Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  Gilda licked a crumb from her finger, then settled back in her chair. “That was delicious,” she called over her shoulder to Becky. “Grossly overpriced but delicious.”

  “Money is money,” Becky said in a la-di-da voice, obviously mocking Gilda’s claim that flour was flour and sugar was sugar. Gilda was Becky’s mother. If Loretta’s mother thought she wasn’t always as respectful as she could be, she ought to see Gilda and Becky go at it.

  In her mid-fifties, Gilda was a firm, slate-haired woman with a fetish for elaborate earrings. Everyone on the team deferred to her not because of her parental link to their boss but because she was focused and shrewd. She was probably aware that Loretta, Kate, and Bob weren’t particularly fond of her daughter. It didn’t matter. All that mattered to Gilda was putting together successful shows. “Since you’re still here,” Gilda addressed her daughter dryly, “I assume it’s because you have something to discuss with us.”

  “I do.” Becky languorously rose from the sofa and approached the table.

  “Wait a minute,” Bob said. He took enormous joy in twitting Becky, acting as if she wasn’t as important as she believed she was. Actually, Loretta wasn’t sure exactly how important Becky was. In one sense, she was just the public face of her show. The team created each broadcast, put words in her mouth, made the whole thing possible. On the other hand, the show was called the Becky Blake Show. Without her, it would have to be called something else.

  “I want to hear about Loretta’s birthday presents,” Bob said.

  Loretta shot him a quelling look. She didn’t want to discuss her presents.

  “Yeah,” Kate chimed in. “What did you get? Anything exciting?”

  “Some books and a charm bracelet,” Loretta muttered.

  Bob pounced. “A charm bracelet! How adorable! I didn’t know you needed a bracelet, Loretta, but you could always use a little charm.”

  Loretta scowled. “Let’s not waste Becky’s time, okay?” She turned to Becky, trying to look eager. Bob made a kissing noise, quiet enough that only Loretta could hear. She swatted at him with her hand.

  Becky stood at the table—since it was round, it had no head, but her position between her mother and Kate automatically became a head of sorts. Petite and impeccable, Becky was the personification of pastel: pink suit, blond hair, a lavender-tinted lipstick and pale blue eye shadow. Pastels might be innocuous, but the woman wearing them was not. Beneath her porcelain skin ran bitchy red blood.

  “We have a problem, people,” she announced. By we, she clearly meant that the production team had a problem.

  Loretta glanced at Gilda. Her face gave nothing away. Apparently, Becky hadn’t given her mother a preview of this talk.

  “Our ratings are down,” Becky said. “We’re in the Valley of Despond, rating-wise.” This wasn’t news; the team had discussed the drop in viewership. The ratings slump had affected other talk shows, too. Online, on-demand, streaming services, and such basic things as jobs and obligations were keeping people from tuning into daytime junk shows.

  “The syndication company believes people don’t want scuzzy shows anymore. Harold wants us to do kinder, gentler shows.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Loretta said. It didn’t matter how benign the era was. When people turned on the Becky Blake Show, they weren’t looking for moral uplift.

  Bob shook his head. “I thought we’d really hit a creative zenith with our ‘I seduced my husband’s gay lover’ show. Or maybe with ‘Pet affection—when does it cross the line?’ Remember that woman who got turned on by biting her cocker spaniel’s ears?”

  Loretta’s favorite recent show had dealt with a dentist who liked to fondle his female patients’ feet when they were high on nitrous oxide. She’d almost phoned her parents and brothers and urged them to watch it, but a self-preservation instinct had kicked in. Since none of them ever mentioned the show, she assumed they’d missed it.

  “Kinder, gentler,” Becky repeated. “We don’t have to avoid controversy, but Harold wants us to reduce the scuzz factor.”

  “The scuzz factor?” Kate asked, reaching for the empty cake plate and searching it for traces of chocolate.

  “Those were his exact words,” Becky told her.

  “Fine,” Gilda said, jotting something in her notebook. “Kinder, gentler. We can do that.” Given her seniority and her bloodline, she usually had the final word, at least when Becky was in the room.

  “There’s more,” Becky warned, leaning forward and pressing her dainty fists against the table. She couldn’t look threatening if she tried. She was five-one and size 0, a detail she often mentioned to the people she worked with. But Loretta and her colleagues knew better than to put any faith in Becky’s appearance. If her desire was to scare them, their best recourse would be to tremble a little, just to keep her happy.

  “The lower ratings mean lower ad rates, which mean lower income for the show and blah-blah-blah.”

  “In other words?” Bob pressed her. He didn’t sound at all concerned, which Loretta considered more foolhardy than courageous.

  “In other words, it’s time to tighten belts.”

  “No raises,” he summed up. “Oh, well. I guess I’ll have to lay off the eight-dollars-an-ounce cake for a while.”

  “Lay-off is right,” Becky said, her voice chilly and her smile oddly smug. “We’re going to have to reduce this staff by one.”

  “This staff?” Gilda exclaimed. “The production team?”

  “Why don’t you lay off Wally?” Kate suggested. Wally was the guy who warmed the audience up before the show. He’d point out the “applause” signs and the “laughter” signs, demonstrate his hand signals—“When I flap my arms like a rabid pigeon, it means react!” —and tell a few drastically unfunny jokes: “You hear about the fellow running for office right here in New York City? His name is Dreams Come True. I hope he wins, so we can call him ‘Mayor Dreams Come True.’” This joke was invariably followed by a great flapping of his arms, so the audience would know they were supposed to react.

  “Harold is evaluating other departments,” Becky assured them, looking even smugger. She actually seemed to relish the prospect of giving a member of the team the boot. “But as of right now, the odds are one of you is going to have to be let go. I feel terrible about this,” she concluded with a smile bright enough to illuminate the Lincoln Tunnel at midnight. “I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime—” she waltzed toward the door “—remember. Kinder, gentler.” With that, she was gone.

  Silence filled the room like a cold, damp fog. Loretta felt the final bite of her birthday treat rise back up into her throat and coagulate, making her want to gag.

  She was going to be the one laid off. She knew it.

  Gilda was Becky’s mother, and no matter how contentious their relationship was, Loretta couldn’t believe Becky was nasty enough to fire her own mother. Kate had the most experience in television, having written for a children’s show on PBS and a Sunday morning shouting-pundits show before deciding to lower her standards and double her salary by working for Becky. Besides, she was the token black on the production staff. Bob was the token man. If they got laid off, they could charge discrimination.

  But Loretta had no protection, no distinction, no tokens. Nothing to pull her clear of the ax’s downward arc. Her first job out of college had been answering fan mail for a network anchorman. With a degree in English, she hadn’t been particularly qualified to do anything, but she could write a damned good letter. After a year, she’d taken a secretarial position at the syndication company, and then one day Becky had plucked her from her desk and hired her to be a personal assistant. When it became clear that Loretta wasn’t subservient enough for Becky’s tastes, she’d been moved over to production, and she’d done an excellent job there. She’d come up with some of the show’s best concepts: a regular feature called “Wedding Bell Blues” that focused on disastrous weddings, and the makeover shows—she
was quite good at getting plastic surgery patients to appear on the show, and given her “medical background,” as Becky referred to the D’Angelo family trade, she was also adept at getting rhinoplasty and breast-enhancement specialists to discuss their work on camera. And she’d put together the show on the foot fetishes of dentists, which had scored quite high in the ratings.

  Still, she had less protection in this job than the others. She was neither a mother, an African-American, nor a man.

  “We’re in deep shit,” Bob announced.

  “What do you mean, we?” Kate sighed loudly over the barren plate. “You guys are safe. She’s going to fire me.”

  “Why would she fire you?” Loretta asked. “You’ve got such great credentials, such outstanding TV experience. You’ve put words in Big Bird’s mouth.”

  “Like Becky gives a flying fuck about that. Sorry, Gilda—”

  “Don’t apologize to me,” Gilda snapped. “She’s probably going to fire me, just to get me back for all the times I grounded her in high school.”

  “Did you ground her a lot?” Bob asked, his eyebrows twitching with curiosity.

  “No more than she deserved.” Gilda shrugged. “So now she’ll get her revenge. If I’m laid off, of course, her father is going to have to start paying me alimony again. He won’t like that.”

  “He’ll probably pressure her to keep you on,” Kate pointed out. “You’re safe, Gilda.”

  “I’m the one who’ll go,” Loretta declared glumly. “I’ve got the least seniority.”

  “Becky likes you the best,” Kate told her. “You used to be her personal assistant.”

  “She moved me over here because she hated the job I did as her personal assistant.”

  “Are you kidding? You lasted longer as her personal assistant than anyone else. Most of them she chewed up and spat out. You, she gave a promotion to. You’re golden, Loretta. You think she would have spent eight dollars an ounce on a birthday cake for you if she didn’t like you?”

  “Four dollars. That piece of cake couldn’t have been more than half an ounce. And she probably gave it to me only to mislead me.”

  “She’ll fire me,” Bob predicted, “because I refused to sleep with her.”

  That shut them all up for a moment. Then Gilda opened her binder and said, “Until one of us gets fired—assuming Becky is serious about that—we’ve got shows to put together. And she wants kinder, gentler ideas. Does anyone have any?”

  “I have a great idea for a show,” Loretta said, shoving an errant lock of hair back from her face. “At least, it was a great idea yesterday. Today, I’m not so sure. It might not be kind and gentle enough.” Everyone turned expectantly to her. “Obnoxious cell phone users,” she said.

  “What about them?” Kate asked.

  “How we respond to them. How heroes among us are reclaiming the environment from the cell phone users.” She recalled the man seated across from her on the train to New York City last night, and assured herself she was less excited by his bedroom eyes and wry wit than by the concept for the show. “There was this idiot cell phone user on the Long Island Railroad yesterday,” she explained.. “She was babbling on and on in a crystal-shattering voice, repeating herself, and suddenly the man sitting next to her—a total stranger—grabbed her phone and disconnected her caller. It was a true Zen moment.”

  “Did people on the train stand and cheer for him?” Bob asked.

  “No—but I’m sure they would have, if they’d been aware of how obnoxious the cell phone user was.”

  “If they weren’t aware, maybe she wasn’t that obnoxious.”

  “She was. I think people might not have realized that he was the one who’d shut her up. He was subtle about it. That was part of his magic. He silenced her without humiliating her.”

  “So, you’re saying what?” Gilda grilled her. “His classiness was what made the deed impressive?”

  “We don’t do shows about classy people,” Bob pointed out.

  “If we’ve got to go kinder-gentler, perhaps that needs to change,” Gilda argued.

  “I’m not saying we should do a show about him,” Loretta said. “I mean, yeah, he could be included in the show. But I’ll bet there are people who’ve tackled cell phone users in grocery stores. People who’ve grabbed someone’s cell phone and thrown it through a window.” Her train hero had considered that option, she recalled. “And then we could have some cell phone partisans up on stage, too, people who can’t imagine how the world functioned before cell phones were invented. People who hate cell phone vigilantes. It could turn into a terrific fight.”

  Gilda, Kate and Bob exchanged looks. Gilda wrote something in her binder. “They’d have to fight kindly and gently.”

  “We could have a police officer who describes a car accident caused by careless cell phone use,” Loretta suggested, pushing her concept further. “And a doctor who was able to save a life thanks to his cell phone. The show would leave people thinking instead of hyperventilating. There’s nothing scuzzy about a doctor saving a life with his cell phone”

  “I’m writing it down,” Gilda said. “It needs tweaking, but maybe we can go somewhere with it. Do you know who this man is, the fellow on the train?”

  “He didn’t tell me his name,” she admitted, “but I gave him my card.”

  “So, if he doesn’t get in touch with you, you’d have to find other cell phone vigilantes for the show.”

  Loretta regretted this. She would have loved to have the show include her cell phone vigilante; he’d seemed awfully telegenic. But she had no way of reaching him. He’d had the opportunity to introduce himself when she’d given him her card, but he’d never mentioned his name. And she’d been demoralized enough by her birthday barbecue that she hadn’t thought to ask him.

  “I’m sure we could find plenty of cell phone vigilantes to come on as guests,” she said. “We can broadcast an invitation.” They often aired invitations to appear on the show just before the commercial breaks: Are you sick and tired of people using cell phones in public places or behind the wheels of cars? Give us a call. Some of the show’s most entertaining guests had answered on-the-air invitations. “Or we can find people on the streets. Cell phone users are everywhere. I’ll bet people who hate them are everywhere, too.”

  “I think a cell phone show has possibilities,” Bob said. “Personally, I hate my cell phone. But I always have it with me, and it’s always turned on.”

  “Why?” Loretta asked.

  Bob shrugged. “You never know.”

  “You never know what?” Kate pressed him, but he only shrugged again. She gave him a minute to provide more of an answer, and when he remained silent she turned to Gilda. “Could we do cell phones without having it turn scuzzy?”

  “We can do whatever we have to do,” Gilda said.

  “I’ve got another idea for a show,” Kate said. “Inspired by our own Loretta: Twenty-ninth birthdays. You’ve just turned twenty-nine, right?”

  An icy ripple of dread shivered down Loretta’s spine. She did not want to be the inspiration for a Becky Blake show, not even a kind, gentle one. “My age is irrelevant,” she said defensively.

  “I was twenty-nine for many years,” Gilda reminisced. “Now I’m thirty-nine. I’ll be celebrating my seventeenth thirty-ninth birthday in a few months. How old are you, Kate?”

  “Twenty-nine, of course.”

  Kate was lying. Everyone knew Loretta was the youngest person on the team. If she was twenty-nine, Kate had to be older.

  “What is it about us that makes us want to land on an age that ends in a nine and stay there a while?” Kate posed. “How many of us fudge our age? Why do we lie? What’s the underlying zeitgeist?”

  “I don’t lie about my age,” Bob commented.

  “No one asked you.”

  “I’m just saying it would be a chick show.” Bob gave them what they’d dubbed his token-man frown, a look of bemusement m
ixed with disgust. As the only male member of the production team, he occasionally labeled shows “chick shows,” which meant he didn’t think they’d appeal to men in the audience. But Becky Blake’s demographic skewed heavily female, so Bob usually got outvoted.

  “We could focus on women’s hang-ups about their age,” Gilda went on. “Age as a state of mind. Age as a social determinant. What does it mean when you’re a woman facing your thirtieth birthday and you aren’t married?”

  Loretta held up her hands. “Stop. We’re not going there.” She’d gone there yesterday—and she’d hopped on the train and left. She had no intention of going back.

  “I was married twice by the time I was thirty,” Kate noted. “But being thirty and single is different from being thirty and married. Which is probably why women lie and say they’re twenty-nine when they’re single.”

  “I’m not lying when I say I’m twenty-nine,” Loretta argued. “In my case, it’s the truth.”

  “And what are you going to say next year?”

  “I’ll say I’m thirty.”

  “What if you’re not married?”

  Loretta rolled her eyes. Her job was worth worrying about. The fact that she was nearly thirty and happily unmarried was not. Annoyed, she pushed away from the table. “I’m getting a cup of coffee. Anyone else want some?” Thank God the coffee machine was in another room so she could leave.

  “I’ll come with you.” Bob shoved to his feet. “I’m single and I don’t give a toad’s fart about my age. Obviously, something’s wrong with me. Maybe coffee will cure me.”

  Loretta managed a smile as she led the way out of the production staff room. The hall was a stark, straight passageway lit with glaring fluorescent ceiling lights. The only decorations on the walls were sporadically placed bulletin boards covered with flyers, memos and reminders. The coffee lounge was three doors down, past a bulletin board bearing a no-smoking sign, an ad for an Alicia Keyes concert and a poster about a fund-raiser for an ecological organization that promised to make the Hudson River once again safe for carp. Bob reached around Loretta and opened the door to the lounge for her.