Mendocino and Other Stories by Ann Packer Page A

she shares with her husband, Josh, is only twenty blocks away, but she rarely arrives on time. She has taken to walking very slowly. She wears heavy, rubber-soled boots, rain or shine. She is thirty-eight, and has had two miscarriages.
    My phone buzzes and I put down the newspaper and pick up the receiver.
    “You'll never believe what I ate for dinner last night.” It's Sam. Her office is two down from mine, but we do most of our talking on the phone.
    “A hot fudge sundae with dill pickles,” I say.
    “What a cliché,” she says. “I'm disappointed in you, Virginia.”
    “What did you have?” I picture her transformed, a wonderful mommy cook making herself hot cereal while Josh looks on, askance, from behind his reheated pizza.
    “It's disgusting,” she says.
    “Well?”
    “Saltines spread with mayonnaise, and I mean
numerous
saltines, twenty or more.”
    “That is disgusting, Sam,” I say, but I feel a rush of warmth for her. I want to tell her that I read somewhere that you can't do better for your baby than to eat as many saltines as possible, every day.
    “I know,” she says, laughing. “
Oy gevalt.
”
    Since they got pregnant, Josh has been teaching her bits of his grandparents' Yiddish, a word or two a day, so the baby can start to feel a little Jewish.
    I AM WORKING on a dog food campaign. Getting this assignment was the realization of my worst nightmare about advertising. My brother, the perennial student, warned me. He said, “You think it will be handsome couples drinking champagne or giving each other important diamonds. But Virginia, it may well be dog food.”
    The joke was on me. Kanine Krunch, it's called. At least it's the dry kind of dog food, the kind that comes in gigantic paper bags. At least it's not the wet, canned kind. That is some consolation.
    ON MY LUNCH hour I have begun to look for baby presents. It's too early to buy, but I want to know what's out there. There's a wonderful mobile at Babes in Arms, a little store around the corner. It's got little pastel animals hanging off curved strips of wood. Pink kittens. Blue puppies. Purple giraffes. I don't know if Sam and Josh are going to go for the bright, primary color decorating schemes plugged by the baby magazines these days, or whether they'll choose soft and cuddly instead. But I'd like to think of them standing at the edge of the crib and touching the little animals so that they sway, gently, over the baby's head. I've got a few more weeks to decide.
    For Karen, it will have to be something more practical. She and her husband, Donald, got married just a month ago, and on his postal clerk's salary they'll be struggling once she stops working. A little terry cloth sleeper, maybe. A soft little sweater with a matching cap. A year's supply of Pampers.
    I don't know what I'll get Jennifer.
    KANINE KRUNCH HAS one distinction: only one. It is very cheap. It is the dog food you would buy if your boyfriend arrived at your house with two large black labradors and asked you to “watch” them for a week or two while he went to Florida to see about buying a boat.
    My assignment is to think of—no, to make up—another distinction. And then to “pop it” into an ad in which two extraordinarily attractive yet wonderfully mellow people have a desultory, nonaggressive (this is not a hard-sell) conversation about their pooches. The idea, of course, is that if you, the consumer, would only switch to Kanine Krunch, you would become extraordinarilyattractive yet wonderfully mellow, too. What you're not supposed to notice is that this image of the good life comes straight from those Molson beer and American Express card ads. Therefore, in an attempt to claim originality, I will be asked to attach to this ad a line similar to “For the easy times in your life.” Similar to, but different. That's the line Samantha used for the flip-top canned puddings.
    THREE MONTHS AGO Jennifer called me into her office, all seriousness, to announce her