Going in Circles Read Online Free PDF Page A

deep sigh, every tear that has plopped onto my desk. He knew when I had spent the entire day crafting an email to Matthew instead of working on copy. He heard me break down when I called my realtor to ask how exactly I would go about getting my name off my own deed. He pretended not to notice the time I broke down sobbing at my desk after someone wandered past our office whistling INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart.”
    The first time I apologized for my behavior was the only time he allowed it. “I’ve been through this before, Charlotte,” he said. He’s on his second marriage—one that he says “looks to be sticking.” I haven’t met her, but from the picture on Jonathan’s desk, she seems fake. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean she looks like Jonathan designed her. He ordered up the pretty, skinny, blonde with the white teeth, pill-free sweaters, and arms-that-never-flap. Even her name is too much.
Cassandra
. Who’s named that, honestly? Noteven Cassie or Cass. She’s so pretty that people still call her by her full name.
Cassandra.
People call me Char. Like someone who’s been scorched.
    Actually, people around here have apparently taken to calling me The Ghost. That’s what Jonathan told me the other day. Frankly, I think that’s a better name for the tiny girl down the hall with the sullen face who always dresses like she’s just come back from a funeral. Francesca is her name. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what you’d call the tiny Goth girl down the hall with the sullen face and funereal clothes. She gets to keep her name, too. The gorgeous and the pseudo-tragic, they get to own their elaborate, fancy full names. Not me. Jonathan said even sad-faced Francesca calls me The Ghost. That can’t be good. When you’re bumming out people who spend all day intentionally trying to look sad, you must look pretty damn pathetic.
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    As soon as I remember that my mother called this morning, I try to forget it. For a fraction of a second it starts to work. I almost rewrite the morning away, changing it into a completely different experience. This morning I got up, jumped out of bed, went to the gym . . . and then on my way to work I saved a child from being hit by a car. Something fantastically honorable and noble like that, something that would either excuse or erase the fact that the truth is I’m the kind of girl who lets her mother’s phone call go to voice mail and then completely forgets about it for the next three or four hours.
    I can’t rewrite the truth away. I have to check my voice mail.
    I do it with my eyes closed, as this somehow shelters mefrom harm. Because it’s not just a phone message from my mother. It is a reminder that no matter how much of a victim I might try to play sometimes, there’s no escaping the fact that I am a terrible person.
    Charlotte Goodman
is
a terrible person. Only a terrible person would leave her husband and not tell her mother about it. That’s right. Charlotte Goodman’s own mother doesn’t know that her daughter is probably about to get a divorce. Worse than that, Charlotte is the kind of rotten daughter who will lie to her mother, to her face, and act like she still lives in the house where she hasn’t been in months.
    In her defense, the only person possibly more terrible than Charlotte Goodman is Elaine Goodman, the woman who raised her. This is because Elaine has two emotional settings: none and all.
    When Charlotte didn’t make the high school cheerleading team, Elaine got rid of Charlotte’s beloved dog, Shoelace, blaming the pet as a distraction from her daughter’s future.
    For most mothers, a daughter’s engagement is cause for celebration. Not so with Elaine Goodman. When her daughter got engaged, Elaine’s first reaction was to say, “Oh, thank God. I truly feared the only time