A BABY NAMED BATHWATER MIREILLE FARJO
(AB’20)
My assistant got my lunch order wrong, and she knew it too. She’s a strange girl, really bad at her job and really nervous about it too. It seems to me that her situation could be easily remedied, but what do I know. “What is it?” I asked. “Smoothie bowl,” she said. “Coconut. I think I got your order today confused with your order from yesterday.” She kept moving her hands in jerky motions towards my desk, like she might work up the nerve to whisk it all away. “Oh. Really? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this stuff before.” My assistant shoved her unruly hands down the pockets of her slacks. “I’ll go back.” “Don’t even worry about it,” I said, too late, and then I spent the rest of the afternoon worrying that there’s an evil part of me who just wants to watch other women suffer. I know this is an instinct lots of us are supposed to share, and inconveniently I am a moral hypochondriac. Sometimes I just need to sit down and breathe deeply and remind myself that if I were a sadist someone probably would have noticed it by now. I decided to make a solemn oath to be kind to women for a full week at least. I pulled a sticky note of my stack and wrote my oath in pen. NICER TO GIRLS. Then I stared in silent penance at the smoothie bowl sitting uneaten at the corner of my desk. There were dark pods in the milky sludge… I let it run over my pen and back into the plastic bowl. Food doesn’t look like food anymore, do you ever notice that? Rima emailed me later that day. It was this thing she’d started trying after her divorce, sending out newsletters with updates on the kids and her job and also Fred, on the days she’d decided the split was amicable. It was a constant stream of information, near-daily, though she never replied to any of the follow-ups we sent her. I didn’t hold the uncommunicativeness against her. Her divorce was still new, like really new. If her divorce was a baby it could focus on objects a foot away, but it would have trouble following you with its eyes. Hey there family and friends, said Rima’s email. Thank you all so much for all your support during this time <3. Fred and I appreciate it more than we can say. I wondered if this meant she was reading our messages after all, and then I wondered if she actually had replied to some of them. I couldn’t tell who all the newsletters were getting sent out to. Rima had used blind carbon copy.
Kitty and Marshall are little troopers, and they’re super excited to go skiing with their dad over spring break. Living room is currently full of kiddos sliding around with books 11
