K. Jennings-Hancock - What You See

What You See

....By Kathryn Jennings-Hancock

The following followed an odd conversation with someone who actually believed if you lived like the commercials advised, and wore what the ads suggested, you would find success in all your endeavors.
Odd way to live, and an idea I couldn't shake -- couldn't help but wonder what it would be like
to be married to someone with those commercial ideals, and the story resulted.
K . J-H

Rachael Norton surveyed herself in the full-length mirror, satisfied. The pale lemon silk jacket coordinated perfectly with the knee-length lemon silk skirt. Shoulder pads lent an aura of grace, her choice of a smoky tan leather belt finalizing the ensemble, perfectly complementing the lemon leather pumps she'd found at Dillard's. Expensive, but worth it. The shoes had prompted the purchase of the suit, the net effect of both combining to produce a rush of well-being rivaling the euphoric singing in the shower on the GNC commercial for SAM-e, alleged natural wonder drug and mood elevator. Rachael Norton did not need SAM-e. All she needed was reflected in the mirror in lemon yellow, perfectly accessorized glory. She looked as she lived to look: Professional. Poised. Completely in control.

Dragging a green plastic brush through her shoulder length, ash blonde hair, dutifully lightened every five weeks at Antoine's, she secured a tight twist with an imitation tortoise comb just above the nape of her neck, slipping diamond studs into her earlobes. Mick wouldn't notice the earrings or their expense. The Zales statement rested in her purse, sandwiched between Lord and Taylor's and Nordstrom's. She carried debt on her clothes and jewelry, but they were worth it. A little anxiety as minimum payments due climbed upward was worth looking as she did and feeling as she felt, a woman who owned the earth. Success was in the details. Flub those up, she'd learned, and go nowhere. "If I'm not dressed right" she'd confided in her journal, "I'm not right. It's an insight for success."

Success was imperative for Rachael Norton, if ill-defined and unfocused like bad reception on a television screen, something she knew existed but lacked a clear view of it until she saw it so perfectly epitomized in the offices where she now worked. Well dressed women safely encased in glass walled offices until they went home to equally successful husbands and savored martinis sipped on the decks of four bedroom Tudors in Apple Ranch, the poshest planned community ever profiled in a national magazine. Details were everything, and the sooner you got them right, the better.

It was a theory Mick had rejected since they'd sat together last year, pre-qualifying for a home loan. Staring blankly at their credit report, juggling the total debt against the mortgage payments required by the four bedroom Tudor in Apple Ranch she'd selected ("Everyone lives in Apple Ranch, Mick. It's so completely the right address for us"), something flickered in his gray green eyes, a flush washing the sharp features of his face. Running a hand wearily through his tousled brown hair, he'd drawn his hands together like a minister about to deliver a benediction before flashing a hundred-watt smile at the loan officer. "I didn't think it was this high," he confessed. "I thought our debt load was smaller."

The loan officer smiled, but not the electro wattage smile Mick had just bestowed. His was a smile reserved for someone expressing their sorrow that the dog you've had since you were eleven was just crushed by a rapid transit bus. "Let's balance it out a bit, come see us in six months. Or, we can qualify you now for a lesser loan"

A lesser loan. That's the part Rachael rejected. A lesser loan meant a lesser address, not a four-bedroom house but a one bedroom, eight hundred square foot condominium across town from the entrance to Apple Ranch. Not even in the zip code.

"It's a great deal," Mick offered, more to break the silence enveloping them on the drive home from their tour of the condo than because he genuinely felt enthusiastic. "We'll paint, stretch the carpets. If real estate goes up, if we manage finances for a couple of years, we'll get the Tudor. Let's build some equity in this place, see what happens."

"The only thing that's going to happen," Rachael snapped, "is the price of Tudors going up. I told everybody we're moving into Apple Ranch-"

"Look," he said, a warning not to push. "We can't afford it." He swore under his breath, narrowly missing the exit ramp that would return them to their apartment. "You've got credit card debt I wasn't even aware of, Rachael. I thought we were paying off the wedding expense before we--"

"You don't know the people I work with, Mick. Looking good is part of getting ahead. So don't start with me. And don't," she warned, "start in about wedding expenses, either. Our wedding was perfect."

Mick Rainey stared straight ahead, pointedly ignoring his companion of seven years and his bride of eight months. If perfect meant 'looked like the spread in a wedding magazine', Rachael was right. If perfect meant living together for years first, waiting for the right cake, all pale pink butter cream icing and fresh flowers, and the right dress, (Two thousand, four hundred dollars now hanging in the back of their closet, to be paid for at the minimum sixty-five eighty per month forever, at eighteen percent interest), and coming away from the experience with a pile of pictures (Nine hundred fifty-seven dollars and forty cents, not including the video), a bad sunburn from the blistering beaches of Mexico and a sinking feeling in his stomach that life as he knew it was about to get worse, Rachael was right. It had been perfect. A perfectly coordinated event he'd been invited to. It hadn't been real. He remained Mick Rainey and she remained Rachael Norton at her insistence ("Nobody changes their name anymore," she'd announced), and if he didn't occasionally glance down at the too-wide platinum band she'd selected, he'd think he'd imagined the whole thing. It hadn't been fun.

Fun was important to Mick Rainey. He might be thirty-one years old, but he didn't have a foot in the grave, or even in the entrance to the cemetery, yet he felt he did, every day he spent with Rachael. Rachael didn't know fun from the man in the moon. Every step was choreographed, taken for the 'right reasons,' as she put it. They ate at Café de Sol, the newest French bistro, because everyone in her office claimed it was the place to be. They shopped at Pando's Market on 5th, not Safeway, because Pando's was 'special', everybody shopped at Pando's. She ignored Friday Afternoon Club, an informal but integral after-work gathering with his friends from Danzen Foods. She had better things to do than discuss marketing strategies for frozen beef, and complained loudly about the smoky interior of Danby's, the neighborhood sports pub where they gathered. His friends weren't among the 'anybody who mattered' set, those nameless people Rachael referred to when justifying a new purchase, or complaining of a lack of recognition in her job.

Just who were these people, he wondered, who went to all the right places, did all the right things, and had time left over to notice what his wife wore to the office every day when she took her place in the secretarial ranks of Crawford and Limetree, publishers of Beautiful Living, the most prestigious, she repeatedly insisted, despite his common sense arguments disproving her, magazine in the country. The absolute bible, she contended, for living well. Martha Stewart, she confided, secretly subscribed. Rachael didn't call it secretarial work. She'd die first, he truly believed she would, so caught up did she get in the first three months of employment with the 'status' of the entire operation.

She was an administrative specialist, a title she'd designed and sold her boss on because, Mick suspected, the man was too busy with things that mattered to argue with her, this woman whose main priority was insuring that calls were routed appropriately, company newsletters were generated bi-monthly, and all departments maintained sufficient supplies of Post-It notes and legal pads. She was put on salary, eliminating the overtime issue. Rachael ran up a lot of overtime 'taking meetings', as she put it, with various departments, something else Mick never questioned, but secretly wondered how many meetings were required to decide between yellow or blue posties. Huge issues for Rachael.

Everything could be huge with Rachael. She wasn't paid enough. She wasn't appreciated enough. She loathed incompetence but was surrounded by it, coming home in tears because some 'idiot' had forgotten to load the main copier and she'd had to do it. Ordering the paper or, as she put it, 'coordinating the purchase', was in her realm. Loading it into the machine apparently was not. "It was demeaning," she confessed, pouring a glass of white wine, holding it out and away from her lime green silk jacket. Demeaning to have to load paper for people too incompetent to do it themselves, and to make it worse, who dressed like slobs.

"Sears," she scoffed one night, brushing out her hair before climbing into their creaking queen sized bed, a bed he'd had since his post-college days, those two weeks he'd had his own apartment before Rachael moved in. Those days, he remembered ruefully, when he looked forward to going to bed. "I have better things to do than get paper for some clerk in a Sears suit she probably got on sale."

Never mind, Mick thought, that it's paid for. But he didn't say a word. He never said a word. He lived on very quiet hope that the Rachael he'd fallen in love with, the shy girl he'd met on campus who'd wanted nothing except to teach elementary school kids, would return. That Rachael had considered herself too plain for him, with his natural born enthusiasm and boisterous salesmanship. "What you see is what you get," she said when they'd dated six months, and the sentiment moved him. "People don't change," she asserted, as he'd lightly kissed the tips of her unmanicured nails.

"I hope you're right," he said, "because what I see is what I want."

He had no idea why she'd abandoned her dream of teaching so quickly after graduation, three days after she'd moved into his apartment, a week before she took a job, the first of many with companies as diverse as the assortment of chocolate fillings in a Whitman's Sampler. There was no money in teaching, she announced, as if this was new information. She needed a job with status.

Rachael jumped from company to company until finally, when she'd threatened to quit Crawford and Limetree after discovering she wasn't the highest paid 'administrative specialist' on the payroll, he'd demanded she stay where she was, ceasing and desisting with the multiple W-2 forms each January. If she didn't, they'd never qualify for the home loan they needed to get into the condominium she'd accepted with a pout that had endured for months.

He'd listened to more than one rant about how 'embarrassing' it had been, explaining to nameless people who really mattered that she'd simply changed her mind, deciding a condo was more 'convenient' than a house and fit their 'professional' lifestyle better. Why any explanation had been necessary, he didn't ask. In his world, a world he couldn't share with his wife, his friends had simply welcomed him to the monthly mortgage set with well intentioned slaps on the back, and picked up that Friday afternoon's tab at Danby's.

The old Rachael, he thought, will eventually come down from the Beautiful Living cloud and see it all for what it is: Airbrushed pictures on glossy paper with no relevance in the real world. He'd loved her for over seven years, and he'd wait. She'd discover that nobody cared whether you shopped at Sears or Lord and Taylor's, that it wasn't what you wore that made you who you were, that shoes from Payless got the job done as well as Italian leather pumps from "Nordy's". Anybody with common sense would see that eventually. Waiting became a part of loving her, a habit like breathing in and out or grinding his teeth, something he did without thinking.

What scared him as the months wore on was this: He grew tired of waiting, he began to ponder the old cliché about seven years. Mick Rainey had become itchy as hell, frightening himself with an occasional, almost all-consuming desire to scratch. He itched when Allison, the waitress at Danby's, smiled at him. He itched when a female meter maid apologized for giving him a ticket. He itched acutely while watching a hair color commercial on TV, late at night after Letterman's monologue, when Rachael was deeply asleep. His wife would never in a million years dance barefoot through their condo clad in one of his shirts, singing about feeling like a natural woman with almost primal abandon, no matter what was in the hair coloring.

The thought made him incredibly sad.

His wife, he realized, reaching out to lay a hand tentatively on her shoulder, removing it quickly when she shrugged in her sleep, had never run her hands through her hair. Such gestures were too spontaneous. Such gestures didn't now and would never fit with the cookie cutter she had become, the Beautiful Living Barbie with coordinating shoes and coordinating purses and coordinating suits blending perfectly with the muted olive and tan condo saturated with reprinted art expensively framed, a home she accepted only until she could have the Tudor she wanted, the address she needed, and the closets large enough to accommodate all the accessories required for her success.

Mick Rainey itched, but knew better than to scratch. Infidelity was like poison oak. A little of it on you, say a thought in your head, would eventually go away if you didn't touch it. It only spread like wildfire when you scratched. Ignored, it disappeared. Marriage was non-negotiable. Exchanging one wife for another might be legally possible, but morally he'd be forever shortchanged, like a man trading Canadian currency in an American exchange. He'd made his bed, now draped in muted olive and tan lace, and he'd lie in it forever. Each Friday afternoon at Danby's, when Allison smiled at him, he saw Canadian currency, visualizing a fistful of short change when that smile enveloped him like the slow burn of the vodka shooters he'd been ending Friday evenings with.

When Rachael had been with Crawford and Limetree for one year, she added acrylic nails to her ensemble. Boxy acrylic nails she adopted as an 'image enhancer' when her first review resulted in no pay raise because, as her boss explained, thoroughly crushing her self esteem and ignoring her achievements, she lamented later, she lacked 'soft skills'. Mick patiently explained that perhaps not taking people's heads off when they forgot to reload the copier would be a soft skill area for her to concentrate on, and Rachael ignored him. It was an image problem, something she should have noted before. Everyone, she contended, had their acrylics done at Paulette Su's, and she quickly became a regular customer, settling one more piece in the Beautiful Living puzzle she was making of their lives. Pieces required for her to be so successful he could quit Danzen and, when they had children, he could stay home and raise them. He'd almost laughed when she said that last, not because he didn't want children, and not because he found the idea of stay at home fathers ridiculous. He almost laughed because the last time he'd touched his wife, she'd done what she'd done for months. Whispering an apology, she explained the intricate chemical processes taking place in the several moisturizers beneath her eyes. "You understand, Mick," she'd said, stifling a yawn. "I can't reapply, or the entire process is ruined, and -"

"Don't tell me," he'd answered. "Everybody uses this stuff."

"It's in the magazine," she said, rolling away from him.

"Of course," he mumbled. "How stupid of me."

If Rachael had stopped with acrylic nails, if she'd purchased even one throw pillow for the condo deviating from the muted olive and tan color scheme offering all the ambiance of an Amtrak train's interior, if she hadn't ignored his request for a simple dinner at McDonald's on his birthday, opting for Café de Sol instead, and if Allison's Mazda hadn't suffered a dead battery the following Friday night, Mick Rainey might have been able to stay the course he'd set his mind to, a course ignoring itches and visualizing Canadian currency at every turn. Standing before the open hood of Allison's Mazda pick-up at nine-thirty that Friday night, dutifully connecting jumper cables and assuring her he'd have her back on the road in no time, Mick's resolve slipped away.

Like a climber who knows the foothold is no good, that the next step will send him tumbling down the sheer rock face of a mountain, he swallowed back the panic threatening to consume him when the jumper cables did not do the trick. A slow sweat formed on the back of his neck as he realized two things simultaneously, their combined impact delivering a full throttle jolt of adrenaline somewhere above his solar plexus: There were troubles with the Mazda beyond a dead battery, and there was no one but himself readily available to give Allison a lift home.

"Is there someone you can call?" He disconnected the cables, stowing them in the trunk of the Jetta they could barely afford but Rachael had insisted on, as it went so well with the Audi she claimed they had to have. "Because I don't think this is fixable tonight."

"Damn." Allison flushed, running a hand awkwardly through straight, unhighlighted auburn hair. "I can leave it overnight. But I've got to get home. My sitter only stays until ten." Her eyes, he noted, even in the dimly lit parking lot, were so incredibly and softly blue. Wide, hopeful, grateful, so unlike the green eyes he faced every night that grew greener under tinted contact lenses that had come into play shortly after the boxy acrylic nails.

There was nothing he could do. He gallantly offered her a ride home, struggling to ignore the faint scent of vanilla and honeysuckle, so different from Rachael's heavy Passion perfume, that preceded her into the car. The contrast reminded him of fresh air after a rain as opposed to the swelter of a city afternoon, smoke and haze trapped in the unsuspecting nostrils of all residents until the fresh vanilla and honeysuckle rain drove them out.

They made polite conversation on the way to her townhouse, an old complex in a respectable neighborhood. She invited him in for coffee. He watched her struggle with the clasp of her seatbelt, watched her lay a tentative hand on the door, as unsure of whether to say yes or no as she was of whether his open stare was an affirmation or a denial of her hospitality. He waited, his adrenaline level rising. Imagined himself, just for a moment, coming home to this woman every night, living in this simple townhouse, existing in a world without triple layer moisturizers and color coordinated closets and shoes that were discarded if no suit existed to match them. "I think," he said then, putting the car in park, "I think-" I think I would like to come in, he continued, surprised his lips were not moving. I think I'd like to come in and kiss you, because I'm not close to anybody and I haven't been for too damned long. I'd like to do that because you want me to and because this is supposed to happen.

This is how it works, he thought. Just as it works in magazines, and on TV. She is my slip, this woman who might dance barefoot through her townhouse because of her hair coloring. She is what comes to all men who wait too long, who postpone the itch until the ivy reaches their heart. Here she is, and it's OK because I've waited forever and then some.

"I'm so grateful to you," she said then, offering a relieved smile. "The world is full of people who aren't nice, who wouldn't do a favor like this. I think it's a beautiful thing, helping other people. Most people don't care what's right." She smiled again, and before he could respond she was out of the car and at her door, the third door from the left corner of the building.

He watched it open and close, knowing he would never see it again.

He'd been wrong about Allison.

The realization made him incredibly sad.

Watching lights go on in various rooms of her townhouse, he knew Allison had been the one to do him the favor, not the other way around. There was merit, he thought, in doing the thing that had to be done, even when it was the last thing he thought he wanted to do.

He waited until her porch light went out before slowly pulling away from the curb, his adrenaline level receding, his breathing calming, his mind clearing like morning fog lifting from the bay as he maneuvered the Jetta through quiet, tree lined streets. He drove slowly, well below posted speed limits, to the carport outside his olive and tan home.

Rachael would be settled primly on the sofa, the weekly issue of Beautiful Living spread across the knees of her aqua silk lounger set, triple layer moisturizers penetrating the fine skin beneath her eyes.

His wife was waiting.

Mick drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and drew a shaky breath. What you see, he thought, staring into the muted light from the condo's bay window, what you see is what you get.

His life was waiting.

It was only when he shifted into reverse and backed from his parking space that he understood the reality of that last thought and comprehended in a place that no longer itched and no longer ached but simply existed, mechanically pumping the blood that made him human and therefore, he suddenly understood, fallible, subject to errors in perception, that he had a full tank of gas in the Jetta and a clearer head than he'd had in months, and all that together added up to a pretty good shot at finding it, if it was truly out there somewhere, provided he only stopped hours later for gas and maybe, just maybe, for a long overdue Big Mac to see him through the journey.

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