The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  She filled her plastic cup and held it aloft. “Let’s have three cheers, please, to wish Margot well. I think you’ll all agree, she’ll make the most wonderful, very organized, very tidy mother. To Margot, even though she isn’t drinking. Hip, hip—”

  But her hurrah was lost in a ripple of turned heads and murmurs that had started by the door and worked its way inward like a Mexican wave. Somewhere near its center, a blond woman was flapping her hands to hush and divert attention back to the toast, but it was too late.

  In glossy magazine offices, a new look—however small—is always something of an event, as the women who work there flock to inspect and compliment it. This—a reveal moment worthy of a Hollywood makeover—had generated its own jamboree.

  The cut, a blunt, shoulder-length crop replacing long tendrils of curls; the color, an expensive-looking honey-caramel where there had been mahogany before. She’s been to my hairdresser.

  “Maggie, you look fantastic,” said Emily Moffatt, cup still in the air. The rest of the room nodded in agreement.

  * * *

  “OKAY, SHE DOES LOOK a bit like you,” admitted Nick. He was staring at the selfie Maggie had uploaded to Instagram earlier that afternoon, presumably on her way back to the office. On her way back to make sure nobody even noticed me leave.

  “A bit?!” I was furious. Not only was this a blatant, not to mention successful, attempt to steal the limelight on my last day, it came with similar creepy Single White Female overtones that Maggie’s having bought the same embroidered slippers had. I had been prepared to overlook a pair of shoes, but an entire image overhaul, timed to coincide with my leaving party, was hardly an accident.

  “It isn’t a coincidence, no,” my ever-reasonable husband agreed. He rested a warm hand on my bump and snuggled into my neck, leaving a trail of warm kisses there before surfacing again and looking me in the eye. “But you should be flattered rather than threatened, ’Go. From what you’ve told me, Maggie’s been so nervous about stepping into your shoes, she had to go out and buy them. And a wig to go with them.” He dug his elbow into my ribs and flashed a silly grin.

  “Oh, piss off,” I grumbled, still outraged but leaning into his embrace. “Why do you always have to be so bloody understanding?”

  But I knew he was right, and that it was something to let go of rather than stew on. Bit sad, really. I wasn’t sure whether I’d be more relieved if Maggie did everything so differently from me that the two of us couldn’t really be compared, or whether I wanted Maggie to emerge as a pale imitation while I was off. Or whether, really, I just wanted it to go as smoothly as possible, so that I returned to a calm office and a grateful replacement.

  I had carefully buried my competitive streak over the years; recently it had been exhumed without my permission. My younger self had been ambitious, driven when I needed to be by status and the urge to climb a hierarchy. As I neared the top, however, I found comparisons with my peers—my rivals—more stressful: less about how I could match them, whether I was working as hard as them, was as successful, and more about whether they might overtake me at some point, whether in fact they’d soon be coming for my job.

  I had thought pregnancy would quiet those voices. So it had been a surprise when I felt the sharp insecurities that I thought I had rid myself of after adolescence pricking me again as my due date approached. It felt so…teenage. Was my mother consumed by stuff like this when I was little? I thought having a baby would mean I’d finally grow out of giving a damn. If anything, the niggles felt more insistent the more I withdrew from work.

  I looked through the beribboned wicker basket of goodies I had been given as I left the office, a pampering parcel designed to make the most of the few weeks left before the baby arrived. Maybe they didn’t entirely forget about me. I had sent a similar package of artfully boxed, gold-lettered potions and thick, fragrant unguents, cadged from the crate beside the beauty editor’s desk, to Winnie a few weeks ago—before the other things had been sent back to me—with a card that simply said: “Thinking of you, lots of love.” Stupid really—Winnie prefers home remedies and lumpy gray soaps that smell like almonds.

  They had all been at the bottom of the box Winnie had returned, a scene of rage daubed in serums and lotion, the jars with their lids twisted off, tubes squeezed out, so that they had coated the other items in the box in a gloopy layer. Not that I would have kept them otherwise. I had dumped the whole thing straight into the garbage, before Nick saw it and knew my secret shame: that I was a friend unfriended. Sometimes I felt as though I had done something very bad indeed; in my more reflective moments, I tried to see Winnie’s actions as those of a woman in great pain.

  I ran a bath and tipped a vial of purple, lavender-scented oil into it, under the tap’s flow, so it frothed. I wanted to mark the milestone I had reached that day: work finished and only a week until my due date. I just wanted someone to wish me good luck, to tell me I’d done well. Before, I would have texted Winnie, but now—Is this what social media is for? Because nobody has real friends anymore?

  I opened Twitter on my phone and typed in an update:

  Margot Jones @hautemargot: last day done! signing off from @hautemagazine for a little while to work on my new side project #hurryupbaby #donthurrytoomuch #wouldlovetowatchsomeboxsetsfirst

  A couple of likes flashed up before I’d even put my phone down on the side by the sink. I had a pang, as I had throughout my pregnancy when referring to the fact of it in public, that I might hurt Winnie’s feelings, but my school friend was not on Twitter, I reminded myself. I tested the warm bathwater with my hand.

  Pulling my hair back into a bun and settling into the tub, I remembered the days when baths could be hot and deep; for pregnant women, they must be tepid and easy to climb out of, in case of fainting or falling. Baths used to be the time I most treasured alone, a moment to savor as I mentally evaluated my week and physically sloughed off its effects.

  I had not felt truly alone for months. The baby inside me was the person who chooses to sit in the row behind in an otherwise empty cinema, somebody on a long train journey with whom one keeps making accidental eye contact. I wasn’t annoyed by it; there was a comfort to the presence. I had already decided it had a sense of humor, a cheekiness, a delight in comic timing. I allowed myself just that much of an attachment to the little swimmer.

  Not truly alone, but the loneliest I had been for years. Isolated at work, excluded by Winnie. Nick was wonderful, as he always was and would be, but even he had a limited attention span for the interminable buzz in my head of speculation and counter-speculation about what the next few months would bring, at home, at work, for me, for the child, for Winnie, and for Maggie. That buzz rose to the level of a din at times, dropped to a faint hum at others, but it was emotional tinnitus, an internal Greek chorus, that left me feeling hostage to myself if I listened for too long.

  I was standing on the very spot where I had first felt my baby move, rubbing scented oil into the drumlike stretched skin of my stomach, when a message flashed up on my phone. A camera icon next to Winnie’s name. Instantly I was filled with a sense of dread, as though I had been caught doing wrong.

  I know what you did.

  It wasn’t my fault.

  The picture was of another picture. A soft-focus professional portrait of Jack lying inside an oak coffin that was lined with pintucked white satin. His womb-scrunched features had relaxed and there was a faint smile on his rosebud lips, his pouchy cheeks neither sallow nor flushed but now the perfect shade of alive. No blood anymore. The caul had been cleaned from a dark thatch of hair that was tamed and combed flat against his head. He wore another of his white onesies; his tiny, perfect hands met across his tummy; and the little toy rabbit was tucked under one arm. A companion.

  My heart broke again and with it, my waters.

  * * *

  UNBEARABLE PAIN—that came later. At f
irst, it was a quiet and insistent ache at the bottom of my back, one that increased its clamor over the next few hours until I could only see colors. We went to the hospital twelve hours after that, by which time I felt the agony like a steel girdle being tightened around my hipbones. I welcomed the cool needle and its icy numbness. I lay on a bed for another day, and in a room full of women—and Nick—Lila took her first breath the next morning.

  8

  MAGGIE

  She saw Margot’s picture on Instagram a few hours after it had been posted. “What a perfect squish!” Maggie wrote underneath the photo—and the baby really was: peachy pink, with a tuft of hair, full cheeks, and clasped hands, her haunches pulled up on each side like a little rabbit, wearing a gray suit dotted with tiny embroidered stars. Trust Margot to dress her baby impeccably.

  Maggie texted her on her way back to the office after lunch: “Well done! She’s adorable, love the name. Do you feel like a different person?” She wasn’t really expecting a reply, if she was honest, and forgot all about it once she arrived back in front of her inbox.

  Maggie had a month before the shows started. Four weeks to prepare for what everybody was telling her would be the most intense period of her life. She knew how it sounded when someone in high heels said that fashion week was a grueling ordeal that most people can’t wait to go home from—hardly like performing open heart surgery or working on an oil rig, you’d point out, and you’d be right.

  And yet, the times she’d reported from the shows in London before, Maggie had gone home every night feeling like she’d run a marathon in her stilettos, craving white bread and waking the next morning feeling like she’d been hit over the head. Granted, that might have had something to do with the number of champagne flutes she was offered over the course of the day.

  The first show started at nine A.M., and if you were on a crappy ticket, you needed to start queuing at eight-fifteen. On a ticket like Margot’s you could turn up at five to and swan in. Then there was a show every hour until about eight P.M. In between, you had just enough time to find a loo or maybe grab a sandwich—but never both—and you were expected to write up each collection before the next one started, so the girls running the website could post the reviews before the other magazines had theirs up. So yes: not a matter of life and death, but stressful nevertheless.

  She spent that month in a heightened state of extreme busyness, learning the ropes at the magazine and trying to remember everybody’s names, tracking down stories and following up on tips that she thought might work for an article, pitching them to Moff and breathing a silent sigh of relief when they seemed to be exactly the sort of thing the editor was looking for. She noted, not without superstition, that it seemed to be going well.

  Maggie was enjoying herself. She had always loved writing, the act of wrangling words into sentences that were not only full of interest and information but worked technically, balanced at each end, with as much action as there was description. It never felt like work, and she was always grateful for that. Words came naturally to her; they never let her down. In fact, they were her longest-term relationship.

  No, it was the other side of things that she was finding tricky—the fashion side. The very process of getting dressed in the morning had become a political act. At first, Maggie had worried only about whether she’d measure up to Margot, who was always so sleek without looking like she was ever really trying; now her replacement faced the daily headache of whether her outfit would pass muster in the office.

  Intentionally or not, the only route into Haute was via a walkway that ran from the elevators down past Moff’s windows, with the kitchenette on one side and the bulk of the desks on the other, known as “the runway.” The magazine’s staffers stalked along it in a fresh and arresting ensemble every morning as though there were editors taking notes on either side. Which there practically were.

  It wasn’t done bitchily—although of course comments were made sotto voce if an outfit was deemed not to have worked—more as a celebration of how good everyone looked. Because, to a woman, they all did. Posh and rangy, cool and streetwise, elegant but with attitude—and then Maggie. Where the rest of them prowled along the runway like cheetahs, Maggie scurried or clomped its length with her head down, eyes glued to her phone, though she could feel theirs scanning her from head to toe.

  The first time she went for a drink after work with Holly and her assistant, Amma, they teased her for it.

  “We work with clothes, Maggie!” they joshed. “You have to at least try to look like you enjoy wearing them!”

  She really was enjoying them—much more than she ever had before. Largely, Maggie suspected, because the clothes she was now wearing were so much nicer—and so much more expensive—than the ones she’d been wearing before. These ones didn’t pull on the bits of her that protruded or need readjusting every five minutes. It had taken only a few strides in a pair of Italian leather heels, a few moments of French silk against her skin, the weight of a chunky handbag dripping in yellow metal, to make her realize with an intensity close to shame the inferiority of what she had had before.

  A bottle of wine or more later, Holly and Amma had shown her YouTube clips of the one-named catwalk goddesses they worshipped, telling Maggie to pop a hip like Letisha or roll her shoulders back like Darlene, pointing out the way these wonders sashayed past the audience, a fluid march that somehow lingered over each step even as their heels stomped briskly in time to the techno soundtrack of the show.

  Maggie put a bit more effort into the runway after that, and began to take pleasure in showing off the new things she bought and tried on daily.

  Her new hair helped too, and the fact she’d lost a bit of weight from not going out drinking with men she didn’t know every night. Her cheekbones had emerged for the first time since adolescence, and her waist looked more defined. She still couldn’t fit into most of the samples that were hanging in the cupboard—nobody could, apart from the hungriest and most wistful-looking of the interns—but she was ordering a full size smaller whenever she chose clothes to try for the stories she was working on.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had to add a coin to the self-esteem jar on the nightstand, either.

  Maggie wasn’t too worried about what she was going to pack for the shows. She had been sent enough things to test-drive that the bits she’d bought after she first met Margot had already been cycled out of rotation and offered to Cath, a role reversal her flatmate had been only too happy about. Maggie’s closet was a new and shiny place, supplemented with the designer handbags and shoes she’d bought with her newly inflated pay packet. She wasn’t ashamed to admit that some evenings after work, she just went home and laid things out on her bed, imagining the Italian marble piazzas and cobbled Parisian streets she’d be wearing them in.

  She wondered whether Margot still did this, or whether, for her, getting dressed was something innate. For Maggie, it had become like piano practice—the more she did it, the better she got and the more she enjoyed figuring out the nuances. She stopped avoiding her reflection and instead greeted it like a friend she’d clap on the back and say was looking well.

  The week before she flew to New York, Maggie was walking back along the runway from the loos—chin high, shoulders back—when Holly stuck her head out of the fashion cupboard and beckoned her inside. Maggie had her own shelf in there now, MJ changed for MB on a sticky label, where she stored the things that had been sent in for her to write about or that she was borrowing. She’d been amassing things she thought she could take with her to bolster her own clothes, but Holly was one step ahead.

  “Take your pick,” the stylist said, draping one long arm over a rail of clothes. “We can’t send you to the front row without the right kit. Need them back afterward, mind.”

  She gestured to a row of silk shirts, embellished bomber jackets, floral dresses, and brightly colored knitwe
ar. Maggie could have kissed her. They’d struck up a bit of a friendship after a few more nights in the pub—another singleton with evenings to spare, Holly was far more down-to-earth than her intimidatingly cool exterior suggested. They spent an hour in the cupboard, putting together outfits for each day Maggie would be away, a combination of things from the rail and pieces she had already.

  Her favorite was a high-waisted pencil skirt in electric blue houndstooth that Holly told her to wear with a cropped, skinny-sleeved black sweater that showed the tiniest sliver of flesh above the waistband. Maggie’s instinct was to wear it with heels, but Holly shook her head: “Too Barbie,” she decreed, producing a chunky pair of white running shoes. “Leg tint—and no socks,” she instructed, as though addressing a small child.

  When she got back to her computer, Maggie had several emails waiting, including one from Penny, the PR she’d met with Margot, about one of her designers, Marc Moreau. Maggie desperately wanted to interview him for the magazine. Marc was dark and brooding, the epitome of edgy Parisian cool. More important, he dressed anyone who was anyone and was famously indiscreet—just the sort of subject Moff got excited about.

  Penny’s email was short, to the point, suggesting Maggie could do the interview with Marc when she arrived in Paris for fashion week next month. He’d be busy but he always had time for Haute, Penny wrote, words that made Maggie’s heart sing after years as a freelancer trying to get quotes in doorways or as celebrities climbed into their cars. More than once she had had to chase a subject down corridors shouting her questions at them. The people she interviewed had no idea who she was, and didn’t care because she wasn’t attached to a prestigious title.