by Heidi Pitlor
Colbert asked her to describe her recent exposé on 60 Minutes, “A Day in the Life of Wanda Lesko.” I had happened to watch it the previous week. Lana said, “I asked a young homeless woman, the mother of a toddler, to wear a hidden camera that we’d had mounted on a pair of eyeglasses. I wanted viewers to see the world as Wanda did. We look at poverty, or at least some of us do from our privileged vantage points, but we need to start looking from it.” The viewer got to see what it was like to be called a “smelly whore” outside the Times Square TGI Friday’s; to learn that the OCFS would take away her son, Christian, if she didn’t move her “sorry ass right now”; to get struck in the eye by a half-eaten slice of pizza and then turned away at the Bowery Mission; to fall asleep on the Z train, and then get robbed at gunpoint. The segment was both harrowing and heartbreaking. One expected Wanda to emerge from this day filthy and bruised on every level, but when she finally turned the camera back on herself, she was the same green-eyed waif with the same serene expression. “Listen,” she said, her son held tight against her chest, “I’m not in jail and me and my baby Christian are alive. You have to keep your eyes on the sky so that you can see the rainbows when they come out.” This particular day had left her no worse off; every day was this horrible for her.
I was thrilled to write for a client who cared more about women’s poverty than women’s nipples. From my cursory research, I knew that Lana was forty-five. Born in Bucharest, she had immigrated at sixteen to New York on the eve of Ceaușescu’s fall. Her father had died when she was eight; maybe the food shortages from the austerity programs had something to do with this. But her mother soon fell in love with an American reporter and, with her two daughters, escaped Communist Romania and moved to Queens to be with him.
Now Lana had a twelve-year-old son and a research-scientist husband, the sole inheritor of his pharma-magnate father’s estate. Lester Harding kept a low profile; from what I could suss out, he was an unremarkable-looking man with a goatee. He studied zebrafish and depression, and had done a lot of work in China.
In addition to practicing law, Lana taught at Columbia, although she was currently on sabbatical. Her op-eds for legislation around nondiscrimination and increased protection of women who worked out of the home ran regularly in The New York Times, as did her interviews on CNN and MSNBC. She had just been voted Person of the Year by one of the progressive magazines that I used to read when I had the time and energy. On Twitter, she had over three hundred thousand followers, and countless trolls. Just yesterday, she had silenced an arrogant tax accountant with: Mansplaining blocked. Need emoji for that. About twenty thousand people had “liked” the tweet.
As the presidential election approached, Lana had become one of the go-to voices for the disenfranchised. She had even just introduced Hillary Clinton at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. Lana had brought along Wanda Lesko, now a married mother of two and stepmother of four, living in Hoboken. Wanda appeared exhausted, a new baby in her arms and Christian running in circles by her side, but she gazed lovingly at Lana as she approached the podium. “Every single woman in our country,” Lana said, “deserves the same great life that my friend Wanda has now. Every single one.” Christian halted and jammed his thumb inside his nose. He worked hard at whatever was stuck in there and when he finally removed it, flicked it in the general direction of Lana. Footage of the moment went viral at first for its comic value. But things took a turn when certain antifeminist factions tweeted that Wanda’s life “didn’t look all that great” and that Lana was using this poor woman to “extend her own fifteen minutes of fame.”
Lana had published a book already, a lofty and, I had thought, unnecessarily wonky tome outlining the myriad ways that welfare law screwed over black mothers. But this had been nine years ago, and the university press that had published it had allowed it to fall out of print.
I had been hired to ghostwrite a second book, a departure for her, a memoir of motherhood that first had been titled Oh Boy! Adventures in and Lessons from a Feminist’s Attempt to Raise a Feminist Son. Someone had just deemed the word “feminist” problematic, so now the title was a work-in-progress. To refer to Lana as anything other than feminist seemed ludicrous, but I rarely had a say in this sort of thing.
I was scheduled to meet her in Manhattan on a Tuesday in September. I had planned to take the bus from Great Barrington, and Kurt would watch Cass for the day. I got dressed and located my shoes under Cass’s bed. I grabbed To the Lighthouse from my bedside table: the bus ride would be a good opportunity to really dig in, finally. I considered what lay ahead of me. What if I blurted out something unwittingly offensive about women or gender? Long ago, I had worked for a small feminist magazine, but at this point in my life, I could not have defined the difference between Material and Marxist feminism. I went to retrieve what was left of a scraggly joint that I had been nursing for weeks, and looked around for my Zippo. We would make a stop in Poughkeepsie and I could find some private spot to smoke there.
In my truck, the voice of Charlie Barleycorn, a Canadian children’s singer who now lived in Vermont, poured from the speakers: “Red, yellow, brown or black? You’re my pal, I’ve got your back! Puerto Rico, Mexico? My mom’s from Ontario!” Charlie let loose with his banjo and harmonica, and an autoharp joined in. I remembered that Cass was not seated behind me and hit the Eject button. Maggie had given us the CD—all songs about race—back when she had learned that Cass’s father was of Indian descent. I had taken it, a little awkward about the naked gesture, but Cass loved the music and knew every word.
My section of the Berkshires was bipolar, more so than it had ever been. In my town alone we had a vegan cafe and McDonald’s, a Peruvian restaurant and a Subway. Outside Goodwill, two athletic-looking women jogged by a man passed out on a bench, a cigarette butt hanging from his mouth. I could have done without the summering moms at the playground giving me the stink eye whenever Cass enjoyed some Doritos or Oreos, the only snacks he would eat for a time, but I tried to appreciate the multitude of trees and the wildflowers in spring, the cottony meadow behind our neighborhood, the leaves—our famed foliage—already turning yellow and amber, and glowing in the morning sun. And the way the horizon appeared closer and broader than anywhere I had been. The stark Mass Pike cut through the verdant hills toward the marbled morning sky. If I did not have a perfectly beautiful home, I certainly lived in a beautiful region, the place that had inspired the writing of Moby-Dick and The House of Mirth, numerous musicians and visual artists.
On the bus to New York, I pulled out my book and began again. “ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.”
My eyes moved to my bookmark, a photo of Cass and me—our tiny family—on a hayride the year before. There were his expressive eyebrows, his plush toddler lips, his silky hair. My love for my son could feel like sadness, threatening and rich. I thought a moment. What if Kurt left him alone for a few minutes and something happened? What if Cass went downstairs and tried to climb Throne of Waste, which now reached the ceiling? Kurt had no car. He used my truck if he needed to go anywhere, and of course I had parked it at the bus station back in Great Barrington. Did he even know where the nearest hospital was?
In Poughkeepsie, I disembarked and huddled behind a dumpster near a ropy man in a gray suit smoking a cigarette. I waited for him to finish and leave, but he was in no hurry. I decided that the benefits outweighed the risks and searched my bag for my lighter. He watched me in a way that fellow smokers never did—with judgment—and so I informed him that his fly was down. There was only time for one drag, but this was my friend Virgil’s excellent Purple Haze, and soon I was thinking that Kurt could handle whatever came their way. He was a grown-up, after all, and Cass was no longer a toddler but a preschooler. The feminist theory I once knew would come back to me. Why had I worried about how I’d come across to Lana? I was a reasonably intelligent woman with decent social skills. Everythin
g would be A-OK. The bus driver honked the horn and we had to get going.
In Manhattan, Colin—handsome in a trim, steel blue suit, his hair gelled but not petrified—stepped from a cab just as I approached Lana’s building off Central Park West. Old friends of a sort, I reached up and we hugged.
“Check you out,” Colin said. “All professional. Last time I saw you, you looked like you had been digging graves.” He had been staying nearby at the Canyon Ranch spa and had picked me up from my landscaping job to take me to lunch. Before I could respond now, a uniformed man opened a glass door for us. He so resembled Captain Kangaroo that I vowed to google the actor to see if he was still alive and for some reason now a doorman in New York.
Colin and I headed inside toward a white marble front desk, three waterfalls streaming down the craggy cement wall behind it. I stood next to a potted yucca as Colin told the concierge, a serious, small-nosed man, that we were here to see Lana.
In the elevator, I said, “Any sense of when I’ll get the first payment for the book?” It was technically due on my signing of the contract, and I had done so two weeks earlier.
“It’ll come when it comes.”
Sometimes I thought he found even the mention of money unseemly.
“You’re both here,” Lana said when we had reached her condo. “Amy, hi. Lana Breban.” She extended her hand, which was both warm and hard.
My chest thumped with excitement as I took it. I did not want to embarrass her so soon by telling her that my name was in fact “Allison” or “Allie,” as most people called me. Apparently Colin felt the same.
She had lively, kind eyes and a strong jaw. In person, she looked different, though. She had on those chunky glasses, but she may not have been as tall as she looked on TV, or maybe this was because she was wearing flats now. She had such presence, such magnitude on TV and in interviews, and of course she would seem smaller in real life. Her blue hair was now a short bob, and given its density, had a weighted Prince Valiant look. Only she could get away with this, I thought fondly.
She led us through an airy foyer, past a painting of a man whose face appeared to be sliding off his head and a framed sketch of Ceaușescu waving a wand at a group of screaming children. The three of us entered a narrow dining room with a stone fireplace and a canted bay window that overlooked the trees of Central Park. This was an opulent address, but if anyone deserved it, Lana did—and certainly more than Nick deserved his spread in Malibu. There at Lana Breban’s enormous oak table lit from above by a feather and glass chandelier, as I unfolded a heavy napkin and draped it over my lap and Colin described the fevered buzz over Lana’s new book deal throughout the New York publishing world, I felt a surge of hope for my life.
Working with Lana would mark a welcome return to my younger, purer values. Years ago, after Dartmouth, I had driven out to San Francisco with some friends and found a job as an office manager for a small feminist magazine. I had gotten to research an article about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and public voyeurism. It was easy to fall in love with San Francisco, that charismatic if fast-gentrifying reminder of a freer, more idealistic decade. I had shared my lunch break at taquerias in the Mission with sharp, principled women writers. But I earned nearly nothing. Since then, my principles had taken a back seat to the need to pay bills.
An attractive, petite woman maybe in her sixties, her chin-length hair black with silver highlights, hurried into the room. Gin. We had never met, but had spoken several times over the phone. She wore an ivory blouse with a gold and black wrap around her shoulders. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said. She had a cast on her pinky finger and appeared flustered. “Hideous traffic jam in midtown.”
“Too much editing?” Colin joked, gesturing to her cast.
“Too much gardening with my granddaughter. But don’t let me interrupt. Keep going—I’ll catch up,” she said, taking a seat. I struggled to envision this polished woman with her hands in dirt alongside a child.
“I’m eager to hear about how this process works,” Lana said. “But I should tell you before we start—I only have about an hour. I have to run to a meeting in Lower Manhattan as soon as we’re done. One day I will learn to say no to at least some requests—but that day is not today.” She laugh-snorted, and her hand flew to her mouth as if to return the snort to its hiding place. “I know this was addressed before we all signed on, but I need to emphasize that what is said here today—and from now on—stays between us. I don’t need it getting out that I had to hire someone to write about my life as a mom, of all subjects.”
“Of course,” Colin said. “Without a doubt.”
“Always,” Gin said.
They turned to me, and I said, “Definitely.” I could feel their desire for me to provide them with more words. “You’ve got my full discretion. I’ve been ghostwriting for over ten years and I’m used to keeping quiet about my clients.”
With a nod in my direction, Colin said, “She’s invisible. No online presence, no publications to her name. She hardly exists.”
“Wonderful,” Lana said. She released her shoulders as if from a too-high hanger.
A pretty, youngish woman wearing maroon cat-eye glasses appeared and filled our goblets with water. Lana, of all people, employed a housekeeper? Or was this woman a cook? She described the lunch we were about to enjoy and fiddled with her earlobe as she spoke. I nodded as if I could define—and had, of course, many times before enjoyed—quenelles and dorade.
Lana turned to me. “How do we get started?”
“It’d be good if you could give me all the raw material that you have,” I said. “Sometimes my client writes me a long email or a letter, or we Skype or talk on the phone, and I take tons of notes. You tell me about your life with your son, all your adventures as a mom, a feminist mom of a boy, of course . . . everything you’ve learned and what’s surprised you over the years. Don’t worry about giving me too much—people usually do.” I tried to convey the air of a seasoned veteran.
She reached for her water. “Can we make room in the book for some new data about parenting, too, you know, and maybe some studies about economics and gender identity in children? I know a wonderful sociologist in Oakland. She is doing this fascinating research on gendered curriculum in public schools.”
“Absolutely,” I said. I craved the opportunity to write something less personal for once, something outward- instead of inward-looking.
“Did you read those books I sent you?” Gin asked her, waving her pinky in its cast.
“I can see why they became bestsellers. They were wonderful.” I noted that Lana had used the word wonderful now three times, and filed this away for use in her book. “Those women had so many stories to tell and, I mean, such well-defined missions. They gave their whole lives to being moms.”
I assumed that she and Gin were referring to the two books she had also sent me, one a memoir about an American mother who had moved her family of eight onto a decrepit houseboat in Amsterdam, the other the semi-comic account of a Maine woman who had integrated the rules of military boot camp in her family’s daily life.
“You don’t think you have a mission?” Colin said.
“Oh, I have a mission. I’m made of missions! But I am also a workaholic. I burn pasta. I couldn’t even make it home for Christmas last year. And I am terrible at laundry. It really does take a village, right?” She nodded in my direction. “I openly admit I’m not going to PTA meetings or baking my son his favorite cookies every day.”
“I’m hopeless with laundry too,” I told her. With everything she said, I liked her more. Why had she even wanted to publish a memoir of motherhood in the first place? People sometimes had unexpected reasons for hiring me. For the congresswoman, I had written a book about her life along the Connecticut River. For Jenna Rose, a bridal contestant on the reality TV show I Thee Wed, I had written The Smart Girl’s Guide to Finding Lasting Love. The congresswoman had confided to me that her book was meant to be an extended personal
letter to her grandchildren. Jenna Rose had likely wanted the public to view her as an intelligent woman, not that she would have openly admitted it. I understood these motivations. I had supported these women; they were each noble in their way.
“Who was it that said, ‘Every life is fascinating’?” Gin asked. “Don’t sell your own life short. Motherhood—parenthood—is more than just cooking or volunteering. If anyone knows that, it’s you. Certainly don’t feel that you have to fall back on research. Can I be frank?”
Lana nodded.
“Readers want the personal and the messy. They like to read about real life and struggle, certainly more than economic studies. People want to see you living out your research and your knowledge.”
Colin said, “We want to see how you manifest your ideals. What it looks and really feels like to feminist-parent a boy.”
His clunky wording made me itch.
“Yes, you are probably right.” Lana looked at me anew. “Do you have children, Amy?”
“I have one son, just like you. But he’s four.”
“Great!” she said. She kept her gaze on me.
Colin went on. “Listen, people will happily read whatever you want to tell them about your life. They want to know more about this brilliant woman who fights for them. They want to know that you are imperfect, just like they are. We’re not asking you to rewrite The Year of the Houseboat or Bootcamp Mama. Remember—this will be your book. It should reflect you and your family and what you believe and what you have been through, in all its messy, singular, Lana fabulousness. We would never have asked anyone else to write it.”