Ellen saw them bending over Debbie, talking to her in the hall. She heard the concern in their voices, the joshing they did to make Debbie laugh. She found it increasingly annoying.
Both she and Debbie were in early the next morning.
“Did you have a good time in Albuquerque?” Debbie asked.
“Yeah, did. And your Christmas?”
“Oh, it was okay. I had to work,” Debbie said as she sat down at her desk. She pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear.
“I tried calling you, Debbie,” Ellen told her.
“I’ve been going to bed early.”
And apparently, Ellen thought, annoyed again, that was all she was going to say.
“I’ve got the house guest from hell,” Sandi from Accounting interrupted her thoughts. “You wouldn’t believe this woman.”
“How so?”
“She came with my mother. They’re staying a week and she is crazy. She’s on this special diet, has to eat six times a day. Drives me nuts. There’s nothing wrong with her, not really,” she explained. “I just hate it, that’s all.”
Ellen looked over at Debbie. She was reading an assignment sheet.
“She goes crazy if I even suggest a restaurant or going out for a drink. She does it in public too,” Sandi was saying. “It’s embarrassing. Everything has to stop for her.”
“Oh,” said Ellen as though she had just made a discovery. “It’s all about attention. She wants attention.” She looked over again. Debbie was still reading.
“Well, yes, I suppose so,” decided Sandi. “The worst thing is this panic she goes into for no reason. She screams, actually screams. I almost drove off the road.”
“I once gave a neighbor a ride to pick up her car,” Ellen told her. “One of her kids in the backseat starts screaming at the top of his lungs for no reason and she does nothing. I stopped the car and turned around and said, ‘Don’t you dare scream when I’m driving.’” She gave a loud imitation of the voice she used on the boy.
“Sure, with a child,” Sandi agreed.
“No, you can do it with adults too,” Ellen stated.
“Maybe you can. I feel terrible even talking about her. She isn’t so awful, not really.”
With a hooded glance at Debbie, Ellen got to her feet.
“Sometimes,” she said in a stage whisper, “Truth can be a great kindness.”
In the van, waiting for Steve, she put her head in her hands. Why had she done that? Why? What was she thinking? Debbie would know she was talking about her. Of course she would.
She hit at her chin with a closed fist. What possessed her? Debbie had only sat down, pushed that blond hair behind her ear. And this is how she reacts?
That vision of the blond hair and the creamy skin and the pretty profile was vividly clear. My God, was she jealous of her? Was that it? She had never been jealous of anyone in her life. She shook the thought off. No, it couldn’t be.
Besides—she took a deep breath—Debbie probably didn’t hear a thing and, if she did, she wouldn’t know she’d been talking about her looking for attention. No.
Still, she told herself, she had to fix this. She had to do something nice because what she had done in there made her feel lousy and stupid.
28
After a week, Ellen decided to break through Debbie’s silence, pounding on her door one night while holding a half-gallon jug of white wine and balancing a pizza. The decision to move into the situation made her remember one of the newsroom stories in Albuquerque.
Dale told her how one Christmas they heard about some poor artist starving up in the mountains, a guy who used to be famous. Now he was old, broke and forgotten. A few of the people in the newsroom chipped in for groceries and a Christmas tree and drove to his house, all ready to sing carols and tear up over the good feelings of the night.
The adobe hut in the mountains turned out to be an expensive ranch house. The housekeeper, surprised at their Christmas Eve visit, told them the artist was spending the holidays at his home in Aspen. They backed away, smiling and waving, and jumped into the cars, hoping they hadn’t been recognized. They deposited the bags and the tree in front of the first shabby house they saw. She wondered if her trip to Debbie’s would be equally misguided.
“It’s me. Let me in. I’m dying out here,” she shouted at Debbie’s door-filtered questions. “Hurry up, Debbie.”
“Thought you might want to get drunk and get fat,” she said once the door opened, and she pushed past Debbie. “I brought everything we’ll need.”
“Where are the plates?” she asked, heading for the kitchen, ignoring Debbie’s “But, I already ate.”
“So, your vacation was good?” Debbie asked after Ellen poured the wine and grabbed a slice of pizza.
“It was,” Ellen said between bites. “I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen in a while. It snowed, a couple of parties. It was a good time. It usually is up there.”
She knew exactly how to do it. You keep the patter bright and happy, filling every second with talk, dumb, quick talk. You did it before a tough interview, one where you were going to have to hang the guy out to dry or when the man was angry or nervous or impatient. You smiled and laughed and chattered on and on, keeping his mind off the photographer setting up the camera and the lights, running the cords, pinning on the microphones.
“And how about you?” she asked. “Christmas can be a bitch. The whole holiday season, if you’re working. I know.”
Debbie didn’t respond.
“Still, the weather is fantastic, isn’t it? I mean, this is why we are all here, right?”
“I guess so.”
“The first year I was here we had three floods, January through March. What a way to start a job. You started in March, didn’t you? April? Almost a year. It went
