Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,26
Five nights out of six she slept on the couch so as to be with the TV. Other nights she listened to podcasts on her computer. The more boring the show, the better. She had taken to listening to a man share negotiating tips—how to haggle a raise—which knocked her out in eight to nine minutes. If the speaker was British, she would not last five. Academic men who touted God were her favorite—three minutes—followed closely by men who tracked wildlife in Africa. The whispering was key: Here we are looking at an African aoudad nursing her young.
Anne-Janet looked for a cassette player, a CD player, an iPod, knowing she did not own these conveniences. She picked up the phone. Maybe she could call a disconnected number and put the response on speakerphone. If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again. Would that put her to sleep? She began to panic.
Esme logged the scene. She knew how to condense. 2315 hrs: Anne Janet Tabetha Riggs bursts into tears for fear of silent night.
After, she got in bed and thought it over. Ned would be happy to go to Cincinnati—plenty of cloud cover in the Midwest. And Anne-Janet, she’d be cake, too, Esme’s logic being that people who were dead inside would do most anything. This was true of Esme, and while there was a degree of faulty generalization in her estimate of the world, she’d never been wrong yet.
Two recruits down, two to go: Olgo and Bruce. Both men were planked across the ruin of their private lives—how hard could it be to entice them elsewhere?
She called Martin to schedule his magic. First thing tomorrow, 6 a.m.
Olgo Panjabi: Wresting accord from the teeth of hostility.
DOB 2.2.45 SS# 035-33-4932
Sunday! Day of rest for some, for others a carnival at a high school gym, where couples were wrecking and rebuilding each other’s lives with every toss of the bean.
Olgo was by the launch site. “I still wish you’d been there,” he said.
His wife dropped her mallet. She’d launched fifty frogs, though none at the pad of her aiming. “We celebrated before,” she said. “Who needs two birthday parties?”
“The Helix was there, which was interesting, I guess.”
“Really? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You would have come for the Helix and not me?”
“Don’t be silly. Did you see Thurlow Dan?”
He sighed. Scanned the gym for his granddaughter, who was just making her way back to them. Tennessee Panjabi Bach. She could stay at this carnival for hours; Olgo might not last another minute.
“The lunatic? No, I imagine he was at home, voodooing the president.”
She frowned. “Like you’d understand. That man is giving us purpose. Now stand back,” she said. “Here we go.”
She shimmied her rear and made to spit on her palms before gripping the mallet.
Tennessee laughed. Olgo turned away. Thurlow Dan was giving them purpose? He hated talk like that. Talk like that nicked the shared ethos of his marriage, which had been his pride to consolidate every day.
“Where’s my mom?” Tennessee said. “When’s she coming?”
He took her hand. They had been through this nine times. “She’s with your father. She’ll be here soon. Now, watch this.” He asked for a drumroll. Quiet, please. Kay uprose the mallet and whacked. She whacked and missed.
“I wanna try,” said Tennessee.
“In a sec,” Kay said. She hoisted the mallet and whacked. This time the resulting thwump meant contact between the mallet and her shin.
“Crap!” she said, and she covered her mouth.
“I wanna try!”
Kay’s T-shirt was gamy with sweat from the day’s play—bean toss, spill-the-milk, Skee-ball, down-a-clown—but still wearable so long as Tenn let go. And then, “In a sec. One more try for Grandma. One or two. Frog hop is my specialty.”
Kay dropped the mallet and bent forward, hand to knee, panting. “I’m done,” she said, and she stood upright. Her lips were dry and notably chapped, given the dew that overspread her face. Ventilation here was poor. And the smell of laps and burpies rose up from the floorboards, no matter the Lysol charged to suppress it.
Olgo looked for the exits. As part of the school’s talent for child endangerment, it had blocked one door with a basketball net. The other door was near the bleachers. He tried to take Kay’s hand. In recent weeks, she had been cranky in ways too minor to dwell on but that, in sum, had come to seem alarming, and maybe indicative of bad health. He’d heard people