Fourth Comings

by Megan Mccafferty

  “Auntie J? Just out of curiationosity…”

  “Curiosity.”

  “Cure-ee-oss-oh-tee. That’s what I said. Anyway, has anyone ever tried to make a doll that totally knows you and talks and plays like a real sister but you can turn her off when she gets annoying?”

  “Like a robot?”

  “Yeah! Like a robot sister doll.”

  “I think something like that has been invented. But that shows you what an awesome idea it was….”

  “Darn it. Grown-ups get to do everything first.”

  “You’ll be a grown-up someday.”

  “Who cares? By the time I’m a grown-up, everything will already be done already!”

  “Marin, I totally know what you mean.”

  twenty-eight

  I’m aware that the preceding oh-so-twee exchange with Marin is nothing special, the fodder of a bizillion blogging mommies trying to out Dooce one another with tales of their precious, precocious spawn. Or worse, something straight out of the cornball Metropolitan Diary in the New York Times. But such conversations are meaningful to me, if only because I never expected them to mean so much. I love Marin, and value all the time we’ve spent together. She has single-handedly restored the term “awesome” to its fundamental awesomeness, and back from the meaninglessness of mundane misappropriation.

  That said…

  I’M SO RELIEVED THAT I HAVE A JOB INTERVIEW TOMORROW.

  Seriously, after eight months of sponging off my sister, I’ve absorbed about as much guilt as I can handle. I’d hoped that moving out of her place and living on my own would help me feel less like a deadbeat and more like a sister again. This was an idiotic notion. How independent can I feel when Bethany’s exorbitant babysitting wages are the only thing keeping me doggy-paddling above the poverty line? I’m embarrassed for myself every Friday afternoon when I accept a check in the amount of three hundred dollars for ten hours of playing with my niece. This is twice the going rate (fifteen dollars) for babysitting services. And it’s almost one and a half times more than my hourly wage (eighteen dollars) at my “real job.”

  I can’t help but use quotations. It feels like a fake job, one I can explain using terms of negation: I’m (minimally) paid for my (quasi) employment at a (micro) magazine with a (barely-there) audience. I am virtually employed in every sense of the word. I don’t commute. I don’t have a cubicle. I don’t have coworkers, which means no office rival to bitch about, no commiserating underling to gossip with, no clueless coworker on the other side of the divide who blasts his iPod too loud, no secretary with Dilbert clippings and I DON’T DO PERKY coffee mugs. It also means no coffee breaks or water-cooler conversation about last night’s episode of, uh, The Office. No staff meetings. No performance reviews. No punching in late or punching out early. There’s scarcely any evidence that I’m actually employed by Think magazine other than the assignments messengered to my apartment, the weekly time sheets I fill out and turn in after messengering back said assignments, and bimonthly paychecks for completing them to my editors’ approval.

  Because you displayed a decidedly European indifference to my job, I will now answer all the questions you never asked about it. Every day I get an electronic message (or several) telling me what needs to be done: journals to be read, articles to be fact-checked, taped interviews to be transcribed. I’ve never met any of my fellow editors, and I’ve only spoken to my top editor once on the phone. I don’t even think of him as a real person, Robert Stevens, editor in chief. To me he’s an e-mail address: r_stevens@thinkpub.com. And I’m pretty sure they don’t want to put a real human face to my in-box either, otherwise they might feel more guilty about not hiring me full-time. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if I am part of a grand experiment, the lab rat in someone’s postdoctoral thesis, “To Commit or Bullshit? A Case Study in Employee Loyalty and Productivity in an Imaginary Workplace.”

  The worst part about it? I actually like what I do. Think mixes reprints of journal articles and research abstracts with original essays and interviews. Since winning the National Magazine Award for general excellence in the small-circulation category a few years ago, it has had no shortage of A-list contributors. The other day I spent four hours painstakingly transcribing a ten-minute conversation between Bono and Bill Gates about the psychology of philanthropy. It’s my job to geek out on the readings and research that I used to follow as a hobby. Isn’t this the goal for any worker? To be paid for what one would do for free? I would happily take a full-time position as the lowest of the low on the masthead, if such a position were available. But it’s not.

  Prestige doesn’t equal profits. I mean, we’re not talking Condé Nast or Hearst here, or even Time Inc. or Hachette Filipacchi. This is Plato Publishing, which specializes in niche periodicals that are hybrids of commercial magazines and academic journals. In addition to Think (“Pop Psychology for Smart People”), there’s Bio (“Every Cell Has a Story”), Theory (“Where Your Guess Is as Good as Ours”), and a few others. Since Think’s target circulation is less than fifty thousand, I can hardly blame my quasi-employer for the budgetary constraints. There aren’t enough laypeople interested in subscribing to a publication that proudly compares itself to Utne Reader and Psychology Today. Think’s tagline should be revised to “Deep Thoughts, Shallow Pockets.”

  Think hires freelancers like me to do the work of an editorial assistant so the company doesn’t have to provide 401(k) plans or medical insurance. And though I could easily work eight hours a day, I can only bill a maximum of twenty hours a week because that’s all the budget allows. This isn’t enough to live on without the supplementary income from my sister. Thus, tomorrow’s job interview. It promises $32,000 a year with benefits, which might be enough to take me off Bethany’s payroll if all my meals come from a can. (More on this later.)

  I don’t know why I’m so ashamed about accepting my sister’s money. I can only count one true trust funder among my circle of friends. (Author-turned-activist Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace is rumored to have inherited roughly fifty million dollars when her dad died earlier this year. Imagine the payout if he hadn’t split when she was four, or sired ten half siblings with his next three wives?) Yet nearly everyone I know who is not in the financial sector—and certainly all of us living in Sammy—are or have been subsidized by a munificent patron of the arts.

  Hope has an ancient benefactress from her Tennessee hometown, whom she refers to as the “Sugar Grandmama.” Manda’s parents paid her college bill, so she can sort of afford to put herself into debt for grad school. I have Bethany, of course, and if Gladdie hadn’t left me $50,000 when she died, I would now be in that much deeper to that hillbilly bitch Sallie Mae who bills me $437.25 a month …just on the interest. One simply can’t pursue a vaguely creative career in this prohibitively expensive city unless you’re independently wealthy or your life has been generously underwritten.

  (I know, I know. Then why live here? Why live in a city that is systematically designed to undermine happiness and prosperity? Why not come to the land of peace, quiet, and opportunity, colloquially known as the borough of princes? Why not come to the place where my true love resides…?)

  Maybe I would feel more okay about accepting Bethany’s money if she had earned it herself and wasn’t married to half the mastermind behind the Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe/Papa D’s Donuts empire. I once made the mistake of referring to their money as Grant’s money and she didn’t talk to me for several weeks. I know better than to say it twice, even though I think it all the time. And yet Bethany must be aware of the awkwardness of our current patron/pauper relationship. She must know that if it weren’t for her generosity, I’d be maxing out my credit card on ramen and stealing rolls of toilet paper from public restrooms.

  Or (shudder!) living in Pineville with my parents.

  Lately she has repeatedly tried to persuade me to join the family business—a more legitimate and less humiliating form of handout. Her recruiting went a little too far
last time, when she basically asked me to be a corporate whore for her hubby’s empire. And I mean that as figuratively as figurative can go before it turns literal.

  twenty-nine

  “Try this on,” Bethany said, without further explanation.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s adorable, that’s what it is.”

  It was a tiny T-shirt with two lip-smacking rainbow-sprinkled donuts encircling each breast.

  “DONUT HO’?”

  “It’s a play on words!” Bethany offered unnecessarily. “We’ll debut the new uniform with the launch of Papa D’s newest treat….” Shegrandly gestured at the plate set before us, on which there was an assortment of glazed, chocolate dipped, and sprinkled treats, the kind that PapaD’s most famous competitor has copyrighted as Munchkins. “DONUTHO’s! Get it?”

  I got it, all right. I got that I wouldn’t have to perform the sort of sordid acts that my XXX namesake, Jessica Darling the porn star, is famous for. But I would be expected to wear a uniform that hints that I just might perform such acts if the price was right.

  “I don’t see what the T-shirt has to do with me. You told me Grantwanted me for a job in marketing…or something.”

  “Junior Vice President of Branding.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Grant needs bright, attractive women like you to tour target cities like Atlantic City, Vegas, Reno, maybe Los Angeles….”

  “Wearing this?” I asked.

  “Well, of course. We need you to meet with potential investors. We’re trying to penetrate an untapped market….”

  “In this T-shirt, the untapped market will want to penetrate me.”

  “Of course,” Bethany replied, not getting the joke. “This is a chance to see major growth in new regions….”

  “Major growth in the nether regions.

  ” Then I let her finish for the next five minutes, during which I learned that Grant and Wally D’Abruzzi had even been bestowed the honor of “Best New Franchisers” in Capitalist magazine, with new Shoppes opening up all over the country, including some in the unchartered territories of the South and Midwest. And yet there was always room for improvement. Apparently, Papa D’s Donuts “exceeded sales projections” in the suburbs. It merely “met projections” in the exurbs. But it “underperformed” in urban areas. My brother-in-law was always looking for new ways to bump himself up to the top 99.99 percent of earners from his current 99.9 percent position, so this underperforming just wouldn’t do.

  It was a vexing question: How could he increase customer traffic in the urban areas, where one could get coffee and handheld carbohydrates on just about any block? The solution, according to my brother-in-law and my sister, was simple: sex.

  “Why do guys go to Hooters?” Bethany asked.

  “Hot wings, hot chicks.”

  “Exactly!”

  “So…pastries and prostitutes?”

  “We won’t employ prostitutes,” Bethany said matter-of-factly.

  “You’ll employ girls to look like prostitutes….”

  “And provide peerless customer service,” my sister added.

  “A lap dance with every latte!” I volunteered mock helpfully.

  “Hmm.” Bethany pensively tapped her manicure on the countertop. “I think it would violate the city’s cabaret laws….”

  She was still dead serious. This reveals an elemental cause of all our miscommunication. I am fluent in snark. Bethany only notices snark when snark grabs her off the sidewalk, throws her in the back of a sketchy van with tinted windows, drives to the middle of the Meadow-lands in the dead of night, and uses a heavy blunt instrument to smack her repeatedly about the head as it screams, “I’M SNARK. DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME? I’M SNARKY SNARKY SNARK!” And even then she’s like, “Ohhhh? Snark? Is that you?”

  “Bagel and a blow job,” I continued in my gleefully facetious vein.

  “We don’t sell bagels,” she said, ignoring my comment because the only thing my sister lacks more than a snark detector is a sense of humor. “Anyway, this is not a customer service position. You wouldn’t be selling the donuts. You’d be selling a lifestyle as a paid representative of the Wally D’s/Papa D’s Retailtainment Corporation on the franchise level….”

  “If we’re working off of the Hooters model, would I pair my DONUT HO’ T-shirt with a pair of shorts?”

  “Any ideas are welcome. Grant is always looking for ways to grow our business. He appreciates the brainstorming process….”

  Yes, he appreciates the give-and-take exchange of ideas so much that he couldn’t even be bothered to meet with me in person.

  “Ooh! Ooh! I’ve got it!” I said, wildly waving my hand in the air. “A pair of silver short-short-short-shorts…”

  “Okay…”

  “I mean reeeeeaallly short,” I said. “So short that you’ll have to consider providing medical benefits that cover, you know, certain female infections.” I whispered these last two words. “Shorts like these don’t exactly, you know, breathe….”

  “Great…,” Bethany said, losing interest.

  “So picture a handprint on each butt cheek….” I smacked my own ass stripper-style—SSSSSLAP! SSSSSLAP!—to emphasize my point.

  “I’m picturing it….”

  “And in pink script: ‘HOT-N-STICKY BUNS.’”

  “‘HOT-N-STICKY BUNS,’” Bethany repeated to herself, trying it out.

  “Think about how Playboy has marketed its image to the masses,” I said. “DONUT HO’ T-shirts. HOT-N-STICKY BUNS trucker caps. DONUT HO’ lunch boxes. HOT-N-STICKY BUNS onesies…”

  “I love it!” Bethany said, cheeks flushed. “See? You’re perfect for this job.”

  “Bethany,” I said, my voice calm. “I’m joking. This whole thing is a joke.”

  “Of course you’re joking! We’re all joking! It’s tongue-in-cheek!”

  “It’s certainly tongue-in -something….”

  “DONUT HO’. HOT-N-STICKY BUNS. It’s all fun and sexy.”

  “It’s sex ist, Bethany, not sexy.”

  Bethany set her still-steaming mug of chai tea on her gray marble coaster that was protecting her white marble countertop.

  “If a guy wants to pay double for a donut served by a hottie in a DONUT HO’ T-shirt and short shorts, then why shouldn’t we profit from it?” she asked. “What’s so wrong about a woman using her feminine wiles for capital gain? This is a pro-female promotional campaign!”

  This was a secondhand argument Bethany was making. I’m sure it was first made by her husband to gird himself for the inevitable protests from Christians and Friedan-model feminists and whoever else hasn’t had much to do lately since Howard Stern went satellite. And what better person to take this perverse pro-feminist argument public than a flat-chested corporate figurehead with a newly minted Ivy League degree? G-Money was an evil genius. He deserved every penny he had ever earned.

  I couldn’t expect someone like my sister to understand why the DONUT HO’ promotion was just another pathetic example of “feminism” gone wrong. She has soared, swooped, and glided through life on the gilded wings of her golden good looks. I mean, it’s one thing to be a MILF and have other people refer to you as such in private. “Now there’s a mom I’d like to fuck.” But it is quite another to unapologetically and unironically refer to yourself and your circle of friends as MILFs, as my sister and her friends do.

  I would love to lecture her on how embracing the porn aesthetic doesn’t liberate women, it only validates men’s right to objectify us. And objectification is objectification, even if the woman profits from it, and especially so if the profits come in the form of wads of bills stuffed into teeny G-strings. How is our gender ever going to be taken seriously if the tacit promise to give head is the easiest way to get ahead…?

  (Oh my. I do sound like Manda. I’ll just stop right here.)

  thirty

  What could be so bad about attending an end-of-summer barbecue in a beautifully cultivated garden
atop one of the most envied brown-stones in Brooklyn Heights?

  Ask the hostess. Bethany hates throwing parties. Oh, she’ll deny it. But she hates it. Whereas our mom totally gets off on being the sole person responsible for conceiving and executing her fabulous backyard-on-the-waterfront affairs, my sister totally freaks out, even when she hires professionals for all the traditional party-hostess duties (cooking, serving, cleaning, bartending, etc.) short of greeting her guests at the door.

  True to form, my sister met me in full Stepford-on-meth mode.

  “Jessie! You’re here! You’re twenty minutes late! I thought you’d never arrive! The MILFs are all here!”

  (See? I wasn’t kidding about that MILFs thing.)

  The MILFs came together through their husbands, all of whom met G-Money in business school or shortly thereafter while working as tireless young turks on Wall Street during the get-rich-quick tech boom of the late nineties. The threesome invited today had all wisely invested in Wally D’s/Papa D’s Retailtainment Corp. and were now enjoying their good fortune. The husbands spent the afternoon cavemanning the ten-thousand-dollar grill, marveling at the flames (“Ugga. Ugga. FIRE.”) and attacking large chunks of charred flesh with titanium spears (“Ugga. Ugga. MEAT.”).

  Their wives were huddled together, wineglasses in hand, gossiping in bemused, beleaguered tones about their spouses’ Cro-Magnon display, conspicuously similar in an Atkins-thin and Blandi-blond kind of way. They were all simply yet expensively dressed. Their body-skimming luxe T-shirts were paired with linen gauchos or swingy, silk twill circle skirts. They wore leather thongs or ballet flats on their pedicured feet. They never over-accessorize. Perhaps a pair of silver hoop earrings, a beaded necklace, a jade bangle bracelet. Each knows that her ostrich-egg-sized engagement diamond is all the bling any tasteful woman needs.

  (I had slipped your handmade ring off my finger and into my front pocket. I had learned from Bridget that it would be noticed, and I didn’t want to have that discussion in front of them.)