knew what that meant.

  My hands land on a scrapbook page from the junior year winter formal. There I’m posing with my friends. I remember my dad and mom were fighting a lot then—usually about money.

  Toward the end of the year, he’d started going to Atlantic City on his days off without my mom. She tried to keep the peace, but then the attacks on the towers happened the first week I started my senior year. My dad wasn’t working his usual shift at the airport that day, thank God. Looking back, the year seemed to fade into a blur completely.

  Then, later in the year around the holidays, Dad was laid off for saying something to one of his superiors, and he started going to AC for a week at a time. She tried to keep the peace, but to no avail. Finally, my parents told me that they were getting divorced and selling our house—the one my mom’s mother had grown up in—so they could afford my college tuition. He’d begun seeing another woman, a divorcée he’d met in a bar playing Keno. I could tell my mom was devastated, but she simply packed us up and we moved on. She found a small rental on the outskirts of our town.

  Then, my sophomore year of college, my mother was diagnosed with a difficult to locate stage 3 breast cancer that kept threatening to metastasize. It had taken almost eight years in total to beat it—a toll that had devastated the both of us and one we faced alone.

  My mom knocks at the door. “Lizzie, are you almost done? There’s something I found the other day that I wanted to show you.”

  She comes in, sits on my bed and hands me a scrapbook. “This is one thing I’d never throw away.” She pats a space next to her and I go sit down beside her. I op
en it to find articles, newspaper clippings and pictures—my entire life’s accomplishments—including the letter announcing I’d been accepted into the prestigious Paris Sciences Po program for my junior year abroad. I’d turned it down—it would have been too expensive, and I’d needed to be at home anyway.

  She wipes something out of the corner of her eye and lets out a little laugh. “You didn’t know I was keeping this. You’ve always amazed me, Lizzie, with your determination. You set out to do something and you always do it.”

  Eleven

  Coming to work Tuesday morning after the long weekend, now almost a month in—the date I was supposed to be out of Paddy Cakes for good, I feel as if I am standing on the highway median strip in that old video game “Frogger.” I know I’m going to get smacked no matter which way I head, so I stand still for just a little bit longer.

  Before I can even settle in to “The Best Colleges for Toddlers” revise, I get an email notice from Caitlyn.

  Everyone to the conference room, it reads.

  I glance at Jules with an expression that says “think we should be worried?” We all look a little confused as we head over. By the scared-bunny looks on people’s faces, I think we’re all remembering what happened last time with the Cynthia announcement.

  But once we see that there are ample Honey Cups and Diet Cokes, our chests give a collective sigh. Everyone takes a seat and Cynthia comes in, wearing a particularly expensive-looking structured black dress with nude heels, her cheeks frosty with luminating powder.