by Heidi Pitlor
I now began to wish that he had held on to at least some of his assets.
I called the real estate agent and told her we would not be taking the perfect house in Stockbridge. A few weeks ago, my landlord had given me a new lease. I signed it, and went to pack our suitcases.
Because Disney World was to be our dream vacation, I had booked a room for Cass and me in one of their deluxe hotels. We stepped off the shuttle bus from the airport and were greeted by a handsome bellhop who introduced himself as Slade or Slate. He scooped up our suitcases and led us into the huge lobby painted a pleasant chowder color. “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” blared, and I sank into the comfort that came with being somewhere entirely child-focused. Cass could have a temper tantrum or break a vase and theoretically people would not care so much. The many cozy but lavish seating areas teemed with children wearing mouse ears and shouting at their frazzled adults. Giant blue pots spilling with flowers sat on marble side tables. I thought I smelled cotton candy.
I had never been to any Disney property before, despite my frequent begging when I was a young kid. “Be glad we can’t afford Disney World,” my mother had said. “It’s tacky.”
I must have been eight or nine. “Have you ever been there, Mom?”
“Grampy actually took us for the grand opening when I was about your age. It was so loud even in the cheesy hotel, and the lines were horrible. But it was nice of him to take us, I guess.” Even then I knew how my grandfather, a philandering small-town lawyer and professional blackjack player, amassed a minor fortune and then lost it all soon before he died, when my mother was eighteen. Over the years, she had developed a variety of defense mechanisms against the shame of her financial limitations: denial, disassociation, snobbery.
So far, nothing was as awful here as my mother had described. Our hotel room was neutrally attractive in the manner of certain doctors’ waiting rooms, and I went to close the door against the sound of “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” in the hallway. On the walls hung several watercolors of children sleeping in fields of flowers that, oddly, resembled poppies. Two high beds were made up with soft, white comforters and feather pillows, and there was a plush tan carpet on which Cass tried to do a somersault. “I love this rug. I love this bed. I love this room,” he said.
“I think our house is just as nice,” I lied. I had at least opted out of the pricier water view. Our room looked out over a row of sedans and a dumpster.
I had fantasized about the two of us holding hands as we strolled past Cinderella Castle, nibbling on ice cream cones and waving hello to Goofy or Doc McStuffins, Cass telling me that he had never been happier. But five minutes after we arrived at the Magic Kingdom, he collided with a pale, lantern-jawed boy holding an enormous turkey leg. The boy got right in Cass’s face and said, “Two lanes, asshole.”
Cass ran behind me. I told the boy that he was being rude and should take his ugly meat and go.
Buzz Lightyear approached and we said hello, and made our way past the stores of Main Street USA, where Cass asked to buy a lollipop, penny candy, a T-shirt, a pin, a magnet, a lanyard, a stuffed animal, a pencil, mouse ears, unlimited photos of us for $200.
“We are here to have fun, not just to buy stuff,” I finally told him.
“Why can’t we do both?” he said.
“Hey look, there’s someone else from Massachusetts,” I offered lamely, gesturing toward a man in a Celtics shirt. When I looked, I saw that he, too, held a huge drumstick.
That night, Cass wanted to know why we had not seen Doc McStuffins.
“Good question,” I said, and went to google the character. We had crossed paths with almost no characters roaming the park, and it turned out that most were now hidden away at various meet-and-greet locations. Apparently they were getting harassed by tourists constantly demanding to take pictures with them—although wasn’t that the point of the characters being here? Doc McStuffins could only be found at some big breakfast event for which you needed reservations. And none were available. The resort recommended booking up to 180 days in advance. Sometimes the foresight and capabilities of other parents stunned me.
I decided to take Cass to the breakfast event anyway at the tail end of seating the next morning, and just wait outside so we could at least say a quick hello to Doc as she was leaving.
But the moment we approached the hostess stand at the restaurant, a woman with short beige hair was on us. “No standing here, folks.”
I could see Doc in the distance by the omelet station, her large plastic head bobbing around with those signature brown pigtails and her white lab coat. She was hugging a toddler girl. I heard the sobs of a dozen babies, a dozen babies who had likely never seen the show and would never even remember being here.
“Come on,” I pled with the woman. “We came to Disney World basically just to meet Doc McStuffins. She’s my son’s favorite. Look, Cass, there she is!”
“No can do,” said the woman. “Let’s move it along now.” She stepped out from behind the stand as if we might rush the place. She had a square face and substantial earlobes.
“Can’t we wait until breakfast is over and then say hello? Is it really against the law to just stand here?”
“You’ll need to make reservations for another day.” Her eyes went from Cass to me and back again.
“You guys are booked for the next goddamned year.”
She glared at me.
Cass began to whimper and I grew desperate. “Fine. What will it take?” I asked, reaching for my purse. We would probably never come back here. I had little to lose.
“You and your boy need to leave, ma’am. Now.”
A voice inside me said, “No.”
She turned and called out to someone else.
“Doc, hey, Doc!” I yelled.
But Doc did not hear me, and another woman appeared and the first woman’s fingers were tight around my arm, pushing me back.
“Motherfucker,” I said.
Cass began to cry.
I shoved the first woman away from me and she fell backward against the stand.
The other woman helped her regain her footing. “Ma’am,” the second woman said, adjusting the lapels of her blazer. “You need to leave or I will have you and your son forcibly removed from the park. Do you understand me?”
Later I would learn that cussing alone was grounds for removal. It hardly seemed possible to vacation in a place like this with young children and not blurt out a single “fuck.”
“Doc!” Cass called out desperately. “Please!”
Doc McStuffins finally turned and headed toward us. At last we had won out over these heartless women. Doc would set them straight and we would all laugh at how riled up we had gotten. She would give Cass a hug and I would snap a photo and he would remember this moment forever, the magical time his mother took him to Disney World to meet his favorite character. In that big plastic costume, she waddled toward us and when she was maybe ten or fifteen feet away, I leaned down and whispered to Cass, “Get ready, here she comes.” He jumped a few times in his excitement and said, “What do I say to her?”
“Anything you want!” I was giddy now too. “Tell her she’s your favorite character on TV!”
Doc stopped. She went to high-five a teenage girl, but the girl recoiled and lifted her iPhone to her face before Doc’s hand could make contact. Her plastic face frozen in that grin, Doc turned and headed back toward the omelet station.
“Oh God,” I said.
Cass called out one last time in a voice now choked with tears.
“Doc,” I called out. “Can we get a quick hello?”
“Michael. Code six at Play ‘n Dine.” The second woman had a walkie-talkie.
I grabbed Cass’s hand and stormed off. In my rage, I explained to him that Doc was a fake anyway, just some jerk dressed up in a costume, and that certain restaurant hostesses got high off of whatever miniscule power they had.
Of course none of this helped
. “What?” he cried. “You ruined everything. You ruined Doc, you ruined this trip, you ruined my life,” he said. He was inconsolable all the way back to the hotel. “I just want to go home.”
“No. We are going to enjoy this place. Tomorrow is a new day,” I said, possibly because that song was playing again in the lobby.
We walked in silence back to our room, and I admit that on the way, we stopped at the gift shop and I bought him a lollipop the size of his face to make him feel better, and it did.
In the following days, the number of times I said “no” to my son—“no” to the pricey Typhoon Lagoon, “no” to renting a poolside cabana, “no” to any item in our minifridge—put a real damper on things. I tried to encourage him to stay focused on enjoying what we did have. We were in Disney World, after all. How many kids got to say that? (His answer: “Every kid.” My response: “I never went as a kid.” Cass: “You don’t count. You’re not a kid.”)
Cass got to meet Cinderella toward the end of our trip. We even got to do a last-minute meet and greet with Sleeping Beauty in the France Pavilion at Epcot. Both princesses were friendly and kind, and I hoped they would partly make up for our experience with Doc. I asked them questions like, “What’s it like to ride in a real pumpkin?” and “How much do you sleep?” in order to buy more time for Cass. Through smiles, they answered in silky voices—“A real pumpkin is magical, but it’s better with two slippers!” I watched them perform the same act for each child, even one awful girl who told Aurora that she was obviously wearing a wig and had on “too much hooker makeup” to be Sleeping Beauty. “Where did you ever get that idea? Why, of course I’m Aurora,” said the princess without missing a beat.
“I am the only boy here,” Cass said as we turned to leave. He was right; we were surrounded by throngs of girls and their sisters and mothers. Even the Disney staff there were all women.
“So?”
“Aren’t any princes here?”
I said, “Let me see if we can find some,” and approached a younger woman dressed in a crisp white blouse and skirt that looked as if it had been made of a circus tent.
“Hmm,” she said. “There’s Prince Naveen at Tiana’s Garden. Oh, and Gaston is at Belle’s Village Courtyard.”
“But aren’t those places back at the Magic Kingdom?” I said. We had already used up our passes to that park. “We’re heading home tomorrow. Are there any princes here at Epcot?”
She looked kindly at Cass. “How about Chip and Dale? They’ll be here later this afternoon.” She explained that they were funny chipmunk brothers from classic cartoons.
He shook his head. He tended to prejudge anything from a time older than he was as boring and valueless.
After the woman walked off, he begged me to take him back to Magic Kingdom.
I refused but he kept at me. I’d had enough. “Please do not ask me for one more thing,” I said. “You need to learn to stop when I say, ‘No.’ Got it?” He welled up, and I softened. “How about we get crêpes for lunch?” and I marched us toward the kiosk for Crêpes des Chefs de France.
Afterward, we wandered to Morocco and Japan, and then the fountains at the American Adventure, where an a cappella group named Voices of Liberty took their places nearby and starting singing “This Land Was Made for You and Me.” They sounded incredible, but because they were dressed in old-fashioned clothes and were not Doc McStuffins, Cass had no interest in them.
We continued on to Italy and took in the replica of the Doge’s Palace, the Columns of San Marco and San Teodoro. We went to Il Bel Cristallo shop, a place made to resemble the outside of the Sistine Chapel. “Maybe someday I’ll be able to take you to the real Sistine Chapel,” I told Cass. If there was something I craved most, it was the ability to travel with him. “You never know.”
Returning home was the psychic equivalent of drinking newly spoiled milk. I picked up a landscaping job, which would only last a few days. As it was summer and school was out, there were no substitute teaching jobs to be had.
Kurt upped his hours at the hardware store and that was a help, but he soon cut back again when he started a new sculpture. He had been collecting various items from the dumpsters next to houses in town that were being renovated: patches of vinyl flooring, several toy Furbies, a broken Cuisinart, a cracked non-flat-screen TV. He had begun to build a ten-foot-tall chair, a thing far too wobbly to even climb, which was the point. He named it Throne of Waste. As he had with his other sculptures, which lay half-finished in my backyard, he named them before he began. One evening after dinner, he explained that this one would be a statement about materialism, global warming, and greed.
“Okay, cool,” I said, standing to clear the table. “Listen, I’m about to drain my checking account on rent and utilities.”
“Jimmy charges you twice what he should for this place. We should all just barter. Did you know that last year, barter transactions in the U.S. alone were fifteen billion dollars? It’s all about community, and creating value with who you are versus what you own. Money is corrosive to human interactions.”
“Maybe we could barter your sculpture for rent when you’re done,” I said before I could stop myself.
“I mean, we could—” he said. “I’ll see if I can get more hours next week at Pete’s.”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
I emailed Colin to ask if he had heard any more about that new book, but he did not respond. I emailed him again a week later under the guise of chit chat: “Can you believe that the host of The Apprentice actually got the Republican nomination? Tanya Dawson told me that she is already looking at apartments in Toronto.” Tanya, a comedienne and character actress, had been my client years ago, but we still kept in touch.
I heard nothing back from Colin.
I started To the Lighthouse again. “ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.” It was hard to focus on the Ramsays.
Things in my life had been so promising once. I had won a few national writing contests in high school, had been named salutatorian of my graduating class, and was granted an almost full scholarship to Dartmouth. I moved up to Hanover, got good grades, and published a couple of poems in the school’s literary journal. My adviser, a youngish Brit Lit professor and the faculty adviser of the journal, was an avid champion of my writing. In a campus full of students who had come from New England prep schools and who were avid skiers and lacrosse players, Professor McCoy was a kindred spirit, a fellow outsider from Pittsfield who graded papers at the same diner in White River Junction where I often went to do homework and write. Sometimes we sat together and talked about Western Mass or Shakespeare. And then midway through my senior year, after class, he brushed his hand across my ass, muttering something about “so many giddy offenses.” I chose to think that he had accidentally touched me and that I had misheard him. But the next week, after I turned down his plainly audible offer to visit his “ample personal library,” he gave me a course grade of D. Shaken, I registered a complaint with the English Department, but was never contacted in response. My GPA plummeted, both because of this grade and my state of mind. I even lost part of what remained of my scholarship. The whole thing was so dispiriting that I never regained my enthusiasm for writing poetry or my pride of Dartmouth.
When Colin Finally called me, his voice nearly bounced as he described the new client and book. “And it’s one of Gin’s books.” I had worked with this same editor on Tanya’s memoir. “You’re her first choice,” he added.
“Really?” I was flattered. Virginia, who went by “Gin,” had requested several major revisions and was hardly the sort to dole out praise. A legend in the industry, her authors ranged from edgy women entertainers (like Tanya) to leaders of the Democratic Party to Pulitzer Prize–winning nonfiction writers. She had recently been given her own imprint at an exalted publisher, Countenance Books. I was used to larger, less discriminating houses. I took in all that Colin h
ad just told me: the thrillingly impressive client—Lana Breban—and Gin and Countenance. “Wow, if this isn’t karma after Nick Felles.” I had come to think of his book and that whole debacle as “Project Fuckface.”
“I know, right? We’ll do the usual terms.”
“Okay,” I said. I thought a moment. “But should you push for more up front? As a kind of insurance? You know, in case the book gets canceled for whatever reason?”
“Have you ever had another book canceled, Al? You don’t need to worry about this client. And it’s a great offer. Come on, take it.”
“It is pretty good,” I said. I estimated the differential between what I would have earned for Nick’s book and what this new project would bring. The two were apples and oranges, of course, and Nick was more widely known, but at the moment, given who my new client was and all she stood for, the sizable differential was tough to ignore.
Still, the offer did exceed what I was typically paid. I could hardly afford to be greedy. “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said. “Of course I will.”
Chapter Two
Lana Breban had come onto my radar a year earlier, around the time she was a guest on The Late Show. I had liked her immediately. “Please welcome powerhouse lawyer, and the person responsible for the congressional Task Force on Women and Poverty, columnist at The New York Times, feminist rabble-rouser, and the woman you don’t want to offend on Twitter,” Stephen Colbert had said. She appeared on stage, tall and unslouching in her slim, pavement-colored suit and chunky eyeglasses, her hair buzzed short and dyed royal blue. She brought to mind Annie Lennox. Lana strode toward Colbert like a storm promising to explode everything in its wake. She took her seat and they began to banter, and I soon learned that she had been the one to coin a phrase that I had been seeing lately on T-shirts and bumper stickers: Never Apologize, Never Compromise, Never Rationalize. “I got the idea for my battle cry from Julia Child. She refused to say she was sorry, even if a dish turned out terribly. A chef has to ‘grin and bear it,’ she used to say.” Lana had immigrated from Romania as a teen, and her accent was still detectable, although barely.