The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  Maggie gulped, and the makeup artist began sponging foundation onto her face. “Glamorama?”

  “Don’t worry.” The stylist laughed, displaying perfect little teeth. “We’ll make you look major.”

  She was right. The woman who emerged from the camera, wielded by a man so hip and so handsome Maggie could barely speak to him throughout the process, wasn’t somebody she’d ever met before. Sleek, sexy, glossy, and expensive-looking without seeming snooty, she exuded confidence from the computer screen and storyboard, even though Maggie had felt ridiculous while posing on the spot, hand on hip, chin tilted upward, and taking a little step into the frame so that her hair bounced just so as the lights popped.

  None of the gaucheness, the awkwardness, or the what-do-I-do-with-my-hands-ness had made it into the final edit: Maggie was the best version of herself, wearing the most fabulous clothes she’d ever laid eyes on. She looked like a fashion editor. She’d certainly spent the day pretending to be one. Perhaps that meant she was one? Back at home on the sofa, admiring her manicured nails and looking through the pictures again on her laptop, she certainly felt like one.

  “Can’t wait to see you in the office when you start,” Holly said as her assistants packed away the clothes and Maggie peeled off a set of false eyelashes in front of the bulb-framed vanity mirror.

  She and the rest of the crew had joked that the new girl was a natural.

  “Margot will have to watch out!” Holly called, smiling, as Maggie climbed into her second taxi of the day.

  5

  MARGOT

  I felt a stab of envy when the copies of the new issue landed in the office and the post boys dealt them out to the women at their desks like cards in a poker game. I had seen the layouts of Maggie’s story inside, had edited her words to fit them onto the page and into the Haute mold. The trouble was, they hadn’t needed much doing to them.

  I couldn’t deny that Maggie had written a great piece. Funny, engaging, heartfelt, and—always a bonus—actually useful, it’d be the one that our readers flicked to first, thanks to the strapline I’d come up with for the cover: HELP! MAKE ME A FASHION EDITOR—NOW! Moff encouraged liberal use of exclamation marks.

  I had indeed made Maggie a fashion editor. I’d chosen her because I knew Maggie was clever and capable, reliable, hardworking, and in need of a break. I hadn’t thought of my replacement as a charity case, but I was aware my job was valuable, and it had seemed right to offer it to someone who really needed it. Someone grateful who’d repay the debt with loyalty. Maggie, subsisting on a few commissions a month, had struck me as talent squandered, potential untapped.

  Well, Moff has tapped it now. I opened the magazine onto my desk with its usual satisfying thunk and found the page where Maggie’s feature began. The first spread was a lineup of several versions of her, each wearing a different, of-the-moment trend and posing as though they were all sitting on a front row next to one another.

  Here she wore a classic skirt suit and heels, her shiny dark hair tucked into an elegant chignon at the nape of her neck. There she was in patched jeans and a white shirt tied at the waist, focusing the eye on that hourglass figure of hers. To the right, she half-smiled, knowingly goofish, in this season’s most achingly cutting-edge ironic tracksuit and sneakers, a look so immensely unflattering I wouldn’t have attempted it even if I hadn’t been pregnant. Maggie made it look rather sweet, pretty even.

  On the following page, next to Maggie’s words, was a picture of her in a skintight emerald-green bandage dress and matching crystal-embellished heels, one hand on hip, red lips and smoky eyes set to smolder.

  I eyed her pillowy cleavage enviously: I had never had much of a décolletage myself, but what little there was had inflated slightly with pregnancy—not, I noticed every morning, into anything thrilling or pneumatic, but into two puffy-looking points that I couldn’t even put into a proper bra, according to the lingerie saleswoman I’d seen over the weekend.

  “You don’t want an underwire pressing on those milk ducts!” the bespectacled fitter had trilled while strapping me ruthlessly into a sensible flesh-colored specimen that made me want to cry.

  The transformation of my underwear drawer (I’d also swapped my usual lace and low-slung knickers for the giant cotton variety in the name of comfort) was yet another way being pregnant made me feel like a stranger in my own skin. Whenever I found myself thinking this way, I wished, for a split second that was more muscle memory than an articulated feeling, that I could speak to Winnie about it.

  Winnie had always looked after me, soothed me, and listened to me. The pattern had been set when we were at school together. We had been inseparable: an army of two who could finish each other’s sentences and paint the nails on each other’s left hands simultaneously.

  But in the three months since Jack’s death, I had had only one other message from my oldest friend, a brief and brittle response to numerous variations on a theme of love and solicitude: “I’m sorry, I can’t right now.”

  Can’t talk? Can’t be my friend? Can’t stand me for being pregnant?

  I knew from our school days that to crowd Winnie when she’d asked for space was a surefire way to alienate her even more. I’d learned that after what Helen did. I didn’t like to think of the time we had fallen out at school—Winnie and I rarely talked of Helen now—but I had learned then that the only way to thaw Winnie when she was in her distant, icy mode was to let her defrost in her own time.

  After the messages and my calls had gone unanswered, my voicemails unreturned, I had toyed with simply turning up on Winnie’s doorstep—only a half-hour walk from my own, but which felt like miles thanks to the radio silence between us—but I knew Winnie would not thank me for it.

  I had even asked Nick to drive me round there, but the windows had been dark and the driveway empty. I hadn’t realized I had been dreading seeing my friend, but the relief that washed over me when we turned the car around and went straight home felt almost cleansing. I had been afraid, I admitted later to myself, of Winnie’s seeing my growing belly, had worried it would offend her, hadn’t known how we would talk around it but not about it. It would have even got in the way of a hug—a round, firm reproach to Winnie and a reminder of what she didn’t have. It had been so long since I had felt scared of my best friend, I had almost forgotten how intense the power that Winnie had over me was. Almost.

  Winnie would come to me when she was ready. Until then, I tried to let her know she was loved from a distance.

  I had sent flowers, first a bouquet and then a packet of seeds that promised to grow into exactly the sort of bright and blowsy blooms of which Winnie was so fond in her little backyard. I hoped they might help during the darkest days. The task of nurturing the dry pods into abundant life struck me as time-consuming in exactly the right way—something constructive and positive, a way to mark off the months of grief with color and optimism and beauty. I had hoped my friend would shrug off her remoteness and reach out, the way plants push through hard winter soil toward warm sunlight in spring.

  Now the idea seemed trite. I should have sent food, should have offered to clean for them, could have run errands, done chores. I would have willingly scrubbed Winnie’s floors, my heavy belly scraping the ground in penitential pose, to assuage the survivor’s guilt I felt so keenly almost every moment I was awake. Asleep too, in gory, panic-stricken dreamscapes of hospital monitors and tiny corpses.

  Winnie was a constant rhythm in my blood. When I wasn’t wondering where my friend was or how she passed her days, a new superstition marked my actions: Crossing roads, catching trains, climbing stairs were all done to a soundtrack of silent gratitude that my own baby’s heart was still beating. When I felt its kicks, my delight was tempered instantly by sorrow and self-reproach, then dulled by fear. I felt Winnie’s disapproval and sense of betrayal every time I let myself forget to be scared.

 
; Some women I and my bump walked past made eye contact and smiled—that’s how I knew they too had babies and young children at home. Others ignored me, didn’t give up their seats because I failed to penetrate their podcasts and their streaming services, wasn’t on their radar. I was like that. You’ll feel bad about it when it’s your turn.

  Then there were others, who looked straight through me and set their jaws, who glowered at me or stared at my belly without then looking at my face. The didn’ts, and the couldn’ts, the never-quite-got-round-to-its. The ones who had tried but had their hearts broken in the process. One of them had followed me in the supermarket from aisle to aisle, watching what I picked up and tutting at the bottle of wine I eventually returned to the shelf, embarrassed—and then told me I was having a boy.

  “Without a doubt,” the woman said, and laid a liver-spotted hand on my rounded stomach. “That’s a little fella in there.”

  I should have been able to shrug it off, like the other comments or conversation directed at my bump rather than to me. My body had never been so appraised by strangers, visually and otherwise, before I was pregnant. But the woman’s touch felt like a burn, a curse, and I reeled backward into the shelves behind me—this unwanted, uninvited caress, whose perpetrator sent my thoughts spiraling into a medieval hysteria over hexes and old women with hairy chins.

  I was increasingly paranoid. One day, I sensed someone behind me as I walked along a pavement alone near home. The route from the bus stop to our house took me down several quiet residential streets after I turned off the main road with its sprinkling of shops and pubs. There were well-groomed hedgerows for someone to hide behind, driveways to duck into—and, sure enough, whenever I spun around to confront whoever it was, the noise of whose footsteps came and went in the breeze, they were no longer there. But they had been.

  Nick sensed this weird, jittery pulse in me. “You have to relax, ’Go, or it really will affect the baby,” he murmured into my hair at night. Because of my stomach, I now slept on my side, facing away from him, which made me feel even more lonely as the nightmares pressed in. “Do you need to go and talk to someone about it?”

  What would I say? That my best friend wouldn’t speak to me, that I was worried she hated me, that I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, that none of this was my fault. I remembered this feeling from the six weeks when Winnie and I hadn’t spoken at school. They had been the most difficult of my life.

  The scream as she fell. The noise she made as she landed.

  No, I didn’t want to go and talk to someone, not if it meant revisiting all that again.

  “It’d just sound like teenage angst,” I told Nick, switching off my bedside light. “I’m sure Winnie will be in touch when she’s ready. And I’ve got so much to get through at work before I finish, I won’t have a chance to worry.”

  But instead I found myself with more and more time on my hands in the office. I was passed over for stories, left off agenda lists, not invited to planning meetings, no longer present in Moff’s short and unpredictable attention span. In an industry that thrives on what comes next, I found myself old news.

  I looked back at the magazine, at the picture of Maggie in her green silk dress. It was supposed to highlight her taste for feminine clothing, in contrast to most fashion editors, who “exist only in jeans and navy sweaters.” I had taken exception to this line in particular, because I felt it was a dig at my own style; I had worn little else on the trip to Iceland that Maggie and I had met on. Nick had told me I was being overly sensitive and to forget it. You try forgetting someone when they’re stealing your identity.

  “But Maggie’s nothing like you,” he’d reasoned, trying to soothe me, rubbing my shoulders in the way he knew I liked. Right now, that seemed to be working in Maggie’s favor: She was a breath of fresh air in the magazine, exotic and interesting.

  I felt as though Maggie was trying to sit at my desk before the seat had been vacated, let alone gone cold. In the cozy minutes before my alarm went off, I dreamed that Maggie had come into the office; sat down on my lap, squashing my pregnant stomach; and begun typing on my keyboard. I woke from these dreams irritable and suspicious, but that was preferable to the cold sweats and tears of the gruesome visions that plagued me during the infinitely chillier small hours.

  I closed the magazine without even looking at the small piece I had in there this month.

  It wasn’t Maggie’s article itself that had lodged in my throat when I first found out about it and stuck there, sharp as a piece of glass. It was the fact that nobody had bothered to tell me it was happening. That one day I had heard Holly and the other juniors discussing Maggie’s “fashion editor shoot” and had had to ask them what they were talking about. The humiliation! The bigger I get, the less they see me; it’s not like I’m hard to miss these days.

  Now that I was in my seventh month, my bump sat high and proud, the first thing to enter a room, like the mermaid on the prow of a ship. I dressed around it without dressing for it, avoiding the usual maternity clothes, all drapes and wraps, and instead plumping for larger versions of what I usually wore: shirts, loose tunics, a silk kimono that I wore over a black T-shirt with jeans. Plenty of jeans, but by now the ones that came with a waistband that extended up to my armpits. I loathed them, but they were the most comfortable thing I could remember wearing since I had become a fashion editor.

  Maybe Moff would be interested in a piece on that.

  I laughed at the thought of my editor commissioning anything that might lower the glam factor in the magazine. I had already caught Moff gazing thoughtfully at my puffy feet during our daily news meetings. I had made the mistake of wearing strappy sandals, and my bloated, water-retaining flesh had strained at the rope fastenings until I’d taken them off. A livid crosshatching of strap marks had been cut into my feet, which I’d hidden under my desk all day after Moff had tittered at them as she stalked past.

  Laugh back, so they don’t think you’re a miserable old cow.

  “Hey, Maggie,” I had texted when I’d found out about the shoot. “The piece sounds fantastic! Can’t wait to read!”

  Too many exclamation marks. Still, I’d wanted to head off this feeling at the pass. It pressed on me day and night, a righteous indignation at the way, as I faded out of people’s consciousness at work, Maggie seemed to appear in ever sharper focus.

  They were planning future issues in the office, editions that would thump onto doormats and arrive in newsagents long after my baby had come—if it doesn’t die—so the news of Maggie’s appointment had been made public and she’d been into the office a few times. Her contact details had been given as the phone on my desk, which meant I answered it several times daily to PRs desperate to flog their wares to its incoming occupant. I felt like Maggie’s PA, like a secretary to my own life tasked with shutting it down as you would a failing company.

  “Aww, thanks! It was all Moff’s idea,” Maggie replied promptly to my text. “Hope I don’t look too dreadful in the pics!”

  Exclamation marks are the way women circle each other now.

  It wasn’t until that morning, when the bound stacks of magazines had been brought in on the box cart and I had heard Moff discussing the piece in the elevator with one of the suits from upstairs, that I realized Maggie had lied to me.

  “We’ve got this great piece in this month by a new writer called Maggie Beecher, about how a normal woman becomes a fashion editor,” Moff explained. “Such a fun idea from her, it looks like she’ll be a perfect fit here. She’s covering Margot’s maternity leave.”

  Moff gestured toward my stomach, inside which a dull nausea that was nothing to do with my pregnancy had settled.

  Why hadn’t Maggie been honest with me? My unease combined with a self-righteous indignation that made tears prick the back of my eyes. The injustice of it! I had become the pregnant-woman cliché: out of the loop, undermi
ned, suspicious, and now, embarrassingly, publicly upset. Precisely what I brought Maggie in to avoid, thanks a bunch.

  I cried when I told Nick about it later that evening. “I look like an idiot, like I don’t know what’s going on in the office, and I can’t even ask about it or suggest they might have let me know, because then I’ll look like a paranoid preggo control freak.”

  “Which you are.” He grinned and reached out a hand to stroke mine.

  “Which I am,” I admitted through my tears, “but only because they’ve made me. I’m really pissed off with Maggie about this.”

  “Don’t be with her,” Nick reasoned. “She shouldn’t have lied, ’Go, but maybe she felt weird about the idea, in case it looked like she was muscling in. Moff should have told you—but maybe she forgot?”

  He was right, but the fact of Maggie’s fib pricked at me for the rest of the evening. She had every right to be ambitious about the role she was taking on; why be coy? I doubted it was a deliberate strategy to unnerve me, or to deceive, although the less charitable part of my brain tried to drag me down that path. I weighed my hormones in the balance and wondered whether I was overreacting; Nick didn’t seem at all bothered about his own graphic design work being farmed out to others during his paternity leave.

  That’s because it’s three weeks, and there are only two of them in the company. There’s no question that he’ll come straight back to his job. And society hasn’t taught him to mistrust other men since birth.

  Not for the first time, I rued working in an industry that numbered mostly women among its employees. Women and gay men. It was a cohort that, during the boozy, child-free years, made for such camaraderie and fun, untainted by sexual competition or alpha male bores, but that conspired, consciously or no, to shut out what many of them referred to as “the breeders” in later years.