I'll Eat When I'm Dead

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I'll Eat When I'm Dead Page 19

by Barbara Bourland


  So Taki and Anais had searched for a practical solution to help Cat find her confidence. A friend of a friend described Sawyer’s as “a challenging school for hearty girls from nice families.” Intrigued, they sent away for the admissions materials, knowing it might be too late for that fall but pleading with the school’s office to send them anyway.

  Anais had squealed with delight over their glossy catalog. The rainbow-nation photos of other multiethnic Sawyer girls—a rowing crew, and girls with dirt on their faces tilling fields for the school’s then-unusual organic farm—could have been staged from her dreams. Taki studied the academics and Ivy League acceptance rates and was pleased at their high numbers. Cat liked that it was in America, in Connecticut, the home of Yale University and a Barbara Stanwyck movie she had on VHS.

  She had to write an essay about why she wanted to go but couldn’t think of anything good to say. Because…my parents think I know too many silly girls, and…I think they are right? Because America is exciting? Because I want to be an American girl with her own convertible, at a football game, like Nancy Drew? Because I want to see New York City? The day after the catalog arrived she had sat at the kitchen table until dark, her mechanical pencil poised to write a brilliant first draft. But nothing came out. Six languages and she had no words. Taki looked at her blank cahier page and shook his head.

  “You’ll try again tomorrow,” he said in English. “You must sleep on it.”

  She’d run up to her room, thrown herself on the bed, and sobbed loudly. She didn’t fit in here, but she couldn’t even articulate why she deserved to fit in somewhere else.

  Her mother snuck in and stroked her head, something Cat had stopped letting her do a year earlier. She patted and finger-combed and braided Cat’s big hanks of black hair until her red-faced daughter finally stopped wailing and looked up.

  “The Onos are adventurers,” Anais leaned down and whispered to Cat in Flemish. “It’s in your blood. You must cross an ocean to discover your soul.”

  In the morning Cat rose with the dawn to watch her mother traipse out to the barn, then put on her school uniform and sat down at the kitchen table. She drafted her essay with a furious purpose. By the time her father appeared to make the coffee it was almost done.

  “May I read it, little Katteke?”

  She handed it to him proudly. He read it out loud, a barely suppressed grin on his face.

  My name is Catherine Celia Ono, and I am an adventurer. Twenty years ago my father crossed the world from Hokkaido to Brussels to find his soul. He found his soul mate and they made me, and now it is my turn to find my place in the world.

  I know that Miss Sawyer’s is a difficult school. I am a very hard worker. To prove that I have passed advanced fluency in Italian, Dutch, German, French, and of course English and Flemish.

  I want to see America. It is a place full of important women like Annie Oakley and Eleanor Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I want to become a part of America, and I know that being a student at Miss Sawyer’s—a school inside the fabric of the country—will show me the way.

  In return I offer my dedicated work. I will not waste a moment of time. I am eager to learn from the teachers and from the other students. Please consider my humble application and be assured that I will try harder than any other student you have ever had.

  Sincerely

  Catherine C Ono

  Taki and Anais hadn’t changed a single word. They sent the essay out that afternoon, and Sawyer’s—thrilled to have a full-pay middle schooler who spoke six languages—admitted her just one week after her application materials arrived.

  The Onos had been so proud of her as she graduated first from Sawyer’s, then North Adams College, and went straight to the University of Chicago to begin a doctoral program in art history; and so disappointed when she’d given up on her dissertation to work for Hillary at RAGE.

  It must be nearly dawn at the farm. Cat could feel their disappointment pulsing from the air, as though her mother’s tears had washed from the river into the North Sea, across the ocean and up through the bedrock, evaporating into the rain that fell outside her windows. They were sad for her: sad that she had made a superficial life and would be judged superficially. They didn’t think she had any real friends.

  But Cat did have friends. She had best friends, people who understood her obsessions with objects and appearance not just as the anxieties of a foreigner, of a minority—which certainly, on some level, existed; she would happily admit that—but also as the anxieties of a philosopher, someone who lived in the world and sought to change it using the lingua franca of culture at large. She didn’t live in Rijmenam. She lived in New York. They would change, too, if they lived here.

  She didn’t think she could speak to Hutton ever again. How could he have made such a terrible mistake—have let her rot in a detention center for three days? How could he have allowed her to be so humiliated?

  These were your own choices, she reminded herself. When she’d listened to his voicemails last night they were so sweetly apologetic that for a moment she had a hard time being mad, until she remembered her mug shot on the cover of the newspaper—and about how manipulated she felt, how abandoned.

  Cat had gambled her whole life—her whole self—with only a moment’s hesitation. If she was fired or demoted, in this public way…how could she go on? Where would she live? How could she face herself, her family, her friends? How would she ever recover from losing her job?

  Notorious.

  What a terrible word.

  But I haven’t lost it, she reminded herself. Not yet.

  Part II

  September

  Chapter Twelve

  Cat turned to Bess in the adjacent seat of what they’d come to think of as “their” Suburban, a nine-seater Cooper had been letting them use since July, and bared her teeth for inspection. Bess wiped an errant fleck from Cat’s brow bone, then nodded.

  “Flawless,” she said.

  Cat’s makeup was indeed literally flawless, her face a perfect mask shellacked to require no photoshop. It was flawless every day now; Cooper sent hair and makeup artists any time she would be expected in the office or at an event. Today actual gold leaf lined her eyelids, a fall of blue-black-colored hair had been sewn into the crown of her head, and matching gold leaf tipped her navy fingernails, all of it designed to complement the custom-made Dior cocktail dress she’d been stitched into. The stiffly tiered black crepe structure—paired with pointed suede ankle boots that faded from red to pink—was surprisingly comfortable, despite the rubber shapewear she’d been squeezed into beneath it. Still, she’d been able to sit upright in her seat in the Suburban, an increasingly rare opportunity. Last week Cat and Bess had been sewn into lace columns so tight they’d been lifted on wood planks one by one through the back door of the SUV, then pulled out ankles-first in an alleyway behind the venue.

  The vehicle’s perforated calfskin interior was littered with empty coffee cups from Starbucks, cigarette butts stubbed into Luna bar wrappers, Sephora bags full of emergency product, dog-eared novels, and a scattering of king-size pillows with clumps of mascara smeared into their Frette pillowcases. Cat and Bess found themselves spending more time in the SUV than in the office. It seemed pointless to clean up.

  Bess pulled back her lips to carefully expose her own blindingly white veneers. “How about me?”

  Cat examined her attentively. The double sets of fake mink lashes were still in place, the matte pink lipstick hadn’t migrated onto her teeth, and the tiny ruby studs set on the apple of her left cheekbone—temporary microdermal implants—weren’t smudged with foundation. Her dewy skin was coated with the dust of real South Sea pearls that Raphael, their favorite makeup artist, had ground up in a mortar and pestle the night before. “They were free,” he’d explained, “from some tacky company who wants to sponsor you. Much better as makeup. And you’re still wearing them, anyway.”

  Bess was intact: their new standard for achievem
ent.

  “You’re a doll,” Cat said reassuringly.

  Jim, the hatchet-faced middle-aged driver assigned to them by Cooper, looked back.

  “Ready?” he asked, sounding positive though his expression remained stony and emotionless.

  “Ready!” they chimed. Cat dug a Klonopin out of the bottom of her purse, broke it in half, and held it under her tongue.

  He walked around and opened their door. Bess got out first, leaping gracefully onto the gray carpet with Jim’s arm as a banister. The flashbulbs exploded. Ten thousand frames—professional, amateur, iPhone—clicked off as she made her way over to the first step-and-repeat, her movements now fluid and practiced even in scalloped four-inch silk stilettos.

  Today’s event, the Council for Fashion Awareness Awards sponsored by British Petroleum, had been jammed smack in the middle of New York Fashion Week, and Lincoln Center was overflowing with skeletal women swaddled in precious yardage, tiny human bouquets of cigarette smoke and hair extensions. Companion hordes of plain-Jane handlers screamed into cellphones and headsets, hustling their charges from logo to logo for the audiences watching and clicking around the world. As Bess posed, a childlike brunette publicist waved her arms at Jim to send Cat up.

  He helped her out of the SUV onto the carpet, propping her up with his wiry biceps as she tugged her dress into place. The photographers were still focused on Bess, who helpfully changed poses and looked over her shoulder, giving Cat ten whole seconds before anyone noticed her. She took advantage of the stolen moment to breathe (a ragged little hiccup as the cage of her dress resisted any true expansion of the diaphragm) and scan the plaza for a friendly face.

  Nothing. Everyone was familiar, but these days, no one was her friend.

  A boy in a porkpie hat with a camera bigger than his head and brand-new seafoam Prada loafers turned around and screamed her name, galloping toward her on his slender little legs. The other photographers followed suit. Cat moved her lips into a grin automatically and began taking mincing, robotic steps toward the first step-and-repeat board, focusing her eyes on the fish-in-a-gown logo as the swarm descended around her. They all called her by name, asking asinine questions about what she was wearing, what she was doing later, where she had come from. She didn’t respond: just stared at the fish drawing and smiled vacantly, holding her cheeks up and swiveling into a position modeled by the childlike publicist.

  The cameramen from TMI were the pushiest: asking who her boyfriend was, if she had an eating disorder like her friend Hillary. They all knew Hillary now. RAGE’s September issue had come out four weeks ago, on August 20, with a close-up of Hillary’s spectacular face on the cover. Her green eyes and white lashes were rendered in high-resolution gloss on every newsstand on the globe. BEAUTY KILLS read the cover in navy all-caps. In the year-old picture—a test shot from one of Reuben Avador’s winter shoots—Hillary’s skin glowed like a Swedish teenager’s, her visage placed in the center of a lightly feathered vignette. Set just beneath her poreless and freckled jawline: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HEIRESS HILLARY WHITNEY.

  After forty-eight hours it was their best-selling issue of all time. Maddie’s feature, fact-checked within a single pixel, had slaughtered sixteen different beauty companies, five members of Congress, four retail chains, and the head of the Federal Drug Administration. Margot ran it all with an editor’s letter read around the world:

  Dear Readers:

  We must never step away from the critical lens, even when it is turned back upon our own faces. There is nothing to fear from transparency. Only lessons to be learned.

  Magazines like RAGE are the collective conscious. Surely after this issue Cooper will lose some of the advertisers implicated in Maddie Plattstein’s astonishing work of journalism, which, plainly, means losing money. This means you may have to pay more on the newsstand—but isn’t a dollar or two more worth reading genuine editorial content from a truly independent apparatus, instead of the discounted opinions our competitors offer, constructed behind-the-scenes by the advertisers whose products are choked down your throats? Or, like some of our competitors, delivering no editorials at all? Well, I hope this issue will prove that it is, indeed, worth it.

  Fashion and beauty are not meaningless. They are not frivolous. They are not silly. They are multitrillion-dollar industries that employ close to half a billion people around the globe directly and indirectly. RAGE is not just a consumer magazine—we are the most widely read trade publication in the world. We consider that a responsibility to the women in Bangladesh who cannot read this page, but instead earned just thirty cents today making your cheap T-shirt; who will be poisoned by making your face cream in unregulated, unsupervised laboratories and still be unable to feed their families; whose lives are literally dictated by your purchasing power.

  So let us look inward and to the future without fear. Be careful how you spend your money, lest it be your own death.

  Margot Villiers, editor in chief and founder of RAGE Fashion Book

  The issue’s articles—all headlined under MATRIARCH, the new name for the entire features section—were paired with 47 pages of photography and 283 total issue pages of advertising, a Cooper record. Cat’s collection of Hillary history ran throughout Maddie’s piece, a career-making work of journalism that wove the threads of Hillary’s life and her friendships with Bess, Cat, and even Sigrid alongside a razor-sharp exposé of the wholly unregulated beauty industry. In addition to reporting on Bedford Organics, Maddie had also dug up whistle-blower testimony from inside three major international beauty companies, exposing their own attempts to experiment with minor fractions of illegal drugs and mood-enhancing supplements in products like body lotion and skin oil, all of it marketed as “natural” and “organic.” An internal memo from Esme Bowder, which owned no less than fifteen global beauty brands, asked the question “we don’t have to disclose this, right?” over email to a member of the United States Congress, who replied “not really. that’s what trademarks are for ;)” in reference to a weight-loss cream costing $250 per ounce.

  RAGE’s subsequent tests of the trademark in question, expedited by the DEA, found that HypnoEnerSerum™ was loaded with enough stimulants to potentially stop the heart of a child or an extremely thin woman. Hillary’s designer death, Maddie Plattstein argued, might have been custom-made in Brooklyn—but just like reclaimed wood walls and screenprints of water towers, it had been merely the precursor to what could be a national epidemic.

  Photo editor Rose Cashin-Trask had outdone herself. She’d combed old party pictures from celebrity photographers, wire services, and Photogram for the most flattering and sophisticated images of Bess and Cat she could find, portraying them as hardworking mini-Margots caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’d played along as instructed, giving a mea culpa interview—an hour-long sit-down on-air with broadcast personality Anders Smith—exactly one week after their arrest in July, affirming their devotion to RAGE and their devastation over Hillary’s death with convincing sincerity.

  “It doesn’t matter what I’m being called,” Cat had said, trying to garner support from every woman who’d ever called herself a feminist. “Party girl—which we all know is tabloid-speak for ‘useless, drug-addled slut’—is just a pathetic attempt to reframe the focus from what RAGE, along with Maddie Plattstein, who I think you’ll agree is an incredibly well-respected investigative journalist, is trying to expose. Bedford Organics has opened a door into the beauty industry that we refuse to close. So if what comes out of this is that women across the globe learn about what constitutes healthy and safe in the products they use every day, that they feel pressured to use every day in order to be defined as ‘good enough’ by the society around them, then I’ll gladly be arrested a million times. We can tolerate being made fun of. We can’t tolerate promoting products that kill people, people like our friend Hillary.”

  “But why not tell the whole story now? Why apologize without an explanation?” Anders had lobbed them a big
fat grapefruit of a softball.

  Bess had replied with her most serious face, punting to promote the magazine as Paula had instructed her to do: “The article will be out in the September issue, on newsstands August 20. It’s late for us, but it’s the soonest we can get it out. In this day and age, I know a lot of people think print doesn’t matter—but it does. It’s the best avenue for us to distribute this information as widely as possible. And frankly, it’s still being fact-checked at this very moment, something that’s very important to us, and certainly to the public.”

  “So you’re confirming that there’s more to the story?”

  “Absolutely. Read the September issue,” Cat had insisted. “RAGE is still a global feminist publication for everyone, and we’re still committed journalists, even if what we cover is fashion and beauty. Did we make a mistake? Yes. Absolutely. But that mistake has led to a story that we—and Margot Villiers—won’t drop.”

  “What does Margot think about all of this?”

  “Margot’s politics have shaped an entire generation of women,” Cat replied, ready for her final sound bite, one that had come directly from Margot herself. “As you know, RAGE began as a magazine that showcased only American-made goods, but when globalization demanded that we change, we did. We’ve focused proudly on featuring only goods made with living-wage labor since 1994. I’m thrilled to announce we’ve added a new standard, and that is represented by the word ‘sustainable’: starting with this issue, we’re transitioning into featuring only goods that are made with care for the planet and care for the people on it.”

 

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