Don't Wait Up

by Liz Astrof

  To be fair, my mirror had seen a lot worse. From the time it showed up with my new bedroom furniture (including a canopy bed) when I was eight, it watched me grow up, suspended over my little girl’s vanity that later doubled as a desk, flanked in time by my poster of John Travolta in Grease on one side and my signed photo of Janet from Three’s Company on the other.

  Many a night the mirror had borne silent witness to my flinching at the sound of my father’s approaching footsteps and subsequent blasting open the door waving a bad report card, or a pair of shoes I’d left out in the rain, or, one memorable evening, an empty package of Cathy’s favorite cookies that I’d put back in the rear of the cabinet, where they were hiding it from me (my strategy was to just hope the house would burn down before she went looking for a snack and noticed the package was empty).

  In retrospect, it’s a miracle the mirror survived the fury-fueled trashings of my room on those occasions, the air peppered with condemnations of me as a pig or slob and always, always, a huge disappointment to my father, as out of control as my mother, just like her in fact, and not nearly as smart or good as my older brother, Jeff. For what would feel like hours, he would rage: I was going to fail out of school. I was going to be a nothing. My mirror never suffered so much as a crack or a paint chip from where it hung, watching—me red-faced and crying, Jeff and Cathy hovering in the doorway, trying halfheartedly to calm my father down, too afraid to step in.

  My mirror would watch my nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old self promise my father to be better, to beg for my keep. It would watch my father not believe me, tell me that he was done with me and how much he hated me, all before mercifully leaving me to sit in the wreckage that he left my room. Clothes, pictures, stuffed animals, everywhere—all stuff my father paid for that I knew I was lucky to have.

  The mirror would watch him come back into my room later, calmer and contrite. He would hug me, telling me that I knew he loved me, that he just got so frustrated because he wanted me to be happy. And thinner. And smarter. And more like my brother. And just a completely different person.

  My mirror saw me after fat camp, which left me twelve pounds lighter and four inches thinner. Proud and tan, admiring my new thigh gap, and so, so hungry as I swore I’d never gain weight again, my mirror watched me gain all of the weight back. Watched me desperately try to zip my jeans, flailing, gasping for air, cursing myself, my thigh gap long gone, then giving up and stretching my (also tight) sweatshirt down to cover the fact that the jeans weren’t buttoned. I knew, even if Dad and Cathy didn’t, that fat camp hadn’t been about teaching me to eat healthy. Fat camp was simply about starving kids like me and then releasing us—more cynical, less trusting, so, so hungry and with the souls of hardened criminals—back into our old lives, with a 7-Eleven (Freedom was waiting!) on every corner. Until the next year, of course, when our parents would deliver us back to be starved once again. The camp knew what it was doing. Failing us kids was how they made their money.

  My mirror knew this and never judged me. Quite the opposite—it served as my appreciative audience, not only when I would put off doing my homework, instead reading my history book as a news anchor for the Channel 4 news, but when I hosted my “Talk Shows,” and did my impressions of guests like Carol Burnett, Penny Marshall, and The Facts of Life’s Mindy Cohn speaking into my hairbrush and me reading “viewer questions” off index cards. In between segments I’d act out commercials—back then you HAD to stop for commercials. Putting Dove soap on one side of my face and Zest deodorant soap on the other, I’d look straight into my mirror—the only time I could do it without hating myself. “The Dove side feels smooth and soft. The Zest side is burning . . .” I’d say in a sultry grown-up lady voice. I’d do taste tests with crunchy peanut butter on one spoon and creamy on the other. “Well, this is just nuts! I love them both equally!” I’d say in a kid voice.

  Then I would carelessly leave the spoons in my desk drawer and get ants. Then my room would get trashed again, at which point my father would sometimes discover some of the cash I’d stolen from him, at which point I’d really catch hell.

  Mercifully, no one ever found Cathy’s white angora sweater that I borrowed without asking and a BIC pen accidentally exploded all over. Trying to clean it with that same bar of Dove soap just . . . spread the ink around the sweater. The mirror witnessed me put it in a plastic bag before hiding it in the nook above my closet like a dead body.

  It saw me after I’d gone on my first voluntary jog around the neighborhood—I’d meant to go only a block to satisfy Cathy’s request that I “just go get out of here,” but I got lost and wound up running four miles. Sweaty, breathless, and exhilarated, endorphins rushing through my system. Freed by my own two feet, I’d felt empowered, having literally run away from my problems.

  The mirror saw me shed weight, through running and a diet of turkey breast, grapes, and Trident gum. It saw the return of the thigh gap—bigger this time. It saw me model new designer jeans my father had only dreamt I’d fit into someday. It saw me beam when I earned his approval, saw the pride I felt. Enough joy to make me forget the bad stuff.

  It saw my first attempt at putting on makeup. Blue eye shadow. It saw my severe allergy to eye shadow.

  It saw my shame. My pride. My perms. My acne. My Molly Ringwald Breakfast Club phase. My Molly Ringwald Sixteen Candles phase. My Molly Ringwald Pretty in Pink phase.

  Then, shortly before I left home, my mirror saw me sneak into my bedroom at sunrise, reeking of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men after my first date with Don Jaconi. We’d each paid for our own food at a deli, and he had driven me to a cemetery. We sat in his car and made out, and he told me his dream of becoming floor manager at Sam Goody and maybe, just maybe, someday moving out of his mother’s house because his stepfather really bummed him out. He told me he was really thirty-six, not twenty-six, and showed me where his grandfather was buried.

  A few weeks later, my mirror saw me bawl my eyes out when I found out Don was dating a girl who worked in Victoria’s Secret. He’d gotten us the same Christmas presents—a thin gold-plated bracelet and a bottle of Shalimar perfume.

  My mirror had seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. And now, across the country, it saw a married me with my legs in the air, trying to increase my chances of pregnancy, searching for the TV remote so I didn’t have to see that the porn Todd needed involved lady wrestlers.

  • • •

  WHEN TODD AND I moved from that apartment into our first house, there was still no baby on the horizon. I was disappointed and frustrated. But just when I went into the spare bedroom and lamented to Todd about what a great nursery it would make, if it were not for my “unreliable ovaries”—the doctor’s words, seriously—the realtor poked her head in and told me that the two families who’d lived in the house before us conceived within the first month of moving in. So, we bought the house at slightly above market price.

  I tried to sell my childhood mirror at a garage sale in the hope of finding it a good home. At the end of the day it was the only item that remained—someone had even bought the blanket it had been lying on. Even Todd’s brown, leatherette football-watching chair—another thing we “didn’t have room for aesthetically”—had been sold. I wondered if people sensed the shit my mirror had seen and didn’t want it.

  • • •

  SO, THE MIRROR wound up coming with us to our first house, where it sat in the garage for ten years.

  • • •

  EVENTUALLY, THE KID thing happened—Jesse, as the realtor had promised, having been conceived within a month of moving in. Two years later, Phoebe was born. And as it turned out, I did want children—though I was grateful that my kids hadn’t been sired by Don Jaconi, because he was forty-six when we dated when I was sixteen. His hair hadn’t been prematurely graying, but on-time graying, and far as I know he never made floor manager of Sam Goody or moved out of his mother’s house.

  When we moved to a bigger house, the one we live in now,
I left the mirror at our old place with a bunch of other stuff I didn’t know what to do with. But when we were unpacking . . . there it was, staring at me. Well, I was staring at me in it. It had followed me to California, then from apartment to apartment to my first house. And finally, my second house.

  My spiritual friend, Kristin, suggested that night that the universe wanted me to have it, that it was a character in my life story and that it would reveal itself eventually. I told her to stop acting like the universe is a thing.

  At the time of that move, Jesse was eight and Phoebe was five. I was worried my son would be anxious about the change—all the new creaks and drips, the different outside sounds, the noise the air-conditioning made when it’s turned on. Any of it could cause severe panic in him, I knew.

  I didn’t think for a second that Phoebe would be fazed by her new home, however. My fearless, brave child—the one who had barreled out of me six days early and was almost born in my new car—had been on a rampage, brave as hell ever since. She was the kid who would climb to the bow of a fast-moving boat during a whale-watching excursion, the kid who jumped into the pool before she could swim, and who kicked me out of Mommy and Me, preferring to be just “Me.”

  Which was why I was so surprised to find the kids’ roles reversed at their new address. Jesse was calm, even excited about having a staircase—not quoting me so much as a single staircase death statistic. Phoebe, on the other hand, refused to go to sleep in her room, terrified that monsters were living under her bed. I told her that was dumb.

  “But Nora said there are monsters!” she yelled at me. Nora was her friend who spewed “facts” about shit she knew nothing about. Like that McDonald’s food had plastic in it (which ruined my previously foolproof bribing strategy).

  I was insulted that Phoebe trusted a five-year-old more than her own mother. I told her that Nora knew nothing, that she was a compulsive liar and not even that cute. I also refused my daughter’s demand that I check under her bed one last time.

  “It’s three in the morning, Phoebe,” I said as I kissed her forehead, “and I have to go to sleep and be awake tomorrow because I happen to work for an actual monster.”

  In retrospect, I shouldn’t have said that last part.

  “You work with a monster?!” Jesse was rooted to the doorway. Apparently, he’d overheard.

  “Okay, yes, he’s a sort of monster,” I explained. “But he’s a monster who paid for this amazing new house and your school and all your toys.”

  Now, they were both terrified. They stared at me as if they were seeing me for the last time.

  “I’m saying he’s a different kind of monster!” I insisted. “A mean man! Not the monsters that eat you! I mean, okay, yes, he eats people alive in a verbal abuse sense, but he doesn’t actually chew people up and spit them out . . . well, he has been physical in the past, but—”

  I had yet to understand that my children were too young to get the finer points of metaphor. Or sarcasm. Now everyone was inconsolable. Including me.

  I put the kid’s vaporizer on high, pumping lavender into the air. The woman who had sold it to me said it was soothing. She had also gotten me involved in a pyramid scheme, and now I was selling artisanal oils to fellow desperate parents.

  “Okay, listen up,” I said firmly. “The monster I work for is just one of many very successful men in television who’ve been rewarded for treating people terribly. His bosses think that’s a small price to pay in return for their ‘genius,’ so they get giant development deals and lots of money, and Mommy gets a job!” I said it all a little condescendingly, as if they read the entertainment trades.

  “You’re talking about Tony, aren’t you?” Jesse asked.

  “Yes!” I enthused, proud of my son. “He’s the monster! And that’s what we call the ‘cycle of abuse.’ ” It was an odd time for a teaching moment, but you call them as you see them.

  “I’m NEVER sleeping in my room EVER!” Phoebe yelled, not giving a shit what kind of monster I worked for.

  Though in pictures, Tony looked “happy” and “fun” with his bright-green eyes, chiseled features, and truly great smile (it always appeared as if he’d been caught midlaughter), his reputation for being a monster preceded him. Stories about his outbursts, firings, one about him knocking a plate of food out of a writer’s hands . . . accounts of his nastiness spread through writers’ rooms all over LA. Even my therapist knew of him and thought my taking the job was a bad idea.

  So did my brother. Jeff had preceded me in our chosen careers as TV comedy writers by a bunch of years. Which made me take his thoughts on the matter pretty seriously.

  “You can’t work for that guy!” Jeff had exclaimed when I called him with the news. “My friend was about to be deported and still didn’t take a job there. He works in a diner now, Liz. In Canada!”

  I’d told him I didn’t have the luxury of choosing jobs based on whether or not my boss was abusive. It was a show I loved and really wanted to write for, an established hit, meaning job security. So long as I didn’t fuck up, of course.

  “Safe not getting fired by a monster?” I asked him.

  “Safe not getting fired by a monster,” he sighed.

  “Safe-safe, safe-safe, safe-safe,” we said over each other, as we always did before hanging up the phone.

  I learned on my first day that my assigned seat at the conference table in the writers’ room had been occupied twice before—both times by writers who, among others, had been fired. No one expected me to last. I was basically sitting on an Eject button, and everyone would be surprised when I broke the curse by staying on.

  The writers on the show were shells of their former selves. Several had skin rashes, a couple had gone completely gray, one had developed a tic where he looked like he was about to speak but never did. They looked like war refugees, not like the staff of a hit show with good hours and high-end snacks. There were alliances among them, and I sensed immediately that I was being watched to see which side I would join. Every friendly “Where you from?” or “I love your shirt!” or “Want my coleslaw?” propelled me into a different loyalty camp.

  I set out to make sure I was nice to everyone at the same time, while being not nice to anyone at the same time. Basically, I stayed in my office during breaks.

  Maybe I’d dealt with so much worse in the past at the hands of other authority figures like my father. Maybe I was more of a survivor than I realized as a result. Maybe I was just seeing a different person than everyone else did, but Tony seemed delightful to me. He was charismatic, funny, and a great listener who really seemed to care about his staff’s lives and emotional baggage. He wanted to know all about us. I started to think maybe he was a reformed monster, that maybe he’d spent his most recent hiatus floating in a lithium pool. Maybe he’d never been all that bad, and the stories about him were embellished.

  If anything, as it turned out, the stories about him had been under-bellished.

  I was about a week in when this young female writer who just hours earlier Tony had proclaimed a magical genius and “the voice of the show” stood up to pitch a story. He’d put her on such a pedestal that he made her actually stand when she spoke—in fluent Hipster, of course—so we could admire more of her.

  For whatever reason—probably a Millennial thing—or because she looked great in them—she put on a pair of large sunglasses as she stood up. Tony stood up as well. I thought maybe out of respect. Would he be saluting her? He would not.

  Red-faced, his formerly kind, bright-green eyes bulging, he started screaming at her. I didn’t know which of them I was supposed to look at, or if I was supposed to stand, too, or go with my gut and just crawl out the door. I decided to do what the rest of the room was doing and stared at my thumb as if it had just sprouted out of my hand.

  Tony went after this girl in a way I’d never seen in a writers’ room before. He made it deeply and viciously personal, attacking everything from her character and personality to her cloth
es, from her car to her private life. He used all the things she’d opened up to him about against her. I didn’t know if he was once beaten with a pair of sunglasses, or if his mother had been beaten in front of him with a pair of sunglasses, or if he even had a mother, rather than having been spawned in some primordial and toxic ooze.

  Afterward, exhausted from his tantrum and (it seemed) just a tiny bit pleased with himself, he sent us all home at noon.

  No one but me seemed thrown by what the fuck had just happened. Everyone just acted like this was normal. No one talked about it. The guy who looked like he’d go to say something and then not went to say something, and then didn’t.

  That’s when I knew: this workplace was open season for Tony’s rage.

  I wasn’t wrong; we went home at noon a lot. I gleaned from hushed snippets that he’d been bullied when he was a kid and seemed to have a score to settle. As he’d also been treated badly by past bosses, he had a second score to settle. And those were just the scores we knew about.

  His outbursts weren’t reserved for the privacy of the writers’ room. A former actor, he was forever in search of an audience—sometimes even a studio audience. It’s fairly common when taping a show for writers to gather between scenes on the floor to rewrite jokes that don’t “land” the first time around. Tony would get so frustrated and impatient when this happened that he would cause his own scene. The audience would stop watching the actors they’d waited all day to see to take in the other performance—the writers being screamed at and shamed by an unhinged man in a very expensive suit with everyone scrambling to make him happy. His writers would rattle off jokes, one after another—he’d shoot every one down, usually accompanied by a crushing insult. “That’s not a joke, it’s a sentence!” he would seethe, knowing that statement was like a knife to the heart for a comedy writer.