Life, Libby, and the Pursuit of Happiness Read online

  Go. Fight. Win.

  Ah, down in front.

  My grandmother’s rosary beads had a reconditioned sheen thanks to my incessant fiddling. Please God (here I go again)…I’ll limit my complaining about Cecilia to just friends if I get a promotion. And if I get that pink slip, may I keep my eyes on the prize of Italy. I’m not good at this praying thing, but if it’s okay to ask to find a really nice online flight and hotel package, that’d be great. Thanks. I mean, amen.

  I watched the pipe cleaner-shaped figures with a glimmer of hope. I saw that they broke from their debate to nibble on lasagna and lunch on Chianti delivered from Ciao Cucina. I glared while they crossed off social security numbers from their master list and wiped blood-red sauce from recently plumped lips. I cringed as those alien lips formed my name and blew smoke rings through it while I watched the scene on mute from afar.

  My sister’s phone number appeared and disappeared on my cell phone, but I couldn’t lose my focus. I was a passenger in a driver’s ed car—one glance away and my life would come to a messy end. And with de-elasticized, unintentional granny underwear no less.

  Hours after the last bread stick was digested, hands were shaken and the divas parted company. I scurried back down the hall to my office and tried to calm my pulse by sniffing the remnants of my vanilla-patchouli candle. A “good luck on your promotion” gift from my friend Ariel.

  I should mention she gave it to me before last year’s review.

  I’m so behind schedule.

  Five minutes later Cecilia entered without a knock. Typical disregard for anyone. This was the woman who had interviewed me three times within a two-week period and then mistook me for her on call manicurist on my first day. Ah, if only I had understood how that so-kooky-almost-forgivable mishap foreshadowed the relationship to come.

  “Libby.” Cecilia closed the door with force that suctioned the air out of my dank cubbyhole office. She was adjusting nicely to playing God while slightly tipsy. I acted busy. Very busy. I doodled pictures of the Cheshire cat.

  “I have news for you.”

  Not good or bad, of course. Just news. I looked up at the tall, striking fifty-ish woman who had vacationed at the Desert Rehab clinic as many times as she had been engaged. Four was the last count. The correlating number wasn’t by chance. The next husband-to-be who never came-to-be was always claimed during a weak moment in detox.

  I drew a big four in the center of the cat’s forehead and waited.

  “I really went to bat for you. I’m sure you know about Mave’s reputation for cleaning house down to the janitor. Who wants to start a major venture with a disloyal crew, right?”

  “Certainly.” I needed to sound so very understanding.

  “She has agreed to my recommendation to keep you on board in a new position.” She awaited my gushing gratitude.

  I swallowed hard. Pride had such a nasty aftertaste.

  “Cecilia, I appreciate your faith in me. As creative account executive I will focus on teamwork. In fact, I look forward to the new challenge.” Where did that come from? Had that cheerleader just taken over my very being?

  “Well… there was a lot of negotiating done. Like I said, she is a tough nut to crack. She didn’t go for that position exactly. And, honestly…I don’t see you in that position either. You are too analytical for creative…”

  I serve this woman for five years, and she still doesn’t know me. Or my skills.

  Cecilia licked her lips nervously. “There is another exciting, new position I’m sure you will be pleased with.”

  “Janitor?” I allowed my sarcasm to come up for air.

  “Goodness…aren’t you funny? No, you will be the assistant to the new senior account executive. They are bringing a very successful AE over from the prestigious head office of Newman Winters in Chicago. Blaine Slater. You’ll be working with the best. He came with an amazing endorsement from the headhunter agency Mave swears by.” She leaned in toward me and whispered, “And I hear he is divine in the looks department.”

  But I only heard one word.

  Well, two.

  “Assistant?” Headhunter? I had visions of my shrunken visage swirling from a chime in Mave’s villa courtyard as she and Cecilia laughed hysterically, lounging on lounge chairs and doubling up on double martinis.

  “To the best.” Knowing her news was less than desirable but better than the worst, she slowly backed toward the door. “I’ve scheduled a meeting next week for you, Mave, Blaine, and myself. We want to take care of our housecleaning before new personnel come on board. Until then it might be good to brush up on…well, assistant skills, I suppose.”

  Harsh.

  My mind flashed to the day I saw Rachel using a steam iron on Cecilia’s office drapes. Sweat rolled down her nose as she blew hair out of her eyes. “Apparently an MA degree stands for Masochistic Assistantdom,” she had said. Streaks of mascara carved up her face, and we laughed together at her expense.

  I looked up from the noose I was drawing around my cat, who now had a 666 stamped above the four. “Thank you, Cecilia. I’ll do that.”

  The door closed. I was exiled from wonderland and trapped forever in never never land. Never never move to an assistant position. Never never accept a demotion graciously from a lush. Never never tell my mother. I unlocked my fingers and rubbed them back to life. Then I picked up the phone to call my sister with the amazingly bad good news.

  “You didn’t tell Mom, did you?” asked Cass, less out of concern than fear of missing yet another “Look, Mom, no success!” conversation between me and our very driven mother.

  “I think I need a weekend to invent a positive spin for this.”

  “You are the queen of spin. Besides, you might as well wait until Mom and Dad come up next month.” Her voice lifted, but she sounded more distracted than supportive. Could be she mentally slipped on the “mom” word and could not recover her balance.

  But Cass was a little bit happy about my predicament. After all, what would our family do if we couldn’t gather together over the warm glow of my life going down in flames? “Yeah, you’d love to witness that confession.”

  “So sensitive. By then you might have a plan in mind. Besides, Libby, you should feel good. You get to hang on to your job, right?”

  “Well, a job…not quite mine. I was hoping to get the creative account executive position this month. I’m actually moving down…from assistant account executive to assistant to an account executive.”

  “Case of the Misplaced Preposition?” Cass resorted to our favorite tactic of reducing all less-than-desirable circumstances to a Nancy Drew mystery title. Sometimes it helped.

  Not this time. “Good try.”

  “There are other agencies in Seattle, you know.”

  “I’ll see how this plays out. Besides, I’m fully vested in the retirement fund in ten more months. I don’t want to blow that.” I knew nothing about my retirement plan. I just wasn’t ready to justify staying or going.

  “Good thinking,” Cass confirmed. Then I heard her sigh heavily. “Don’t you dare say it.”

  “What?”

  “The ‘I have to think about such things because I’m single’ spiel. Then you insert crazy logic about how I don’t have to worry about money or layoffs or economic decline or nuclear war because I’m married.”

  “I wasn’t going to say…okay, so I almost went there.” It was true. After all, Cass was cared for, provided for. It wasn’t the life of my dreams, but it was the life she had always wanted, and she got it.

  And me? I was enjoying the downhill scenery as my life whizzed by with all its shortcomings.

  Libby demoted.

  Whoosh.

  Libby dating The Man Without a Future.

  Whoosh.

  Retirement fund-less Libby.

  Zoom. Zoom. Woosh.

  I looked out my door and saw Jocelyn from personnel hugging Karen from accounting. The firing line had begun. I nudged my office door closed to prote
ct myself from the Storm-induced inferno taking place.

  “Oh, no. It’s started, Cass. It’s like that scene from Broadcast News…you know, when Holly Hunter’s character tells William Hurt’s character how sick she feels inside…watching her coworkers get fired. “

  “Right…and he is super practical about it. ‘This has happened at every station I have ever been to’ or something like that.”

  “I feel more like Holly than William right now.” I watched a few more people cram their personal belongings into pre-labeled file boxes. Some minimum wage temp had possessed the hit list days before. “I didn’t realize how lucky I was to hear my bad news. I have no idea how to act in front of these people. What do I do?”

  “Try being Holly Hunter on the outside and go share their pain. But be William Hurt on the inside. I know you, Libby. You will start taking on some bizarre responsibility for your good fate and their bad fate. You take on way too much emotional baggage from these kinds of things.”

  “I did use Grandmother’s rosary beads…”

  “Do you think you were the only one to pray about keeping a job?”

  “No, of course not. I meant that I need to trust in why I’m here for right now.”

  “Okay. That sounds healthy. Now go be Holly Hunter.”

  I slipped the beads into my pocket and stepped into my appointed role. My mind had already distanced itself from the anger boiling in my gut. Survival instincts propelled me further into the crowd of the newly unemployed. I carried the right posture of sadness. I added humor where a light moment was needed. I paused thoughtfully when the weight of the loss was too much to bear. But I sensed I wouldn’t recognize my own reflection had I caught it in one of the PC monitors being permanently shut down.

  It was only four o’clock, but I was determined to leave. “What are ya gonna do, fire me?” I imagined a hallway confrontation with Cecilia. I would laugh maniacally and keep walking. Yes, I would. I quickly gathered my belongings and checked email. I was glad to see a message from my Aunt Maddie. I printed it and dashed for the door. No encounter took place. Most managers feigned urgent phone calls so they could have their backs to the exodus of workers and former company softball teammates.

  As I rode the elevator down in silence, my knees shaking, I had a personal epiphany. While I played my assigned roles, the mark where the real me was supposed to stand remained empty. Maybe…maybe it was time to start playing me.

  And like any epiphany worth mentioning, it scared me senseless.

  Three

  I stood in front of Chin Chin’s smudged take-out window deciding whether to order enough for leftovers. Chang Chin grabbed his dull, dented No. 2 pencil and poised it above the order pad. There was no expression on his face. No customer service pleasantries tickled his features. And though I’m a regular customer, we played out a scene from the Tower of Babel.

  “Just then noodles,” he emphatically announced.

  “Well, noodles and pork.”

  “You always get fork with take out.”

  “Not fork…well, yes, I want a fork. But I want moo shu pork. Pork. You know…a pig.” I pushed my nose up in a snout, much to the surprise of his customers seated inside. I had never before resorted to charades, but I thought it would clear up this point of regular confusion. Chang was disgusted…appalled, as though I had just threatened to rub hot mustard in his eyes.

  He left.

  Kayo, his wife, shuffled to the window to complete my order. Her usual cherub smile was replaced by a constipated frown. She shoved plastic bags at me and shook her head. “You know he has a bad heart,” she said with her stern mouth.

  Clearly, I had threatened the life of her husband and I was lucky to get a taste of her cooking. That is what her eyes said. And I heard her.

  I waddled to the bus station with my hard-earned comfort food rustling against my thighs. Using public transportation is a bit like picnicking on a nudist beach. Everyone knows your business. Anyone paying attention knew that I wasn’t in a worthwhile relationship because a romantic comedy DVD rental tried often to escape from my coat pocket, and my single order of ethnic food was draped over my middle finger as I balanced between poles like a solo circus act.

  If I wasn’t afraid of heights and had not experienced the executive-spread syndrome from years of sitting in an ergonomically incorrect roller chair, I would have seriously considered joining the circus and suiting up in Lycra.

  Well, and if I could handle change.

  I got off the bus at Kerry Park and joined a couple tourists taking in the view of the Space Needle. My favorite bench for journaling was free, so I plopped down and pulled the printed email from my new Prada leather knapsack—a pre-promotion splurge that after the day’s events transformed into demotion debt, the cost of which would be transferred to so many different 1.9 percent introductory rate credit cards that I will have lost the bag by the time it is paid for.

  The vegetable chow mein’s smoky noodles pulled me from my negative tangent. I eagerly opened the container and dug in. Food. Comfort. A young boy scouting out the area wandered away from his sightseeing parents and came upon my hideout. He stared at me with his baseball cap askew. I was a bad judge of kids’ ages, but I guessed he was about seven. He kept staring at me, and I wanted him to vamoose.

  “B-bye.” I motioned elsewhere. “Oh…hey, it looks like your folks want you to look at the Space Needle. Isn’t it cool?”

  He wasn’t budging. He peered more closely. I was an odd, free-range animal he would describe to his school class during share time.

  I did the adult thing. I spit out the edges of my noodles in a most sinister way.

  He ran back to his parents with a look of fear. Only once did he glance back at me. His folks handed him the binoculars and ADD boy was immediately mesmerized by the boats on the horizon and the people going up and down in the Space Needle elevator.

  Random acts of meanness had been my specialty lately. I needed a therapist. And probably so would everyone I interacted with. Once the little family headed toward their silver Audi, I opened the moo shu pork container and rested the email on my knee. Aunt Madeleine had good timing. I could use a dose of her encouragement.

  Aunt Madeleine was also Sister Madeleine. Well, ex-sister. Six years ago she headed out on a short-term mission exchange and experienced life in a small Croatian village. Aunt Maddie experienced a spiritual and personal awakening. The day she was supposed to return to New York her legs wouldn’t cooperate. She said it was as if they were frozen, and she knew she had to stay. Her order didn’t exactly have an employee transfer benefit, so she quit. The next day her legs were good as new, and she said she kept hearing the sweet sound of chimes.

  The people in her small town still called her Sister Madeline, but they stopped treating her as a fragile icon. In one of our cherished phone conversations, Aunt Maddie said she felt as though she had crossed over into a life surrounded by humanity. “This must be what Jesus felt like.” She laughed at this comparison, but I understood—she was finding the sacred in the ordinary. It was a lesson she had been trying to teach me all my life, and here it was fully dimensional and it took her by surprise. But for me, it was the example I needed to begin my own awakening. I saw how faith could play out in a woman’s life.

  My mom had been appalled that her sister chose to use inheritance money for this lifestyle. Their father had worked hard to build his synthetic roofing business, and when he died, Mom and Aunt Maddie each received a substantial sum. Mom didn’t ever blatantly express her disappointment with Maddie’s choice of investment—people—but whatever Mom said at the time disturbed my romantic view of Aunt Maddie’s courage. I envisioned the movie where Mary Tyler Moore is a nun who must decide whether to leave the church for the cute doctor, Elvis Presley. At the closing, the camera jump cuts between a crucifix and Elvis strumming a guitar. You just knew she was going to choose Elvis. Sorry, God.

  Of course, my aunt didn’t get Elvis. But she did get her legs (
and heart) back.

  Today’s email was a response to my most recent rant about life. Mind you, even a week ago when I had a career crawling in the right direction I wasn’t all that happy with my lack of purpose.

  Dearest Libby,

  Your grumblings do not sound like a whiny, spoiled brat, as you put it, but rather the growing pains of a young woman who realizes life is more. Not “more than” anything. But MORE. Always MORE. Be watching for it! It can happen right where you are. Your life does not have to drastically change like mine did. You might not want to hear this, but the position you are in at work could be right where you should be. You’ve wanted to read more about faith. I think a perfect book for you right now would be The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. It speaks about this very thing…finding God where you are at, even in the simplest of tasks. Brother Lawrence shares a simple yet profound understanding of God and faith and everyday meditation through the work we do, the life we lead. He was a kitchen helper for his monastery. He did not have worldly wisdom, but he understood what it meant to seek God completely. You will tell me what you think?

  Somehow they have put me in charge of a humanitarian conference in Rome (look at me, world traveler). This consortium could really help create a better structure for the ongoing needs of orphaned children. Wish me luck.

  One day you will meet up with me somewhere in the world. I see it happening.

  Aunt Maddie

  “Libby, it’s time to find your purpose,” I whispered, sending my earlier epiphany into a mess of cooling noodles.

  Could it be that this well-timed email from Aunt Maddie was something fated? Her encouragement to be watching for something special felt orchestrated…divine. Was it arrogant to assume such a thing could take place in my life? I felt giddy for the first time in months.

  Giddy juxtaposed against a demotional breakdown meant one thing: I needed an “Ariel view,” my term for the sanity my best friend brought to my life. She leveled my anxious highs and phobic lows to a place of near balance.