Chapter 3
TOTO’S “AFRICA” WAS THE LAST SONG OF THE EVENING, AND I WAS giving it my all. I was no Adele. But my mezzo-soprano voice had the ability to dazzle at a karaoke bar. Not that I was big on the bar scene anymore. Which was why I now spent my Tuesday nights at the J. T. Carnegie Community Center in central Pittsburgh, jamming with the illustrious Looney Tunes.
I watched my friend Gabe sing along from his spot down the row from me, his brown fleece jacket with the red pockets draped over the back of his seat. Gabe was wonderful. We’d recently started hanging out after these weekly singing sessions, at first with a larger group, and we’d mostly talk about music. Lately, we’d head out to the bar, just the two of us. We’d fallen into an easy rhythm. I liked Gabe’s way. Saying the right thing was never his priority, nor was trying to impress other people. The details that most people would brag about tumbled out of his mouth like accidental revelations. It turned out, for instance, that Gabe was studying Russian—which came up only when I mentioned my great-grandmother Rivka. Oh, and another thing—he used to sing and play lead guitar in a punk band, a band that had once opened for the Strokes before they were famous. Not that you would have any idea from the looks of him. He was cute, with his dimples and bright blue eyes, but he seemed a bit worn down by life. Gabe kind of reminded me of a stuffed animal a kid had outgrown but couldn’t stand to toss out.
Gabe now poured his musical passion into our a cappella sessions. He had a lot of feelings to work through here. Gabe’s wife, Thea, a bankruptcy lawyer with long hair and longer legs, had left him for a partner at her firm because, she said, she found Gabe exhausting. She told him she wanted to have a “big life.” She was feeling the momentum in her career and needed someone who was excited to take on the world with her. And somehow Gabe had ended up here, in a community center with a motley crew of this city’s eccentrics. See? He really didn’t care what other people thought.
Something about seeing Gabe go for broke inspired me to sing what remained of the song with even more emotion. When I sang, I wasn’t hung up on the past or the future. I was suspended in time, just a bundle of vibrations ricocheting off the plaster walls, crooning about doing the things we never “ha-aaaaad.”
When the session was over, our ringleader, a white-haired soprano named Barb McGregor, beamed at us and clapped as if we were all in on an incredible secret. Which, I guessed, we were. To think of all the money I had wasted on therapists, the years of experimenting with antidepressants. It turned out the most dependable way to shake off my troubles and improve my mood was to lose myself in a cluster of loud, searching souls.
In New York I would never have joined a group so undeniably uncool. I had enough friends there to ensure my social calendar was always packed, sometimes more than I wanted it to be. I’d worked for a local radio station doing fundraising and between my demanding work schedule and meeting up with people at night, I didn’t have much time to bake, much less take up a new hobby.
By the time we moved to Pittsburgh, Hal knew five people and I knew none, which meant he was the de facto driver of our social lives. Within months, he had more than two dozen close friends and seemed to know about every concert and party in Allegheny County. That was Hal’s magic; he always had new things for you to try, up-and-coming music to listen to, and new places to check out. His unquenchable wanderlust complemented his go-with-the-flow attitude. Thanks to his sense of adventure, I’d slept under the stars in Joshua Tree, and my passport had stamps from Nicaragua and Greenland. But I was eager to have something in my life that was entirely mine once again. Enter the Looney Tunes.
I glanced down the row at Gabe. There was something familiar about him that I couldn’t place. I chalked it up to the fact that we both had similar backstories, both transplants from New York, persuaded to move here by our significant others, both of us struggling to put down roots in this unfamiliar town. Gabe had outgrown the punk scene and embraced his life as a high-school math teacher. Now he spent his free time playing hockey and hanging out with his eight-year-old daughter, Ramona, named after the beloved children’s book heroine Ramona Quimby. He had mentioned once that his late mother had been a school librarian, which I found incredibly endearing.
GABE WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET ON TONIGHT’S WALK TO THE TAVERN. WE took our regular table in the back and hung our stuff on the backs of our fraying wicker chairs, recapping the highs and lows of our singing session. He was acting strange. He kept running his hand through his scruffy hair and he’d barely touched his beer since the waiter had plopped it on the table five minutes earlier. And he kept checking his phone.
“Everything okay?” I asked, gesturing at Gabe’s frosted mug.
He gave me a reluctant smile. “It’s my anniversary,” he said in a barely audible mumble. “My separation anniversary. One full year since Thea pulled the plug.”
“Sheesh, I’m sorry,” I said, searching for something more helpful to say. I took a sip of my wine. Then I remembered the olive focaccia loaf I’d made the night before, and grabbed it out of my bag. I watched him rip off a chunk and chew appraisingly.
“Mmmm. You used those wrinkly olives?”
“Salt-cured.” I nodded and watched him eat some more.
Gabe took a sip of his beer and sighed sadly. I’d never seen him this down in the dumps.
“Look, at least you got married,” I said at last. “A for eff—”
“Getting married is hardly any kind of achievement.”
“Tell that to my mother.” I forced a chuckle.
“Want to see something?” Gabe held up his hand. My heart twisted when I noticed that his ring finger was bare. Until now, he’d still worn it. Its absence made me sad.
“God, I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I’ll eventually get used to it, I suppose.” Gabe shrugged. “Or maybe not.”
“You know what they say. Relationships are complicated,” I said, trying to fill the silence. I quickly realized that I was hardly one to be offering advice. “How’s that for a useless pep talk?” I asked.
“Supremely not helpful.” His dimples became deep crescents when he smiled. “Let’s talk about something else. Anything else. Tell me about your exciting life.”
“Okaaaay,” I said, trying to remember something that might qualify as remotely exciting. “How about this? In addition to being on my case about casting ‘rad dads’ to ride this ridiculous ‘Feminists for Father’s Day’ float that Alice wants me to organize, she emailed me to say how excited she was to learn that I am friends with Leigh Sullivan.”
“The artist, right? The one who makes those sculptures of...” Gabe waved his hands in the air and averted my gaze.
“Celebrity vulvas,” I said, finishing his sentence. I hadn’t gone into too much detail about Leigh, somebody with whom I hadn’t had a real conversation in years, but Gabe’s memory was a steel trap. While I had to be reminded of the names of everyone in our singing troupe, Gabe knew all the Looney Tunes’ first and last names right after meeting them–and a lot of their phone numbers too.
“Alice, being the stalker that she is, saw that Leigh had liked something of mine on Instagram,” I told him. “She wanted to know how Leigh and I could possibly know each other, which was borderline offensive, but before I could even reply to explain that we lived together in college, she was off to the races, following up to ask if I could help get her a Leigh Sullivan sculpture without the gallery markup.”
“It’s not like she could afford one at full price. Her great-grandfather only owned what, half of the railroads in America?” Gabe raised his eyebrows.
“Exactly,” I said.
“What did you tell her?”
“I said that I would bring it up with Leigh at our college reunion this weekend,” I said. “Which, by the way, I am not going to do.”
“You’re not going to the reunion?”
“I’m not going to bring it up. I have to go. I can’t not go.”
“You don’t sound too thrilled.”
“It was going to be fun. But now I’m not so sure.” I took another gulp of wine and proceeded to tell Gabe about how ashamed I’d felt when scrolling through all the videos of my classmates boasting about their accomplishments, how it put my lack of any discernible life achievement into sharp relief. “To add insult to injury...” I pulled out my phone, careful to scroll past the dick pic, and showed him the photo Geeta had texted me, the portrait of my embodied self.
“Cute,” he said in an unconvincing tone.
I screwed up my mouth. “She’s trying to be encouraging, but it can sometimes have the opposite effect. It’s almost like my friends are getting tired of my lack of...” I petered out, trying to locate the right word.
“Lack of...?” Gabe sounded confused.
“It’s like... they don’t know what to do with me.” I thought about how Thea told Gabe she found him exhausting. My friends and family members felt the same way about me.
Gabe listened as I told him about my older brother, Andrew, who, despite being a certifiable meathead, managed a hedge fund and lived in a dream home with his fitness-instructor wife. I told him about my mother, and how we used to be so close, and how the only thing we seemed to talk about anymore was her disappointment in my choices and concerns about my future. I told him about Sophie, who was more than ten years my junior and excelling at work all the while amassing an army of TikTok followers with her snack-related content.
“Hold up. I thought we liked Sophie?”
“We do! I do! She’s the best! She just puts me to shame sometimes. I don’t know how she does it. She left a terrible controlling boyfriend who I know she’s still hung up on, but she never even mentions him. She just powers through. Seriously, she’s so disciplined and confident. She kills it at work and she does Pilates four times a week. I bet she’s going to run the Gates Foundation by the time she’s thirty. Which would be great, as I’d be more than happy to go work for her.” The alcohol was going straight to my head. I was rambling.
“I still don’t see what you mean by this supposed ‘lack,’” Gabe said, leaning back in his seat. “You’re smart enough to understand that our whole culture is powered by manufacturing feelings of inadequacy to sell us something to fix the fake problem. It’s how the bastards grind us down.”
“Ugh, I know,” I told him. “But, sometimes, when I’m with my friends—who aren’t bastards, for the most part—I feel worse than down. Like I’m cursed.”
“Jenny, take it easy.”
“Okay, maybe I’m not cursed, but I definitely feel like—”
“Like what?”
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like I have no chance. Like I’m doomed to fail over and over again. Like I never got the memo.”
Gabe chuckled. “There’s a memo?”
“You know, the‘I didn’t get the memo’ memo.”
“From my perspective, you’re doing great things.” He took another bite of bread.
“Thanks.” I felt my cheeks flush. “That makes one of us.”
“Forget the other people! Their opinions don’t matter. Do you think I care what anyone has to say about my becoming a high school math teacher?”
“That you’re good at math?”
“More like: ‘Look at that guy who used to pull in mid-six figures and is now teaching fractions to kids who are playing with their phones.’”
“I’m not following.”
“You know, I briefly worked as a Wall Street quant, trading derivatives,” he said.
“You did?” I shook my head, a little embarrassed. Sometimes I worried I was a terrible listener. “Did you tell me that already?”
“Why would it have come up?”
“Okay,” I said, feeling relieved. “So you were a wolf of Wall Street and you were on tour with the Strokes? Anything else you want to put out there?”
“It was one show.”
“Still,” I said. “Wow. Tell me about your mid-six-figure days.”
“I was on a team of math nerds who evaluated what was going on in the market, but not based on investment fundamentals. We ran algorithms, using mathematics to discover arbitrage opportunities. We were killers.”
“You? A killer?”
“Good point.” He took a gulp of his beer. “I wasn’t so much of a killer.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“The guy who ran the firm was a total tyrant. He wore Belgian loafers and had three baseball bats in his office. When Ramona was born, I became the first person who used the company’s paternity-leave policy, which we were expected not to do. Then, right before I was ready to go back to work, I started having the worst stress headaches. The thought of returning to that job was literally making me sick. Thea is the one who encouraged me to quit.”
“That was nice of her,” I allowed.
“Sure,” he said unsurely. “Teaching was something I always wanted to do, and she was pulling all-nighters to climb the ladder of her firm. One of us had to be around for Ramona at dinnertime, right? Her desire for me to have a better work-life balance wasn’t entirely altruistic.”
I nodded. “Nothing ever is.”
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Quitting that job was the best thing I ever did,” he went on. “Teaching is pretty cool. And math is beautiful. Plus, now I have time to spend with Ramona and I never miss my hockey league. A cappella nights are all right too.” He gave me a small smile. I was on my second glass of wine now and felt my cheeks warming. Gabe took another bite of bread.
“This is fucking tremendous,” he said.
“It’s a good recipe,” I said modestly, but I could feel myself grinning with pride.
“Let’s hear more about this magic memo,” he said, all but cackling. “What would it tell you?”
“I don’t know.” I looked up at the pub’s tin ceiling. “I guess that’s the problem. I always believed that I had time to explore and figure out what I was going to become ever since that whole culinary wunderkind thing went up in flames.”
Gabe made a sympathetic expression. “It didn’t go anywhere.” He pointed to the crumbs on the table.
“Gabe.” I met his eye. “It did. I set a UNESCO World Heritage Site on fire. As I may have mentioned.”
“Only about a hundred times.”
No matter how many years had passed since my “accident,” as those who loved me encouraged me to call my five-alarm fuck-up, I could never snuff that fire from my memories. I’d shown up in Italy convinced that my apprenticeship at a historic, Michelin-starred bakery was a “life-altering opportunity.” It sure had been after that fateful Wednesday afternoon when I’d idiotically ran home early to grab a pair of earrings that I wanted to wear on a date with Massimo, my summer fling. I was so excited I forgot to finish cleaning the oven, which resulted in a stray towel catching on fire and the entire place going down. The reconstruction took close to a year. It was almost two years before I could bring myself to bake so much as a loaf of banana bread.
“Did I ever tell you that when I came back from Italy, I had an opportunity to work at a promising culinary start-up, but I was too traumatized and withdrew my application?”
“Am I missing something?” Gabe asked.
“That start-up is now Cup Queen, the cupcake chain you see on every corner in every major city.”
“They make an excellent red velvet, not gonna lie,” Gabe said. “You should have taken the gig.”
“Thanks.” I wrinkled my nose. “Remember my last job in New York, at the public radio station? I’m not sure I ever shared the full story of what happened there.”
Gabe nodded for me to go on.
“Well, during one of the pledge drives, they had me come on air—it was a chance for me to convince the top brass that I could potentially host a show. At the moment I should have summoned my charm and winning personality, I had a brain freeze and totally messed up. I named the anonymous donor who’d offered to double people’s contributions that day.”
“Oops!” I could tell Gabe was trying to contain his laughter.
“It gets better. The anonymous donor,” I went on, “turned out to be this old lady who was the matriarch of this borderline fascist political family, which led to a New York Times exposé about the ties between dark money and public radio.”
I could tell by Gabe’s face that my story was losing its funny factor, but I continued, “And when I heard about Alice’s foundation, of course I jumped at the chance to work with her—I had no other options. But I didn’t know what a phony she was. And here I am on the edge of thirty-six with no clue—”
“Listen,” Gabe interrupted. “You’re not ‘cursed.’ And you’re still young.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You’re not over the hill.”
“You really know how to make a girl feel special,” I said.
Gabe took another sip and leaned back in his chair, causing his messenger bag to fall, its contents scattering across the floor. I reached down to help him gather his belongings.
“What the...?” My eyes fixed on one of the books that had tumbled out. A paperback copy of Stacey Plunkett Gets a Life by T. S. Almond. It had the same cover as the version I’d taken out of my middle-school library in the 1990s, a cheesy rendition of Stacey, her hair in a crimped side ponytail, sitting on a park bench with her frozen yogurt.
“You okay?” Gabe asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“That used to be my favorite book when I was a kid! I’ve looked for it online, but I’ve never been able to find it anywhere.” I started flipping through the pages.
“It was left over from the school library sale,” Gabe said. “I thought I’d give it to Ramona.”
“This is crazy!” I felt a rush of excitement. “I asked my mother about it the other day, and she couldn’t remember the book. She said it was a figment of my overly active imagination.”
“It’s all yours,” Gabe said, handing it to me. “I’ll find another way to tempt Ramona off her video games.”
IT WAS A CLEAR WARM NIGHT, AND I DECIDED TO WALK HOME. I TEXTED Hal to let him know my ETA, then walked another twenty minutes or so, when my phone buzzed. Hal probably remembered something he wanted me to pick up from the deli, some new kind of plant milk he’d just learned about. But the text was from a non-phone number: 000–000. I never should have let Sophie talk me into signing up for her marketing alerts from the Aurora Foundation. Then I saw the text.
Jenny Green, you’re correct. You never got the Memo. Download the app now.
There was some bit.ly mumbo jumbo, an abbreviated link to a website. What on earth?
I looked up and down the street, as if the engineer of this interruption could be lingering under a lamppost in a fedora, silhouetted by moonlight. I had just shared my memo theory with Gabe tonight. But he was good at old-school math, not new-fangled tech.
Geeta was always sending me early editions of her products—imperfect versions with glitches to be identified and worked out. She had just sent me that embodied-self image—maybe this was related? But then I remembered something. Preying on my insecurities wasn’t her thing. Plus, I hadn’t even mentioned my memo theory to her. Had I shared it with Sophie? It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t do something like this. She was all about empowerment.
I turned the corner onto my block and tried to come up with an explanation. Whatever it was, I did not click on the link. When I looked at my phone again, the message was gone. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need anyone else out there to confirm what was painfully obvious. That I, Jenny Green, never got the Memo.