Red Tape

RED TAPE

The first two chapters of an unpublished novel by Molly Russakoff.

Chapter 1

I hadn’t expected to be telling this story.  I was on a certain path toward security and self-improvement.  One foot was following the other as planned, following the signs to comfort and obscurity when the anvil fell.  My name is Helen Goldberg.  I am fifty-four years old.  I have no idea what’s going to happen to me next.

         I am at the bottom of a gully.  My car is jammed, nose first, into a soft spot of earth that indicates the proximity of water.  It’s still redolent with the fragrance of new car which mixes with the fragrance of soil, foliage and relatively fresh air.  My mother balances on a tree stump, elfin in her pinafore, Dutch bonnet and yellow clogs.  The sun is merciful and warm.  It dapples us through the canopy of trees.  My mother is patient and cheerful, as always.  “Look at you, Helen,” she says, “with your tools and your know-how.”   I look over my shoulder to her, set my jaw and flex my muscles like Rosie the Riveter.  She smiles, but remembering her toothlessness, quickly covers her mouth with her hand. I blow her a kiss and go back to work.

         We had an idea.  It was one of those crazy ideas that just might work but didn’t.  It involved pushing my new car off the edge of a cliff.   It’s a long story.  The thing is, I hadn’t counted on the difficult angle of the car’s landing, like a cartoon rocket ship lodged willy-nilly into the face of the moon.  So, all of my panicked, slapdash plans had not come to pass and, once again, I’m thinking on my feet.  My aching feet.  My aching head.  Funny how I’d sworn I’d never think on my feet again.  This car would be the beginning of my ride down Easy Street.

         Please forgive my excessive prefacing but I have one more digression before I begin the story in earnest.  There I was, just having desecrated my pride and joy, the tank run dry, the battery dead, up to the carburetor in mud and vegetation, when I realized that I’d left my little toolkit in the glove compartment.  I deflated upon myself.  There was no way around it.  I had to have it if I was going to jimmy the trunk open.  I found a rock on the ground nearby and with a definitive blow, smashed the passenger’s window.  It was more satisfying than I thought it was going to be.  I was no longer heartbroken.  I was done with that.  My heart was gone.  So, this is what it feels like, I thought, to be heartless, violent, a vandal, a thief.  Not bad.  Maybe I should’ve started this a long time ago.  I knocked the crinkling glass out and shimmied through the jagged hole.

         You wouldn’t think I was positioned for a spiritual awakening.  I was wrenched into the front seat, my legs sticking out of the broken window like a couple of broomsticks as I reached for the glove compartment, wiggling down, awkward as can be, the side of my face mashed against the seat, my left hand propped against the floor of the driver’s side, creeping on fingertip when I felt a smooth rounded sensation against my wrist.

         I couldn’t figure out what it was and my thinking glitched from the toolkit, which I was so intent on, to this new mystery.  What was it?  What was this thing jammed under the seat of my new car which I’d been so careful to keep pristine that even a gum wrapper was not allowed to languor in the ashtray…This car that I would not allow myself to eat a peanut in.

         After I accomplished the getting of the toolkit, I returned to the maw of the window to pursue this new mystery.  I was a bit more graceful now, motivated only by wonder, not that awful desperation that had been pulling me forward like a hook in the throat of a fish. I reached under the seat with a curled wrist.  And it began to dawn on me.  I knew what it was.  I could feel the crisscross of laces and the trap door where the tongue gave way.  My heart raced and, as if I were birthing a calf, I pulled out a royal blue Doc Martin.  It was as if God had opened His kingdom to me and I worked my way back out to the open air.  For the first time during the entire debacle, I wept.  I held the boot to the heart I thought I’d lost and laughed and sobbed.  I took a moment, only a moment, to bask in the beatitude before picking up the toolkit.  I tucked the boot into my armpit, held the kit to my breast and scooted back down to my mother at the bottom of the hill.

         So, where do I begin?  Should I begin with the birth of my daughter or all the lovely moments that led to her conception?  Or tunnel back to my own birth?  Or further still to my own conception, that other moment when my father sidled up behind my mother at the kitchen sink where she always looked so irresistible to him.  But if I spiral too far into the past, I might slip all the way back to the Big Bang, and there’s just not that much time left.   So, for expediency’s sake I will start on the lot of the car dealership, the moments leading up to the handshake between the salesman and me, just before the papers were signed.  Geez! That was not even two weeks  ago.   

         I closed on my car on the fifteenth of August, after much research and deliberation.  The salesman’s name was Michael Jackson.  I never would’ve remembered that, but it was the same name of an entertainer who’d been legendary during the entirety of my coming up.  He was a light-skinned Black man (the salesman, not the entertainer) with manicured good looks: close-cropped hair, white crescent nails and a mouth bracketed by an impeccable mustache and beard.  He wore a pink Oxford tucked into a pair of pressed Chinos.  He smelled familiar, because he wore the after shave that everyone was wearing at that moment in history.  It was a clean fragrance, a potion of citrus and eucalyptus, that appealed to a breeziness in human nature.  He’d never heard of the other Michael Jackson, which surprised me because it wasn’t very long ago that nobody never heard of Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson (the entertainer) was almost otherworldly in his talent.  He sang and he danced with a mesmerizing force that pulled us all forward.  We watched him grow up and decay before our eyes on a succession of television sets, computer monitors and cell phone screens.  It was like watching a specimen mutate in a lab, changing from dark to light, robust to hollow, exuberant to frightened until, sad as Frankenstein’s monster, he ordered his personal physician to inject him with a cocktail of propofol and benzodiazepine and he slept until he died.  Through it all he maintained a helix of self, always performing for us and willing to take a magnanimous bow. It’s impossible to explain how it felt to live in the time of Michael Jackson, how riveting it was to witness his rise and fall. That just doesn’t happen anymore.  Time rumbles over us like a truck.  Wave after wave, history follows history and erodes even the most beautiful truths.  Now Michael Jackson is a name, a car salesman, as close to anonymous as a name allows. 

         Michael Jackson, the car salesman, and I stood together in the lot surrounded on all sides by glittering windshields, an ocean of them.  The car I’d chosen was blue and shaped like a child’s drawing of a car.  It lacked the sleek lines of its comrades, but it suited me better.  I was no spring chicken. At 54, I was a bit beaten down, a bit overweight, going gray but sturdy and close to the ground.  I didn’t want a snazzy car.  “It has terrific headroom,” Michael Jackson said, casting around for a selling point.  “Not that you need it.  You’re no bigger than a minute, are you?”  I don’t know if this was appropriate for a man in his line of business but it made me like him.  It made him sound a little like a hayseed.  “My daughter’s six-two,” I answered.  “She’ll appreciate it.”  Just as I said so, my phone vibrated in the pocket next to my heart.  It was as if she heard me mention her from across the city, the way I used to feel my milk letting down when I was away from her for an hour or two.  It’s a mysterious bond between a mother and her children.  The phone vibrated again.  I decided to ignore it and amended my statement.  “I think she’ll appreciate it anyway.  I guess she’d rather I get something like that.”  I indicated a candy apple red convertible tapered on either end like a Christmas ornament.

         “Teenagers,” I said.

“Teenagers,” he clucked.  “Well, don’t you forget: you’re the boss.  And I think this is a perfectly dandy little car for you.”

         I liked this guy.  His phraseology was a bit thrown-back and quirky, like he spent some time on his grandfather’s knee.

         “I’ll buy her a pair of earrings or something.  That’ll distract her.  I should’ve named her Magpie.  She loves anything that glitters.”

         Michael Jackson chuckled.  “What’s Maggie’s real name?’

         “Sweetie,” I told him and heard his sincerity catch in his throat.  Every third girl in the country is named Sweetie nowadays.  There was no sense in telling him that she’s the original.  Everyone’s trying to stake that claim.

         A plaintive little air issued from his heart.  “That’s pretty,” I said.  

         “Thanks.  I wrote it myself.”  He took the phone from his shirt pocket.  “You mind if I take this?  I’ll only be a minute.”  I heard the scratch of a woman’s voice, a muffled hysteria.  His mouth pulled into a tight line and his brow furrowed.  Just slightly perceptible.  He quarter-turned away from me and stated in an even tone, not quite a whisper, “I can’t do this now.”  The scratching continued.  “I’ll have to call you back.   I’m closing a sale.”

         Meanwhile, I’d taken the opportunity to scroll through the messages that had been backing up against my breast:

GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF THIS HELL HOLE!!!!

GET ME NOWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!

WHERE ARE YOU????

WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUU??????????????

         We both powered down and replaced our phones to their holsters.  But when we returned to one another there was an edge to our pleasantries.  Our pulses were elevated.  Our voices were a touch more rushed and terse.

         “So, shall we get down to the paperwork?” Michael Jackson suggested.  He held his sculpted hand against the sun’s glare.

         “I guess we’d better,” I answered, although there was no place I’d rather be than standing on that lot.  “How long do you think it’s going to take?”

         “The whole process will take about an hour.  If all goes well.”

         I exhaled, exasperated. “I didn’t realize it would take that long.  I have to be somewhere.”   I could feel the crow’s feet begin to clench at the corner of my eyes.

         “It’s a big purchase,” he said.  “We have to do a credit check, a title transfer, a finance agreement.  It’s not like buying groceries.”

Michael Jackson was getting a little threadbare, drifting away from the charming patter that soothed me so. I didn’t need to be condescended upon just then. I knew it wasn’t like buying groceries.  I’ve bought plenty of groceries. I spent the better part of my life buying groceries.  I just never bought a car before and told him so.  I could feel my frustration rising and he could hear it in my voice.   Geez, was this the first time this guy ever met a struggling person?

         “Hopefully, this won’t be the last,” he said, blinking back to smiling civility.  It was a brilliant recovery.  He’d managed to bring the exchange away from the edge of frustration back to friendly commerce.  This guy was good.  I’d noticed his image on a giant placard when I first walked onto the dealership floor: Michael Jackson: Salesman of the Month.   It was funny to see him emerge from the corral of salesmen, in the flesh with his hand extended.  He deserved the accolade.   “Next time make sure you take an entire afternoon,” he said.  “Some things shouldn’t be rushed.”  An entire afternoon.  What a lovely phrase.  A lovely, unthinkable phrase.

         “I’m sorry.  I just didn’t realize how much time was passing,” I said, following him back, away from the heart of darkness.  It paid to be gracious.  We were both laboring, after all, a step ahead of the same crushing wheel. 

         “Let’s get going then.”  He put his hand lightly on my shoulder to guide me back to the showroom.  “We’ll get you out of here as soon as possible.”

Chapter 2

My first destination in my new ride was Rapunzel, the treatment center for eating disorders.  Sweetie was enrolled in the day program, diagnosed with Stage 3 anorexia and offered the choice of in- or out-patient. “In or out?” she said.  “In or out?  In or out?” tick-tocking her head from shoulder to shoulder.  The intaker and I watched.  It was like waiting on a coin as it turned over in the air. Then with great flourish and finality, she announced, “I’ll take out, baby.  Way out!”  The in-taker checked the box on the form and it was said and done.  My heart sank. 

I so wanted Rapunzel to take my Sweetie from me completely and totally.  Only for a month or two.  There was such a feeling of splitting seams and sprung leaks as I tried to care for her in the intimacy of our apartment.  We’ve been through a lot together but this was an unfamiliar abyss.  Nothing I knew to do worked the way it ought to.  

Then there was the factor of self. I was tired and needed a break.  Her out-patience would further complicate my complicated days.  I calculated additional bus time and fare, factored in additional stress, considered the margin of error…my head began to swim. Eventually, I concluded that, no way around it, I would have to buy a car.  

I knew this day was coming.  It was part of the plan, a mile marker on the road to well-being as laid out for me by my friend Don. “You’ve evolved, Helen,” he told me the day before I pulled the trigger.  “You’ve outrun yourself. You need wheels!”  

We were having lunch at Eternity, his favorite juice spot. He brought me there to celebrate the eve of my major purchase.  “Watch out, world!” I said, holding a thimble of wheatgrass aloft.  “Helen Goldberg is back on the road!”  The unchewed sprouts on my sandwich fringed out of my mouth as I spoke.  I felt like a talking cow.  “May the road rise to meet you!” he parried.  He tapped his glass with a silver spoon.  It clicked.  Plastic, I thought.  

 Don was more than a friend, really.  He was my boss, the CEO of the company I worked for.  But he acted like my friend.  My benevolent friend.  He had a plan for me that I was following with meticulous footing.  It pleased him thoroughly to rehabilitate me.  He thought it made him a better person.  I was happy to be led. 

Rapunzel was in the Social Services District.  The Commercial District, where I bought the car, was one district removed, just past Health and Fitness.  It was not much mile-wise but traffic was always hell.  Or so I heard.  Everybody at work complained about it.  With a flutter, I realized that I’d be complaining along with them now. It was comforting, coming in from the fringe to the woof and warp of the world again.

I spoke into the GPS: “Take me to Rapunzel,” and the womanly voice responded with valor, as if we were off on an adventure. “To Rapunzel!” she said.  And off we went into the congestion.

Entering Rapunzel was always a pleasure.  The winding driveway was trellised on either side with lush vegetation.  They’d opted to retrofit an old stone estate rather than demolish it in favor of the glass and steel that dominated the city.  It was a rare triumph of taste and I was grateful to have the opportunity to enter the gates twice a day: bushes and brambles, flower-laden vines arched and tangled, birds and butterflies and tiny chipmunks nibbling on acorns.  

Up until now, I was deposited at the curb of Rapunzel by the farting public bus.  This time, I pulled up in a sedan and wheeled into a space, like a human being.  I swung the car door shut behind me and turned on my heels toward the facility.  The slam rang in my ears like a song.  My song.   It was my slam.  My car.  No more of the hydraulic door wheezing apart to welcome my departure. I’d arrived in style and would continue to arrive that way until my daughter was well enough to move on and the entire episode of anorexia in our family was blown away by the sheer force of correctness.  I was doing all the right things.  We would win this one.  I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder and strode toward the electric eye.  The doors parted as I approached.  I walked into the same lobby that I had the day before but I felt different.  I wondered if I looked different.  The air was strangely unmoved.

The receptionist looked up as I entered.  She was older and a bit softer in her curves than most receptionists.  She smiled warmly.

“You’re Sweetie Lambert’s mom,” she chirped.  “Wait right there.  I think there’s a note for you.”  She rustled through her papers, holding a finger up to waylay me.  This was abnormal.  There had never been a note for me before.  I’d always sashayed in, exchanged greetings and sashayed out again with my daughter in tow.  Not quite sashayed, actually.  More like trundled or shuffled.  Either way, I was never glitched up like this.  A hot flash ripped from my torso to the top of my head.

“Yep!  I thought so,” the receptionist claimed, triumphant.  “Ms. Salinger needs to see you before you sign her out.”

“Who’s Ms. Salinger?”

“She’s the wraparound coordinator.  She oversees the treatment plans and communicates with the insurance provider.  Wait there for just one minute.  I’ll let her know you’re here.”  She picked up the phone and I stood, suspended.  “Sweetie Lambert’s mother is here.  Shall I have her wait?”

They say that when you drive a new car off the lot, its value decreases immediately by 15% and continues as the minutes tick away. As soon as the odometer turns over, it’s technically not a new car but just a car. This is also true in a psychological sense.  It’s not as if the buyer drives directly from the dealership to a glamorous locale.  She is most likely driving back into the morass of her everyday life.  The only difference is that she’s arriving there in a new car.  The peak experience comes with sealing the deal and recedes from the moment she puts the key in the ignition and her foot on the gas.  Her mind assimilates the new car aroma almost immediately as it begins to mingle with her body odor.     And so, begins the slide back into normalcy.  Soon the dealership, which had been a cathedral of sorts, is a meaningless cube, just another sign to be passed on the highway. 

 This particular slide was short and abrupt.  I was bewildered. I sat and waited for the clicking-clacking of Ms. Salinger’s high-heeled shoes to close in on me from the long, polished hallway.

Mrs. Salinger was like a feminine version of Michael Jackson, an inverse doppelganger.  She was white, rather than black, but her complexion was toasted to a healthy bronze.  In their economic strata, the stabilized class, any trace of ethnicity has been smoothed over, as if they’d all been put in a blender and repoured.  She was tasteful and impeccable but relatable.  Instead of a beard and mustache, her mouth was checked off by a neat application of lipstick.  I stood to greet her as she approached.

“Ms. Lambert,” she said, extending her hand to me.  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

“It’s Goldberg,” I said.  “Helen Goldberg.”  This was not going well.

“Ach!  I apologize.”  She checked the veracity of my claim on the paperwork.  “Yes, of course.  I apologize.  I don’t think we’ve met before.”  There was that citrus and eucalyptus again, a bit lighter for the female set.  A neat rectangle of papers was clamped under her left arm.  “Let me see if there’s a room where we can talk.”  I followed her down a hallway flanked by a gallery of windowed conference rooms on either side.  I felt dumpy in the wake of her perfume and her sure stride.  “Ah, here we go!”  She opened the door and switched on the light.  She showed me to a table with four chairs arranged around it.  My heart began to pound.

“So,” she began, placing her papers square before her on the table and looking straight into the field of my face.  “I’ll get right to the point.  From time to time, actually at regular intervals (a slight cough) we evaluate the progress of each of our clients to determine how they are responding to treatment and whether the established tangent will extend in the direction of ultimate health and well-being.”  Her hands, which had been folded on the table before her, disengaged from one another and opened before her as if she was offering a large loaf.  Then they clapped together like a trap.  “At this stage we look for the client’s degree of engagement in the program, a sort of natural magnetism toward the spirit of the program. I like to compare it to a compass.  If the client is not aligned to the direction she needs to follow out in order to thrive (She keeps her hands sewn together and pulls them in a little prayer to her bottom lip.) “In these cases, we ask that she withdraw until she can (Prayer hands clunk away from her chin, guillotine-fashion and open as if in reasonable supplication)

“We cannot ‘cure’ our clients,” she continued, twitching her fingers around the word cure.  “We can only facilitate their journey toward health. (Here’s the church.  Here’s the steeple.  Steeple to chin) The client has to be ready, willing and able to take each step.  Sweetie is a lovely person but she just doesn’t seem to be at the precipice yet.” (Hands separate and clap together once.  With finality.)

It was an odd choice of words, this precipice.  I imagined my darling inching closer to the edges I’d always warned her against: the edge of the ocean, her milk at the edge of the table, the edge of reason.  I looked at Ms. Salinger’s earrings, single pearls. They matched the single strand of pearls that lay across her collarbone.  I looked at her ribbed turtleneck.  I saw her lipstick as it spoke the words.  I couldn’t absorb what was happening.

“What are you talking about?” I asked her.  “What are you trying to say?”

“We have to terminate her treatment,” she said resolutely.  She would not be misread this time.  “The evaluator from the insurance company was on site today and according to his observations, it was determined that she is not benefiting from the program according to the benchmarks.”

“The evaluator from the insurance company?  What does he know about her?  He’s an insurance guy?”

“There are benchmarks that they look for at different intervals along each client’s recovery.  Sweetie simply isn’t meeting them so we couldn’t justify keeping her on.”

  “But it’s only been three weeks.  You told us very clearly that the process could take months to even begin making a difference.”

“This is very difficult for all of us, believe me,” Ms. Salinger said, with a syrupy tone. “We care very deeply for all of our clients…”

 Through the plate glass, I saw the afternoon group walking together, presumably from the cafeteria to the day room.  They looked like a herd of mismatched animals: colts, giraffes, gazelles, lemurs, with their bulging eyes and rickety skeletons, still with a heart-wrenching grace and beauty.  My Sweetie was among them, a shock of thinning pink hair tumbling past her shoulders.  The ghost of her father moved along with her bones, his face, his gangly structure, his absence.  I put my elbows on the table and made a sling of my hands to cradle my throbbing head.  

Mrs. Salinger and I sat across from one another for several minutes, and then she gathered herself to leave.  “I’m truly sorry, Ms. Goldberg,” she said.  “Please, take as much time as you need.”  

“Ms. Salinger?” I said, just before she closed the door.

“Yes?”

“What do I do?  I mean, do I sign her out?  What do I do?”

“No, everything’s taken care of.  You can just take her home…I hope we see you again.  I really do.”

“Thank you.  I hope so too.”

The door closed behind her with a quiet click and I was alone in the room.  How I wished to be back on the car lot. 

Sweetie was sitting in the anteroom, engrossed in something on her phone, when I came out.  The receptionist alerted her.  “Sweetie, your mom’s here, darling.”  She looked up with a stunned expression then quickly switched to a smile.  She was within the dress code in her loose blue pants and white blouse, but her eyes were heavily made up and a waterfall of silver earrings dangled amid her pink hair.    “Hello, there, ma,” she said, as she gathered her bag.  She blew the  receptionist a kiss and said, “Bye bye Darlene!” as I held the door open for her.  “You take care now,” the receptionist said, before picking up a ringing line.  “Thank you for calling Rapunzel.  How can I help you?”

“Darlene is, like, the nicest person in the world,” she said as we passed from the fluorescence into the late daylight.  We walked silently toward the visitors’ parking lot.  She was tall like her father and I was short like my father.  She dwarfed me.

“So, I guess you heard,” she said.  There was a tentative sound to her voice.  Mine was simply exhausted.

“I heard,” I said.

“Are you mad?”

“No, I’m not mad.”

“What are you?”

I shrugged.  “Sad, I guess.”

“I saw you talking to Salinger.”

“You know her?”

“Yeah.  I can’t stand her.  None of us can.  She runs the affirmation group.”  She pulled out a pack of cigarettes.   “She’s just so icky,” she said as she drew against the little flame.

“She seemed nice enough to me,” I said.  Just to be contrary.  I didn’t much like Ms. Salinger myself.

“Give me a break,” Sweetie said, pausing to light up. “She’s like a positive energy machine. ‘Today, I abandon my old habits and take up new, more positive ones…  Everything that is happening now is happening for my ultimate good… My life is just beginning.’” She did a pretty good imitation of her.  Smoke wafted from her mouth as she spoke.  “It creeps me out,” she said.

“Did you like anybody there?”

“Yeah.  I liked the other girls.  They’re awesome.  They’re my peeps, you know?” 

I just felt so sad when she said that. I thought of her in her early years. How clear her path seemed then, how bright her destination. I thought it best to change the subject.  “So, I bought my new car.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said.  She took another drag.  “And I liked my therapist.  Beebee is awesome.”

She might’ve continued talking as we walked across the grounds and she might’ve stopped.  I wasn’t listening.  I saw the car and pressed the transponder.  It yipped and blinked as if it were a happy puppy.  “Thar she blows,” I said.  It cheered me to have something react this way at my approach.

“Why’d you buy this car?  It’s ugly.”

I didn’t feel like explaining my reasoning, the research and cross-referencing.  I wouldn’t mean anything to her.  I just said, “It suits me.  It’s my car.”

“Can I smoke in here?”

“No fucking way.”.

“Figures,” she groused and threw her smoking butt onto the clean asphalt. She slithered into the shotgun seat and settled into a crossed-arm pout.

“Put your seatbelt on.”

“Oh, Christ.  Would you leave me alone?  I’ve had a really rough day.”

“Put your seatbelt on, Sweetie or I’ll leave you in this fucking parking lot and you’ll have to get home on your own.”  I was crestfallen.  I wanted to cry but I didn’t.

“Geez.  Don’t have a conniption.”  I heard the click and then, as I pulled out, I heard her sigh.  She was like a boat drifting away from its mooring.  She didn’t look back as her peeps receded into nothingness.  But I did.  I looked through the rearview mirror.  I saw two bluebirds flutter out of the wisteria.