The Hole in the Middle (16 page)

The nurse calls me into Dr. Chen's examining room and tells me to have a seat. Within a few minutes I hear the telltale clattering of high heels and Beverley Chen appears, balancing her tiny, perfect frame on a pair of three-inch Louboutin pumps.

“I have no idea how you stand up all day in those,” I say.

“They make me feel young and energetic,” she says. “Mind over matter.” She laughs. “But don't quote me—it's not a medical opinion.”

She comes over and stands beside me. “So what have you done here?”

I hold out my wrist. “Something stupid,” I say. “I fell on the stairs. I'm hoping that I didn't break it.”

She takes my wrist and gently manipulates it. “I don't think so,” she says. “I suspect it's just a bad sprain, but I'm going to send you for an X-ray just to be sure. What were you doing on the stairs?”

I tell her about Nigel and my cold and my narrow escape.

“How long have you had this cold?”

“A couple of weeks,” I admit.

Beverley comes over and takes my temperature. Then she presses her fingers into the sides of my neck. “Any pain in your face?” she asks. “Here, or here?” She runs her fingers under my eyes and across my temple.

“Yes,” I say.

Beverley looks exasperated and sits down at her desk. “You have a sinus infection,” she says. She picks up her pen and begins filling out an X-ray requisition form. “I'll give you a prescription as well.”

“Am I contagious?”

“Not at all.”

“Could you write me a note that says that so I can get past germ security at work?”

Beverley smiles. “It would be my pleasure. Usually people want me to write the opposite.” She scribbles a note on her medical pad and signs it with a flourish. “Is that it? Anything else falling apart aside from the wrist and the sinuses?”

I hear the words
falling apart
and I am horrified to feel my eyes filling with tears. “Oh, how embarrassing,” I say. “I'm just fine. I have no idea why I'm crying.”

Beverley doesn't say anything. She just waits and watches me with an expression of deep kindness and concern. She hands me a box of tissues.

“I've been a little stressed,” I say as I mop my face, but I hear a little sob in my voice.

“I see,” says Beverley, as if she does, indeed, see very well. “How are you sleeping?”

“Not very well. I have trouble falling asleep, and then if Scotty wakes up I can't fall back to sleep. I can't get my brain to turn off.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Work. The kids. Jesse. My mom. Christmas. Everything. How I'm not doing any of it as well as I want to or as well as I should. God, I sound like such a cliché.” I don't add that my life feels like one long, flailing arc through the air, with no soft landing in sight.

“OK. How about eating? How's your appetite?”

I'm not sure I like where this is going. “It's fine.”

“Are you eating a balanced diet?”

“I'm trying to,” I say.

“How about alcohol? How many drinks are you having per week?”

I do a quick calculation and am shocked by the total. Do small glasses of wine count as a whole drink? I immediately revise the figure down. “Maybe seven?” I say.

Beverley makes a note in my chart, but to my relief moves to a new subject. “How often would you say that you feel anxious?”

“Is that a trick question?” Beverley shakes her head. “Pretty much all the time, I guess.”

“If you had to pick one word to describe how you feel most often, what would it be?”

“Totally overwhelmed. Sorry. That was two.”

“Do you cry easily?”

“Lately, yes,” I admit. “Usually a few times a day. It's mortifying. The strangest things set me off. Like opening my e-mail and realizing that I have fifty new messages. Or thinking about what to get my mother for Christmas. Tuesday, I nearly burst into tears in a staff meeting because I found out that I have to come in on Saturday to work on a project. I could barely concentrate on the meeting because I was so stressed about lining up a babysitter.”

“Have you had trouble concentrating on other things? Or making decisions?”

Now I really don't like where this is going. “Sophie?” Beverley prompts me.

“Not with concentration, particularly,” I say. “But in the last few weeks I'm finding decisions a little challenging.” I think about my e-mail inbox and feel the tears well up again.

“Do you do anything for yourself, Sophie? Do you have any regular social things that you do, fitness classes, anything like that?”

I cast about. There must be something. “I go to yoga with my mother,” I say.

Beverley's mouth quirks up at the corner. “Do you enjoy that?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Not particularly,” I say.

“Let's try again, then.”

“Book club?” I offer.

“How often do you go?”

“It's once a month, but I haven't been in a while,” I admit.

She looks up. “When is your next book club meeting?”

“Tonight, actually,” I say.

“I want you to go to book club tonight,” says Beverley sternly.
“Doctor's orders. And this is a prescription for sertraline. It is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. It is a kind of antidepressant that often works quite well for people with your symptoms. I'm putting you on a fairly low dose for now, and I want you to come back and see me in a couple of weeks so I can assess your symptoms again.”

“I'm not depressed,” I say. “I'm just really busy.” Now I'm crying openly. I'm crushed by my own sense of failure.

“Sophie,” says Beverley, “this is your health. And you are headed for a crisis if you don't start taking care of yourself right now. I want you to take this seriously.”

“OK,” I snuffle.

Beverley comes over and takes my hand. “A prescription is not a failing grade in life management,” she says, gently. “I see five or six people exactly like you every week. I think you'd be surprised how many people you know are in the same boat. Now go get your X-ray, and go see your friends. It will make you feel better.”

thursday, december 5, 2013

I show up at Sara's house around eight, and book club is in full swing. I've come straight from the office, and my prescription is still in my purse. I'd say that I haven't had time to fill it, but even I know that for once, lack of time isn't the issue.

I ring the bell. Zoe answers and steps out onto the porch with me for a moment. “I was hoping it was you,” she says. “I'm not ready to tell anyone else about what's going on with Richard, OK?” She gestures toward the house, where the rest of the book club is waiting.

“Of course,” I say. And in any event, I feel a little fuzzy on the details of Zoe's marital crisis. Lunch feels as though it happened a week and not six hours ago.

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

She shrugs. “It helped to see you at lunch,” she says. “But I think this is one of those situations where it's going to keep feeling worse until something big changes. I'm just not ready to think about what the something big is.” I give her a hug, and we go in. “Look, everyone,” she calls. “It's a special guest appearance by Sophie!” She drags me into the living room, where the rest of the book club bursts into enthusiastic applause.

“I haven't read the book,” I say.

“Don't be silly,” says Laura. “No one ever reads the book.”

“I do,” says Sara pointedly. “And it would be great if we could make a tiny effort to talk about it once in a while, even for five minutes. Hi, Soph.” She pauses, taking in the tensor bandage that I've wrapped around my wrist. “What did you do to your arm?”

“A sprain,” I say. “It's nothing.”

“What was the book again?” asks Laura.

Sara raises an eyebrow. “Are you really interested, or are you just trying to humor me?”

Laura laughs. “Was it good?”

“Not especially,” says Sara. “We can stop talking about it now. What's Megan going on about?”

Like Sara, Megan is one of my old friends from the student newspaper, and I've caught her in mid-rant. Nora is leaning back slightly to avoid Megan's violent gesticulations, which are, as usual, aimed at hapless, absent Bob: “And then he looks into the stroller and says, ‘I'm starting to get to the point where I remember that he's around. Do you know what I mean?' And I think, ‘What kind of fucking question is that? It's kind of hard for
me
to forget that our baby is
around
when he's hanging off my
tit
24/7, but I guess you don't have that problem, do you, Bob?' Honestly! I just looked at him and said, ‘I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.'”

Megan takes a breath, looks around, and realizes that she is the main attraction. “Hi, Sophie,” she says. “Good to see you.”

I wave. “Still married?”

Megan snorts. “Barely,” she says, but she smiles a little before turning back to Nora to continue itemizing Bob's shortcomings as a husband and father.

“What can I get you to drink?” asks Zoe. “Prosecco?” I nod, and she disappears into the kitchen. I sit down next to Sara.

“How have you been?” she asks.

“Bad day to ask,” I say. “I'd say I've been stressed to the point of hysteria, while at the same time struggling to find enough meaning in my work to justify my level of anxiety. I mean, shouldn't you have to care about a job to get this worked up about it?”

“Of course not!” Zoe reappears with my glass and plops down on the sofa with us. “Do you remember the
I Love Lucy
episode where Lucy and Ethel are working on an assembly line at a chocolate factory? No? You know the scene in
Pretty Woman
where Richard Gere takes Julia Roberts up to the penthouse for the first time, and they have a fight, and then they make up, and then they stay up late watching TV?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Sara. “Right before she gives him the blow job.”

“Exactly. That moment where you think, am I
really
supposed to be rooting for these two to get together in the end?”

“Totally.” Megan and Nora have finished with Bob and rejoin the group. “But they aren't watching the chocolate factory episode,” Megan says. “They're watching the wine-making one, where Lucy runs around in a giant barrel and throws grapes at everyone.”

Zoe rolls her eyes. “The point I'm making,” she says, with the deliberate enunciation of a woman who has had too much Prosecco, “is that the chocolate factory is a perfect example of a job that is both stressful and meaningless. The chocolate starts coming faster and faster and they can't wrap it quickly enough, and by the end they are stuffing the chocolates down their shirts and in their mouths and looking completely panic-stricken, but to no real end.”

“And this relates to Sophie's job how?” asks Laura.

Zoe waves her hand vaguely. “E-mail, voice mail, staff meetings—the whole tedious routine is a modern-day, white-collar version of the conveyor belt.”

“Well, that's a pretty bleak assessment,” I say.

“Only if you plan to be stuck beside the conveyor belt for the rest of your life,” says Zoe. “But since you don't actually work in a chocolate factory, you have a few options. And if you would admit that you are having a midlife crisis, you could start looking at ways to change it up.”

“I'm not having a midlife crisis,” I say.

Laura laughs. “Everyone's having a midlife crisis, Sophie,” she says. “You might as well join the club.”

“I'll humor you,” I say. “Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I'm having a midlife crisis. What would you suggest I do, then?”

“Any number of things,” says Zoe. “You could change jobs, obviously to something either less stressful or more meaningful. Or you could find ways to make the rest of your life more fulfilling, by getting a hobby or taking a class with me once in a while. You could train for a marathon, or take up kickboxing, or write mommy porn. You could have an affair with your assistant, but that's more of a guy thing.”

“You obviously haven't met my assistant,” I say.

“Or you could figure out a way to be less stressed, which is going to be hard for you given your personality. That route would probably require medication.”

I laugh uncomfortably and say, “That was my doctor's view.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” says Laura.

Megan snorts. “There's nothing wrong with any of you,” she says. “Why you are all medicated is beyond me. It's like the Valley of the Dolls around here.”

“You're on antidepressants?” I say to Laura.

“All of us except Megan,” says Zoe. “But then, she's also the only one threatening to do a home vasectomy on her husband, so you do the math.”

“Shut up, Zoe,” says Megan.

“Now, now, girls,” says Sara. “What's going on at work, Soph? I thought you liked your job.” Sara is an HR manager at a huge telecom company, and she has an anthropological zeal for organizational dynamics that I find mystifying.

“I used to,” I say. “But now, unfortunately, it's draining my will to live.”

“Because?”

“Let me count the ways,” I say. “My boss is a jackass. Every time I step into my office I get something added to my portfolio. I'm spending fifty percent of my time on event planning, which I hate, and another twenty percent on volunteer and staff management, which I hate even more. The other thirty percent I spend in excruciating meetings where nothing gets decided. I just found out that my favorite employee is in love with me, and my assistant wishes I would drop dead.”

“Book club just got a lot more interesting,” says Sara. “Gather 'round, ladies.” She settles back on the couch. “Why does your assistant hate you?”

“It's not personal,” I say. “At least I don't think it is. She's been there a long time and has been shuffled around from department to department. She's the hot potato of the secretarial pool—bad attitude, mediocre skills—your classic admin support horror story.”

“Unionized?” asks Laura.

“You bet,” I say.

“Damn,” says Laura. “They saw you coming a mile away.”

“I know you're going to tell me I'm naïve,” I say, looking at Zoe, “but part of me thinks, we're both professional women here, shouldn't Joy want to help me out? Shouldn't there be some kind of sisterhood instinct that kicks in?”

Zoe leans over and pats my hand. “You women's studies girls are such babes in the woods,” she says pityingly. “Sisterhood doesn't exist. It's a comforting illusion, a rallying cry to keep the foot-soldiers working in solidarity. It's what you used to call a ‘political construct.'”

“Like gender?” I ask, smiling. Zoe and I have been having this debate for the last twenty years.

“No, baby,” she says. “Not like gender. Gender actually exists.”

“Hang on,” says Megan. “I disagree. Sisterhood exists. Look around you.”

“I'm not talking about female friendship,” says Zoe. “I'm talking about the mystical bond that supposedly links women together and makes them act in each other's interest. It's the idea that women's natural instinct is to act collectively. It's nonsense. Anyone who's spent time in private school can tell you that.” Zoe logged ten years at a private girls' school, and for her this is the end of the argument. I think fleetingly of Janelle Moss.

“Are we done with the assistant?” asks Nora. “Because I'm way more interested in the guy who's in love with Sophie.”

“Patience,” says Sara. “What's the problem with your boss?”

“He's a baby boomer,” I say.

“Oh, one of
those,
” says Laura, with a knowing nod. “They are
so
never going to retire. Our generation will be prying the corner office out of their cold, dead hands.”

“Statistically true,” agrees Nora. “I read this demographic study that said our generation is basically screwed because by the time the baby boomers agree to step down, we'll be too old to run anything, and the reins of power will get handed over to the generation behind us.”

“I don't care about the reins of power,” I say. “I just hate working for a condescending know-it-all who treats me like I'm just out of college.”

“Corporate employment is a form of institutionalized humiliation,” says Laura. “Did you hear about the big event last month on the topic of ‘retention of women'? A bunch of law firms and banks had this brilliant idea to join forces and offer a full-day symposium to inspire women to stay in corporate jobs and halt the so-called brain drain. They spent a fortune bringing in high-powered speakers on work-life balance and they basically forced all of their female employees with children to attend—and they held it on a
Saturday.
”

“This is all very cheery,” says Megan. “Before I go and kill myself, can I hear about the guy who's in love with Sophie?”

They all look at me expectantly.

“I thought he was gay!” I wail. “I never saw it coming! If I'd thought it was even a remote possibility, I would have been so much more careful!” Even as I say the words, my brain fills with images, hundreds of them, of me touching Geoff's arm, sharing a private joke, complimenting his new outfits and haircuts, and once, under the mistaken impression that he was on his way out for a date with a man, telling him that he looked sexy. I groan aloud.

Nora puts an arm around my shoulder. “Don't beat yourself up,” she says. “He knew you were married. He's the one who forced the issue. If you're not interested, it's not your fault. That was the risk he took.” She pauses. “You're not interested, right?”

“I am
so
not interested,” I say. “I just liked that Geoff was always
on
for me. That he put his best foot forward, wanted to impress me. I liked that he
tried.
” I realize I'm praising Geoff in the past tense, and that I'm undoubtedly right to do so. “I thought it was because I was a good boss, not because he wanted to sleep with me. It's very disappointing.”

“Why do men feel like they can stop trying once they win you?”
asks Megan. “Don't they realize that if they don't try with you, they're going to end up having to try with someone else?”

“Are they?” asks Laura. “How bad would things have to be for you to leave your marriage? Most people will stick it out with a relationship that's just OK unless a credible alternative presents itself.”

“So you're saying that there is always a third party involved when someone leaves a marriage?” asks Zoe, sounding edgy.

“I'm saying that inertia is a big feature of most marriages. Bodies tend to stay at rest without an external force to knock them into motion. It's basic physics. The external force doesn't have to be sex, but it usually is. Men get pretty comfortable in marriage. Sex is one of the few things powerful enough to get them off the couch.”