“The point is, I’m trying to deal with my shit the best I can,” Dana said. “And if Weight Watchers makes me feel better and helps me get up in the morning and get out the door, why judge? It’s bad enough my ex is having a baby with that fucking Victoria’s Secret model—the baby I should be having—without feeling like a loser from two people I barely even know except that we do yoga a few times a week.”
Sally finally snapped out of her meditational state to murmur, “Amen.”
“Sorry,” Penelope mumbled.
“Yeah, me too,” Lipstick said. “But I can’t believe you want to get pregnant so badly. It freaks me out. My friend Elly Portman got pregnant last year and it did not go well.”
“Oh, I know Elly,” Sally said, doing a full backbend. “She used to do private sessions until she started Pilates.”
“Wasn’t she the socialite who ran over all those people in the Hamptons?” Penelope asked.
“Accidentally.” Lipstick exhaled, starting another sun salutation.
Elly Portman, a model-turned-PR powerhouse, was well known to almost everyone in New York as six years ago she’d “accidentally” backed her SUV into a crowd of people lining up outside Aero nightclub in Southampton at three in the morning. Elly had immediately been whisked away by friends, preventing the police from getting a Breathalyzer test, but not from charging her with leaving the scene of a crime. The story had made the front page of the Telegraph, the Post, and the Daily News—for six weeks.
Two months in prison, a year of community service, and more than three million dollars’ worth of payouts to the victims later, Elly met the love of her life at a work function and, a little more than a year later, married him. Soon after she’d gotten pregnant and subsequently found out that during pregnancy, one couldn’t use any recreational/prescription drugs, cigarettes, or other appetite suppressants. And oddly enough, people actually encouraged her to stuff her mouth full of food. For the first time in her tiny, anorexic life, Elly Portman could eat whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted—and not be judged.
Sadly, for Elly, she went a little overboard.
“You guys, it was terrifying,” Lipstick said, breathing into a downward dog. “She gained over ninety pounds.”
“That is a lot.” Dana sighed, matching Lipstick’s pose.
“She was only eighty-five pounds to start with,” Lipstick said.
“Oh, I remember that,” Penelope said, trying in vain to stand on one foot. “The Telegraph ran a picture of her eight months pregnant and called her ‘Jabba the Portman.’”
“She got so fat she broke her foot—just by walking on it!” Lipstick cried.
“Oh, come on,” Dana said, “that’s ridiculous. Nobody gets that fat.”
“Elly did,” Lipstick said. “Now everyone gets a gestational carrier, which is the hot new thing. Muffie at work had one and raves about her. She got the biological baby without the fat, stretch marks, or morning sickness. And don’t even get me started on the actual birth. Ew.”
“Well, I’m not going to get that fat!” Dana shot back. Fat and babies were clearly her particular sore spots. During Dana’s divorce last year, which scandalized the Lubovitch section of her Miami family (thankfully, it was a small section from her Aunt Nedda’s side and everyone knew Aunt Nedda was nuts), someone had anonymously sent her a copy of a new book, It’s Too Late: The Myth of Female Fertility and the Lies of Fertility Treatments. Even worse, the package was postmarked from the saner climes of Cleveland (as opposed to the Lubovitch Miami).
The book, which caused a national outrage, was about how women need to “focus on finding a man like you find a job because your eggs are dying every day—and after thirty-five it’s just not viable to have children naturally!”—at least according to the author, Dr. Julia Jacobson, MD, PhD. “Women need to tell their bosses in their twenties, ‘Hey, I need to leave early and date. It’s important to me! I want to have a family!’ Because if you don’t, you’ll be forty with no children. People think they can just get in vitro at any age, like going to McDonald’s. Well, in vitro is expensive and doesn’t always work.” What Dr. Julia didn’t say was that at the ripe old age of fifty-two she conceived through fertility treatments with her fourth husband, a steel magnate from Dallas.
“Now that’s called going out of your way to seal the deal,” Penelope mused.
During the year that Dana tried to conceive with Noah, it hadn’t happened as easily as she thought it would and Dr. Julia infuriated—and terrified—her. She felt as if her inability to have kids had contributed to the downfall of marriage and that when she couldn’t conceive he’d found a younger, hotter someone who could. An embittered and frightened Dana now wondered if she was going to be “Aunt Dana” for the rest of her life.
“Take time off to date? I’m a lawyer! What would I tell the client?” Dana fumed. “‘Sorry—can’t go to court for you today because I have to go on a date with this guy I don’t know because he may be the one and my eggs are dying as I speak?’ I’d be fired!”
“Isn’t the point moot anyway?” Sally asked. “Dana, you aren’t actively doing anything to find a live sperm donor and won’t leave the house once you come home from work except apparently for a Weight Watchers meeting. Unless you’re planning on going it alone and getting in vitro, the outlook is grim, babe.”
“I’m working on it!” Dana said. “I’m going to go out…soon.”
“Actually, I may need you to come out next month,” Lipstick said from the lotus position. “I need a date to the Met gala. I’m wearing my biggest creation and need some moral support. It’s the event of the season and everyone is photographed and judged according to what they’re wearing. And I can’t go with any of the socials or someone from work because they’ll just ask about my dress. The fifth degree I got at Portia’s today almost broke me.”
“I’ll think about it,” Dana said.
“No, say you’ll go,” Lipstick pleaded. “Please. I need you. I’ll be with you the whole night; I won’t leave your side and it will be fabulous, I swear!”
“And even if it’s not—who cares?” Penelope said. “It’ll be funny. Besides, I can’t go. That’s sweeps week for the cable news divisions, and I’ve been warned about the fifteen-hour work days.”
“I wasn’t even your first choice?” Dana said.
“Dana,” Sally said while executing a perfect headstand, “just do it. Consider it better therapy than a Weight Watchers meeting.”
“Okay,” Dana conceded. “Fine, but have a Valium on hand, will you? I may need it.”
Later that night, in the privacy of her apartment, under the covers of her king-sized bed in the middle of her living room, Lipstick—who’d received two more messages from her mother that day wondering where she was and why she still hadn’t contacted her—logged onto her computer and typed in “www.socialstatus.com.”
Sure enough, the top picture on the page was of Lipstick at Portia’s trunk show with the headline “Lena Lippencrass Outshines Portia’s Purses in a Dress by Mysterious New Designer.”
Lipstick clicked on the comments. There were fifty-five already. “Jesus, don’t these girls have anything better to do than go to this stupid website?” Lipstick asked herself, missing the irony completely.
To her delight, the comments were overwhelmingly positive. But toward the end, things got a little worrisome.
Princessa1 (Ashley’s obvious screen name): I don’t know who the designer is—Lena is very tight-lipped, but the cut is insane and it’s fierce!
Parkavenue79: I agree. So chic. Where can we get this???
PookieBoo: Lena Lippencrass is such a bitch. She probably found it somewhere in the West Village where she lives and wants to keep it a secret so no one can copy her. She doesn’t talk to anyone anymore since Thad left her for Bitsy. Not that anyone can blame him. Bitsy is soooo chic.
Princessa1: Lena is not a bitch. She probably got it in Paris with her mother last summer. And Lena talks to me eve
ry day—and she couldn’t care less about Thad and Bitsy. They deserve each other!
ItsyBitsy: Funny, because I heard she and her mother aren’t talking anymore. And that she might not be living in the West Village for much longer. She probably got that dress from a thrift store.
Lena’s blood froze. How could Bitsy know what had happened? Her mother would never breathe a word of something that smacked of familial indiscretion.
JimmyChoolover: Do I smell scandal????
Princessa1: IstyBitsy, you are such a jealous witch. Lena is a friend of mine and everything is fine. And wherever she got that fabulous dress, it wasn’t from a secondhand store. Lena doesn’t do thrift.
Socialslut9: Well, if she did get it from a thrift store, which one? It’s hot!
Lipstick sighed, turned off her computer, and went to bed.
9
SCORPIO:
Career cycles start to finally look good as friendships and bonds are formed with coworkers. But in order to succeed, one must pay particular attention to detail—and dress.
Marge wasn’t that impressed with Penelope’s “Easter Bunnies in Heat” story, but in the end she conceded that the station needed a roving features reporter and there was no one else around who was willing to bow to the job’s particular (and particularly odd) demands. Penelope was happy to do anything that allowed her to spend as much time as possible out of the office and enabled her to do actual reporting again—however loosely she could reconcile the definition of reporting with what she’d been doing.
In the five weeks since her “promotion”—a lateral move that came without a pay raise and didn’t release Penelope from her occasional gofering or hair-spraying duties—Penelope covered a wide range of stories. There was the “Firesluts: What Pole Won’t These Women Slide Down?” story, wherein Penelope had to interview women from the Firemen’s Appreciation Club and hear all about the pros and cons of having sex on a parked fire truck as opposed to one in motion. There was the “Celebrities Flying Their Own Planes: A Dangerous New Adrenaline High,” in which Marge made Penelope fly with a drunken ex–Air Force pilot who demonstrated what happens when a plane stalls at fifteen thousand feet, with John Denver blaring in the background.
“John Denver died in a glider accident, not a plane,” Penelope, still nauseous from the flight, said to Marge after watching the clip air.
“Same thing!” Marge shot back.
And, of course, there was “The Latest Plastic Surgery Craze—You’ll Never Guess Where They’re Getting Botox Now!” for which Penelope—who suffered from severe needlephobia—received Botox shots to the forehead, brows, armpits, and lip area, on camera. (She put her foot down when the doctor started talking about genital Botox.) A week later she still couldn’t move her face properly, but on a brighter note, she didn’t sweat either. There was also the “Teddy Bears with Heart” segment, in which Penelope, dressed in Trace’s assistant Berry’s lime-green blazer and a pink skirt that had been hanging in the makeup room for a decade and deemed a “TV friendly color” by Marge, had gone to the Make-a-Bear factory in Brooklyn looking like a human watermelon to stuff a few plush bears with “real live ticking hearts.” During that particular “exclusive,” one of the factory workers mimed a blow job behind her back using a literal tongue-in-cheek as Penelope feigned interest—or tried to, considering her face was frozen—as the factory owner described his “fun-filled lifelike love bears!”
Penelope’s workday tended to follow one of two trajectories. If it was a bad day, she wasn’t assigned a story and had to spend her time milling around the office, playing gofer, and dodging Trace’s wandering hands and eyes. On a not-so-bad day, she was assigned a story in the morning meeting. It was always one of Marge’s abnormal ideas, but it was a story nonetheless.
In the latter instance, Penelope would first do groundwork with Thomas, rounding up people to interview and sorting out locations. If the shoot wasn’t in the office, she and Thomas would pile into Stew’s 1993 Chevy Suburban with Eric and drive to the location of the shoot. While Eric set up the camera, Stew would outfit Penelope with a wireless microphone while Thomas tried to corral subjects and make sure the shoot went as smoothly as possible. It almost never did.
But working in close proximity with a group of people was, to Penelope’s surprise, fun. At the Telegraph she’d led a mostly solitary existence, doorstepping by herself or with a random photographer. Penelope had never really had work friends.
Eric and Stew were like Jack and Mrs. Spratt. Eric was a short, bearish guy in his early forties, with a permanent five o’clock shadow on his face and a large Jew-fro. He was a doughy man with an easy high-pitched giggle that would transform his face into that of a delighted five-year-old. He wore his press tags around his neck, along with a picture of his wife Marie and infant daughter Sam wrapped tightly in a Mets onesie.
Stew, by contrast, was a towering six foot, four inches, with a bald pate and rimless glasses. He looked almost manorexic, although he ate like a horse (“a metabolism to die for,” he joked), lived with his mother in Brooklyn despite being close to fifty, and had a penchant for reading Harlequin romance novels that had their covers ripped off so no one could identify his not-so-masculine reading material. “They’re just so addictive,” he’d say and shrug when anyone made fun of him.
Then there was Thomas. By now she’d learned he was thirty-three, an NYU graduate who’d spent several years after college living in London and working for Channel 4 as a news producer before traveling in Pakistan as part of a crew filming a documentary series on Islam. He’d returned to the U.S. four years earlier for mysterious reasons—mysterious to Penelope, anyway, as he wouldn’t tell her why. He’d gotten a job at NY Access despite a recession and hiring freezes at the major networks. Thomas, who showed up at NY Access every day in a suit, tie, and shirt that was buttoned all the way up, worked hard and didn’t talk a lot about other aspects of his life. But he genuinely seemed to like Penelope, who’d developed a raging case of puppy love for him.
The crush was turning out to literally be a crash and had worsened over the past few weeks as Thomas, unlike many other men Penelope had met, including her father, actually took an interest in her life and her history.
“So, what are your parents like?” Thomas asked one afternoon. It had been a slow day and no assignment was given, so Penelope had been relegated to office chores and Thomas was just hanging around waiting to start setting up for the evening news.
“Huh?” Penelope asked, not quite sure if she’d heard the question. She was sitting next to Laura Lopez’s desk, collating files for Marge.
“Your parents,” Thomas said, leaning over the cubicle divider. “You know, the people who raised you?”
“Oh, right. They’re just regular, normal, well, no, that’s not quite right,” Penelope answered, chewing on a pen and trying to sound relaxed. “Mom’s kind of a left-wing Jew from Queens who randomly got stuck in Ohio with my right-wing, born-again Dad. It’s a long, bizarre story.”
“Ohio? Really?”
“Well, I actually graduated from a convent in Kentucky,” Penelope said, leaning back in her office-issued swivel chair.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah—I was the only Jew and virgin in the joint. Nuns included!” Penelope joked, leaning back a little farther in an attempt to look calm, cool, and collected.
“No wonder you have a good sense of humor,” Thomas said, resting his elbows on the cubicle top. “A double dose of Jewish and Catholic guilt mixed in with some oddball parents. Nice.”
“Yep, that’s me,” Penelope said, leaning farther back in her chair, as it went almost vertical. “Just one funny, fucked up—” Her chair crashed backward to the ground.
“I should’ve warned you not to lean too far back on those things,” Thomas said as he laughingly helped her up. “They’ll get you every time. I fell over twice last week.”
Standing up, mortified but trying to pretend like nothing had happened, Pe
nelope said, “Yeah, cool, happens all the time. No big deal. Um, what about you? Your parents?” at which Thomas had checked his watch and said, “Damn. It’s news time, gotta go. Talk later,” and walked off.
Another crash came the following week. They were on assignment covering “Bat Boy”—a lame name for a stunt derived by a secondhand “magician” who was hanging upside down in Central Park for “sixty straight hours!” despite taking a break every fifteen minutes to stand up and pee. Bat Boy insisted that the only interviews he would do had to be done upside down, so while Stew and Thomas held her upside down, Eric rolled tape. All the blood rushed to Penelope’s head and she looked like a giant cherry while asking Bat Boy things like, “So, um, why are you doing this? I mean, what’s the point?” “Why do you have to stand up to pee if you have a catheter in?” and “What the heck does this have to do with magic?”
All was going well until Thomas, who’d been taking Zyrtec for his spring-induced allergies, sneezed so violently he dropped Penelope’s leg. Thankfully, Stew held on and her NY Access microphone broke her fall, but Thomas was mortified. He’d apologized at least twenty times and the next day brought her the recently rereleased So 80s CD, which was a compilation of the decade’s biggest hits.
“Oh man,” Penelope said, ripping open the CD to look at the album credits. “This is awesome. Thank you. You didn’t have to do that…and how’d you know I wanted this?”
“Please,” Thomas said and smiled. “You bust out singing Journey, Bananarama, and The Bangles at least once a day. Anyway, I really am sorry. I’ll never drop you again.”
“I do seem to end up on the floor a lot when I’m around you,” Penelope said.
“He’s a little uptight, but he’s just so…cute,” Penelope said to Lipstick and Dana at yoga that Saturday. “And smart, and nice, and I love working with him. I know this sounds totally unromantic, but he’s so efficient. I feel taken care of, like he can get me in and out of a situation pretty much unscathed. Well, except for dropping me that one time, but whatever. Is that retarded?”
Mercury in Retrograde Page 14