Woman No. 17

by Edan Lepucki

  I knew I had to channel my rage, turn my reaction into something productive, something funny yet meaningful. “Artist-as-translator,” as Everett liked to say.

  This woman walked her bank receipt to her Subaru, which had a bike rack on the roof and a license-plate holder that read BERKELEY: DECIDEDLY DIFFERENT. I turned away. What could I do with this feeling? Definitely couldn’t take it to graduate school. I’d painted my way into an art minor, but painting wouldn’t work this time.

  Enter, stage left, my Give Us Your Tevas program by Esther Shapiro.

  Give Us Your Tevas was modeled after the programs introduced in inner cities all across the US of A that asked people to turn in their black-market guns, no questions asked. Except Berkeley doesn’t have a widespread gun-violence problem, it has an eye violence one. I could have asked people to return their sun hats (like my muse was wearing that fateful day), their COEXIST bumper stickers (undeniable proof that you’re a meek and shitty driver), their walking sticks (Solano Avenue is not the French Alps!), or any variation on waterproof hiking wear, or, or—I thought about it for weeks as I worked and commuted and cleaned my grimy sublet. The possibilities were endless. I decided, finally, that Tevas, and every other Franken-sneaker-sandal on the market, were the worst offenders. It didn’t matter if it was cold, because people just paired the things with nubby socks, and it didn’t matter that the shoes were ugly, because ugliness was powerless against comfort. To be comfortable: that’s the fashion ethos of Berkeley. I wondered at how my mom, who didn’t care about clothes, had never put these on her own feet. It seemed miraculous.

  To my dad, I explained that Tevas were part of the baby boomer uniform. (Sun hat? Check. Gray hair? Check. Khaki shorts for men, quirky museum gift shop earrings for women? Check and check.) All of these Berkeleyites looked the same, I told him, which suggested that it wasn’t only their clothes that were identical, but their beliefs, their families, their diets, their thoughts, their everything. While they were enjoying their retirement plans and succulent gardens, my generation was facing underemployment and debt. Despite what they wanted to believe, the boomers hadn’t changed shit about the world. The artist Esther Shapiro, I told my dad, saw it as her duty to give voice to the young and fight these automatons, one pair of Tevas at a time.

  I couldn’t tell him that I’d been thinking about my mom too. He wouldn’t understand. Katherine Mary Fowler didn’t have the life he had, that these boomers had. It was something she and I shared, wasn’t it?

  The campaign began on a Monday night in July, three hours before sunrise. In darkness I slapped two hundred silkscreened posters across the city. I left large drop-off barrels in front of markets, banks, and community centers. A week before, I’d commissioned a welder to make me metal signs to post at Berkeley’s city limits; on the night in question I nailed them directly below the infamous NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE signs. My dad wouldn’t help because what I was doing could be illegal, but because Maria was afraid I’d hurt myself lifting the barrels, he did hire a guy named Clay to transport them for me. (I’d had the idea myself but I’d already maxed out one of my two credit cards to fund the project, and if I had fifty bucks to slip to anyone I would have given it to myself.)

  At 5:00 that morning, the website went live (the first FAQ: What should I wear instead?) and I sent a press release to various media outlets. Then I passed out facedown on my futon, my hands still icky with wheat paste.

  First there was the irate but witty blogger who came along three days later. He was probably right, I was a Banksy wannabe. I wasn’t an artist but a hoax-puller. Or, worse, I was an artist, but a mediocre and derivative one. Then the Oakland Tribune picked up the story. Some guy from the North Berkeley neighborhood association, his long white ponytail greasy as an old shoelace, declared my metal posters vandalism, saying they perverted Berkeley’s spirit of safety and public good. He organized a group of outraged citizens one Saturday afternoon. “We recycled the signs,” he told the reporter. Ponytail Man was also a guest on a local radio program, during which a few people called in to harangue me. “What some might find funny,” one woman warbled, “others find offensive.” I could just see her frizzy gray hair, tucked under a purple velvet cloche, the kind of hat that reminded me of chemo patients. And maybe she had survived cancer, making her all the more smug as she loaded half a dozen Seckel pears into her reusable mesh produce bag at Berkeley Bowl (organic, of course. Big whoop, lady, no one cares, etc.).

  —

  The People’s Republic of Berkeley had acknowledged my work and swiftly reached a verdict. That is: Esther Shapiro wasn’t an artist, she was a shallow beeotch. Not that they used those words to describe me. No, they said it was unfortunate I focused on the superficial. They lamented that I hadn’t directed my talents to issues of global importance, thus wasting said talents.

  Oh, Esther Shapiro! If I’d taken a moment to predict what might happen, I might not have felt so dejected about how the project actually turned out. But what had I wanted? To get away from my boring future? To try something sexier than painting, something that Everett would actually respect? To connect with my mom in some bogus, indirect way? I hadn’t even told her about it.

  My dad, at least, said the attention I received proved the project’s success. I wouldn’t go that far—but it’s true, at least my work had been noticed. By the time he was giving me this pep talk, people were tweeting and Instagramming pictures of my project and posting quips about running in heels, about knockin’ da boots. It wasn’t a trending topic, but the numbers weren’t anything to sneeze at either.

  A few days later, a local footwear brand came forward to applaud my sentiment; they started the campaign #SoulSole, urging people to take pictures of their shoes and post them online for all the world to see. “What we put on our feet is an expression of our identity!” read their website, and I nearly spit my Cheerios all over my laptop. A single pair of abandoned Tevas showed up at the bottom of the only barrel that hadn’t been removed. (God bless the Whole Foods on Gilman!) I found a photo of the donation on Instagram: it was tagged #SoleSoul, #SoStupid, and #ArtSux.

  My dad said I should be proud: people were reacting. But I didn’t feel proud. I was dead out of money and the project had been happily endorsed by a lame shoe company, for fuck’s sake. Most people had probably assumed it was corporate from the start. Nobody was laughing. Even my father didn’t seem to get it: he bought some mustard-colored brogues and asked me if I approved. Maria was convinced I was upset that my dad had married her and was settling for good in Berkeley.

  “My clothes okay to you?” She pointed at her cashmere sweater, concerned.

  No one seemed to notice the way I adapted the fallout shelter symbol so that the three triangles looked like feet. Or that I had bound the drop-off barrels in rubber to mimic the Tevas running sole. Or that the website included fake banner ads for handwoven espadrilles from Brazil and clown shoes made of children’s tongues, with links that clicked to nowhere. People wondered who Esther Shapiro was, but not because they thought she was so smart and original, but because they wanted to have her tarred and feathered and thrown into the cold, cold Bay.

  Then Rivka Browne called. Her voice was like maple syrup sliding across a pancake. “Esther Shapiro,” her voice poured. She said she was a spokeswoman from Teva. “Some people don’t realize the brand name isn’t officially pluralized.”

  “How did you get this number?” I asked.

  “Clayton Barnes.”

  The barrel guy. Fucking snitch.

  “How’d you find him?”

  “He’s my cousin.” I heard her take a sip of something and I imagined a hot latte freshly deposited on her desk. “Have you visited our website?” she asked. “I think you would enjoy seeing the full array of our products. Some of our line is quite fashion-forward, actually.”

  “What can I do for you?” I asked.

  “Well, primarily, we wanted to thank you,” she said. “For making Teva part of the conversati
on.”

  I said nothing.

  “We’d love to meet with you, talk next steps. I think we could cultivate a really interesting partnership.”

  I admit, I considered it for a split second. There was my not-insignificant debt, and the fact that I had to be out of the cheap sublet by the end of July. My dad said that I could stay with him and Maria, and that she would certainly help me pay my credit-card balance. She wouldn’t charge interest either. But I didn’t want that, didn’t want to take her money. With Rivka’s help, I didn’t have to. I could do this: become a corporate shill.

  I rejected the idea as soon as it came to me. I was an artist, no matter how bad (#ArtSux #IHaveASoul).

  Rivka Browne continued: “Guerrilla marketing is the new frontier—but I guess I don’t have to tell you that, do I, Esther?”

  “Gorilla marketing?” I cried. I knew she wouldn’t hear the difference between the two words but it felt good to say it wrong. Everett, who used to wear a baseball cap that read TAKE ME FOR GRANITE, would have appreciated the joke. “Go to hell, Rivka Browne,” I said, and hung up. My hands, long scrubbed of wheat paste, were shaking.

  I had to get out of Berkeley (I’d use the phrase NorCal if it didn’t instigate my gag reflex), and I started making plans to return home. The world was probably right: Esther Shapiro didn’t care about conformity or intergenerational strife, she was just a fashion snob. Or it was Maria who was right: I was just a little girl, trying to process her daddy’s new identity.

  Whatever it was, I have my dad to thank for hatching the next project in my brain. As he helped load my car, he said, “Give Us Your Tevas was just too comedic for this town.” He laughed. “It’s almost something your mom would do, if she ever did art.” I knew he was remembering some goofy shared joke, two decades old. I would’ve asked him to spill it had my brain not been spinning like a rainbow-striped top. Was my dad right? Was the project something my mom would have come up with?

  I was already barreling down the 5 into a cloud of cow shit when my dad called to tell me about an article in the New York Times Style section about sporty footwear.

  “I’m surprised they didn’t reference Esther Shapiro,” he said.

  “I’m relieved they didn’t,” I said. “Anyway, I’m the artist formerly known as Esther Shapiro. I’m trying on Fowler. S Fowler, actually, not Esther. S, like the letter.”

  “S Fowler,” he repeated. “But what’s wrong with Shapiro?” He would never admit that it rankled him that I was aligning myself with his ex-wife, but I knew it did.

  “I swear it’s nothing personal, Dad,” I said. “It just sounds classier.”

  I couldn’t tell him more.

  His voice turned serious, “Waterbug, be careful down there.”

  “No one wears Tevas in L.A.”

  “It’s not that. I mean…Kathy may not be—”

  “I can handle Mom. Besides, I won’t be staying at her place forever. I think I’ll look for a nanny job.”

  “A babysitter? You’ve got a degree from Cal!”

  “It’s not a forever thing. And you know I love kids.”

  “I do. And, hey, you can use what you learned from writing your senior project. Just don’t abandon your art, okay?”

  “Sheesh, guilt trip.”

  “You know what, honey?”

  “What?”

  “This is the first time in your twenty-two years that you and I will be apart for more than a week.”

  “It was bound to happen. This is what you get for following me to college.”

  “And hey, it worked out, didn’t it? I met Maria.”

  “You met Maria. Too bad she lives in the worst place ever.”

  “There are probably a few war-torn countries that would win that distinction before Berzerkeley.”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “Just don’t let that humor get S Fowler in trouble.”

  “You know it will.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  What I didn’t tell my dad was that I wasn’t abandoning my art. As I reached the Grapevine, the smell of cow shit behind me and Magic Mountain’s spooky horizon of roller coasters still ahead, my new project glowed in my imagination. I could feel its potential. I squeezed the steering wheel and sped forward.

  I would try to become my mother.

  8.

  Katherine Mary Fowler. I know it’s phenomenally screwed up (and I know because Everett told me so), but if given the chance to raise my mother as my child, I’d do it. I don’t mean some Freaky Friday scenario where we switch bodies because of a spell cast from a magic fortune cookie or whatever. I mean I’d take Katherine Mary from scratch, and raise her to be a fine, stable woman. Because I believe, I have to believe, that Katherine Mary’s raw ingredients were sound: it’s the barely remembered mother who died when she was a baby, and the vodka-pickled father who never said I love you, and the junior high school music teacher with the roaming hands, and the…on and on and on, that ruined my mom. By the time Steven Shapiro tried to save her she was already shipwrecked. And husbands who double as life rafts don’t last very long. Who loves a life raft?

  I knew my mom moved to L.A. from New Jersey when she was twenty-four, and that she worked as a nanny. The year was 1985. Thankfully she is both sentimental and vain, lugging along a few boxes of photos and keepsakes from apartment to apartment, storing them under her old mattress. My mom has had the same bed my whole life; she got it in the divorce (she got a lot in the divorce but she’s since pissed the rest away), and won’t let it go even though every night she says, “I’m putting myself on the rack,” which means she’s going to lie down. That is, she says this if she hasn’t already blacked out.

  It’s from staring at these photos when I was in high school that I know my mom wore her hair long and parted down the middle, flat, flat, flat. And that she never wore pants, only dresses, which looked a lot like the cheap ones they sell downtown: polyester, poorly sewn, almost cool until you realize that some Bangladeshi child was instructed to cut off a sleeve in the name of some outdated trend. My mom is prettier than I am, or the younger version of her was, but you would never know it. With some lip gloss, some foundation under her eyes, my mom could have been a knockout—but she was pretty enough without all of that, and she couldn’t be bothered to care. Meanwhile, I’m lint in a troll’s armpit if I don’t spend forty-five minutes on my hair and makeup. (“Hair and makeup!” Maria once repeated after me. “What? Like an actress in her trailer?” But Maria would look pretty after an all-nighter and a root canal. Only women from Spain can put olive oil on their scalp and call it shampoo. No, Maria, I can’t just rub it in a leetle beet and leave for work. I am not a salad.) Everett confessed he’d never dated a girlie girl before. He thought intellectual women didn’t care about that stuff. I told him I must not be an intellectual.

  As soon as I got to L.A. I went to a hair salon where an old high school friend worked and asked her to make me as mousy as possible. She stripped out the blond, made it ashy. She cut it shorter too, so that it cowlicked in all the worst places. As payment I gave her all my cosmetics. It was like a makeover in reverse: After and Before.

  And then I took my mom to Melrose (she refused to go downtown because of traffic) to pick out dresses. For me.

  “I don’t understand this,” she said. “You’re pretending to be a younger version of me? Why?”

  “For fun,” I said. I didn’t say “For art,” because, one, she would have made fun of me and, two, she had no idea I did that anymore. It wasn’t just the Give Us Your Tevas program; she didn’t know about my landscapes, or my art minor. Withholding stuff from my mom is key: compartmentalize that woman or perish. She has boundary issues.

  I did admit that I planned to photograph some of my role-playing experiments. I hadn’t decided what other forms the project would take. I was thinking out loud. I was also trying the role on for size. My mom blurts everything out.

  “Kind of Cindy Sherman–esque?” she ask
ed.

  I was so shocked I almost toppled a mannequin in hooker boots.

  “Don’t get too excited, Esther,” she said. “Someone on set had a book of hers.”

  My mother was a wardrobe assistant on a successful network comedy. Jules, her boss, was competent and well connected, and she made sure my mom followed her from show to show. At first I thought it was a charity-case thing, and then I visited the set and saw how much everyone loved my mom. Also, the woman can hold about a zillion pins in her mouth while saying, “Get yourself a sandwich! You are too thin!” which is what every size-frail actress wants to hear.

  “I’m not a photographer,” I said. “I told you, it’s just for fun.”

  She squinted at me. “Did you change your hair?” And then she gasped. “This is like Single White Female!” She threw her head back and cackled.

  Later I took sixteen Polaroids of my own laughing face. From the lips down I looked just like my mom. I angled the camera to capture only that: my mouth open wide; my unsure-of-itself chin; my skin, sad-white; and my lips, cracked and flaking since I’d stopped moisturizing them. I felt something jolt awake in me, becoming Katherine Mary. It was a relief and a responsibility.

  In those shots, the resemblance was uncanny. I was Katherine Mary’s ghost.

  9.

  I’d been Devin’s nanny for three days before I made my bed. And I don’t mean I failed to pull up the duvet and fluff the pillows, I mean I didn’t even unpack my sheets. In Lady’s cavelike guesthouse, which she called the Cottage, with its dorm-room mini-fridge and hot plate, and the overhead light fixture that looked like a nipple, I slept on a bare mattress, my body wrapped in a dingy white sheet. I was a corpse ready for my own burial at sea, dreaming I was a tiny hotel soap.