by Heidi Pitlor
I wanted more for Lana than manufactured likability and the joys of hands-on mothering. And I guess I wanted more for the country, too.
I clicked on the Fresh Air website and listened to Lana being interviewed about her childhood in Bucharest and the restrictive food decrees, but also about the thrill of hearing with her sister a stolen Blondie album on a neighbor’s record player. When asked about her father’s death and growing up without him, Lana answered, “A lot of my friends in America did not have dads either, because of divorce or their being gone at work so much. We moved to Queens after my mother’s husband left her. The families we met there were little matriarchies. My mother was sad to be alone, but she made a lot of friends in our new building. The women helped each other and really became each other’s families. Sometimes I wondered, and still do, what it would be like to have two parents and what would have come if my father had lived? Would we have stayed in Bucharest? But we can never fully envision or understand what we did not have.” She, her sister, and her mother had learned English soon after arriving in New York. Lana had a paper route as a teen: “I would ride my bike down the cracked sidewalk and see lights flick on one by one in the apartment buildings, all those women up so early. I would look in at the women who lived on the first floors, cleaning and folding laundry before the night even ended. There was one woman who, when she saw me, would run outside in her bathrobe and give me half an apple or some bread. She said I was too skinny and she always had advice. Always advice. She’d say, ‘You’ve got the right idea, working already. Don’t ever stop working. Never assume somebody else is going to take care of you even if they say they will.’ Things like that.” Terry asked, “Was she the first feminist you met?” “That woman would never have labeled herself a feminist,” Lana said. “This was just her life. She also brought me books—she worked in a library.” Lana described reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl by the humming light of the small pantry, where she slept so that she would not have to listen to her younger sister kick the wall in palsied spasms.
There was a new reserve in her voice, and something raw just beneath the surface of her words as she went on about Anita. I’d had no idea that Lana’s sister had had cerebral palsy, or that her sister had died when she was only fourteen. I often tried to make connections between my subjects’ past and present lives. People who had nothing as children usually wanted something as adults. People who had been bullied, of course, tended to become bullies themselves.
I watched one last video. “You have been wronged,” Lana told the Asian American Women’s Council just last week. She listed the standard gender pay gap for various subgroups within the council. Burmese women earned almost half of what white men did. Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Indonesian women got less than seventy cents for every dollar that white men did. “You have been wronged and you, and no one else, will make it right unless you act. Now.”
I found where I had left off in her book, and began:
You—and no one else—know exactly how to parent your particular child.
Did this work? I thought it did. I gazed out the window at a tube sock in a tree flapping with a breeze.
There will be those who say that the world is just the way it is, that boys will be boys. These people will say, ‘You can’t change biology and nature!’ They may whisper to a friend if he cries, try to hide a laugh, or call him terrible names. It is within your power to ignore them.
I found a close-up of Lana’s face, a photo taken during her speech at a healthcare conference a few months ago. Her bob haircut had already begun to grow out. Her face had been caught in a laugh, and she may have been wearing a little lip gloss and some mascara. She glowed, I thought, maybe even more so than in person. I looked at it. I stared at it in order to decipher something. Maybe she in fact enjoyed this new image. Maybe this, more than her blue hair and all that Twitter-shaming, was who she felt she was meant to be, and a grand condo on Central Park West was where she had long ago felt she was meant to live. Since the election, she had become ubiquitous. Even Jimmy Pryor mentioned seeing her “get her ass kicked” on Fox News the other night. Maybe ubiquity and influence were really what she was after in the end.
I printed out the picture and taped it on the windowpane that faced me, and got back to work.
“Who’s that?” Cass asked the next morning.
“My boss.”
“What does she make you do?”
“She doesn’t really make me, I mean, she’s not exactly my boss.” We looked at her together. Who would he even tell? “I pretend to be her. I’m writing her book for her. I write as if I were her.”
“Why doesn’t she just write her own book?”
“She’s too busy. She wasn’t really trained in writing this kind of thing.”
“You pretend to be her?”
“Yes. Only on the page, though. Not in person.”
“Her name goes on the front?”
“Yes.”
“And yours does, too?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said. “It’s okay. But it’s just how my job works.”
“Isn’t that lying?”
“It’s confusing, I know.” I sank a little. How would Lana have answered these questions if she were me? And how would she keep the answers from diminishing her in his eyes?
Cass shoved Hippo beneath his sweatshirt and said, “Look at me! I’m pregnant.” He waddled and lumbered around the kitchen, bumping into everything.
I said, “Don’t make fun of pregnant women.”
He turned to me. “Did it hurt to have a baby in you?”
“Sometimes. And it’s a lot of work to make the baby come out. That part really hurt.”
“I’m sorry.” He slid Hippo from beneath his shirt.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Not really.”
Maybe someday, Lana would tell Norton that she alone had written this book about him. If I were her, I might. The alternative would be confusing for really anyone.
At the last minute, I omitted the laxative and replica jaw incidents. I reluctantly left in the breastfeeding-in-the-park and Barbie-shaming episodes and cobbled together enough pages to send to Gin.
She responded quickly: Good stuff so far. But I think you need WAY more anecdotes, less policy wonking and philosophizing about stuff like circumcision and the infertility industry. After all this is memoir, not History/ Poli Sci or Gen’l Nonfiction. If Lana isn’t forthcoming, then make it work some other way.
Can you be more precise? I wrote.
Expand whatever she gives you, she replied. What exactly are her struggles as a mom, and where does she find her gratitude and hope?
Absorbing Gin’s question, I grew exasperated. I clicked onto Ghostwriters Talk, which felt like a kind of solace or at least a momentary escape. invisiblewriter62 complained that a BM was “too busy” with some press junket to read the final draft of their memoir. They also feared that their teenage daughter may have started smoking pot; she had come home from school with hooded, red eyes and ate almost all of a blueberry pie. When invisiblewriter62 approached her and tried to engage conversationally, the girl had leapt backward, obviously to stop me from smelling her. Unfortunately, she has experimented with alcohol in the past.
Another ghostwriter answered: Search her bedroom the next time she goes out, and if anything turns up, confront her as soon as you can. The issue has to be addressed head-on. Pot is a gateway drug, and if you don’t lay down the law now, she might end up addicted to cocaine or opioids.
I sighed. She’s just experimenting, I typed. Weed is probably the least addictive and most benign mind-alterer out there. It’s legal in more and more places, right? Maybe just let this be?
silentpartner responded. No offense, AMLCAL, but you have pretty loose boundaries!
The week before, I had admitted to paraphrasing a few E. M. Forster sentences in a short historical novel I had written years ago for an Olympic gymnast (it was fai
r use, legally). I had made a politician sound as if they really did care about the environment, while they had taken a good amount of money from some of their state’s biggest polluters. I had even, I told them, slept with my agent once. This had been part of a thread called “Confessions.” I had been disappointed in their lesser sins—someone had wadded up a photo of a demanding client and thrown it in the trash; another person made (but did not use) a voodoo doll of a client.
Doesn’t invisiblewriter62’s daughter deserve some boundaries and privacy? I wrote.
Not when it comes to drugs! silentpartner replied.
Kids need parents, not friends, someone else wrote.
She’s just a child! another person added. Children crave limits.
Children? I wrote. The daughter was seventeen. Okay, subject change. Who here is able to support themselves solely with ghostwriting?
Me, wrote silentpartner.
I am, wrote invisiblewriter62.
No one else replied.
invisiblewriter62 added, Of course it doesn’t hurt that my spouse is a pediatrician.
Someone responded, Lucky you with an eyeroll GIF.
People began listing the additional work they did to make ends meet: teaching high school history, bartending, catering. Others worked at Banana Republic, Outback Steakhouse, a DMV, and Petco. Someone was a cheese monger at Whole Foods.
geezerwriter, a new voice at least to me, wrote, I used to make a living ghostwriting Hollywood diet and exercise books. I was able to buy a little vacation place when I was twenty-eight. We sent two kids to college, and one to grad school.
What happened? someone asked.
Who did not know the answer?
Let’s just say that there’s more than enough information online now about diet and exercise.
I had to ask, Do you still have that second home?
geezerwriter said, We had to sell it five years ago to a young family from Tarrytown. But I’m not bitter. I’ll tell you—the high that came from writing for the stars? Priceless. Not that any of you would recognize anyone I wrote for! Enjoy your youth while it lasts, folks!
I logged out a little deflated, as if I did not entirely belong here. From what I could tell, I was the only single parent, the only person who had never published anything under my own name, the only person who had read even a few pages of Fifty Shades of Gray.
The phone rang and I saw Kurt’s number on the small screen beside me. I perked back up.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“It’s getting really cold up here.”
“It’s cold down here, too,” I said. This ridiculous rhythm.
“You know what I was thinking about today? Remember that huge storm that night last winter when we were at Jimmy’s, the night we watched Good Will Hunting and drank way too many Old Milwaukees?” Kurt had only been living with me for about a month, and things between us were new and electric. Halfway through the movie, we sneaked out and fooled around against a snow bank behind Jimmy’s shed.
“It’s a miracle we didn’t get frostbite,” I said.
“You should’ve come up here for New Year’s. There was a big potluck and a barn dance. A bunch of people brought instruments and we just jammed. I haven’t played guitar in over twenty years, so I was a little rough.”
“Sounds fun.”
“Yeah, it was. A few of the guys are talking about driving out to someone’s cousin’s ranch in Wyoming for the rest of the winter. But I don’t have the cash for that kind of big trip, so I guess I’ll be back down there in about a week.”
I was underwhelmed by his decision, made by default more than anything else. “Don’t rush. Come back when you’re ready,” I said. I may have sounded resentful.
“All right,” he said. “Do you want me to come back?”
“You want to come back?” I said, but then changed the subject. “Cass pretended he was pregnant with a stuffed animal the other day. I feel like he’s getting more and more curious about his dad.”
“Is Cass around?”
“Love?” I said, and handed him my phone.
I logged back onto the group chat. silentpartner and secretscribbler were now recommending addiction counselors and a family intervention.
invisiblewriter62: What if she refuses to listen or even stay in the room and hear what we have to say? She can be really stubborn. It’s a trait that I’m proud of, to be honest. She’s a very strong woman in the making!
Then just let her be, I wrote, and logged out.
Chapter Eleven
“You don’t have plans tonight, do you?” Jimmy asked. Bruin tugged at his leash on our front stoop. In Jimmy’s other hand he held a big bag of dinner from Boston Market. “If not, I figured you could use some company.”
“Thanks,” I said. “No plans, just Cass and I, as always.”
“You and Kurt should get married,” Jimmy said.
“I’m not sure I believe in the institution.”
“Why?” Jimmy unfastened the dog’s leash and together we set out the tubs of chicken and cole slaw and mashed potatoes. Bruin lunged up, hooking a chicken wing into his jaws.
“LEAVE IT,” Jimmy hollered. He pried apart Bruin’s mouth and fished out the thing. The presence of the dog almost canceled out the surprise kindness of the food. Jimmy had seen Cass cower in the face of Bruin’s teeth-gnashing and unpredictable but frequent urination.
“What the hell’s wrong with the ‘institution’?”
“For starters, it’s not always beneficial to women. I don’t want a legal promise to be the thing keeping me with someone—and keeping that someone with me.”
“Good lord, listen to you and all this cuckoo crap,” Jimmy said.
I inhaled hard. “Marriage ties you down. I don’t know very many happily married people. Do you?”
Bruin rose onto his hind legs and set his front paws on the counter. He growled, bearing his fangs in the direction of the food. “Git, Boy.” Jimmy snapped his fingers before the dog’s face.
“Any chance we could put him in one of our bedrooms while we eat?” At the moment, Cass was coloring in his own room. I hated to say what I had to next: “It’s just that Bruin can be a lot for Cass.”
“That boy will be fine if you get out of his way. Let him get used to dogs—and to everything else that scares him.”
Jimmy may not have been mistaken.
“Maybe. Cass, dinner,” I called. “Jimmy’s here.” I heard some movement in the hallway. “And Bruin,” I said in what I hoped was a voice coded with warning, but it was too late; Cass stood in the doorway, and when he saw the dog, he tore back to his bedroom and slammed the door.
“Well, good to see you too, kid,” Jimmy said. “I’ll go stick this guy in your bedroom, Al.” He looped a finger around the dog’s collar and tugged him out of the room.
I heard a slap of wind and then the clicking and squeaking of the walls. A proper blizzard was coming, apparently a fast, dry snow. The sun had recently set and pinkened the sky low on the horizon.
I cajoled Cass out of his room, and finally, the three of us took seats around the table.
“You’ve got to let Kurt know that you need him,” Jimmy said, lifting a drumstick to his mouth.
“But I don’t,” I said. “Need him.”
Jimmy gestured toward the stack of mom-moirs and books about parenting boys on the chair beside him, then over at the piled dishes on the counter, an unfinished macaroni necklace on the floor, and over at Cass. “Baloney.”
Here was the advice of someone from a different generation, ignorant of the variety of ways that a person could live her life now: independently, freely, with consideration and choice. I did not need Kurt blazing in and out of our lives. I did not need his erratic and limited financial contributions to this household. I would figure things out soon enough.
I heard a scratching and whining behind my bedroom door. “Dogs don’t like to be shut away in rooms,” Jimmy said.
&nb
sp; “Yeah, well,” I began, but stopped myself from being defensive. I reached for more food.
No one said anything for a while. What a scene this was: Jimmy wiping grease from his chin with his arm, Bruin now howling, Cass making a face of his mashed potatoes and then using his fingers to make the hair. I knew that Jimmy had meant to cheer me up, so I said in as upbeat a voice as I could muster, “Hey, did Gary and Jen tell you that I was in a play with them in high school? Oklahoma!” We chatted about them and some of Jimmy’s other tenants, and although I was not hungry, I made myself eat a few bites of chicken and cole slaw.
After that blizzard, snow continued to fall for the next three days in alternately gentle and aggressive passing storms. We had made a snowman, but he quickly disappeared under more snow. Stuck inside with me, Cass watched too much Dora and ate too much of the peanut brittle that my parents had sent us for Christmas. He made a mosaic of the seashells that my mother had collected from a beach near their condo. Whenever possible I worked on Lana’s book. Cass and I went sledding a few times. We Skyped with my parents. I finally made it to page 14 of To the Lighthouse; “ ‘No going to the lighthouse, James,’ he said, as he stood by the window, speaking awkwardly, but trying in deference to Mrs. Ramsay to soften his voice into some semblance of geniality at least.”
It was only a matter of time before cabin fever took over. My parents had sent us a gift card to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge for Christmas, and I suggested to Maggie that we could all go. She offered to drive us all in her van, and on the way her sons watched Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! on the little screen that hung from the ceiling. “Cass, look what happens to that kid’s leg,” Connor said. From the passenger seat I could hear characters screaming with terror and the rapid popping of bullets. I glanced over to see Cass burying his face in his hands.
“This is their favorite movie right now. This and Robocop. World’s best mom right here,” Maggie said, laughing.