by Heidi Pitlor
Nursing had come to seem like a privilege to me back when Cass was younger. To work full-time and to be available full-time as your baby’s sole food source was no simple thing.
Lana wrote, This may be so, but I’d like to take a more overtly PRO stance. Also you used the word ‘wonderful’ four times in the chapter. Oops! And if you were thinking of the woodblock you saw in my hallway, it was a Hashiguchi, not Utamaro.
Ack, sorry! I shuddered.
In some ways, it had been even easier to write for Nick Felles than for Lana. I had not heard his name in a while, and annoyed, I googled him. Two more young actresses had just come forward with accusations of sexual assault. One had a small part as a witch on his show, and I did not recognize the other. There in a photo was his smug baby face, his arm draped around the actress I did not know, a cigarette between his two fingers that dangled just above her breast.
I immediately toggled back to my conversation with Lana. I’ll redo this section.
Lana: Thanks. I did like the part about nursing in the park and those rude teenagers. LOL. (Could you tone it down tho? Don’t want to turn off readers! Less profanity if you wouldn’t mind, even if it’s meant to convey male anger.) How did you come up with this?!
Me: Something similar happened to me once.
Lana: What creeps! Yes, by all means, feel free to fill in where necessary with more of this sort of thing!
Me: Ok. I think readers would rather hear your stories, though!
Lana: Did Val send you Ned Boyle’s contact info? He’s an old friend and he’s on the board up at Columbia Memorial, Child Psych. One of the most impressive docs out there. You could talk to him about sleep and attachment parenting. He’ll have some good data on boys’ neuro, etc. I’m remembering a study about the mother’s voice, response in male child. Also would you look into the marketing of binary-gendered clothing and toys?
Me: I know from raising my own son how hard it is to find gender-neutral toys.
Lana: Great—go with that. You hardly even need me! (Except again please redo breastfeeding and Utamaro and tone down language.) FYI, I’m out of commission the next few weeks. Have a conference in Melbourne. If that flight alone doesn’t kill me, what follows will: lecture in London, meet cousin in Barcelona, quick vacation in Paris, summit in Geneva.
Me: Ok. Wow.
I made a quick mental assessment; I had yet to finish two chapters in four and a half months. I would have to show Gin double this, and soon. The final manuscript was due in two months, although maybe this could be pushed out if Lana talked to Gin. Still, I owed Jimmy rent money, and I would be unable to pay utilities soon. I had already left my electric company two pitiful phone messages.
Me: Good luck with all that traveling.
Lana: This is my life!
You should see mine! I wrote and quickly deleted. And then, I don’t know why, but I typed the following: Lana, I need to tell you that my name is Allie, not Amy.
Lana: It is?! Why did it take you so long to correct me?
Of course this was my fault. Of course there was no My bad! or even hint of shame on her part. How meek she must have thought me. I typed, Better late than never, right?
She wrote, Well, yes!
That night, i helped Jimmy move a minifridge that he had found on the side of the road into my basement. He planned to use it in the new house that he had just bought, after he converted the basement into its own rental unit.
“Any sense of when you’ll be able to get me some rent, Hon?” he asked, breathing heavily as we set the thing down in the corner of the now largely empty space.
“I can give you part of it now,” I said. “Or soon, I think.”
I saw his face manufacture both pity and skepticism. “I’ve got this, I swear,” I said. “I might be able to pay you a few months all at once. Just not right now.”
“When’s Kurt going to get back? You sure you can cover for him?”
I glanced down at the rusty minifridge on the floor. “I made do before he moved in, right?”
“I’ve been good to you,” Jimmy said, squinting as if trying to see me in some different light. A toothpick emerged from between his lips. Apparently it had been inside his mouth the whole time. “With this new property, I don’t have a lot of wiggle room right now.”
I said what I knew that I had to: “You have been good to us. You’ve been amazing. Jimmy, I don’t even know how to thank you. You were so easy about Kurt moving in downstairs and letting him paint in exchange for rent. And you know, you’re like—you’re like a second grandpa to Cass.” Was it too much? I had found that flattery rarely was, that it could be more effective than anything with certain people, even if it made me feel like a verbal prostitute right now.
“Aw,” he said, waving me away. He moved the toothpick toward the side of his mouth. “Just by the end of the month, okay?”
“To be honest, I try to caution parents against assigning too much import to a baby’s sex in terms of its predetermining behavior. Excuse me.” I could hear Dr. Boyle put the phone down as he began to cough and hack for a good minute. I was about to suggest we try this later, when he came back on. “Genetically, boys and girls are 99.8 percent the same.” He went on for a while about the cells in the anterior hypothalamus.
I asked him about Ferberizing and about Dr. Sears (Dr. Boyle told me they were old friends, and I detected no small degree of competition). I had some questions about attachment parenting and he responded blandly, without giving me his own take on it. I imagined that he had lived through multiple fads in parenting. Each generation was so sure of its choices, only to be refuted by the next.
We moved on to teaching boys empathy. “Modeling compassion is always a good idea. Modeling feminism in the case of this book,” he said. “And a good marriage—an egalitarian one, I guess.”
“What if you’re not married?” I had to ask.
“Then modeling good relationships, I guess.”
We discussed boys’ capacity for empathy. “It depends on the child and his environment. Nurture, nature, you know. A boy raised with a significant amount of external stressors will have a harder time learning anything,” he said, and began to cough again. “I’m talking about poverty, abuse, disease, alcoholism, divorce, you know. We all shut down in the face of immediate stressors, or at least most people do. The fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. A boy dealing with these kinds of problems might not be as empathetic. He might act out. He might even develop depression or anxiety.”
“Or separation anxiety?” I asked carefully.
“Sure.”
“And the absence of a father? What impact would that have?”
“Again, it depends on the household.” He went on to give another blurry answer that gave me little to go on for either Cass or the book.
“So you could say that just the existence of alcoholism or divorce—or the absence of the father—doesn’t automatically cause stress.” He did not agree or disagree. “What’s the best way to help your son with his anxiety?”
“Honestly, I’d just say to love your boy. Hold him and comfort him when he seems to need it. Try to make sure all his basic needs are met. Teach him that people are there to help him, and that the world around him is manageable and caring.”
“What about moms who aren’t able to always do that? I mean, for reasons of time or money. Or disability or what-have-you?”
“No one is always able to do anything. We all do our best,” he said magnanimously.
“How’s that famous woman’s book going?” my mother asked over the phone.
“Slowly,” I said.
“Lottie had some of us over last night, and five minutes in, Patty Copeland got the news that her daughter-in-law had a baby. So then the whole night revolved around Patty. This is grandchild number thirteen, but you’d think it was her first. And then we got to hear all about her son meeting some big NBA player, and now the two are best friends and planning a vacation to Cuba. I finally told Patty
that you’re writing something for one of the most famous women in the country right now. The mystery just killed her. She would not stop asking me who it was.”
“What?” I said. “Why’d you do that?” I was almost impressed by my mother’s resourcefulness in turning her own nagging curiosity into social capital.
“I didn’t tell her anything. I just had a little fun with her, and believe me, it worked. She stopped talking about her new granddaughter and her son,” she said with a laugh. “Anyway, we’ve gotten the condo almost all set up. I found this Japanese woodblock print at a—get this—a yard sale down the street. It looks like an original, so we’re going to get it assessed.”
I glanced over at my screen. Google Alert had sent me a link to an article titled “Breban Bares All at European Women’s Lobby.” “Mom, I have to get to work,” I said. “Let’s talk more in a few days?”
I clicked on the video. Lana stood at a podium on a stage; behind her a line of maybe twenty women breastfed their infants. Apparently Lana herself had not bared anything. The juxtaposition of all these slender, somber-faced women wearing business suits, a few holding briefcases, and the diaper-clad babies was really something. “Never Apologize!” Lana said into the microphone, as did everyone else in the room. “Never Compromise! Never Rationalize!”
One of the babies slipped, and the mother’s breast came into full view. The woman may have been too busy adjusting the baby in her arms to care, and why should she? The video had already been liked 57k times and disliked 109k times. I could only imagine the tweets to come. This speech struck a different chord from recent ones Lana had given. Maybe she and her people had finally rethought their efforts at diluting her image. Maybe now that the battle lines had been drawn throughout the country, she had decided to actually provoke the trolls in order to galvanize her supporters.
I checked Lana’s Twitter feed and Facebook page to see what she might have to say about all this, but she had not posted anything yet.
Was I supposed to now include this in the book—even if it had nothing to do with raising Norton? Surely there were other ghostwriters who had dealt with similar clients. I had not come across more than a few of us over the years. We always spoke haltingly about our work, strapped as most of us were to our nondisclosure agreements. I did a search, and in a heartbeat, there it was, a support group. Everyone had an alias; I went with AMLCAL, my initials together with Cass’s. Ghostwriters Talk was a private mutiny, a chorus of anonymous voices comparing payments and terms and snarky anecdotes about unnamed celebrity clients.
It was a relief to see that what I was earning for Lana’s book was about average for similar projects. There was talk that the top earners and biggest name clients could bring in as much as $500,000 per book. Everyone spoke of their clients in code, BM (Boss Man) or BW (Boss Woman).
SILENTPARTNER wrote: I once did a novel for a has-been country singer BM, and he bitched the whole time that the writing wasn’t literary enough. He wanted it to be, and this is verbatim, “Surrealist and broad-canvas, like Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.” I was like, Dude, you are (hardly still) known for your tired songs about your ex-wife and cold beer.
Someone said that they had maintained a Facebook page for a rage-prone sit-com actress. There was a business book for a verbally abusive media tycoon; a young adult novel for a speed-addicted teen pop star. I had to restrain myself from googling the country singer BM and the sit-com actress, and almost chimed in about Nick, but he would be instantly recognizable, given the widespread news coverage. For all I knew, allegations continued to gather against him.
The ghostwriters discussed their favorite jobs, which really meant their favorite clients, those who had become like family over the years, also those who had put them up at the Beverly Wilshire or the Mandarin Oriental for a week, those who brought them along to a dude ranch or on Caribbean vacations. I began to feel sorry for myself. Congresswoman McGrath had offered me and Cass the use of her cottage on Cape Cod for a weekend, but that and the Gucci bag and samurai sword that Nick sent had been about it.
But I was being petty. Weren’t there other more meaningful perks to ghostwriting? Both Jenna Rose and Tanya Dawson had become friends, although I had not heard from Jenna in a while now. Still, I was no longer writing about tax breaks for the extraordinarily wealthy or listening to my colleagues fantasize about Halle Berry and the office manager’s hot daughter. My schedule was somewhat flexible, which helped with Cass. I worked in my pajamas. This was not nothing, I told myself.
Chapter Nine
Three weeks after he had left, Kurt called me from Montpelier. Labrador and Newfoundland were a no-go, he said. He had been having too much fun in Vermont and had decided to stay put for a while. “I’ve been helping rebuild part of a barn with some people I met.” He went on to tell me about the reclaimed wood they had found at another old barn nearby, the many stables, the cabin nearby where they had set up camp and slept. “I’m thinking I’ll come back once the barn is done, in a couple weeks or so. It’s spectacular country up here,” he said.
“It’s nice country down here, too.” It was late, and I suspected that he might be about to tell me something I did not want to hear. “Who are these ‘people’ you’ve met?”
“Oh, there’s a carpenter and a builder and the guy who bought the barn, he’s a kind of farmer. And his father, who has a few goats and pigs that will live here. Everyone is so kind and interesting—and real.”
I waited for him to go on about any one of these people. When he did not, I said, “Cass misses you.”
The quiet on the phone was a heavy cloud between us, something theoretically permeable but still intrusive.
“I’ve been letting him watch too much TV,” I said.
“It’s okay. You’re doing the best you can.”
I did not want to crave Kurt’s physical presence like I did right then. I did not want to be jealous of a barn or a carpenter, or anyone else. I certainly did not want to sound piteous. “I should get back to work,” I said.
“It’s eleven-thirty at night.”
“I’ve been trying to work when Cass is sleeping. It goes better that way.”
“Jeez, that’s got to be tough,” he said. “I think about you guys, you know.”
“We think about you, too. Anyway, onward,” I said. And then, “We miss you.”
“Yeah, me, too.” He added that he would call again when he knew more about his return, and that he would send Cass a postcard.
I went outside into the frozen night. The dark sapphire sky was unusually clear, and stardust hung everywhere. I could just make out the Berkshires, a blueish rolling at the bottom of the horizon. I looked across the street at the Garbellas’ house, the small farmer’s porch and the ceramic pot near the stained wood door, all its lights off.
Things were hardly perfect for me and Cass, but we were getting by without Kurt. And writing this book was a good thing to be doing. Women needed it. Mothers. Single mothers. And boys, and men, fathers, stepfathers, all of us. No one needed another Bootcamp Mama or some new screed that guilted us into teaching kids to make their beds military style or throwing away our iPhones and all our friends and comforts so we could experience a simpler life on a houseboat. Ideally, Lana’s would be a book that empowered mothers.
Back inside, I saw a new text on my phone from my own mother: “It’s Oprah, isn’t it?!”
Two days later, Lana instant-messaged back. She had read my revision of the second chapter, where I had added in, per her request, a discussion of gendered toys and clothes, and then described certain shopping experiences with Norton, who had for better or worse become a version of Cass. My mother and Ed had given me a stack of onesies when Cass was born, blue garments emblazoned with sayings just right for Lana’s book: “I cry and her top comes off,” and “My Mommy thinks she’s in charge! That’s so cute.”
I told Norton that colors did not have “private parts.” He was too young to understand the reasons that clothing an
d toy manufacturers segregated their products in order to promote power to one gender and beauty to another, thereby maintaining a cultural patriarchy that financially benefited them.
When Norton was three, he decided for a time that he liked “girls’ clothes” better. Although to be honest, I did worry about other children teasing or bullying him. I reminded myself of what Frederick Douglass said: “If there is not struggle, there is no progress.” I bought Norton one pink party dress and a couple of skirts, as well as a Barbie doll, for which he had begged for weeks. He carried his Barbie wherever we went. One day, when we stood in a checkout line at a supermarket, a woman approached us and said to him, “I hope you’re holding that thing for your sister.”
It had all come back to me: the woman’s pointy, glossy face; Cass, in the seat of the shopping cart at Walmart, hugging his Barbie in her bridal gown to his chest; my own feeble response—“Yep, it’s his sister’s.” And what followed, Cass’s blinking fast as he tried to make sense of what I had just said. He was even then—most children are—attuned to the hardest truths. And although, after the woman walked off, I tried to explain myself and told him that his toy preferences were nobody’s business, the damage was done. “Why did that lady laugh at me?” he said. I admit that I changed the subject and off we went.
Lana wanted me to cut the bit about toy manufacturers segregating products by gender for financial gain. Not sure we can actually prove this and I don’t want to inadvertently rankle any execs who happen to read this. Otherwise looks good. Toddlerhood, here we come!
Me: I’m already on it!
Lana: How about picking up on the theme of pink vs. blue? (Let’s keep it to parents and kids, rather than investors’ motives.)