Kitabı oku: «A Clean Slate», sayfa 4

We made our way to the bar and snagged the last two empty stools. Laney ordered margaritas, our cocktail of choice. I started to ask her for more details about Gear, but we were soon interrupted by a shout and a round of hugs from Jess and Steve, two friends of ours from Laney’s days at an advertising agency. Jess and Steve both still worked there (at least as far as I knew), and they both still did everything together, but for different reasons now. For years, while they were “just friends,” we were constantly telling Jess that they should have sex and get it over with, but she swore they weren’t like that. Then one day, a year and a half ago, they’d announced that they were, in fact, like that. They were in love, they’d discovered, and a few months later they were engaged. We’d been hearing about the wedding plans all year and in fact, if I remembered correctly, it was coming up soon.

“Oh my God,” Jess said. “Is it Kelly McGraw, blast from the past, or is it a vision?”

“It’s me,” I said, letting myself be pulled into another one of Jess’s surprisingly strong hugs. Everything about Jess was tiny—her miniature frame, her rosebud mouth, her hands and feet—and although she hated being called “cute,” she was probably going to be stuck with the term her whole life. Steve was just the opposite. Tall and gangly, with an unfortunate resemblance to Ichabod Crane.

“You look unbelievable,” Jess said. “Where have you been and what have you done to yourself?”

“We had a little makeover day,” Laney said. “Shopping at Saks and then the works at Trevé.”

I smiled at her, thankful for her answer and the diversion from the question about where I’d been for so long. I wasn’t prepared to broadcast my memory loss, and I couldn’t very well use Ben as an excuse for not being around, since everyone probably knew we’d broken up months ago.

“I won’t even ask what you spent,” Jess said, “but whatever it was, it was worth it. You look beautiful!”

Behind her Steve nodded, and I thanked them profusely, the compliments making me sit taller on my bar stool.

“So the wedding’s soon, right?” I asked as Laney turned to the bar and ordered drinks for Steve and Jess.

“One week from today,” Steve said. “According to the schedule Jess set, we should be home right now writing out place cards, but we needed a break.”

“He needed a break,” Jess said. “Anyway, Kell, we’re so bummed you can’t be there.”

I couldn’t be there? Why not? These were two of my good friends. An uncomfortable silence fell.

“Right. Well, I was going to be busy.” I glanced at Laney for some help.

“With that charity thing,” she said.

I had no idea what she was talking about, but by her expression and the way she was nodding slowly I could tell that she was making it up. I had, apparently, declined the wedding invitation because I had another date with my couch and my antidepressants.

“Right,” I said. “The charity thing. But I’m not doing that anymore, am I?”

“No,” Laney said. “It got cancelled, right?”

“Right. So I’ll be able to go, after all. Is that okay?”

“We’d love it,” Jess said, but she and Steve exchanged worried looks. “The thing is we already turned in our seating chart. I don’t know if we can change it.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Laney said. “I was planning on bringing Gear, but he was going to have to leave early to go to some gig, so why don’t I just bring Kelly as my date. Would that work?”

“That would be perfect!” Jess said in a relieved voice. “I’m so glad you’ll be there.”

“Me, too.” I squeezed Laney’s hand.

I loved being out and about like this, loved seeing my friends. So why hadn’t I done it for so long? Why had I holed myself up in that apartment and turned down a wedding invitation? I wouldn’t think about it. Not now—maybe not ever.

I helped Laney order another round of drinks, then more cocktails when other friends arrived. We made a tight circle near the bar, shouting over the music, laughing at old stories, clinking glasses. And then I felt him. My mouth slowed down, my head turned. Ben. Pushing through the crowd. He looked handsome in a thick wool sweater, his brown hair tamed and combed away from his face, his cheeks a little flushed from the cold outside. Behind him, another Toni look-alike trailed along, and when I looked closer, I could see they were holding hands. Therese. The girlfriend.

Ben was smiling, looking right at our group, and I was panicked at how I was supposed to act. From what Laney had told me, I’d been trailing after Ben like a puppy for the last few months. But if Ben or Therese were unhappy about seeing me, they didn’t show it. They walked up to us, calling hello, hugging a few people, while Laney glared at him. Ben knew Steve from college, but clearly Laney hadn’t expected him to be here tonight.

When he reached us, Ben nodded at Laney. I felt my heart beating hard under my new bronze sweater, and I wondered if anyone could hear it. Laney gave him a terse nod back, and then Ben turned to me with an expectant smile.

“I’m Ben,” he said, apparently not recognizing me. He started to raise his hand to shake mine, but then froze, the smile dropping from his face. “Kell?”

“Hi, Ben.” Be brave. Be brave.

He gave a little shake of his head, the one that reminded me of a dog shaking water off its coat, the gesture he made when he was trying to clear his brain of something he couldn’t make sense of.

“Jeez.” He stared at my hair, my face, my clothes. “What…ah…what happened to you?”

He made it sound as if I’d been mauled by wild dogs.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. You just look so different, especially from this morning.”

Was it only that morning that I’d stood in front of his apartment, frenetically pushing the buzzer?

“You look great, though.” His words came fast now, almost tripping over themselves. “You look better and beautiful, and I’m glad to see it, and—”

Just then the woman I assumed to be Therese wedged herself into our conversation and cast a look of disdain at me, then one at Ben for good measure.

“Hi,” I said, as politely as possible. “I’m Kelly.”

“I know who you are.” She raked her hands through her sandy, streaked hair and shot me an expression of pure disgust.

I felt myself falter. It had been such a shock to be so close to Ben that I’d forgotten for a second that I’d met this woman sometime over the last five months while I was hounding her boyfriend.

“I need to use the powder room,” Laney said in a too loud voice. “Kell?”

“Sure,” I said, grateful beyond belief.

“Are you all right?” Laney asked once we were in the safe confines of the tiny pink bathroom. She gripped my shoulders and peered at my face.

“I was just surprised, that’s all.” It was true, and I was also surprised to find that I didn’t feel like falling apart. I didn’t feel like crying or shrieking. I had just been so startled to see him, the guy whose kids I thought I’d have, whose underwear I thought I’d wash for the rest of my life. How strange it was to have known him so intimately—to know the way he squeezed his toothpaste tube into a triangular roll and the way he liked to have his forehead rubbed when he had a headache—and yet not to have a relationship with him anymore.

Laney hugged me, then proceeded to give me a rousing pep talk about not letting him get to me, how I was gorgeous and smart and starting a new chapter in my life that didn’t involve him.

By the time we made it back to the bar, I was better. We ordered another round, and I was just starting to enjoy a chat with Jess about their honeymoon plans when Ben interrupted.

“Can I have a second?” He shot me his meaningful look, the one he’d probably given me on my birthday before he’d handed me my walking papers instead of a diamond solitaire.

Jess patted me on the shoulder as if to say good luck, then left us alone.

“So.” Ben looked me up and down again. “You must have had some day.”

“A great day, actually. A little shopping with Laney.”

“And a new haircut.”

I said nothing. Did he really want to talk about my hair?

“You really look amazing.”

“Thanks.” I hated myself for being flattered.

“Well, anyway,” he said, with another doggy shake of his head, “Therese asked me to speak to you about today.”

I looked over my shoulder at his girlfriend who was pretending to be engrossed in a conversation with Steve, but I could sense her antennae pointed in our direction. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”

“This coming over to my place really has to stop.”

“I know. It’s done. It won’t happen again.”

He gave me a look of patent disbelief. “Seriously, Kell, Therese is getting upset. This can’t keep happening.”

His mouth continued to move, talking on and on about how poor little Therese could barely sleep, how I needed to get on with my life, et cetera. The more he talked, the more I wanted to laugh, because right then the thought of waiting for Ben at work or calling him repeatedly or buzzing his apartment was ludicrous to me. He’d dumped me, the asshole, and although I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around that, I wasn’t stalker material. I couldn’t believe I’d ever gotten close to it.

Finally I interrupted him, putting a hand on his arm. “I can’t even remember doing those things you’re talking about, but I promise you, it won’t ever happen again. I’ve had a little memory problem….” I let my words trail off, suddenly unsure whether I wanted to admit to anyone other than Laney my loss of memory. Would people think me crazy? Was I crazy?

“What are you talking about?” He actually looked concerned, his gray-brown eyes worried and blinking, and that expression got to me. I found myself telling him the whole story of my day, explaining that I had no recollection of us breaking up or the way I’d been unwilling to let him go.

“Are you joking?” he asked a few times, his eyes skeptical now, as if this might be another one of my crafty ploys to get him back.

“It’s true. I can’t remember my birthday or anything after that until today. But I feel okay.”

“Well, shouldn’t you go to a doctor or something? Get yourself checked out?”

I made a show of holding out my arms, looking down at my legs. “Everything else is intact, so…” I shrugged.

“I don’t know.” He fingered the dark-brown freckle on his right cheekbone. That freckle had always made him self-conscious, because it resembled a speck of dirt, and people were forever telling him he had something on his face. But I used to love that spot. I’d kiss it whenever he walked in my door.

“You do look good.” His eyes trailed over me again.

I wanted to make a snappy retort, something like Yes, I look damn good and you’re not getting any of it, but I kept quiet.

“So how’s Bartley Brothers?” I didn’t want to talk about us or my memory any longer, but wanted to occupy Ben for a while, just to piss off Therese. “How’s Attila?”

“Demoted. He’s pushing paper,” Ben said.

“No!”

Ben nodded. “Lots of people are getting moved around or let go.”

“Yeah, so I heard.”

“Well, obviously. You’d know that since you…”

“Got fired.”

“Right.”

There was an uncomfortable pause.

“So tell me what happened to Attila,” I said.

Ben launched into a story about Attila being investigated for insider information right around the time of the budget cuts. From there, our conversation was easy, catching up on all our co-workers—my ex-co-workers—Ben telling me stories about trades gone awry, and bringing me up-to-date on the market.

We were laughing about another Attila story when Therese sauntered up to us and placed a proprietary hand on his arm.

“Benji,” she said—and I couldn’t help it; I snorted. Benji was a nickname he hated, the name Ben’s brothers used to make fun of him. Both of his brothers were much bigger. They excelled at football and other bone-crunching sports, while Ben had been relegated to running and tennis.

Ben sent me a look as if to say, Shut up, please. I tried to quell the giggles.

“I’m ready to go,” Therese said, shooting me little knives with her eyes. “It’s getting way too uncomfortable in here.”

“How about one more and then we’ll head out?” Ben said.

Therese’s bottom lip dropped a little. I got the impression that she wasn’t used to Ben saying no to her. “I want to go now. We’ve got to be at my mother’s for brunch tomorrow, remember?” She sent me a look of triumph, clearly expecting me to be crushed by this news. Strangely, I wasn’t. In fact, I felt so much better now that Ben and I had had a normal conversation.

“Sure,” Ben said, “I was just updating Kelly on what’s going on at Bartley.”

“Great. Did you tell her that you made partner?”

Ben sent a quick, guilty look in my direction.

My good mood, my ease at talking to Ben, evaporated like steam. “What? When?”

“Last week,” Therese bragged.

I fought hard not to smack her.

“Is that true?” I said to Ben. I was the one who was supposed to make partner first. Me. Ben had started at Bartley two years after me. I was next in line. How had I gotten the ax while he was elected to goddamn partnership status? I felt my neck go red.

Ben nodded sheepishly.

“He deserves it,” Therese said. “He’s worked really hard and—”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you shut up for one minute?”

Her eyes narrowed, and she sent a glance at Ben as if to say, Are you going to let her talk to me like that?

“Kell,” he said. “Take it easy. It just happened. I didn’t even know it was coming.”

Something about the way he had said that, the way his words got incrementally softer at the end of the sentence and the way his mouth became tight, told me that he had damn well known it was coming. He probably knew back in May. For a horrified moment, I wondered if he’d known that I was going to be fired, too. I stood there, completely stumped for words, wishing my temper would take over and do something rash that I would later regret—something like head-butting Ben—but nothing came. Finally, Therese tugged on his sleeve.

He drained the rest of his beer. “I’m sorry, Kell. Good to see you.”

I searched my brain for a witty comeback, something that would erase the smirk from Therese’s face, but once again I came up blank. A pregnant quiet enveloped us.

“Ben, let’s go,” Therese said.

He hesitated, still standing before me as if he might say something else.

“Oh, please,” Therese said, before he got the chance. She clamped a hand on his arm and dragged him away.

When they reached the door, Therese disappeared through it, but Ben turned around and for the longest moment held my eyes.

My temper flared after Ben left, obviously the wrong time, but I was immune to a cure, and so I sat at the bar, boring poor Jess and Steve and Laney about the manipulative machinations of Bartley Brothers and the treachery of Ben, all the while trying to douse my anger with cocktails. Laney eventually wrenched the conversation away from me and back to Jess and Steve’s wedding, and they were happy to prattle on about place settings and invitations and the band vs. DJ debate until we got the “last call” shout from the bartender.

After Tarringtons closed, and Laney had convinced me that no convenience store in the city sold margarita mix, she and I lay snug in her king-size bed, gossiping maliciously about Therese, giggling about Ben not recognizing me, and rehashing—at least fifty times—my conversation with him. Although still pissed off about him being made partner ahead of me, about him possibly knowing that I would be fired, I felt much better now that I’d gotten my dose of rage. And oddly enough, I felt a tipsy contentment around me. It’d been eons since Laney and I had had a late-night chat like this, a fact that made me sad. It was Laney who’d been with me every step of the way though the traumas of high school, the newfound freedom of college and the often painful days of early adulthood, and yet it was Ben I’d ended up spending so much time with. Ben, who’d eventually decided that the time meant nothing.

“He is such a fucker,” I said, the margaritas making my tongue loose, causing me to repeat myself over and over.

Laney gave me a light smack on the arm. “Stop already. It’s unhealthy. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Name it.”

“Are you sure you’re all right with this no-memory thing? I mean, you’ve had a lot going on today, and it’s all right to fall apart.”

I turned on my side to face her. “I feel better than I ever have.”

“Well, don’t think that you have to put on a tough act. You can still fall apart if you want.”

“Nope. I’ve done enough of that.”

Laney was silent for a second, and I could hear the whoosh of cars passing by her building. “It’s just that something was definitely wrong. Something more than Ben and the job,” she said.

“It was obviously something that didn’t matter.”

“Maybe.”

Her tone made me feel a little chilly, and I buried myself deeper under her duvet. What was it that I hadn’t told anyone? Did it matter now? On one hand, if whatever it was could explain why I couldn’t remember this summer, I wanted to know it. For some reason, I truly wanted to learn why this odd memory loss had happened to me. But on the other hand, if I remembered those five months, wouldn’t I just slip back into that depression? I wanted the whys and the hows of the situation, but I feared the details. I felt as if my memory was a house of cards, wobbly and shaky and hollow inside. I was afraid that if I came too close to that emptiness, that missing time, everything would fall in on me.

“Look, Lane,” I said, “I’ve already spent too much time on whatever it was, and maybe that’s why I feel so good now, because I let myself be depressed until I couldn’t be depressed anymore.”

“Shouldn’t you try to figure out more about what was going on with you during that time? I could help you, you know. We could go talk to Ellen or somebody, maybe do some research.” Laney’s voice sounded so sweet, so helpful and slightly worried, and it made me tremble a little inside.

I squeezed her arm, as much to reassure her as myself. “It’s okay. As far as I can tell, nothing good happened during those months, right?”

“Right,” she said, a hint of doubt lingering in her voice.

“Right.” I rolled over, turning my back to her. “And what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

6

On Sunday, I suffered an intense headache. I usually didn’t feel so bad after a night of drinking, but I probably hadn’t been drinking much for five months. I tried not to think about the headaches Laney had told me about, the ones I suffered during those months I was holed up in my apartment.

After Laney plied me with ibuprofen, she and I joined Gear and the rest of his High Gear band to watch the Bears game at a little corner pub. I’m not sure what I expected of Laney’s latest boyfriend—maybe heroin at halftime?—but he wasn’t exactly the stereotypical dude in a heavy metal band. Oh sure, he had the requisite tattoos on his arms (barbed wire on the right, some Chinese lettering on the left) and he wore a ripped black T-shirt and black army boots, but Gear was warm and friendly, too, which surprised me.

“So this is the infamous Kelly,” he said when Laney introduced us.

“Infamous? I hope that’s a good thing.” I held out my hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He smelled like shaving cream and cigarettes.

“You’re infamous because Laney Bug is always talking about you.”

“Laney Bug?” I looked over my shoulder at Laney, who groaned a little, probably realizing that she would never be able to live down this nickname. I could almost see us at age ninety, me taunting her, Oh Laney Bug, can you bring me my tea, please?

The rest of Gear’s band weren’t quite as outgoing or sweet, but we spent a happy afternoon with them eating pizza, watching football and screaming at the TV when the Bears messed up. I drank a few beers in a hair-of-the-dog effort, and didn’t think about anything else for hours—not Ben or my town house or my lack of employment.

Monday morning, I rolled over in Laney’s bed and stretched, feeling, once again, intensely headachy from the alcohol. Apparently, I couldn’t hold my liquor like I used to. I heard the hum of Laney’s hair dryer from the bathroom, followed by the clatter of makeup on the tile floor and Laney’s curse.

“You okay in there, Laney Bug?” I yelled, stretching my legs under her comfy duvet.

“Late,” she called back, ignoring my use of her new nickname. “Totally late.”

A second later, she tore out of the bathroom, yanked open her closet and stepped into a pair of shoes.

“What time did you get up?” I asked.

“Six.”

I turned and squinted at her bedside clock. It was eight-thirty. “And what have you been doing?”

“Answered e-mail, did a Tae-Bo tape, returned a few phone calls.”

“Okay, now I feel like a lazy ass.”

“You need to take it easy.” She picked up her purse by the bedside and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay as long as you want, all right? And call me at work if you need anything.”

“Thanks.” I watched her run into the kitchen and grab an apple out of a bowl. “Have a good day!” I called, but she was already out the door.

With Laney gone, the apartment seemed empty and vast. I swallowed some Advil, then took one of the books from her shelf, a memoir about a woman who’d followed the Grateful Dead. I figured that maybe I’d lie in bed all day and read. The book wasn’t that interesting, though, at least not after the first three acid trips, and within an hour I was antsy. I knew I should probably go back to my own apartment, but the thought brought only a queasy feeling.

To thank Laney for everything she’d done for me lately, I ignored the pain in my head and the nausea in my stomach and cleaned up her place. Then I made myself a bowl of granola and decided I’d just spend a lazy day in front of the TV.

The first few hours went okay, especially after my headache eased. I watched the news and business stations, trying to catch up on the market, studying the Bloomberg as I used to for the ticker symbols that signaled the retail stocks. There were a couple of surprises, a few stocks that were way higher than when I’d followed them, and I found myself analyzing the rest of the market and how it might affect these companies. After a while, though, I didn’t care all that much. It was a relief just to flip the channel.

Next, I tried the talk shows and the soaps, which kept my interest for a whole forty minutes. What, exactly, was I going to do with the rest of my day? A better question—what had I done when I was home for five months? I couldn’t fathom it.

A thought came to me. Laney had said that I had more than enough money to live on because of the severance pay from Bartley Brothers and the sale of my town house. But what if I’d somehow spent that money during those five months? Laney had assumed I was holed up in that high-rise, but what if I’d actually been blowing the cash on God-knows-what, maybe a sailboat or a Porsche for Ben or a diamond engagement ring for myself?

I found Laney’s cordless phone, dialing the number for my bank’s automated system. Leaning against the kitchen fridge, I punched in my social security number, relieved that I remembered it, then my banking code, which came just as easily. A second later, an inflectionless voice informed me that I had a nice chunk of money in my account, more than I’d ever had at one time. Laney had been right, after all. I hadn’t blown it. I didn’t have to work right now if I didn’t want to.

But what did people do if they didn’t work? I put the phone on the counter with a clunk. Most women I knew who were officially unemployed were unofficially working their asses off in their own homes, raising their kids. I didn’t have kids, obviously. Wasn’t even on the path to eventual children. So what to do?

I could do anything I wanted with my life, I realized. It was mine to shape. I suppose that had always been true, but before, I’d felt the invisible constraints of the need for money, or my relationship with Ben, or the partnership track I thought I was on. Yet none of those concerns existed anymore.

My life was a clean slate. What did I want to do with it?

I found a pad of paper in Laney’s desk and settled on the couch again. “New Possible Careers,” I wrote at the top. I sat there for a full five minutes staring at the paper. Why wasn’t anything coming to me? Anything, I told myself, write anything that comes to mind. I shook my hand to relax it and scribbled the following list:

Journalist

Clothing Store Owner

Music Video Dancer

Ambassador to France

A good list, excellent really. These were the jobs that I’d always thought so glamorous and cool. I could almost see myself as a political journalist, a pen tucked behind one ear, the president at the podium, pointing to me and saying, “Kelly,” because of course I’d know the president. The problem was that in reality I had no writing skills to speak of and it probably took twenty years of hard-core newspaper journalism to get on the White House beat.

All the other possible careers I’d listed had impediments, too. I’d love to have my own clothing store, to be able to change outfits in the middle of the day just because I could, but I knew that owning a store was a massive amount of hard work. And as much as I’d been interested in the retail stocks and my own shopping, I really couldn’t envision myself standing in the same shop day after day.

As for the music video career, well, I couldn’t imagine what would be more fun than wearing a don’t-fuck-with-me face and shaking my thing behind J. Lo or whoever, but I could dance about as well as I could remember the last five months. Ditto for the ambassador to France gig. I couldn’t speak French.

I crossed out the list and tore the paper off, giving myself a fresh sheet. I would concentrate on the things that I could do, the activities that truly gave me pleasure, whether or not they could lead to a career.

The thing that came immediately out of the pen was “Photography.” Ever since my stepfather, Danny, had given me that Nikon, a gift I later heard my mother say was “probably hot,” I’d loved taking pictures. As a kid, it was something to do, something to play around with, a way to let myself be part of a crowd while still hiding behind the safety of a lens. As I got older, I realized that I was a natural at it. I could study the light on a sidewalk and realize how it would appear as a pattern in a black-and-white photo, and I knew how to take portraits from different ranges and angles to make the subject appear more studious or glamorous or thoughtful. Ben had even given me classes at a local university as a gift, and for the last few years I’d been taking them weekly. Was I still taking those classes?

I made a note to follow up on this issue, then wrote, “Shopping.” Definitely one of my great loves, something I’d already made into a career of sorts, but I wasn’t a retail analyst anymore, and I’d already done enough shopping on Saturday. I could probably get an analyst job at another investment firm—I knew enough people in the business; I could work my way up again—and eventually I’d be a partner somewhere else, just like Ben. Yet, even as I thought this, the realization came to me that I didn’t have to work right now, and that knowledge took away all my drive to be in the market again. Maybe I’d never had the drive, or I’d only been driven by money.

What else? I lowered my pen and scribbled, “Walking.” I wasn’t much of a runner. I hated the way my breath came ragged and hard when I tried jogging, but I loved to walk. Again, I couldn’t imagine why I had holed myself up in my apartment during an entire summer in Chicago, a city that was made for walking along the lake and through the zoo and down the Mag Mile. That’s what I would do today, I decided. I’d take a huge walk.

But first I wanted to finish my list. What else, what else? It came to me, the answer, but I had a hard time putting it on paper. Finally, I wrote in small letters, so fine that you could barely read them—“Family.” My mom had given me the best life she could muster, but it was one filled with random men, alternating cities and a series of small apartments. For as long as I could remember, I’d been jealous of the typical family—the husband and wife in the country with the 2.5 kids—and I’d sworn I’d get that for myself someday. And so I’d always been concerned about the ticking of my so-called biological clock (although to be truthful I couldn’t hear a peep), pointing out to Ben time and again that if we were going to get married and have kids, we had to do it soon—a belief that led, in part, to the ultimatum I’d given him. But now I didn’t really have any family at all. Dee was gone in an instant, in a tangle of metal and rubber on the Dan Ryan Expressway, and Ben was gone now, too. And the children I was supposed to have one day? Far, far away.

My mom was still around, of course, but she and I had been family in name only since Dee had died. We’d handled Dee’s death differently, to say the least. Me, well, I had my tantrums, my not-so-occasional flashes of anger when I tossed picture frames and broke dishes. Ben, after quietly watching me shatter more than half of my Pottery Barn bowls, had bought me a big brown candle and taken me into the bathroom one day.

“Throw it,” he had said, opening the shower curtain and pointing to the wall inside the tub.

“What?” I looked from the candle to Ben and back again, irritated at this cryptic directive.

“Look.” He took the candle from my hand, hurling it at the wall. It bounced off, a mere dent in the brown wax. “See? You can throw it and smash it. Do whatever you want, but it won’t break.”