“Huh? Oh. No, I’m not scared.”
“What’s the first thing that pops into your mouth when I ask you to speak?”
Isabel’s eyes settle directly on Dr. Seidler’s face. “There’s no way I’m living until next Christmas. No way.”
“Why? Isabel? Stay with that thought…why? Can you hear me?”
Isabel is already gone. In her mind she sees the truck speeding toward her. She hears the screech of the brakes, the truck’s tires locking up too late. She closes her eyes imagining the impact, the feel of the pavement beneath her bloody body, the relief.
I refuse to be someone who’s in and out of institutions. I will not be Zelda Fitzgerald.
“Isabel. Listen to me for just a minute.” Her therapist is trying to get her attention. “While you’re here we need to work on your coping skills. I see you get a little overwhelmed with life. We need to teach you how to deal with the stuff that’s thrown at you. That way you won’t need to dissociate yourself from it, like you seem to be doing right now.”
“‘A little overwhelmed’?” Isabel snaps back and is crying again. “‘A little overwhelmed’? I’d say it’s a little more than that.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“Well, first of all, I have absolutely no control over my life and what I do with it. ANN has me on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They’ll beep me at three in the morning and tell me to get to the airport and sometimes I don’t even know where I’m going until I call from the back of the taxi. I have to have a bag packed at all times so that I can just walk away from whatever I’m doing and go to work. I’m in the middle of getting divorced. I don’t even have time to go to couples counseling—not that that’s any big loss, though….”
“Before you go any further,” the therapist interrupts Isabel, “let’s look at these things one at a time. You bring up some very good points. Let’s start with the divorce. What happened in your marriage?”
Isabel softens and slumps into her chair.
“My marriage?”
“I think that might be a good starting point for us.”
“Alex. That’s his name. Alex.” Isabel is sobbing again.
“Tell me about Alex.”
Twelve
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked as he slapped the paper cocktail napkin in front of Isabel.
“A greyhound, please,” she answered while rifling through her purse for her cigarettes. “Actually, could you make that a double?”
“No problem,” the bartender said. But he looked as if it were.
“Where’s Stu, anyway? Tuesday’s not his night off.”
“Yeah, well, it is tonight.” The bartender talked as he surveyed his cage of bottles. He tentatively picked one out, looked at the label and slid it back into its dusty cell. “He’s sick.”
“Is it too late to change my mind and order a gin and tonic?” She knew it wasn’t, as the bartender was looking up “greyhound” in his bartender’s guide.
“Nope,” he said, looking relieved. “That I can do.”
Isabel took a long drag of her cigarette. “What’s your name?”
“Alex.”
“I’m Isabel.”
“This is on the house,” he said as he delivered the drink. “For going easy on me with the order.”
“Not necessary but thank you.” Because she had an audience she decided to sip not gulp her drink. “Slow night, huh.”
“Kind of. I’m not complaining, though. I’m not used to bartending, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Isabel smiled. “I knew it.”
“How’d you crack the code?” he asked.
“Well—” she fiddled with the swizzle stick poking out of her drink “—first of all you aren’t studying a quartered-up section of the want ads. You must not have heard it’s required reading for all barkeeps.”
Alex laughed.
“Whoa! You’ve got Kennedy teeth,” she said.
“Kennedy teeth?”
“It’s like you have more in there than the rest of us. It’s really quite amazing. Open up, let me see them again.”
Alex clamped his mouth shut.
“Come on,” Isabel mock begged. “One quick peek.”
Careful to cover his teeth with his lips, Alex shook his head and said, “Good Kennedy or bad Kennedy?”
Isabel laughed. “What’s good Kennedy and what’s bad Kennedy?”
“You know: JFK Jr. or Chappaquiddick?”
“Uh-uh. I’m not falling into that trap….” Isabel took another sip of her drink.
“What trap?”
“If I say JFK Jr., you’d get a big head and then I’d have to spend the rest of the night breaking your spirit…”
“Yeah, ’cause my spirit is flying so high here behind the bar…”
“…and if I said Chappaquiddick I’d have to spend the rest of the night hearing a laundry list of things that make you a swell guy…”
“It’d be a short list since my only competition would be an adulterer who let his date drown…”
“…so I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
“And to think this all started because my dad’s a dentist….”
“Aha! So you do have an unfair advantage over the rest of us, dentally speaking, I mean.”
“You saw right through me.”
There was a brief pause in the banter.
“What do you do normally? I mean,” she laughed and corrected herself, “what do you normally do?”
Isabel knew she was flirting, but she was sinking into her comfortable buzz and didn’t care.
“I wait tables. How come I’ve never seen you here before? You I would have noticed.”
“I don’t eat here. I just come for liquid nourishment.”
“Always this late?”
“I just got off work. So, yeah. Always this late.”
“We’re both night owls, then.”
“Guess so.”
“Excuse me.” Alex left to serve a couple who should not have been served. Isabel watched him put napkins in front of them.
The drink was settling her stomach, filling it with warmth.
“Sorry about that,” he said as he leaned back against the space of mahogany in front of Isabel. “Duty calls.”
“Let me ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“Seriously.”
Alex forced his smile into a frown. “Go ahead.”
“How do you like your job?”
“You mean tonight? Bartending? Or serving?”
“Serving.”