“Hey, it’s me,” she said. “Do you think you can figure out dinner tonight?”
“If you don’t feel like cooking, let’s order in.”
“We can’t. It’s the twins parenting potluck. We’re hosting,” she reminded him. Because even though it was on the calendar, and even though she’d told him about it earlier in the week, and even though the potlucks had been happening every other month for more than four years now, they still caught him by surprise. “And I’m not feeling great,” she added.
“So cancel,” he said.
She knew he’d say that. Jason was very fond of the easy way out. But the only time anyone had canceled a potluck was two years ago, right after Hurricane Sandy. And, yes, she knew this wasn’t Jason’s thing. But she’d joined this group when the twins were six weeks old and she’d been body-bruised from the exhaustion of it all and so unbelievably lonely from being home all day with just them. And, yes, maybe some of the parents were annoying (like Adrienne, with her changing dietary demands for Clementine and Mo based on whichever nutritional study she’d just read about in the Times—no dairy, no gluten, now it was paleo). But these had been her first parenting friends. Even if she didn’t exactly like them all, they were her comrades in arms.
“I’m just worn out,” she told Jason. “And it’s too late to cancel.”
“It’s just I’ve got a crazy day,” Jason said. “We have tens of thousands of files to migrate before the database upgrade.”
Maribeth imagined a world in which a crazy day excused her from having to deal with dinner. Excused her from anything. She would like to live in such a world. “Can’t you just cook something? Please.” Don’t tell me to order pizza, Maribeth thought, her chest clenching, though not from stress, as she thought, but from the blood bottlenecking through her narrowed coronary artery. Please don’t tell me to order pizza.
Jason sighed. “Fine. I’ll make the chicken with olives. Everyone likes that.”
“Thank you.” She felt almost tearfully grateful to be off the hook, and residually angry because she was always on the hook.
It took her fifteen minutes to walk the three blocks to the café where she’d arranged to meet Andrea Davis, a former colleague of hers from the Rule. She would’ve liked to cancel that appointment, but Andrea, who was divorced and had two teenage children, was out of a job now that the shopping magazine where she’d been working had folded. Just like the Rule had folded. Just like so many of the magazines they’d worked at had folded.
“You’re so lucky to be at Frap, with Elizabeth,” Andrea told her over coffee, the smell of which was making Maribeth want to gag. “It’s brutal out there.”
Yes, Maribeth knew this. It was brutal. She was lucky.
“We’re a long way from the Rule,” Andrea said. “Remember after 9/11 when we tore up the entire issue and remade it from scratch? Those late nights, all of us working together, the smell of burning plastic in the air. Sometimes I think those were the best days of my life. Isn’t that sick?”
Maribeth wanted to say that sometimes she felt that way, too, but at the moment she’d grown so breathless she could hardly speak.
“Are you okay?” Andrea asked.
“I’m feeling off,” Maribeth admitted. She didn’t know Andrea all that well, which made it easier to tell the truth. “Strange symptoms. Like pains. In my chest. I’m worried it might be my . . .” She couldn’t finish.
“Your heart?” Andrea asked.
Maribeth nodded, as the implicated organ clenched again.
“I go to the ER at least once a year, convinced I’m having a heart attack. I get the pain in my arm and everything.” Andrea shook her head. “Anyhow, it’s nothing. Okay, not nothing, it’s reflux. With me anyhow.”
“Reflux?”
Andrea nodded. “Acid reflux. A by-product of this thing called stress. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
Of course, stress. That made more sense. But Frap had just done a profile on a twenty-seven-year-old sitcom star who’d been diagnosed with MS. “You just never know,” the actress had said in the article. And then two weeks ago Maribeth’s mother had called and mentioned that her friend Ellen Berman’s thirty-six-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer. Although Maribeth had never met Ellen Berman or her daughter, she felt terrible for her and freaked out enough to schedule an ob-gyn appointment (and she really did need to schedule a mammogram, too; she’d only had one since the twins were born.) Because that actress was right: You never knew.
And in fact, Maribeth did not know that at that point, her heart tissue had begun to die from lack of oxygen. So she carried on with her day. Promised Andrea she’d ask Elizabeth about any openings or leads and then took a cab to the CPA’s office to drop off the year’s receipts so their tax returns—already on extension since April—could be prepared in time for the deadline next week. Then she hailed a cab uptown to Dr. Cray’s office because even though she was dizzy now and wanted nothing more than to go home and crash, she was already six months late for her annual ob-gyn exam and she didn’t want to wind up like Ellen Berman’s daughter.
And because she did not know that the exhaustion she was feeling was a result of the decreased oxygenated blood now flowing through her, she told Dr. Cray’s nurse she was feeling fine, even as the nurse took her vitals and noted that her blood pressure seemed abnormally low and asked her if she might be dehydrated. Maybe she was. Maybe that was it. So she accepted a cup of water.