Scissor Link, Georgette Kaplan [best 7 inch ereader .TXT] 📗

twenty-five minutes, the pedicure thirty-five. Five minutes of drying. She tipped thirty percent.

She spent fifteen minutes on the letter after, to make it an even hour and a half. She wanted to be back on track.

Dear Roberta,

 

Is it control? Is that what you miss so dearly? Is that what you’ve starved for, more and more hungrily, during all our wedded bliss?

 

Can you not enjoy our good fortune because it’s under my name instead of yours? Do you think you’d be happy, an over-the-hill paralegal playing greenhorn lawyer in this day and age, simply because all your disasters are your own?

 

Every choice we made, we made. You agreed to all of it. I supported you as much as you supported me. It’s been a good life.

 

What decision have I made that you can’t live with?

 

Was it the baby?

Her hair salon appointment was at 1:30 p.m. It was within walking distance of the nail salon. Because she had finished early, she took the brisk walk rather than an Uber. She tried to think about the letter some more, about Roberta, about control, but her thoughts circled each other, chased their own tail and refused to yield dividends. It didn’t make sense and she couldn’t make itmake sense and she wished someone could explain it to her and she felt guilty that she needed it explained.

And more and more, she wondered if there was an explanation, or if it mattered that she knew it.

Inside the hair salon, there were no cell phones, no eating, and no loud conversations. A stereo played a song Janet didn’t recognize. It was low and soothing, a curtain thrown up between her ears and the sound of snipping. Denise, her preferred stylist, was there and, as always, she asked if Janet would like to try something new. She always had an idea for a new look and sometimes Janet indulged her, but she was in no mood today. She asked for the same look, asked if Denise needed to see the picture on her phone again. Denise didn’t. She’d done the cut enough times.

Just little tendrils of hair, pushing out of her short, neat side part. Slowly pulling the lines of her silhouette out of alignment, adding one more frizzy deviation to her overall look, then another, then another. They were all stripped away. Scoured. Until all that was left was her undiminished, unencumbered perfection.

Two hundred dollars for an hour’s work. She tipped thirty percent. It was 2:30 p.m. She had nothing else to do with her day.

She went back to her apartment. It was quiet. Not too quiet—she didn’t believe such a thing existed. The four-bedroom was spacious, she knew, but its real virtue was quiet. That was the premium, the rarity, the value. Only the most wandering sounds made their way up from the streets below—tires, horns, but no people; nothing as messy as that. Divorced from context and shorn of environment, the sounds became little semaphore flags against her windows. The world politely trying to contact her, and Janet refusing its attentions.

The living room was like a reverse painting. The appropriately bold whitewashed walls, the hardwood floors, the prints on the wall of a ballet company in repose (Roberta’s) and the models of the furnishings of airplanes in flight (hers)—they were all framing for the TV, the sound system, stereo equipment, and plasma screen just abreast of the dappling of light from the shuttered windows. She filled the frame. Powered on the TV, the surround sound, the Blu-ray player in ritualistic sequence. Selected Netflix. Checked her watchlist.

She settled on a documentary. At an hour long, it wasn’t in-depth enough to be informing, but also didn’t dramatize the subject well enough to be engaging. Eventually, she just let the noise of it play; it compelled being watched only so that she could say it did not get any better. It didn’t. At 3 p.m. she left it playing to make herself a late lunch. She’d forgotten to eat again.

After a salad, she turned Netflix back on. Checked the new releases.

Nothing of interest. Everything was too old to be intriguing, but not old enough to be classic.

Horror movies. Serial killers she wasn’t afraid of—too easy to deal with so long as you had a brain in your head, which none of the characters did. Ghosts she didn’t believe in. Zombies she was just bored of.

Action movies. Nothing with a budget high enough for so much as a decent explosion. Starring the washed-up and those who would never be famous enough to ever wash up. They would just disappear one day when they walked around a corner out of sight, like something unloved.

Dear Roberta,

 

Twenty-five years in this business have convinced me that I have my managerial style down, and down so well that I can apply it in any aspect of my life with similar success. When faced with a dilemma, I weigh my options, I solicit advice, I decide the right course of action, then I apply myself to it with all my strength.

 

Maybe I’ve treated you as just another team member, giving me advice, when you’re not. You’re my wife. That’s not fair to you.

 

But I can’t regret my life. I can’t take back my career. This is my home. This job is what I do.

Janet stopped. She crossed out the last sentence. She wrote:

This job is who I am.

She wondered why she’d written that. She wondered if it was the truth. It seemed like it, and she had no one to tell her otherwise. Funny as hell: all this time, she’d never had to choose between work and a relationship until now. And it hadn’t been hard at all.

“It should’ve been, right?”

The words surprised her. She hadn’t spoken since she’d left the hair salon. The silence had been perfect, completing, inviolate.

She didn’t like how the words reverberated, even when they were her own.

Her laptop was still on. She stared at it as the background became a long-forgotten inside joke—a modern-day flying toasters screensaver. Flying…had to