So I made them. Late each afternoon at quitting time I would go like an inexperienced beggar to Lily’s workstation and she, without making eye contact or speaking to me, would quickly close out of her open work projects, collect her things, and depart. I would try to thank her—for what I wasn’t entirely sure—but she would hurry away, as if unwilling to acknowledge my humiliation. And there I would sit—sometimes for hours—the line of Lily’s gargoyles looking down on me from atop her monitor with expressions of fear and pity on their distorted faces, methodically going through all of Eleanor’s changes, double and triple checking that I had made each one to her exact specifications.
That first night I got home after nine o’clock and immediately set about to prepare a sandwich without changing out of my work clothes. I knew Jenny had already put Jacob to bed, so appeasing my hunger was my number one priority. While I was standing there in the kitchen eating my turkey and cheese on rye and letting the crumbs fall into the sink, Jenny appeared in the doorway, looking as haggard and as tired as me, and began telling me about the things that had happened during her day.
“The neighbor’s dog got loose again,” she said accusingly, as if I had snuck home at lunch and let the animal off its leash. “It’s going to bite someone in the neighborhood one of these days.”
My mouth full, I only nodded my head. She hadn’t mentioned Jacob by name, of course, but I knew that was her implication, and that this manufactured threat against his safety was evidently my responsibility to address. I remained silent and took another bite of my sandwich.
“Salmon was on sale again at the grocery store today,” she said next. “But I didn’t get any because I knew you’d be working late and it didn’t make sense for me to buy it just for myself.”
When we were newlyweds I might’ve taken this as a non-sequitur, but now I understood the connection. I smiled as pleasantly as I could while continuing to chew my sandwich, obediently taking a plate out of the cupboard so I could face her and still have something on which to catch the crumbs. Jenny hated it when I worked late, hated it even more when I traveled on business, feeling as she did an unfair amount of our child care already on her shoulders. These stealth criticisms were just how she expressed that frustration. It was so much an accepted pattern in our lives that when she started talking next about all the work she had done that day trying to find me a new job, it seemed like a natural transition.
She had dug my latest resume out of a file we kept upstairs and had made some suggested changes to it. She had also circled a couple of ads in the paper she thought I might be interested in. She had done some searching on several online job boards and printed off a few promising leads. She had talked to her network of stay-at-home moms and had sent messages out to her atrophying network of professional ex-colleagues to see if anyone was aware of job openings that might be a good fit. And she had everything organized in a series of file folders, so that when I had finished the sandwich and placed the dish in the sink, she could sit me down at the dining room table and go through them with me one by one.
It was touching, in a way, the care she had taken to keep things organized and to help me get ready for the job search. But at the same time her sweetness carried with it the undertone of hostility she had shown before, and she couldn’t help but express the new frustration she was feeling over the fact that I hadn’t yet done any of this on my own.
“Don’t you want to get out of there?” she asked me as I felt my eyes glazing over with all the details she was throwing my way.
“Sure,” I said. “I guess.”
“You guess?” Jenny said. “They’re taking you for granted. It’s time we started looking out for ourselves.”
I couldn’t disagree with her. But I was tired. More than anything I just wanted to go to sleep.
She drew my attention back to a position announcement she had downloaded from a job board. “Look at this one,” she said, “It’s absolutely perfect for you.”
I took the paper and started reading it, and despite my fatigue, I began to see what Jenny meant. Scanning down the list of required experience and competencies, I found myself mentally checking off each one as something I could already show on my resume. The company name wasn’t familiar to me, but it appeared to be in the same business—managing nonprofits—and the position was to serve as the account executive for an organization in a field similar to the one for which I had just donated some unpaid overtime. Salary information wasn’t listed, but from the stats they included it was clearly a larger organization; and it was the top job, not some deputy role where I would be playing second fiddle to an egomaniac. Thinking I wasn’t going to find anything wrong with it, my eye almost skipped past the address of the firm.
“Jenny,” I said. “This job is in Boston.”
She looked at me bashfully. “I know.”
“Do you want to move to Boston?” I asked. I sure as hell didn’t.
She paused, her eyes looking briefly up at the ceiling as if able to see her sleeping son through the floorboards. When she spoke, she spoke quietly, almost in a whisper. “I don’t think we should reject it just because it’s in another city. There are only so many good paying jobs in your field. If we open ourselves up to a national search, we’re more likely to find something that’s a step up for you. And this one looks like a perfect fit.”
My mouth popped open a couple of times while she spoke, but Jenny just kept talking—slowly, calmly and rationally—cutting off each of my objections before they could get started. When she was finished her eyes warned me to keep my response equally even-tempered.
I tried. “But what about Jacob? And you? And the new baby? And your mother?”
She gave me an ornery look as I tacked on that last one. “What about them?”
“Well, it just seems like there’s a lot tying us down at this point in our lives. Is this really the best time to uproot ourselves and move—potentially across the country?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “For the right opportunity, it might be, but we don’t have to make that decision tonight. Send in your application and if you get called for an interview we can start talking about it. If you get called back for a second, we’ll talk about it some more. And if they want you to fly out there and meet the company president, well, then we’ll have to agree it’s something we really want to do before you get on the airplane.”
I looked at her skeptically, her tone reminding me of the conversation we had had a few nights ago, when she had decided that I needed to start looking for a new job.
“Alan,” she said. “You can interview them at the same time they’re interviewing you, you know.”
Sure I could. If the situation was reversed, that’s what Jenny would do. She was always confident and sure, ready to take on the world, and I knew it was easy for her to imagine brokering some sort of sweetheart deal with this unknown Boston company. But I never had her confidence, least of all in myself. My eyes scanned the position requirements again and this time I found my experience lacking in many of the key areas. Reading between the lines, it seemed clear that the company was looking for some kind of turnaround artist—someone who could come in and chart a new course for a beleaguered nonprofit. Motivate the staff. Develop new leadership. Raise capital. Could I do those things? Thinking about all the parts of the business Mary generally kept hidden from me, I was suddenly a lot less sure.
Jenny clasped my hand. “Can we please just take this one step at a time?”
The second night I didn’t work as late, but only because I had to get home in order to take Jacob to his Sports Class. This was another one of Jenny’s decisions for me—an opportunity for Jacob and me to spend some time together, doing things she thought all fathers were supposed to do with their sons. The class was part of the local school district’s extra-curricular program, and was designed to help awkward four-year-olds develop some rudimentary physical skills. I still remember the way I felt when Jenny showed me the class description, circled in red in the recreation department catalog exactly the way she would later circle want ads in the newspaper.
Little Sports Explorer, it was called, and it was billed as a “parent/child” class. Introduce your little aspiring athlete to a new sport or game each week. Kick soccer balls, throw and catch footballs, hit baseballs off a tee—our focus will be on basic athletic skills, socialization and fun!! I was usually snarky about these kinds of things, believing that anything that ended in two exclamation points had to be for losers and misfits. But my natural smugness was quickly overmastered by a strange hidden shame that rose in my chest when I realized that Jacob and I had never done any of these things together. Indeed, if we were going to enroll in the class, I wouldn’t have to just buy him a baseball glove, I’d have to get one for myself.
I’d barely seen him the last two days—leaving in the mornings before he woke and getting home the previous night after he’d gone to bed—and when I came in the door that night Jenny already had him dressed and ready to go. His shorts were wrinkled, his socks were bunched up around his bony ankles, and the baseball cap he wore—not from the local team, but from the college Jenny’s father had gone to, a gift the previous year, crisp and never before worn—was pulled down too far over his eyes. On the drive to the high school where the class was held I looked at him in the rearview mirror.
“Are you excited about Sports Class?” I asked him.
He had to tip his head back so he could see me from under his cap’s visor. “Uh huh,” he said, somewhat hesitantly, and I knew he didn’t have any idea what we were getting him into.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I said as reassuringly as I could. “It’ll be fun.”
The class was taught by a pair of high school students—girls in their junior year; breastless, athletic girls wearing baggy white t-shirts over their sports bras and shorts too tight for their muscular thighs. One was named Marcie and she had a clipboard, and when she read of the roll of participating children, the six other dads and I one by one raised our hands and said present, each looking around at the other dads after being called out. Some did so self-consciously like me, perhaps embarrassed to have it publicly revealed that they needed teenage girls to teach their sons how to hit a baseball. But others exuded a cocky self-assuredness, and I imagined those dads as ex-high school jocks themselves, now balder and thicker around the middle, but still just as charmed and just as confident in their own infallibility.
One guy, whose son’s name was Tyler, was clearly not there because he thought Tyler needed to learn anything, but so he could see how Tyler’s already developed athleticism measured up against “the competition.” He told me as much while we were standing against the gymnasium wall waiting for our sons to take their turns with a soccer ball.
“You watch the game last night?” he asked me.
“Game?” I said, not having any idea what he was talking about. “What game?”
“What game!” he said incredulously, and then told me the names of two sports teams that must have faced off the previous night while I was busy adding dots between the Phs and the Ds in Lily’s workstation. I didn’t recognize either team—didn’t even know what sport they were from. I searched my brain for a moment, trying to remember if it was baseball or basketball season. The game. As if there weren’t a hundred games on a hundred different channels every freaking night.
“Oh, that one,” I said simply. “No, I missed it. I had to work late last night.”
“Huh,” he said, the noise sounding like the satisfied grunt of a prize pig. “What do you do?”
I started to explain it to him—nonprofit organizations, educational conferences, volunteer boards of directors—but only got halfway through my usual spiel because I could see by the drifting look in his eyes that he had no real interest in what I was saying. Like a lot of grown men who met me for the first time, Tyler’s dad had innocently offered me his heart, accustomed as he was to being surrounded by kindred spirits. The game, my new friend. Didst thou see the game? And when I had failed to embrace it, he had protectively drawn it back and dismissed me as something to fear or shun. I was used to it, and let him off the hook by pretending to get a call on my cell phone.
Despite my troubles relating to the other dads, Jacob seemed to have an impossibly good time. The high school girls had us do all kinds of things in father and son pairs—kick a soccer ball back and forth, toss a soft fabric baseball to each other, roll a red rubber ball at a set of wooden pins—and with each new activity, Jacob delighted with the things he could make his body do and the impact he had on the world around him. I could see that he wasn’t as skilled as Tyler and some of the other boys, but Jacob didn’t seem to notice. There was no head-to-head competition—just each boy learning and practicing the skills with his dad—and having never done any of these things before, Jacob was simply happy with whatever success he had. At one point while we sat on the bleachers with the rest of the class watching the girls demonstrate our next activity, he actually stood next to me and gave me a hug, kissing me warmly on the cheek as he did so.
“I love you, Daddy,” he said, looking into my ear like a lover and oblivious to both the instruction of the girls and the odd stares of the other dads.
“I love you, too, buddy,” I said, trying to drag him away from my side. His long legs seemed anchored in place, but eventually I got him up over my knees and sat him down in front of me. I pointed to one of our teenage coaches. “Now please pay attention to Marcie.”
The third night I worked until almost eleven o’clock, paying for the hooky I had played with my son the night before. It was my last night to work on Eleanor’s program. It was going to the printer the next day and I had to get all of the changes made so Lily could package it up and transfer the files in the morning.
The office was always a strange place after hours, even more so after the sun went down and the darkness of night filled the space outside the windows. I worked steadily in Lily’s pod until after the last person left for the day—it was Bethany, I remember that night, swinging by to wish me well with her laptop bag slung over one shoulder and her car keys already in her hand. I worked until after the noises from cleaning crew’s vacuums and trash carts had faded away with their last trip down the elevators, and until after even the lights of the other office night owls in the building across the street had all gone out. With just a few pages left to go I got up to use the restroom and to get my third soda out of the vending machine, and on my way back I suddenly decided to take the scenic route, making a loop around the office space and peeking in all the darkened rooms.
The traces of the other human beings I worked with were evident everywhere—files left open on people’s desks, computers left on in violation of the company’s energy use reduction policy, half drunk cups of coffee being used as paperweights, some with oily lipstick stains glimmering in the dim light. I inevitably found myself in Mary’s office, the door closed but not locked, and I spent several minutes sitting in the chair behind her desk. I didn’t disturb anything—didn’t really want to—but hoped to get some kind of sense of what the world must look like from there. In the darkness Mary’s globe was just a round shape and the artwork on the walls mere rectangles. Only the trophies and awards in her display case had any life to them, the little interior accent lights still illuminating their silver and crystal surfaces. At one point I found myself methodically opening her desk drawers one by one. I didn’t touch anything. I simply opened them and peered inside, surprised at how little they contained.
When I got back to Lily’s workstation the gargoyles were waiting for me, including the big one in the center I had nicknamed Scratch, partly because of the way his claws draped over the top edge of Lily’s monitor, but also because of the devilish grin he wore on his face. Scratch and his crew were definitely in violation of Don’s office décor and accessories policy, but they had kept me company on my lonely vigil and I had decided not to turn them in.
“Well, Scratch,” I said. “What do you think? Should we put this baby to bed?”
Scratch thought that was a good idea, but wondered if there wasn’t something we could do to leave our own little mark on Eleanor’s program. We had, after all, spent a good portion of the time that was supposed to be reserved for our families on it. I made the last few changes called for in Eleanor’s script and saved the file—and all the while I silently turned Scratch’s devious suggestion over and over in my mind. I should do something, shouldn’t I? Nothing major. Just a little…something—something to show that asking me to do this was wrong, and that I should’ve said no. That next time I was going to say no. But what? I looked at Scratch to see if he had any ideas, and wouldn’t you know it, that little devil did.
I found it on page 173.
This session is composed of three distinct presentation segments.
I had already fixed it. On Eleanor’s printed copy, a nearly identical sentence appeared, but in that one she had struck out the word ‘comprised’ with two parallel lines and had written ‘composed’ in her neat red letters in the space above it—and, like thousands of others, I had dutifully made that change in the electronic file.
It took me only one mouse click and three keystrokes to put things back the way they had been.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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