The Verbs

Cynthia Scoffs maintains a list of people she’s met who also have verbs for last names, including:

• Terrance Beat
• Jill Bent
• May Blanche—extra points for the modal auxiliary verb
• Oscar Cumming

Cynthia plays with the idea of establishing a club for her fellow sufferers. She imagines secret handshakes, a club song, and T-shirts with clever illustrations depicting their last names in action. They will discuss how verbal names shaped and influenced their childhoods and led to their current adult successes—or lack thereof. Speaking of which, despite Cynthia’s ambition to act, the most success she’s had in two years of auditions is a spot in a corporate training video about sexual harassment. She was directed to look annoyed at the rude banter of a fellow employee as he played ventriloquist to a sexist staple remover. Cynthia’s other roles (though she is unaware of them) include woman walking quickly and seated woman talking to a friend, both appearing in architectural renderings for a shopping mall in Calgary, and, independently, in renderings for an office park in Buffalo, and an expansion of an art museum in Los Angeles.

Cynthia gives up her acting ambitions and, in the doldrums, begins visiting doctors’ waiting rooms. If approached, she says she is there to pick up her grandmother or an aunt—she can act, after all. But no one asks her why she is there. She pretends to look at her phone while staring at patients with terminal illness, or those who are losing their hearing or vision. Suffering is a drug. If she is feeling low on a weekend, when most offices are closed, she visits an E.R.’s waiting room: drops of blood on the floor, people looking grim and done for, though probably only temporarily. An hour in these settings and she is thankful for several days—not for being who she is, but for not being them.

From her time spent in waiting rooms, Cynthia adds two additional verbal last names to her list:

• Telly Carver
• Joe Deal

Cynthia moves in with her new boyfriend, Dan Allot. She’ll never take on the cringey hyphenate of Scoffs-Allot, as Dan isn’t interested in marriage. He’s only recently removed himself from a union that soured.

At Cynthia’s temp job número ocho (so many jobs over the past year that she mentally pronounces the count as ouch-o), she spends her lunch (half) hour searching the company directory for potential new members of her club, uncovering:

• Darren Forage
• Ellie Harps

Cynthia looks into the cost of letterpress invitations. She’d like to have The Verbs written in a custom script, along with a meeting place and time. She’ll hand the invitations out with a wink and a nod—though given that she’s been told her winks look pained, perhaps only a nod. Those who’ve married into their verbal names will be gladly welcomed, deserving pity, while those in possession of alpha verbal names—your Powers, your Towers, your Victors and Masters—will be barred.

Cynthia considers meeting places: the E.R., a church basement after an AA meeting lets out, a coffeeshop, a bar. Club rule: the person with the worst name will have all their food, drink, and entertainment comped in order to rectify, for an evening, the injustice done to them by their ancestors.

Tired of rent increases, Cynthia and Dan look at homes for sale. They spend a couple of dispiriting weekends with their realtor, then decide to continue renting instead. Cynthia can’t help but think that the realtor would have preferred a Cynthia Love or a Cynthia Settle as a client.

• Sharon House: their one-time realtor
• Gary Flats: their once and future landlord

Sharon and Gary belong to the nominative determinism club, one made up of self-assured extraverts who’ve never suffered from introduction anxiety. They can afford new cars, the mortgage on second homes, and biannual international vacations so distant that exotic inoculations are required. They approve everything on their dentist’s menu of recommendations. They have known their destinies as soon as they could write their names. They have belonged to this club for generations.

At her temp job, Cynthia discovers:

• Mal Gorge: skinny gal, several cubicles over
• Yvonne Rains: sunny demeanor, in billing

These outliers pay no heed to the names they carry because they both are only an approaching wedding date away from the old last-name switcheroo-ditcheroo. Dan is still uninterested in the institution of marriage, even though his divorce has been final for nearly half a year. Why buy the cow when the milk is free? Cynthia’s mother states. Cynthia tells her that Dan is lactose intolerant, though he isn’t. It’s a retort she saw on TV once, but it doesn’t even earn a grunt.

More potential invitees to The Verbs, gleaned from the company directory:

• Robert Moons
• Sal Vows

Her new boss at job ouch-o praises Cynthia’s work. She gives Cynthia’s shoulders a quick rub at least once a day, insists on inviting her out for lunch on Fridays, and likes to give out hugs she calls her “squeeze of joy.” Cynthia knows that this, along with a dozen other micro-expressions and actions, constitutes sexual harassment; Cynthia’s acted in the training video, after all. But it doesn’t feel the way she expected harassment to feel. It’s doting, kind. Even the occasional flashes of frustration directed at her by her boss have more of a maternal quality. Still, whenever Cynthia picks up her boss’s iced coffee, she always takes a swig and gives it a good backwash, her spittle chilling with the ice cubes.

Cynthia Scoffs finds a better-paying, hug-free gig. From the job description, she expects to be building and tracking social media campaigns. In reality, she is tasked with becoming the online persona of a dozen real people, including:

• An Asian-American gynecologist/public speaker
• A psychologist specializing in treating teenage eating disorders
• Two CEOs of companies too small to convincingly wear “chief executive” in their titles
• A surprising number of self-employed moms who always include innocent-seeming cleavage in their selfies

The gynecologist’s feed draws a flume of filthy comments, the psychologist’s is clogged with concerned parents and grandparents looking for free advice, the CEOs’ followers are bots who pitch them NFTs and cryptocurrencies, and the moms’ followers think the women are “damn fine,” “lovely,” “juicy AF,” “Girl, if you were mine…” (cue the squirting eggplant taco tongue explosion emoji and the many, many links Cynthia dares not follow.) Block, mute, block, mute. Her job, at its core, is a game of whack-a-mole. Cynthia pretends she’s a playwright, creating lines for a dozen characters, all of whom are trembling with goodwill and happiness as they opine multiple times a day before the growling horny masses. It’s worse when they speak into the packed silence, when Cynthia’s words fail to gain traction and the needle on her share score on the internal company dashboard dips and dips, her posts unworthy of even the most minuscule physical acknowledgement by others: the mouse click, the finger tap.

Of the dozen new last names Cynthia is representing, not one of them is a verb. She thinks how life would be simpler if social media would implode and never resurface: like the quill pen, the telegraph, pneumatic tubes, the VHS cassette, the marriage proposal.

Employees at the social media marketing company who, like Cynthia, are local and work from home invite her to their monthly in-person drinks night. Freed from the 13” confines of a weekly team videoconference, her colleagues are huge and funny and smart in real life, and not at all undone by the roles they are playing. They teach her coping strategies:

• purposely use the British spelling of words to make an assigned client look bad to any snoots who follow their feed
• write long political screeds that can only be deciphered if you put together the first letter of every post
• mentally replace the octothorpe—speaking of snoots—in every tag with the phrase I love to fuck

Cynthia tries it the next day at work (from home) with #glutenfreepasta. She then looks up some British spellings of words only to discover she’s been spelling some of them the British way her whole life, including: travelling, cancelled, and licence. She contributes her own tiny subversive act: an inappropriate hyphen in teenage-eating disorders. No one notices. The clients have neither the time nor inclination to care or to mingle with their plebs. As for spelling and grammar, both met their deaths sometimes in the late 2010s. Cynthia scrimps until she’s saved a month’s expenses, then quits the madness.

Meanwhile.

Meanwhile, her boyfriend Dan is promoted to another department at his company, nearly doubling his income in a month, or—as he’s taken to saying—their income. He wants to look at houses again. The word marriage comes up on his end in a benevolent tone that Cynthia finds suspicious. Haven’t the two of them been arguing more often? Or is that only in her head? She considers the possibility that the phony effervescence of her past clients, and the vitriol in their feeds, are two extremes of behavior that have framed her own life as duller than it actually is. Is she finally approaching the moment when she can drop the Scoffs, that heavy chip on her family shoulder, and walk down the aisle, proverbially, if Dan favors another try at marriage?

Their union takes place at City Hall that summer. Sharon House sends them a fancy coffee maker, now that they’re in escrow. With a few forms, Cynthia Scoffs becomes Cynthia Allot—accent on the A. Now an urbanite, she moves with Dan into their new place in the city. They ditch their cars and upgrade their shoes, sunglasses, bags, and umbrellas. Slotting into the young mom look (though without child), Cynthia goes to a few auditions and lands a thirty-second spot for an insurance company. She plays the getaway driver for a bank heist. She wears a black wig with straight bangs. Her line is “Aren’t you glad we carpooled.” It’s one of those complicated commercials that make no sense, even if you’re paying attention. She is paid by direct deposit to Cynthia S. Allot, that S. an inside joke. She earns enough to cover a mortgage payment. That winter, she and Dan try for a child and she becomes pregnant too easily. Time gobbles time.

She visits E.R.s and medical waiting rooms again—this time with her baby, then toddler, then child—for checkups, inoculations, pink-eye, the deathly bark of croup, and a scare that requires a pediatric MRI scan but turns out to be nothing serious, except for the bill. She is working from home again, now. The sheer fatigue and all-consuming fog of motherhood and work turns her into an M without the ILF, though Dan’s disinterest (mostly a thank-god kind of disinterest) is because he’s working 70-hour weeks to make ends meet. In this untenable state, highly electrified with arguments and yet also stupefyingly dull, Cynthia expects to be soon visiting the waiting rooms of lawyers’ offices and alimony chasers. Divorce would be the voice of the universe enforcing a decree she tried to avoid: Once a Scoffs, always a Scoffs. In preparation, Cynthia finds herself making the awkward hyphenate visible, like an opening bud or a scar.

Enter the small graces: they begin sleeping through the night; there’s a lull in the barrage of weapons-grade viruses brought home from day care; a tax refund pays for a month’s groceries. She and Dan find time—fifteen minutes, perhaps as much as an hour on weekends—to be with their original audience of one, even if it’s simply for a mundane conversation. Their once-imagined future selves are given last rites and drift away.

On a Saturday afternoon when Dan is out buying potting soil, weed killer, and a new trellis, Cynthia lies on the cool of their bed in a half-nap, their new (old) dog twitching at her feet in its sleep. Her daughter is singing softly to herself from the other room. Cynthia can hear the purr of an airplane and the dry rub of passing cars. She closes her eyes and feels contentment brush against her. If eternity exists, she wishes it would part the fabric of time and space right now, right here, and allow her to linger in the endless this. Of course there is a loud thump in the other room followed by crying; and of course there is Dan at the door, having forgotten his keys, the dog howling; and of course there is the mound of laundry to work through; the refrigerator’s odor to investigate; the, the—an endlessness of thes. But the universe grants her a half-hour of eternity first, and Cynthia lies perfectly still, herself.