The Stand-In(2)

Cheri chucks her dirty dishcloth at the photographer, who yelps indignantly when it lands smack on his chest, covering his raincoat with coffee grounds.

“Yo, Ansel Adams. Get the hell out of my store and stop hounding my customers. You’re trespassing.”

He opens his mouth to argue, but she threateningly grabs a pot of freshly brewed coffee and leans over the counter as if daring him to mouth off. With an angry shrug, he blows me a kiss and saunters out.

I turn to Cheri. “Ansel Adams?”

She puts down the pot and hands over my latte with a half-turned smile. “Couldn’t think of another photographer.”

“Ansel Adams did landscapes, didn’t he? Not people?”

“Like I said. Couldn’t think of another one. Also, that’s very judgmental talk coming from a woman who used a muffin as a shield.”

I bristle. “He surprised me.”

“Right.” Safe in her victory, Cheri complacently pats her magenta curls. “What was that even about? You caught up in some naughty scandal?”

Deeply skeptical, I check my phone. The only alert is a notification from LifePlanX about the second load of laundry I should be doing. “Nope.”

“Huh. Must have mistaken you for someone else. Makes sense—there’s always a lot of filming going on in Toronto. Oh, speaking of, did I tell you I saw Keanu Reeves last week?” She wipes the counter with passionate strokes. “What a god. There’s no one else as gorgeous as him around here.”

“Uh, Cheri?” It’s Loni, who is packing Little Loniette into her stroller as her wife tidies the table. “Outside.” She points.

We look out the front window. “Shit,” I say. “There are two of them.” Inspector-turned-paparazzo Clouseau now has a buddy standing with him outside the café. They’re both sporting seriously intense cameras around their necks and gesturing wildly.

“Quick. Go out the back way,” Cheri advises in a hiss.

This is bizarre and not on my to-do list. I hesitate, wondering who on earth they think I am, before I duck into the hall and sneak out, feeling pleasantly important. The buzz of acting like a celebrity lasts until I step right into an oil-slicked puddle that smells like raccoon pee. Damn it. There’s a patch of grass at the end of the alley, so I walk over and wipe my shoe. Once reasonably clean, I sip my latte as I decide what to do. I faked being sick to get out of work so I could meet the lawyer, which means there’s no need to go to the office. That I’m Todd-free the rest of the day lightens my mood.

I tap through my phone to the LifePlanX app. According to my schedule, I’m due to go home and spend some time doing chores. Plan the work and work the plan, that’s the saying. I wish it were always that easy, though.

I think I’ve tried every system available to humanity that’s supposed to get your life under control, but none of them have helped. My bullet journal bit the dust last winter, when I finally accepted Mom’s dementia was too bad for her to live alone. It was a beautiful notebook full of carefully hand-drawn calendars and lists, which slowly devolved into roughly scribbled pages of names and phone numbers in different color inks, a written microcosm of my resentful journey through the healthcare system.

Once Mom had been moved to Glen Lake, I put that notebook aside and turned to an award-winning, minimalist online tasker. That was abandoned five months ago, when checking through the previous weeks, I finally realized that my to-do lists confirmed what I had only dimly suspected up until then—that I was getting assigned my own projects less and less in favor of taking on tasks for others…or for one other person in particular. Todd, my marketing department manager, was blocking my advancement by giving my projects to his slimy protégé, Brent.

I turned to journaling as a release, diligently recording my feelings every day until Todd grabbed my arm during a company event and held on a little too long, while his other hand grazed my hip. No big deal, right? It was a crowded room. Just a mistake, no need to make a fuss, so I tried to laugh it off. I did the same thing the next week when he backed me into a table after I gave him the projections I’d printed out, joking that his bad eyesight meant he had to lean in close. I said nothing when he spent an entire meeting staring at me before saying he liked exotic-looking girls. That’s when I put the journal away. I had no desire to relive my days with a written record.

“Stop it,” I say softly to my phone. “Stop.”

I never say those words to Todd. When it first started happening, I convinced myself this was my issue, not his—I was overreacting or being too sensitive. I’d been too self-conscious to do anything but laugh, not wanting to cause a fuss and embarrass him or needlessly put my job at risk.

The decision to see Fred the Lawyer came to me as I curled up in bed one morning fighting nausea because of another job rejection. It wasn’t normal to cry myself to sleep every night. Something had to give.

My phone dings with yet another LifePlanX notification, triggering a Pavlovian instinct to accomplish something, anything. The message flashes on my screen. Not on track? Sit with that, said the coyote to the bear.

What the hell does that even mean?

I decide I don’t need the additional pressure of a phone that constantly reminds me of my failures. “Coyote this,” I whisper as I press the little shaky X in the app’s corner.

Yet the moment it disappears from the screen, I feel lost. I’m not proud of my dependence on these kinds of things to maintain focus (“It’s like you need a corset for your brain,” my über-organized friend Anjali said), but I do. I admit it. I love lists. I crave them. I draw visceral pleasure from anything I can put a line through, a check beside, or delete as a declaration that I have Completed a Task and am therefore a worthy, functioning human.