Limp salad, salmon both oversalted and overcooked. The waitress talked too much and kept forgetting things. Wilva asked for a table in the bar, so she could smoke over drinks and between every course.
"Loved it."
"You know, I liked it too."
How could she stand that wool jacket in this heat? The weave was thick enough to make his skin itch. He wore a generously tailored poplin suit, a shirt of fine, breathing cotton, and still felt clammy.
"Thank you for finding it."
"You're welcome."
"This is done," he announced after a moment. "If you're OK with it we can get things going again." Wilva smiled. "Do you want to read it?"
"Sure, I'm coming," Wilva said, and, like a character from a Beckett play, did not move. She would never say that she wanted to chat, or that she was blue or bored or lonely. Over the years she and Walter had spent hours in these unacknowledged zones of companionship.
"How's — " He couldn't say How's everything? because he had asked her that last night. And he didn't have to ask. Like him, she lived alone; not in an overpriced studio, but an overfurnished house 20 minutes from where she worked and about an hour from where she'd been born. She had never married. Her family was gone, other than a cousin whose son she sometimes mentioned. In all these years he'd never heard her allude to a man in her life, a friend, a lover, anyone; she might be gay for all he knew, although she didn't seem to have close female friends either. For years she had kept an old beagle that had been one of her father's hunting dogs. The only time she became emotional was the day he called her with a production question on a project they were working on and she blurted out that the night before she had to have Duke put down. "Duke?" Walter said. Then he remembered. "Oh, I'm so sorry," he said, and Wilva began to weep. We all cry without an accent, Walter found himself thinking. He listened, not daring to speak or hang up, until the line went dead. The next day she called him back and answered his question. She never mentioned Duke again. Neither did he.
When he first met her Wilva had been Product Manager on a pharmaceutical brand with multiple indications and a huge budget. But she hadn't become a star either. Though she still worked at Glaxo, she now "managed promotion for the non-promoted products." She used those words when she called him out of the blue to offer him this project, and Walter didn't know whether he was supposed to laugh or not.
"How's the house?" he said finally. "The den all done?"
"Oh yes. And I'm still paying for it. And now I'm rethinking the kitchen." She laughed with sudden force. "Walt honey, it'll never be done. That's fine. It's my hobby."
"You enjoy it."
"Yes. I enjoy it." She gestured at his laptop. "Turn that around so I can see it." As she read, her wizened face wrinkled further. "Perfect."
But she kept looking, smiling at the screen. Walter waited for her usual nitpicks. She said: "Any chance you can squeeze in dinner tonight? I know you got other work, but…I think I found another good restaurant. Sushi. Your favorite."
"Oh really?" He couldn't. He just couldn't. Not that he felt any hint of romantic interest from her. But one evening of Wilva's smoking and Fox News talking points and vague neediness was all he could stand. Which was why he'd lied about having a conference call tonight on another project. "Tempting. But the call starts right at six, and I'm leading it. I promise it won't interfere with anything we're doing tomorrow…"
"Oh, I know that, honey." Wilva's smile never faded. "I may sit right at the Sushi bar then. See how they do it."
* * *
The new protocol worked like a charm. Five kids, five moms, 10 clear preferences for Zovent Fizz. But next came the wiry overactive girl and her mom.
"OK Zooey, you go first," said Harriet.
"Zoey," said the girl, giving it a long o.
"Excuse me. But is that spelled, z-o-o-e-y?"
"Yes. But it's Zoey," said the girl. She stood as if ready to walk out, but raised her arms and sang: "Say it like Zoey, spell it like Zooey, now ain't that just screwy?"
"Sit down, Zooey," said her mother.
"I have a question," Walter said. Harriet turned around, and he could feel Wilva looking at him. "Have you ever read the author J.D. Salinger?"
The mother looked at him. Her face was broad and fleshy, the opposite of her daughter's, but she managed a rather delicate smirk.
"First of all, I read. Some of us actually do down here. And secondly, yes, I have read Salinger." Her voice was almost as slow as Wilva's, but not Southern, not Floridian, in fact without accent.
"He named me!" yelled Zooey.
"Yeah," her mother said. "Named after a book, and can't sit still to read one."
Everyone laughed. "We have to talk," Walter said. "I'm a Salinger fanatic from way back."
The woman who named her child Zooey was now expressionless, and Walter felt like an idiot for assuming she could be a fanatic about anything.
"Sally named me," Zooey said again, "but he's not my daddy." The silence that followed wasn't enough for her, because she jumped up again, flapped her arms and shimmied her abdomen like a belly dancer, and sang: "Say it like Zoey, spell it like Zooey, now ain't that just screwy? Say it like Zoey, spell it like — "
"That's enough," said her mother.
"My real daddy taught me that," Zooey said, "but he's gone." Her searchlight stare swept Walter as if he knew the father's whereabouts.
"If you don't sit down," said her mother — still not standing up, or raising her voice — "they will throw us out of here."
"And we don't get paid?"
"No. We won't get paid."
Zooey sat instantly, folding her hands in her lap and pressing her lips shut to broadcast her new-found obedience. Walter couldn't help it: he laughed again.
"OK Zooey," said Harriet. "Now here's what we want you to do — "
"Oh, I already know." Zooey waved her hand, then, glancing at her mother, yanked it down and sat on it.
"You've done product testing before?"
"Sure, all the time. I was here Friday and three weeks before."
"You must like it," said Wilva.
"Well" — she looked confidentially at Wilva, then Walter — "I do it for the money, you know."
"Oh, Zooey." The mother couldn't help it either; she chuckled.
"That's OK, Zooey honey," said Wilva. "We're all doin' it for the money."
"You get paid too?" Zooey addressed this to Walter. "You don't even taste it!"
"I'll explain why to you later," Walter said. "Right now, let's just…git-er-done." Some pseudo-redneck comedian he'd seen on the Comedy Channel last night used that phrase to punctuate all his unfunny stories. The girl laughed wildly. "Git-er-done!" she said.
Weird: he had promised to speak to both kid and mom after the test, when of course he would never lay eyes on them again once they left this room. The girl was no nymphet: bones sticking up from her chest, eyes far apart, and her hair curly yet thin, exposing a scalp like dirty dough beneath, unlike the sunburnt peel of the rest of her skin. But when she moved or laughed, none of this mattered: animation transformed her, in the same way that singing can temporarily erase a stammer.
She must take after the missing father. She looked nothing like her mother, who took in everything and gave back nothing like a white trash sphinx. Actually the woman was pretty, albeit heavy-breasted and thick in the leg. Her reddish-blond hair seemed authentic, her eyes a vivid green. That shock of color, and the extinction of spirit behind it, reminded Walter of the rouge blazing from his aunt's cheeks at her wake.
He corrected himself: she didn't dress like trash. (Cotton shirt with muted blue stripes — a trashy redhead would have worn green — and properly-fitting grey slacks; Talbot's or some local equivalent.) A history of emotions could be read through her blankness, like a palimpsest. She read Salinger, and she named her daughter Zooey… Let's go," he said to Harriet.
Harriet explained the procedure to Zooey, whose eyes blanched them with knowingness, not only of what she was supposed to do, but what they, he wanted her to say. Her first cup contained Zovent Syrup. She made a face. "That's bad," she said. She drank the whole cup of water and ate the whole cracker before sipping from the cup of Zovent Fizz. This made her stand up and sit down: "That's…a mounda doo."
"Doo?" Harried said, probably thinking she meant shit.
"Mountain Dew, dodo," Zooey laughed.
"OK," said Harriet, unfailingly phlegmatic. "Which one do you prefer?"
"The other one, of course." Zooey smiled at Walter, like she had made a winning move in a game they were playing. "I hate medicine. But medicine tastes like medicine. This" — she held up the cup of Fizz — "is like it wants to be soda, and it ain't."
"Git-er-done!" He didn't look at Wilva. He didn't care. He let the words fly as certainly as he had flung away his cigarettes after coughing up his own blood. Now he adored the ugly brat: she was his ally against everyone and everything phony.
Zooey traded seats with her mother. "Your name is Georgia?" Harriet said.
"Yeah. And no, I'm not from there. My mother liked the song."
Wilva sniffed — was she pissed? maybe he should care — and laughed. After a moment Walter let himself laugh, too. Zooey jumped up and sang, "Georgia-porgia, you'd never know, she really comes from O-hi-o!"
"Your husband again?" Walter grinned at Georgia. "Quite the poet."
Georgia ignored him even as her eyes never left him. "If I don't hear your butt hit that seat, I'm going to hit it with something else."
Zooey sat. To Walter she made a slicing motion across her mouth: Don't smile, Momma's mad already.
Georgia tasted both liquids. Unlike Zooey, she had no reaction to either. "Which one do you prefer?"
Maybe the brat was a genius at reading the back of her mother's head. Somehow, Walter realized, though neither was identified and their order reversed, Zooey knew which liquid was Fizz and which Syrup. She did not want her mother to pick Fizz — because Walter did — and she stood, one hand trying to guide Georgia's selection from behind.
"I don't really like either one," Georgia said.
"Still, if you had to choose, which do you prefer?"