until something better comes along

jonathan berzer

JOSIE PULLS INTO THE DRIVEWAY. Her dad has put the flag out. It hangs limply from its pole in the burning sun. It practically melts above the yard’s desert succulents and cacti, plants she’s always hated as they look less like living things and more like deformed growths. The flag is the most colorful ornament of their beige stucco house, a house that has changed little in the forty years of Josie’s life. Over the decades, they’ve repainted it four times, always the same color, a desert camouflage that blends well with the landscape.

She sits clutching the wheel of her Prius. Perspiration dots her brow and bleeds across her chest. Even the house looks like it’s sweating. She dabs tears from her eyes. She’s grieving.

That’s what it is, she realizes. So what does someone do when she’s grieving, she comes home. They’ve invited her for the holiday. She’d said no three times before finally saying yes.

She’d thought this was the last place she wanted to be, especially on this day. She’s in no mood to celebrate anything, but here she is. What she really wants is to have a great destination ahead of her, somewhere she can feel she’s truly arrived, a place that will help fill the void that has erupted in her heart. Instead, she shoves her way out of the car and heads for the house with her head bowed against the sun.

When many adult children return to their childhood home, they are startled by how much larger it loomed in memory than it does in life. Josie has never experienced this phenomenon. The house has always seemed dark and claustrophobic. In the hallways two people have to turn sideways to pass each other. The rooms seem no bigger than drop-off storage cubes. It’s the starter home her parents have lived in for forty-five years.

Mr. Cuddles is the first to greet her. Her mom’s copper-colored cavapoo bounces at her feet, then runs to fetch a toy. The dog, bred for ultra-cuteness, is one of the few extravagances in her parents’ very prosaic existence, purchased to replace the children who moved away and entertain the grandchildren who visit infrequently. Mr. Cuddles trots to the backyard and flops down under the picnic table. Her dad is skimming leaves from the surface of the pool.

Jerry is recovering from a stroke. His right arm and leg are impaired, but he makes good use of them. He smiles a crooked smile and plants a crooked kiss on his daughter’s cheek. Once lean, his limbs and torso now seem edematous. He’d always been active and defiant of his age, and so the fact that a blood clot could go off in his brain like a bomb seems less like a physiological malfunction and more like a terrorist plot.

The pool is small, kidney-shaped. What isn’t pool is desert and sundeck. Jerry asks his daughter to grab the hose and water the fragments of dried grass. She’s been watering this land for years, but there’s no sign that anything will ever grow here.

“This is my new job,” her dad says as he operates the skimmer with flair. Before the stroke, he was selling refrigerators in a big box store, a humiliating come down for a man who spent fifty years moving up the invisible ladder. He was a manager in the manufacturing of tiny parts that fit into other tiny parts that enabled a machine to work. But the manufacturing moved to China, and younger people who were more amenable to automation replaced him.

“Finally my own boss,” he says with a smirk, though his eyes reveal the sad irony behind the jest.

“Looking good, Dad.”

Josie drops her tote on a lounge and toes the water with a flip-flopped foot. The bottom of the pool is green from algae. She assumes her dad doesn’t have the strength to scrub it with the pool brush.

“You should get one of those automatic cleaners to do the work for you.”

“Not letting technology put me out of a job,” he says with mock defiance. “Besides, this is good for me. It’s therapy.”

Josie lifts the pool brush and hoes the bottom of the pool. Algae rises in swirling green clouds.

Her dad looks over her shoulder. “Where’s your guy?” 

“Darin and I aren’t together anymore.”

“Oh.” Her dad looks briefly mournful. “He seemed like a nice guy.” 

“He was.”

“What happened?”

“We wanted different things,” Josie answers, maybe too quickly.

“I suppose I’m supposed to say something supportive like, there’s plenty more fish in the sea, but there really aren’t. The world’s running out of fish. In ten years they could all be extinct.”

They’re silent for a time as they work the pool. 

“Your mom says you’re a manager now.”

“Yeah, branding manager. I’m in charge of the marketing platform for our clients.”

“That sounds impressive. Did you get a raise to go with it?” 

She nods.

He squeezes her shoulder, then removes his hat and palms his brow. “I gotta get out of the sun.”

She helps him negotiate the strip of concrete around the pool until they’re under the shade of a retractable awning. She pours a glass of iced tea for each of them. He drinks with one hand and glares down at the other.

“Goddamn this thing.”

“Dad, you’re doing really well.”

Jerry huffs and stares at the pool. “This is God’s way of telling me I need to spend more time at home.” He drinks with his good hand. “I suppose I’m supposed to take up a hobby, but you’re mom has them all.”

“You can volunteer at a career center,” she offers. “They need people like you.” 

“And say what?” he grumbles. “Don’t get too attached to your career because it’ll disappear on you?” He seems to realize he’s being a buzzkill and suddenly brightens. “Enough about me. Tell me what’s new in your world.”

She thinks a moment. “People prefer pink-dyed artificially flavored drinks to green ones.”

“Wow,” her father says with a smirk. “I hope your boss appreciates you. If he doesn’t, don’t hesitate to tell him off.”

“Is that your career advice?”

“You don’t want to be on your deathbed wishing you’d told more people to fuck off and die. Make sure you let the assholes know they’re assholes.”

“Thanks, Dad. I’ll put that above my mirror.”

“Last time I played golf, there were these real shits behind us, guys who thought they were too good for the public course. I was changing my shoes, and the guy’s yelling at me to tee off. I’m changing my shoes, I shout back. God, what a world. Finally, we told them to play through. It was over, but it ruined my day. Hell is other people. Who said that?”

“Satre,” she answers. “But people misunderstand what he meant. He didn’t mean other people are hell. He meant other people have their own interpretations of how they see us, and if they see us at our worst, then we’re in hell.”

“Ha, that one-hundred-thousand dollar education was not a complete waste.”

She drapes her arm over his shoulders and gives him a gentle squeeze before stepping into the kitchen.

Her mother is using a circular metal mold to lay out perfect quarter-pound patties on a glass tray. Ellen is newly retired after spending thirty years cleaning people’s disgusting teeth. She’s channeled her skill as a dental hygienist into making ceramic figurines. While Jerry trawls online for get-rich-quick schemes, Ellen retreats to the garage to huddle under a relentless ceiling fan to sculpt mythical fairies and smiling animals. She’s soft-spoken, soft-skinned, with a joyfully round face resembling Mrs. Claus.

Josie kisses her mother on the cheek, and the woman takes the opportunity to cup her daughter’s face in her hands.

“You look tired. Are they working you too hard?” 

“It’s just the heat.”

“Just you?” Ellen asks.

“Darin and I aren’t together anymore. It ran its course.”

Her mother’s mouth tightens. Josie thinks the holiday is about to be called off. “Oh no. I bought all this food.” She stops what she’s doing to assess the hunk of ground beef before her. “I’m sorry, Sweetie. He was nice.”

“He was.”

“You two seemed very compatible.” 

“We were.”

“Well, somebody better will come along.” Ellen slices tomatoes, tears lettuce, and spoons condiments into glass bowls. She pulls a big bottle of pink liquid from the fridge. 

“Look, I’m supporting your client,” she says with a grin. “Do you actually like it?”

“Ugh, it tastes like mint gasoline. Maybe I have to be an athlete.” 

“It’s never too late,” she says.

Her mother laughs as if this is the most absurd thing she’s ever heard. 

“Dad seems like he’s really doing well.”

“Yes.” Her mother’s reply lands heavily as if it’s freighted with baggage. “The doctors can’t believe he’s walking unaided already. And he’s bored, so that’s a good sign. Maybe he can get back to work soon.”

“Really? Isn’t that kind of a lot?”

“He can’t just lie around the house. I’m sure he misses the place, and they need him.” 

“Mom, it’s a giant store. Isn’t it a lot of walking?”

Her mother lowers her voice. “You don’t know what he’s been like since this happened. He talks like his life is over.” Ellen looks at her hands as if she doesn’t know what to do with them, then she goes back to making burgers even though there are more than enough.

Josie rubs her mother’s back.

Growing up here, Josie found her parents annoyingly ordinary. They were born in the ‘50s but the entire counter culture revolution seemed to pass them by. They found each other at a jazz festival for people who hate jazz. They worked hard to ensure their daughters could grow up to work hard themselves. Josie couldn’t wait to get away from their world of conformity and common sense. But as she grew up, she discovered how much effort it took to lead a simple life. She knows they’d wanted more and are ambivalent about where they ended up. The children were supposed to have made it all worth it.

In her childhood bedroom, Josie lays a bikini and a modest one-piece on the bed. If it weren’t so hot, she’d just stay in shorts. She’s not feeling anything the bikini represents, so she chooses the one-piece. She never thought she’d be back in this room at this age as alone as she was when she left twenty years ago. She pulls open drawers and finds high school papers and relics from her teen years. Everything just as she left it. It strikes her as sad––her room preserved in case she were to fail in the world and come back in need of shelter.

When she returns to the pool, her sister is on a lounge chair under an umbrella. Josie takes the lounge next to her and hides behind giant sunglasses. Nora is wearing the tiniest bikini Josie’s ever seen, proud of the fact that her body shows no signs of having birthed two children. She’s three years younger, but everyone assumes it’s the reverse. She’s a personal injury attorney who has sexy billboards of herself in urban neighborhoods with an easy to remember phone number under the phrase, GET MORA. CALL NORA. She’s always loved a scrap, thrives on conflict, was always in screaming matches with their parents about typical teen bullshit while Josie sat quietly staring down her dinner plate. Nora is enjoying a margarita while flipping through the pages of a tabloid.

“The girls with Jeff?” Josie asks.

“Yeah,” Nora answers with a roll of her eyes at the mention of her ex. “He’s taking them to an amusement beach for fireworks and rides. Glad I could duck out of that. Where’s Darin?”

“It’s over.” Josie says.

“I’m sorry. What happened?”

It’s always hard for Josie to know if Nora is sincere in her sympathy or is just saying what is customary. Where Josie seems to be battered by her own emotions, Nora cruises through life with hardly any, a trait Josie now looks on with envy.

“Oh you know, the usual stuff.” This is the third time she’s been asked. She feels she’s running out of stock responses. Maybe she should tell them the whole story, but Josie doesn’t want to talk about Darin with everyone here for a holiday, with the sun blazing above her like it’s intent on killing every last thought in her head.

Nora divorced her husband soon after her second child was born. It always seemed to Josie that the marriage was merely a vehicle for her to get two kids.

Nora looks over the pool and shakes her head. “He really should pay a pool guy. It’s disgusting.”

“How’s the lawsuit business?” Josie asks.

“Never better. I’m getting a lot of ADA work. Disabled people being discriminated against. It’s amazing how many businesses aren’t in compliance.”

“So you sue them?” 

“Twenty grand a case.”

“Can’t your clients just sit down and work it out?” 

“That’s what a suit is. We sit down and work it out.”

“I mean without lawyers. Why does everything have to end up in court? When did we all stop talking to each other?”

Nora seems to take offense to Josie’s query. She shifts uncomfortably on her lounge chair. “What planet are you from?”

“Yeah, I get it. The world should be fair for everybody, but you’re taking something that could be an opportunity for connection and turning it into a fight.”

Nora lowers her magazine and trawls a celery stick through a mound of dip and snaps it in half with her molars. “We all can’t spend our lives promoting sports drinks. I’m helping people. You’re making them diabetics.”

“Well if our customers want to sue, I’ll give them your number.”

“Thanks, we can split the commission.” Nora takes a healthy gulp of her drink. “Jesus, Joze, I just came here to relax and eat burgers. Why you being so shitty?”

“Sorry. I’m happy for you, really.” She borrows her sister’s sunblock and begins to cover her arms and shoulders. “My boss asked me out on a date.”

“Oh,” says Nora. 

“Is that so bad? He’s 50, divorced, rich, has his shit together. We laugh at the same things. No more fragile artsy types who get knocked over by the slightest breeze.” 

“If you want to sue him for harassment, I’ll represent you.”

“That’s great,” Josie shoots back. “If it all ends in divorce, you can handle that too.”

Josie rises to her feet, which are momentarily stung by the scalding pavement, and belly flops into the pool. She sinks to the bottom. Her heels kick up a swirl of algae. Under water, she feels like weeping or screaming. She breaks the surface and floats on her back with her ears submerged so that all she hears is the working of her lungs.

When she met Darin, he was teaching poetry and a facilitator of a support group for frustrated academics. Their one-bedoom house a block from the university was papered with quotes from Buddhism and Western philosophy, from the Tao Te Ching, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and Nick Cave. He was a truly gifted listener who actually gave his full attention to people. In return, they opened up to him. He would host small groups of teachers and administrators in their tiny square of a living room, where they would sit on folding chairs around what seemed like the world’s last wood-burning fireplace and expel their grief and fatigue into the flames. He would listen, then know just what to say, which sometimes just meant saying, You’re not alone.

Then one night, he woke up shivering, breathing like a drowning man. He started developing a fear of the outside and became reclusive and frightened of that which he could not control. He gave up the responsibility of being a teacher. He could read his students’ work, but he would never grade papers, never mark them up, just read them and set them aside, saying they were good enough as they were and why should his opinion matter. He stopped writing and boxed up the books that had been the core of his life.

She came home from work to find the house dark and him hiding in a corner. He said he didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t want to have to prove himself, submit to a standard of living of which he’d had no say. He spoke with his head buried under his arms, curled into a ball so tight he seemed half his size. She got him to bed and tried to hold him as he rocked and whimpered. He stayed that way for hours. At dawn, he softly announced he was quitting everything.

As far as she could tell, there was no breaking point, no single event that cracked him, more of a gradual wearing away of the protective shell of illusion, dreams, ambition. He closed all accounts, detached from all commitments, kept only what he could cram into his economy car and left. He relocated to a space above a body shop that was like living in a corrugated attic. He took a job at a public library and lived in silence, pushing carts of books over indoor-outdoor carpet. Many of the books had been abused and mishandled over too many years. He would repair their bindings with tape, try to do everything to save a book rather than see it pulped.

When he’s not working, he walks along a river and sets up an easel to paint nature. He has no friends or family. His life is both completely inexplicable and utterly predictable. It’s like he committed suicide without dying, and she’s left to grieve him and what they had.

As a parting gift, he gave her his favorite print, a panoramic image of the ocean with a quote by Clement Robinson: You are better lost than found. Josie hung it over the fireplace, then on her fortieth birthday, took it off the wall and burned it.

She climbs out of the pool, towels her hair and heads inside to change back into her clothes. When she comes back, the sun is just dropping behind the rooftops and it’s cool enough to sit outside. The picnic table is adorned with side dishes and citronella candles. Smoke rises around her dad as he jousts with the grill.

After dinner, they join the neighbors on the street to watch fireworks from the little league field. Mr. Cuddles sits diligently at Josie’s feet, completely oblivious to the explosions that could flatten a house. Josie used to love the display, but now it startles her. Has it gotten louder or is she just more sensitive? It ends in twenty minutes, and everyone goes back inside for strawberry shortcake, coffee, and to watch the Fourth of July on TV.

The neighborhood’s barrage of illegal fireworks foul the air and create a soundtrack that mimics an ariel bombardment. Ellen shuts every door and window and puts on the AC. Jerry settles into his favorite chair but watches the celebrations vacantly. If the power were to suddenly go out, he might just stay there, staring into the dark.

Nora says her goodbyes as she has to make the long drive to be home in time for when Jeff brings her daughters back from the beach.

Josie helps Ellen scrape the plates and load the dishwasher.

“I’m sorry about Darin,” her mom says. “Maybe you can meet someone at work. Brand manager,” she says with pride. “I always knew you’d find your place.”

Josie washes utensils as if they need to be sterile. “That job, I don’t have it anymore.” 

Ellen looks confused.

“I still work there. I just don’t have that job. It was a lot of budgeting and haggling with vendors and fighting with clients over unpaid bills. I’m not really…” She takes a fortifying breath and tries not to avert her eyes from her mother’s hopeful gaze. “It’s not me. So I asked for my old job back.”

“As an assistant?”

“Office manager,” she corrects. From branding manager back to office manager. From negotiating budgets and organizing promotional events to ordering toner and clearing the printer of jammed paper.

“Are you sure about that?” Ellen asks. “Maybe you need to give it more time.”

“I’m happier this way. Not everybody’s about just making money.” She means this to be a declaration of principles, but it comes out whiny and petulant.

Ellen looks out at the yard that’s lit by the pool light. “You had so much going for you. I never thought you’d just muddle through.”

Josie emits a sound that’s part sigh, part scoff. “At least you have Nora. She’s setting the world on fire, then suing everybody for it.”

Ellen takes her daughter’s hands. “I hate to see you without a purpose.”

“Fine, I’ll take the dog for a walk.”

She doesn’t wait for her mother’s response, but once she’s out on the driveway, letting Mr. Cuddles drag her to the street, she feels like an idiot. She’s 15 again, storming out of the house rather than eloquently expressing her views.

Josie and Mr. Cuddles set off at a quick march with the dog seeming to know exactly where he’s headed. The crack and hiss overhead is less interesting to him than the overflowing garbage cans that smell of hamburger grease and ketchup. She lets him lead her and they cover one block, then another. The neighbors who were lining the street for fireworks have locked themselves inside.

Josie feels like she could walk all night. She imagines abandoning everything and moving some place far away and wonders if having the same life in a different country would make her feel less vulnerable.

There’s a new sound in the night. Across the street something like plastic scraping on concrete is growing louder, loud enough for Mr. Cuddles to freeze in its direction, his head high, his ears alert. Two boys, somewhere between 12 and 14, have stolen a plastic chair from someone’s front yard and are kicking it down the street. They treat the chair with the callous disregard that one does for something that belongs to someone else and has no value to them. When Josie was a child, she had a habit of personifying human emotions onto inanimate objects. She would feel sorry for a pair of shoes she didn’t wear very often. She would feel the pain that a rusty scooter must have felt at being left for months in the rain. Though she’s outgrown this childhood perception of things, she winces as the chair flips end over end and lands upside-down in the street. Mr. Cuddles watches the action with equal parts curiosity and puzzlement.

The boys enter the crosswalk and one of them hurls the chair to the other side of the street with a drunken laugh. His partner takes his turn with the chair and boots the back of it like a kicker lowering the boom on a football.

Ordinarily, she would curse the boys under her breath and walk the other way. She would dismiss them and do nothing more. But tonight, something is pushing her forward. The universe has turned its eyes to her to put things right.

“Hey, you guys, what’re you doing with that? That’s not cool.” Even though any sort of confrontation makes her tremble, there’s no jolt of adrenalin. She feels strangely calm and assured and her voice reflects it.

The boys don’t seem to think she’s talking to them and keep knocking the chair along the sidewalk. Josie crosses the intersection diagonally to catch up to them.

“Hey,” she continues, now some fifteen feet behind them. Mr. Cuddles follows along obediently as if this is a usual part of his usual walk. “Come on, guys. Don’t do that. That’s somebody’s chair.”

The boys look back at her as if she’s a joke. A woman with a puffy dog telling them how to behave. The only thing that’s missing is for Josie to be an old woman and the dog to be some ill-groomed, ancient yorkie.

“Why don’t you take the chair back where you got it.”

The boys are not big or intimidating. They’re very much boys, but they’re not going to let some strange woman with a dog ruin their fun. They turn their backs and give the chair two more deliberate kicks.

“How would you like it if that was your chair? You should put it back.”

Now she’s closing on them, ten feet, eight feet. The sound of the chair as it scrapes across the sidewalk is surprisingly loud, one more form of man-made disturbance in the night. The boys are now looking at her, sizing her up, wondering if they need to be afraid of her. One of them kind of laughs, not at Josie but as if this whole thing is just funny and her role in it is also just part of the joke.

She tries to talk to them in terms they’ll understand, not as a high and mighty authority figure, but as someone intent on winning them over. She appeals not to their sense of right and wrong but to their vanity.

“Come on, guys, you should take it back. It doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means something to the person who owns it. You really want to be like that?”

One of the boys shouts something unintelligible in her direction before kicking the chair one more time.

“You should take the chair back. That would be cool. Kicking somebody’s chair down the street, that’s not cool.”

The boys start to walk faster, so Josie increases her pace to keep up with them, which seems to suit Mr. Cuddles fine. He strains at the leash as if the boys are friends he’s supposed to play with, and the chair is being tossed for his benefit.

The boys catch up to the chair, step around it and keep walking as if they’d had nothing to do with it. It’s over. If the object of the exercise was to get the chair back, then Josie has won, but that’s not the object.

“Okay, guys, now come back, get the chair, and take it back where you found it.” The boys continue to walk away, laughing under their breath.

“Guys, you should take the chair back.”

She speed walks after them. Mr. Cuddles pads along at a happy trot. She’s closing on them. The boys cast glances back and start walking faster. She wonders if they’re going to break into a run, and if they do, will she give chase.

“Guys, you shouldn’t leave it there. That’s not where it belongs.”

One of the boys, who is slightly taller and maybe slightly older, stops and turns to face her. “Why don’t you take it back?” His voice is a boy’s voice. He doesn’t sound menacing as much as he sounds put out, like a kid asked to clean his room.

“That’s not the point.”

They’ve all stopped walking now, which Josie considers a victory in itself. The boys have stopped trying to get away. They’re going to try to reason their way out of this.

“It’s not about what I want. It’s about what’s good. I know you’re just messing around, and it’s Fourth of July, and it’s just a stupid chair, and it if were my chair, I’d say, Keep it. I hate plastic chairs. But it’s not up to me, and it’s not up to you. Somebody paid for that chair and put it outside tonight, and now they’re looking for it and thinking, I bet some little shits took our chair. Who would steal somebody’s chair? You don’t want to be those guys. You don’t want to be a jerk. You wanna be the hero. Take the chair back and knock on their door and say, Hey, we saw these guys steal your chair. We told them to give it back, and they dropped it and ran.”

“We’re not stealing it. We’re not gonna keep it,” says the second kid. 

“Great,” says Josie. “Then you can return it.”

The boys seem to be tiring of this entire episode, certainly wishing they’d never encountered this crazy lady and her fluffy dog.

“Hey,” she adds. “What if I was a girl you liked? What if I was a girl from your class who you wanted to like you? What do you think she’d say if she were standing here now? Which guy would she like best—the guy who’s kicking somebody’s chair down the street or the guy who takes the chair back where it belongs?”

“Okay,” says the first boy.

The boys brush past her and walk back the way they came. Josie and Mr. Cuddles are right behind them. Mr. Cuddles has picked up his pace, knowing that he’s headed home. He follows the boys like they’re part of a pack now, and they look back at this stuffed-animal of a dog like he’s a German shepherd trained by the Stasi to guard the Berlin Wall.

Josie now offers encouragement and praise. When they reach the chair, the second boy scoops it up and balances it on his shoulder. They get to the house rather quickly, and the boy places the chair on the lawn, doesn’t toss it on the grass but places it with respect. The house is dark like everyone’s gone to bed. The chair joins three other matching members of its kin. Just like that, it’s as if the incident never happened.

Josie expects the boys to race off now that their task is complete, but they stand on the sidewalk waiting for her approval. “Thanks, guys. That was a good thing you did.”

The boys nod with bored expressions and lope away like the kids they are, the swagger and defiance burned out of them.

Josie makes her way to her parents’ house. The aggravation seems to have been burned out of her as well. Mr. Cuddles waits for her to let him in. Josie sits down on the steps and listens to the sounds of warfare that clatter through the sky. The sky is stained with smoke, but Josie can see stars.