I had to laugh at how accurately he’d pegged me. “I have to start DJing again,” I told him.
“Can I have your number?” he asked, and to my surprise, I gave it to him.
He called me the next day.
Unlike my previous boyfriends, Peter always called when he said he would. During our first few dates, I put on my dizzy-girl-about-town act. I told him the having-sex-with-Adrian-makes-me-puke-and-cry story; I bragged about my DJing and my job at Rev and made myself sound like much more of a whirlwind than I actually was. Looking back, I think I was acting as loony as possible to test him: Caleb had always criticized me for being so dramatic, and I wanted Peter to get the full force of my drama to see how he would respond.
Peter was not turned off. Underneath that preppy exterior, we had a lot in common. He is also an only child, a late-in-life miracle baby. His parents had both been married before, and neither had children from those first, disastrous unions. Peter’s mom in particular was desperate to have a kid, and so when he emerged on her forty-second birthday, she was immediately obsessed with him.
Unlike me, though, Peter’s always been a golden boy: partial scholarship to Georgetown, secured a job as a junior analyst at a well-regarded financial firm by the fall of his senior year. I secretly think he’s always followed the straight and narrow path in part because he never wanted to let his mother down. His parents retired at sixty-two and live on Long Island. They watch Fox News for approximately 40 percent of their waking hours. They are nice to me in a distant sort of way, although I suspect that in my absence they refer to me as a socialist.
When Peter and I first started dating we would go to shows together, and we always stood near the front and held hands. But soon we found ourselves at home more often than not. Being with him was so soothing and felt so natural that I could really be myself, not some histrionic fool. I didn’t mind being a homebody when Peter was around. Sure, part of me was always going to be overwrought, but Peter accepted that as part of who I am, not as some terrible inconvenience to his lifestyle.
After Peter heads to work I get up to brush my teeth and see that it’s almost seven. “Shit,” I say aloud, and decide to ankle the teeth brushing. Instead I pour myself some coffee and dart back to the couch, flipping open my laptop. “Come on come on come on,” I chant under my breath when I get the spinning rainbow wheel. Moira is going to be furious.
Finally my MacBook comes to life. I immediately go on IM.
MoiraPoira (7:01:33): WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN??
Alex182 (7:01:35): I’m really sorry! I overslept.
MoiraPoira (7:01:44): Molly was the only one of you lot online on time this morning. So I gave her the first post of the day.
MoiraPoira (7:02:15): Sometimes I think she’s the only one of you girls who really cares about this job.
Alex182 (7:02:28): It won’t happen again.
MoiraPoira (7:03:12): It best not. I’ve sent you a bunch of links. Choose one and have something for me by 8:30. If you’re a minute late filing, Molly gets your next post slot.
Alex182 (7:03:34): Roger that.
Damn brown-nosing Molly. Of course she was there to pick up my slack. I know I really shouldn’t be mad at her—she’s just doing her job, and I’m the one who screwed up—but I’m furious. Since the traffic pressure started, Moira’s been emphasizing our constricted budget; she’s made it very clear that no one is going to get promoted unless someone else quits—or gets canned. It really feels like Molly is deliberately trying to make me look bad so she can squirm her way up the ladder.
My laptop feels extra hot against my bare legs and all I want to do is rinse the Coney Island grit off my body, but I need to churn out at least one post before I can move from the couch. I click through Moira’s links.
There’s a story about a high school in Tallahassee, Florida, where ten girls in the tenth-grade class are pregnant. We wrote about those knocked-up teenagers when the story first broke two weeks ago. A reporter named Marti Grimes at the Tallahassee Democrat had written an article on the “Tallahassee Ten,” and Tina had linked to the story and provided some clucking commentary about the pathetic state of sex education in some of our school districts.
The story was big news for a day or so but then receded. It generally takes the major news networks a week or two to pick up on these Internet firestorms, and so last night Diane Sawyer put on her best concerned expression and talked to some of those preggo fifteen-year-olds on ABC World News. I predict the Lifetime made-for-TV movie about the Tallahassee Ten will hit your cable listings in approximately six months.
I watch the clip online. “I’m pregnant, so what?” one of the girls asks the camera defiantly, her bulbous belly pushing out over the top of her too-tight jeans. “So was my mom when she was my age. And I turned out fine.”
Diane Sawyer cocks her head to the right, purses her lips, and says nothing.
I throw the clip up with a headline, “The Tallahassee Ten: ‘I’m Pregnant, So What?’” and manage to write two hundred desultory words describing Diane Sawyer’s immobile face and the pregnant girl’s churlish yet sort of inspiring attitude. Part of me admires her unwillingness to be shamed, even in the face of all that straining Botox.
Ten minutes later, the comments on the post are mixed. Most of them are about the sorry state of sex education in the Bible belt. A regular commenter with the handle Shananana says, “If only these girls had Depo shots this stuff would never happen.” The normally churlish Weathergrrrl is even supportive. “You should publish things like this more often.”
The room starts to seesaw right after I’ve read the first handful of comments, and I run to the bathroom, thinking that I might hurl.
I don’t puke, but I do spend several minutes lying with my face against the cool tile floor, trying to decide if I should go to Breaking the Chick Habit when I can force myself into an upright position again. I weigh the pros and cons. Pro: I won’t be able to stop thinking about what’s on the site until I actually see it for myself. Con: I will actually see it for myself. Pro: It might not be as bad as I fear. Con: It will be worse than I could ever imagine in my darkest self-loathing nadirs, confirming all the anxieties I have about myself as a person and a writer. Pro: Maybe they think I’m pretty!
I use what little arm strength I have left to lift myself off the floor and propel myself back to the couch. An IM from Rel is waiting for me there.
Wienerdog (9:07:15): Ugh I feel like shit
Alex182 (9:07:44): I know, dude. I want to die.
Wienerdog (9:07:49): This is the worst.
Alex182 (9:08:01) I KNOW! And that little sycophant Molly did the 8:30 post instead of me. She is so far up Moira’s ass I don’t even know how she can type.
Wienerdog (9:08:04): Word.
Alex182 (9:08:07): I still haven’t looked at Breaking the Chick Habit yet.
Wienerdog (9:08:11): Dude, that is ridiculous. Just look at the fucking thing already.
Alex182 (9:08:16): Are you sure?
Wienerdog (9:08:22): Yes. Sack up. It’s not actually a life or death situation.
This is the second time in two days that one of my coworkers has told me that I need to grow some cojones and deal. I tell myself four times: You are not a wuss you are not a wuss you are not a wuss you are not a wuss. I take a deep breath and type the URL into my browser.
I have to give our hate blogger credit for excellent design sense. She’s taken our Chick Habit logo—a baby chick held in a manicured hand—and realistically severed that li’l chicken’s head for her own logo. She also altered our site’s purple color palate ever so slightly so that Breaking the Chick Habit looks like an angry eggplant exploded all over it. I also notice the cleverness of the name: In acronym form, it spells BTCH.
The site hasn’t been updated since yesterday, so the first post at the top of the screen is still “Top 5 Things Alex Lyons Should Do Instead of Writing in Public.” It’s written in the manner of a Letterman Top Ten and lists
, in descending order, occupations that would apparently better suit me:
5. Cleaning toilets. She thinks her shit doesn’t stink, so other people’s shit probably won’t bother her either.
4. Hospital orderly. She’s quite familiar with bile already.
3. Nursery school aide. Fits her maturity level to hang around with toddlers.
2. Garbage collector. She’s used to producing trash so picking it up won’t be too much of a stretch.
1. Kill herself. That’s not really an occupation, it’s a one-off job.
I’m so shaken by this—especially the last one—that I have to get up and pace around the ten square feet of the living room. I guess my Internet nemesis stopped at five, rather than doing the full ten, because once you suggest someone should kill herself there’s really nowhere else to go. For each number on the list, the hate blogger has hyperlinked to one of my posts. If you click on “Kill herself” it goes to a particularly judgmental post I wrote about women who live-tweet their own weddings. “About to walk down the aisle!” DashingDiva79 had tweeted last month. “About to stick my head in the oven!” I had blithely written about her up-to-the-minute marriage coverage.
When I had written that post, I chuckled to myself—but I also wondered if I had crossed the line. I had used DashingDiva79’s real name in the post—Ashley Smathers—and now when you Google her, my petty post is the first thing that shows up.
I click through the other links. I’ve posted over a thousand times since I started this job, and yet this anonymous blogger has somehow zeroed in on the five posts that I’ve felt most conflicted about. I continue to pace. Should I call Peter? Cry on the phone to my mom? IM my fury to Rel? I thought the site would be upsetting, but I hoped it would be something I could laugh off. This isn’t funny at all.
But rather than take some kind of action, I am compelled instead to devour the entire website in one sitting. It’s only been around for a month (how did it take us so long to find it?) so the archives aren’t too deep—it’s averaging about a post a day. The post preceding the one about me is the one that calls Rel racist. “The stereotypes she perpetuates about people of color are so awful,” our hate blogger wrote, “I can’t believe that Tina agrees to work with her.” But then she adds, “Too bad Tina’s too dumb to protest.”
I even make myself watch the infamous Causing Treble performance, which was posted last week, without comment. The earnestness in my little face as I head-bang to the extended bridge in “Bohemian Rhapsody” is nearly heartbreaking. I move on quickly to the photo of Tina from high school (it’s not that bad) and see that the hate blogger has also posted an anonymous e-mail from one of Tina’s ex-coworkers. Before Tina was a freelance stylist, she worked under Rosie Stevenson, one of the most famous stylists in the fashion business. You might know her from her little-seen reality show, Ro’s Guide to Style. “When she first started working here, Tina thought that French-tipped manicures were cutting-edge. I don’t know if you can sue someone for intellectual theft for stealing your style, but Ro should lawyer up.”
I see the posts shaming Rel for her drug-laced past and a couple more about specific things we’ve written. (Our blogger does not take kindly to our blanket coverage of every Real Housewives iteration—“These are not the kinds of women the Chickies should be promoting with their considerable platform.”) And then I see something that makes me take a sharp breath.
It’s a scanned-in clipping of a Connecticut newspaper story from 1992. The article is about the local reaction to brand-new first lady Hillary Clinton. It has a photograph of me, along with a quote: “I love Hillary Clinton. I think it is super neat that she is out being a lawyer and not home baking cookies.”
I was obviously parroting back something I overheard my notoriously non-cookie-baking mother say. I recall her gathering her fellow teachers in our living room to make phone calls on behalf of Bill. I helped her seal envelopes asking for campaign donations because, always the teacher, she wanted me to learn about civic involvement. I remember watching her dark hair shine under our kitchen lamp as she stayed up late decorating placards. Whatever I feel about everything that Hillary has gone through in the intervening twenty years—and I have a lot of feelings about that one—that has remained a fond and private memory of a special time spent with my mom.
Until now.
The headline on that post is simply “How Did This Bright Little Girl Become Such a Raging Bitch?”
It’s a mindfuck to see a photograph of your vulnerable small self on the Internet, posted for the purpose of making you feel like a jerk. Furthermore, it’s immediately clear to me that our hate blogger is someone who knows me personally. There’s no other explanation for why she would have included such a seemingly random image—or how she would have found it.
I start trying to catalogue all the people I may have wronged in the past twenty-five years. Maybe it was that girl in college whose boyfriend I made out with on my twenty-first birthday. Or that guy who always hated me because I beat him in high school debate.
I’m on the verge of a sweaty panic attack when I realize that the little IM bar I’ve minimized is blinking angrily in the lower left-hand corner of my laptop screen. Moira. Shit.
MoiraPoira (11:45:01): Where are you?
MoiraPoira (11:46:32): Hello?
MoiraPoira (12:01:04): It’s almost the end of the month and let’s just say your traffic numbers are not what they should be. Molly is eager to write on Selena Gomez pole dancing if you’re not up to the challenge of posting today.
Alex182 (12:02:56): I’m really sorry. I’m just not feeling very well. I’ll get something good for you right away.
Before Moira’s traffic admonition, I had considered telling her about our prolific little hater. Chick Habit is her baby, after all, so she’d probably want to do something about the site. But I’m now so nervous about finding a blockbuster post that I’m no longer in the mood to confess to Moira. She’d probably just admonish me for being a pussy and say something about needing a stiff upper lip if I want to succeed at this job. So instead I shove my concerns about BTCH down into the bottom of my churning stomach. I need to find something to write about before I can run out to the bodega and get the world’s greatest hangover remedy—bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll.
I have bacon on the brain as I refresh refresh refresh my RSS feed. Nothing doing. I scroll down through Twitter to see if anyone is talking about anything post-worthy. All anyone seems to be discussing is a new Lady Gaga single, which Rel already posted about two hours ago. I turn to my Facebook wall—this is a last resort. Peter’s mom has just posted photos from her bridge club’s road trip to Fort Ticonderoga. There’s a post from Jay, my sincere med student friend from college, who “likes” a story from the Times about the rising costs of health care in America. I also see that some super-lefty girl—I think from college, but I don’t recognize her name—has posted a similarly useless article about the secret links between BP oil and American Apparel, or BP oil and Whole Foods, or BP oil and puppies. I don’t bother clicking through to find out which it is.
Since nothing good is popping up, I decide to stall a bit by posting a quick link to a study that shows if you loved chocolate as a kid you will be more likely to be an alcoholic as an adult. You know, because of science. I file to Moira in a mere ten minutes. I realize I haven’t IMed with Tina yet today, and so I decided to message her.
Alex182 (12:13:04): Hey! I finally looked at the hate site. They’re pretty harsh, but I think that pic of you from high school is kind of cute :)
TheSevAbides (12:13:38): It’s not.
Alex182 (12:13:44): Well compared to the other crap on there it’s pretty mild.
TheSevAbides (12:14:25): I guess.
TheSevAbides (12:14:39): By the way, why did you post about the Tallahassee Ten?
Alex182 (12:15:11): I thought the video was good and I had an angle on it.
TheSevAbides (12:15:42): That was my story. I posted on it before.
Alex182 (12:16:18): Sorry. I didn’t mean to step on your toes.
TheSevAbides (12:17:32): This isn’t the first time this has happened. You should watch yourself.
Shit. The last thing I wanted to do was piss Tina off after our breakthrough last night. I try to change the subject back to BTCH.
Alex182 (12:18:20): I’m really sorry. It won’t happen again.
Alex182 (12:18:25): Did you find out any of that IP stuff yet?
TheSevAbides (12:20:29): I’m actually super busy right now.
Alex182 (12:21:39): Sorry. Talk later.
Tina’s coldness and Moira’s pressure and BTCH are all adding up to an oppressive weight perched on top of my chest, and I begin to feel like I might vomit. Again.
Prettyinpink86 (12:23:19): Do you need me to help you with anything? Moira says you’re having a rough time today ;)
I want to say to Molly, You shove that winky-face emoticon where the sun don’t shine. Instead I type:
Alex182 (12:24:22): I’m fine, thanks for asking. I don’t need any help.
What I do need is to satisfy my bacon jones. I’ll feel less crazy if I eat something, I figure, since I haven’t had anything to eat since my salad of the day before. And so I run across the street, clutching my iPhone.
The air inside the bodega is cool and calming. It smells like a combination of Café Bustelo and the slightly wilted dahlias sitting in buckets near the register. I am the only customer in the store, save for the deli cat that is lazily stretching in his oval bed. Manuel makes me the platonic ideal of a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich: The egg is fluffy and glistening with oil; the bacon is freshly cooked, its fatty edges still extant; the cheese is that gorgeous neon orange color. I watch as it melts evenly into a thin layer of film over the egg. He even toasts the bun, which is not hard and stale but soft and pliable—I can see how pliable—in his large, latex-covered hands. I watch, nearly drooling, as he wraps the sandwich in wax paper and then again in tinfoil, then sticks it, along with about forty-five napkins, more napkins than any one girl could need, into a plastic bag. He hands the bag over to the counterman and smiles at me.
Sad Desk Salad Page 5