Seven Year Switch Part 1

Seven Year Switch.

Claire Cook.

TO OLD FRIENDS,.

NEW FRIENDS,.

FACEBOOK FRIENDS.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

GEORGE E LIOT.

1.

I SAILED INTO THE COMMUNITY CENTER JUST IN TIME TO take my Lunch Around the World cla.s.s to China. I hated to be late, but my daughter, Anastasia, had forgotten part of her school project.

"Oh, honey," I'd said when she called from the school office. "Can't it wait till tomorrow? I'm just leaving for work." I tried not to wallow in it, but sometimes the logistics of being a single mom were pretty exhausting.

"Mom," she whispered, "it's a diorama of a cow's habitat, and I forgot the cow."

I remembered seeing the small plastic cow grazing next to Anastasia's cereal bowl at breakfast, but how it had meandered into the dishwasher was anyone's guess. I gave it a quick rinse under the faucet and let it air-dry on the ride to school. From there I hightailed it to the community center.

Though it wasn't the most challenging part of my work week, this Monday noon-to-two-o'clock cla.s.s got me home before my daughter, which in the dictionary of my life made it the best kind of gig. Sometimes I even had time for a cup of tea before her school bus came rolling down the street. Who knew a cup of tea could be the most decadent part of your day.

I plopped my supplies on the kitchen counter and jumped right in. "In Chinese cooking, it's important to balance colors as well as contrasts in tastes and textures."

"Take a deep breath, honey," one of my favorite students said. Her name was Ethel, and she had bright orange lips and I Love Lucy hair. "We're not going anywhere."

A man with white hair and matching eyebrows started singing "On a Slow Boat to China." A couple of the women giggled. I took that deep breath.

"Yum cha is one of the best ways to experience this," I continued. "Literally, yum cha means 'drinking tea,' but it actually encompa.s.ses both the tea drinking and the eating of dim sum, a wide range of light dishes served in small portions."

"Yum-yum," a man named Tom said. His thick gla.s.ses were smudged with fingerprints, and he was wearing a T-shirt that said TUNE IN TOMORROW FOR A DIFFERENT SHIRT.

"Let's hope," I said. "In any case, dim sum has many translations: 'small eats,' of course, but also 'heart's delight,' 'to touch your heart,' and even 'small piece of heart.' I've often wondered if Janis Joplin decided to sing the song she made famous after a dim sum experience."

Last night when I was planning my lesson, this had seemed like a brilliant and totally original cross-cultural connection, but everybody just nodded politely.

We made dumplings and pot stickers and mini spring rolls, and then we moved on to fortune cookies. Custard tarts or even mango pudding would have been more culturally accurate, but fortune cookies were always a crowd-pleaser. I explained that the crispy, sage-laced cookies had actually been invented in San Francisco, and tried to justify my choice by adding that the original inspiration for fortune cookies possibly dated back to the thirteenth century, when Chinese soldiers slipped rice paper messages into mooncakes to help coordinate their defense against Mongolian invaders.

Last night Anastasia had helped me cut small strips of white paper to write the fortunes on. And because the cookies had to be wrapped around the paper as soon as they came out of the oven, while they were still pliable, I'd bought packages of white cotton gloves at CVS and handed out one to each person. The single gloves kept the students' hands from burning and were less awkward than using pot holders.

They also made the cla.s.s look like aging Michael Jackson impersonators. A couple of the women started to sing "Beat It" while they stirred the batter, and then everybody else joined in. There wasn't a decent singer in the group, but some of them could still remember how to moonwalk.

After we finished packing up some to take home, we'd each placed one of our cookies in a big bamboo salad bowl. There'd been more giggling as we pa.s.sed the bowl around the long, wobbly wooden table and took turns choosing a cookie and reading the fortune, written by an anonymous cla.s.smate, out loud.

"'The time is right to make new friends.'"

"'A great adventure is in your near future.'"

"'A tall dark-haired man will come into your life.'"

"'You will step on the soil of many countries, so don't forget to pack clean socks.'"

"'The one you love is closer than you think,'" Ethel read. Her black velour sweat suit was dusted with flour.

"Oo-ooh," the two friends taking the cla.s.s with her said. One of them elbowed her.

The fortune cookies were a hit. So what if my students seemed more interested in the food than in its cultural origins. I wondered if they'd still have signed up if I'd shortened the name of the cla.s.s from Lunch Around the World to just plain Lunch. My cla.s.s had been growing all session, and not a single person had asked for a refund. In this economy, everybody was cutting everything, and even community center cla.s.ses weren't immune. The best way to stay off the chopping block was to keep your cla.s.ses full and your students happy.

I reached over and picked up the final fortune cookie, then looked at my watch. "Oops," I said. "Looks like we're out of time." I stood and smiled at the group. "Okay, everybody, that's it for today." I nodded at the take-out cartons I'd talked the guy at the Imperial Dragon into donating to the cause. "Don't forget your cookies, and remember, next week we'll be lunching in Mexico." I took care to p.r.o.nounce it Mehico.

"Tacos?" T-shirt Tom asked.

"You'll have to wait and see-eee," I said, mostly because I hadn't begun to think about next week. Surviving this one was enough of a challenge.

"Not even a hint?" a woman named Donna said.

I shook my head and smiled some more.

They took their time saying thanks and see you next week as they grabbed their take-out boxes by the metal handles and headed out the door. A few even offered to help me pack up, but I said I was all set. It was faster to do it myself.

As I gave the counters a final scrub, I reviewed the day's cla.s.s in my head. Overall, I thought it had gone well, but I still didn't understand why the Janis Joplin reference had fallen flat.

I put the sponge down, picked up a wooden spoon, and got ready to belt out "Piece of My Heart."

When I opened my mouth, a chill danced the full length of my spine. I looked up. A man was standing just outside the doorway. He had dark, wavy hair cascading almost to his shoulders and pale, freckled skin. He was tall and a little too thin. His long fingers gripped the doorframe, as if a strong wind might blow him back down the hallway.

He was wearing faded jeans and the deep green embroidered Guatemalan shirt I'd given my husband just before he abandoned us seven years ago.

No. Way.

I'd dreamed this scene a thousand times, played it out hundreds of different ways.

I'd kissed him and killed him over and over and over again, violently and pa.s.sionately, and at every emotional stop in between.

"Jill?" he said.

My mouth didn't seem to be working. That's my name, don't wear it out popped into my head randomly, as if to prove my brain wasn't firing on all cylinders either.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" he said.

My heart leaped into action and my hands began to shake, but other than that, I couldn't feel a thing. I remembered reading that in a fight-or-flight reaction, deep thought shuts down and more primitive responses take over.

I picked up the bowl. I gulped down some air. I measured the distance between us. I tried to imagine my feet propelling me past him-out of the building, into my car, safely back home. Flight was winning by a landslide.

"No," I said. "Actually, you can't."

He followed me out to my car, keeping a safe distance. I clicked the lock and balanced the bowl on my left hip while I pened the door of my battered old Toyota.

"How is she?" he asked. "How's Asia?"

"Her name is Anastasia," I said.

But the damage had been done. In one nickname, four letters, he'd brought it all back. We'd spent much of my pregnancy tracing our family trees online, looking for the perfect name for our daughter-to-be. In a sea of Sarahs and Claras and Helens, Anastasia jumped right out, a long-forgotten relative on Seth's side of the family. Since we didn't have any details, we made up our own. Our daughter would be Anastasia, the lost princess of Russia. Sometimes she'd have escaped the revolution only to be frozen to wait for the perfect parents to be born. Other times she came to us via simple reincarnation. We'd curled up on our shabby couch in front of our hand-me-down TV and watched the animated Anastasia over and over again, until we could do most of the voice-overs right along with Meg Ryan and John Cusack.

When she was born, Anastasia brought her own twist to the story. From a combined ethnic pool swimming with ancestors from Ireland, England, Scotland, Italy, and Portugal, she'd somehow inherited the most amazing silky straight dark hair and exotic almond-shaped eyes. We nicknamed her Asia, a continent we loved, the place we'd met.

I closed my eyes. "She's ten," I said. "She's fine. I'm fine. Leave us alone, Seth. Just leave us the f.u.c.k alone."

By the time I opened my eyes, he was already walking away.

It wasn't until I went to put my hands on the steering wheel that I realized I was still holding my fortune cookie. It had shattered into pieces, and the thin strip of paper inside had morphed into a crumb-and-sweat-covered ball. I peeled it off my palm.

Something you lost will soon show up.

"Thanks for the warning," I said.

2.

"GREAT GIRLFRIEND GETAWAYS," I SAID INTO MY HEADPHONE as Anastasia reached for another pot sticker with her chopsticks. "Feisty and fabulous man-free escapes both close to home and all over the world. When was the last time you got together with your girlfriends?"

"h.e.l.lo?" a female voice said into my ear. "Is this a real person?"

That was probably a question to be pondered, but I gave her the short answer. "Yes," I said. "This is Jill, one of GGG's cultural consultants, available twenty-four/seven to help you plan the girlfriend getaway of your dreams. How can I help you?"

"Okay, well, my friends and I are thinking about your trip to the Dominican, but somebody I work with said she went to an all-inclusive there and saw an actual rat in her room, and I don't do rats. Can you guarantee me a rat-free room? In writing?"

I wasn't sure I could guarantee her a rat-free room in New York, but why get into it. Anastasia picked up her plate and started sliding her chair back. I narrowed my eyes and gave her a mom glare.

"Well," I said, "if you want to keep the pests at bay, we've also got a trip to Italy coming up. It includes one full day on Beach 134, aka the Pink Beach, the official no-men-allowed beach on the Adriatic coast."

I waited for a laugh. Nothing. Anastasia was tiptoeing across the kitchen. I stamped my foot. She kept walking.

"The signs alone will make your photo alb.u.m," I said. "They've got this one huge sign with an Italian version of the Marlboro man in an old-fashioned bathing suit getting ready to hit on somebody, and he's got a great big diagonal line drawn through him."

Of course, I'd never actually seen this sign, but I'd added the photo to our brochure and also uploaded it to the Web site.

"I don't know," the woman said. "I bet the guys still pinch you as soon as you get off the beach. And doesn't Italy have rats, too?"

I pinched off a little piece of pork dumpling and popped it into my mouth.

I covered the phone and swallowed quickly. "Orlando's nice this time of year," I finally said.

"I don't know. We really wanted to absorb another culture."

I rolled my eyes and reached for another pinch of pork. "You can always go to Epcot."

"Good point. Okay, so do you recommend the Epcot-only International Pajama Party or the Careening-thru-Kissimmee Mult.i.theme Park Girlfriend Adventure?"

In so many ways, this job had saved my life, and I knew how lucky I was to have it. Joni Robertson, Great Girlfriend Getaways' owner, paid me enough of a salary to almost make ends meet, as well as about half of Anastasia's and my health insurance. She'd also given me a computer to replace my dinosaur when she upgraded her office equipment, and even paid half my cell phone bill so I had somewhere to forward the GGG calls. But the best thing was that she let me do most of my work from home and gave me enough flexibility to pick up jobs on the side.

I couldn't have made it without Joni. If I were in charge of the world, I'd get rid of all the Oscars and the Grammys and just give awards to women who helped other women.

Sure, I'd imagined that by this point in my life, I'd be a little further along in my career as a cultural consultant. A dual major in international government and sociocultural anthropology, I'd envisioned myself as a pioneer in the emerging field of cross-cultural coaching. After getting my feet wet in the corporate world, where I'd be brilliantly successful at training executives to become more effective global communicators, I'd build my own international consulting business. I pictured myself jetting around, preparing foreign service families before they headed off to their posts, helping to greenwash small countries trying to step up their ecotourism trade, counseling rising politicians who thought they could see Russia from their backyards.

And then life got in the way.

Here's the thing that really p.i.s.ses me off when I listen to those women on TV with their big salaries, or their trust funds, or their great family support. They're up on their high horses in their rarefied worlds telling the rest of us women we shouldn't jump off the career track or we'll never get back on. We should just follow our dreams, go after what we want, come h.e.l.l or high water.

But what if scrambling to pay the bills takes every minute of your day, every ounce of your creativity? What if you can't afford an au pair? What if you can't even afford an ordinary babysitter? And even if you could, which you can't, what if your three-year-old is so afraid that you're going to leave her, too, that she spends most of an entire year holding on to your leg, and somedays, just to do the vacuuming, you have to drag her around the room with you?

Eventually I got Rat Girl off the phone. I popped the rest of the dumpling into my mouth, took half a second to appreciate the warm burst of ginger and green onion, and pushed back my own chair.

I poked my head into the living room. "You've got until three to turn that TV off and get back to the dinner table."

Anastasia ignored me.

"One," I said.

She ignored me some more.

"Two," I said.

"Mom," she said. "It's almost over."

"Anabanana...," I said.

She jumped up. "Don't call me that. It's a baby name."

My daughter, all elbows and knees in purple leggings and a long striped T-shirt dress, flounced past me with her empty plate. She adjusted her shiny pink headband with one hand as she came in for a landing at the kitchen table. I tried hard to give her the firm, consistent limits all kids need, but the truth was I loved her little acts of rebellion. I read them as signs of progress, evidence that she had not only survived, but was finally starting to thrive. She had friends at school. Her grades were good. She loved to read.

The last thing either of us needed was for Seth to come back into our lives and screw them all up again.