by Heidi Pitlor
secretscribbler: Any of you ever tried to publish under your own names?
geezerwriter: I did. A novel. I earned one thirtieth of what I made ghostwriting and the book sold less than 2000 copies. But you can get it on Amazon. LMK if you are interested in confessional sci-fi!
What was “confessional sci-fi”?
secretscribbler: I’m getting paid dick for this new book for that tech guy. $21k minus 15% to agent, 30% to taxes and my take home is like $11.5k.
It was disheartening: yes, we were lucky to have work, but we were almost all of us working multiple jobs while writing for some of the most privileged people in the country.
I typed: What if we got together and tried to demand an industry-wide rate? Could we unionize?
geezerwriter: LOL. Good luck with that.
secretscribbler: Isn’t there some kind of freelancers’ union? There’s the writers’ guild.
invisiblewriter62: You know how many young wannabe authors would kill for this work and be happy with skimpy pay?
Someone posted a GIF of an enraged Hulk thrashing a tiny man to the ground again and again.
In silence, Cass and I helped Bertie pack up her clothes and her Scrabble board. “You’re really okay with this?” I said. I wanted to ask if she worried about living in the house where her grandson no longer did. And visiting him in his group home. Had she forgiven Norm for sending him away?
“Don’t feel bad for me. I have a hard time remembering some things and that’s bound to get worse. Norm is family, despite everything.” Parents don’t just give up on their children, she herself had told Norm.
“Your dentures,” I said, gesturing toward the glass on her dresser. I resented the speed with which this was all happening. They would fly to Wichita that evening. Norm had already spoken to a real estate agent about listing her house. This might even be the last time that Cass and I saw her.
i lounged in my bathtub that night, submerged beneath a weightless layer of Johnson’s Bubble Bath. Everyone had left: my parents, Maggie, Bertie. Who knew when Kurt would come back, or if he even would? He was supposed to have returned before now. I poked my toes through the bubbles. Cass was asleep, and I became glad for this moment of quiet, the tranquilizing heat of the bathwater, and the chance to just wallow.
I grew nostalgic for a time in my life when my decisions about men or work or travel were based on nothing but want. I had moved to San Francisco, worked for the magazine for little pay, hooked up with Daniel, had a one-night stand with Colin—all because I had wanted to. But Cass and my career as a ghostwriter were things I had wanted as well. What other work would I even do if I could choose anything at all? I had no idea. There were real rewards in the friendships that I’d had with these large personalities. And admittedly, it was a thrill to write from the point of view of someone more powerful or well-known.
I thought back to Nick again. Of course I never would have agreed to work with him if I’d known what he’d done to those actresses. But: I had not been completely ignorant. I had seen plenty of episodes of Skinwalker Ranch. I had played Honor Code. I had listened to him go on about nipples, Picasso, Linkin Park, the young Mia Farrow. It was as if I had been standing by a fire for months, tending it and feeding it, but in the growing light and warmth had ignored its ability to burn.
There may have been validation that came with the approval of a very famous, very successful man. Yes, I had hesitated, but then had resolved to adopt that “large amount of sack” as my own. And at the time, becoming Nick had been exhilarating, frankly, certainly more appealing than wiping Cass’s pee off the bathroom tiles or hauling bag after bag of builder’s sand to a client’s drainage ditch.
Still, exercising my freedom of choice—to live with independence and authenticity, to write, to avoid settling into bad relationships, of which there had been several; to rely on myself and only myself—had, in the end, limited my choices. Exercising my free will had in essence taken away my freedom.
“ ‘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.”
I reached for a washcloth, and my book slid into the water.
Chapter Thirteen
Allie, I have a speech tomorrow at Mount Holyoke College. That’s near you, right? Could you meet for an espresso or cup of tea afterward? Bring your son if you’d like!
I wrote, Sounds terrific. Mount Holyoke was at least a forty-five minute drive, but people tended to think of Western Mass as a smaller area than it was. I pictured Cass trying to sit still in some espresso shop in Northampton. Yes, Cass will be with me. Any chance you’d be up for a nice walk somewhere instead of a café?
The next afternoon, I pulled my truck into a small clearing near a trailhead and cut the engine. Bundled in his snowsuit, mittens, and boots, Cass climbed around a low snowbank while we waited for Lana. I had found this trail last summer, when Kurt, Cass, and I had come to South Hadley for a day-long music festival. It had been a great, chaotic day full of bands and dancing, food trucks and Cass’s epic tantrum after he grew tired of all the noise and commotion. Kurt had heroically scooped him up and trotted him back to the car while I gathered our picnic supplies. It seemed just days, not months ago.
“This woman you’re going to meet is my boss,” I told Cass. “Remember that picture in our kitchen? She’s a really big deal. I need for you to be well-behaved and kind of quiet today, all right?”
“Why do I have to be here?”
“Because,” I said, and I tried to think of a kind way to tell him that there was nowhere else for him to be, and no one else to take care of him.
The daylight was electric, and the air brutally cold. The woods behind us stood sparse and still. Thin tree trunks rose uniformly from the ground. In winter, the woods here could be solemn and beautiful, an X-ray of itself in summer.
“Allie!” Lana hurried toward us, dressed in an overcoat and black tights, a big leather pocketbook slung over her shoulder. She gave me a light hug. She wore immaculate silver and turquoise sneakers, and the thought that she might have bought new shoes just for our walk was touching. A cab idled in the small lot behind her. “Hello,” Lana said to Cass, and he dropped his gaze.
I nudged him. “This is Cass. He’s still learning how to be friendly to new people,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” he said.
“I almost never have time to do this sort of thing,” Lana said to me. “Just take a plain old walk in the woods. I guess I’m more of a city mouse. I tend to get antsy when I’m too far from New York. My museums and my restaurants and my box and flow.”
“Box and flow?” I said.
“It’s an exercise—oh my god. Have you never tried it? Allie! It will change your life. You start off shadowboxing, and then work your way up in rumble rounds. It kind of morphs into flow and then some Ashtanga. I have a trainer come to our place, but I think you can take group classes. I’m sure some gym near you offers it. I’ve been doing it for six months and honestly? I feel so much sharper and after months of insomnia, I’m finally sleeping well.”
“Nice!” I said. She was more buoyant than usual today, or maybe it was just that we were discussing subjects other than her book. “Does Norton ever exercise with you?”
“No.” She gave me a perplexed look. “Promise me you’ll try it.”
“Okay. I will,” I lied.
“So, I read Chapter Four on my way up here,” she said, her sneakers crunching the snow. “I think it’s almost where it needs to be, but I might add more about discipline at the preschool age. Even small boys can be tyrants. This topic is ripe for a feminist discussion.”
“All right,” I said, looking around for Cass.
“Women tend to shrink in the face of male aggression, even if this comes in the form of a child. It’s hard-wired for too many women.”
“This is true.”
Cass sprang ou
t from behind an enormous boulder, sending me face first into a rocky snowbank. I was not hurt, but I was stunned, and then mortified. I tried to casually clear the snow and ice from my face. “Cass, that was not all right,” I said. I unwound my scarf, now crusted and pressing frozen bits against my neck.
“You sure you’re okay?” she asked.
I nodded. “Just about good to go.”
Cass yelled, “I’m FREEZING.”
“Yeah, it’s cold out here, but you’ll be fine,” I said.
Lana watched us.
“How much farther do we have to go?” he said, wiping at his eyes with his mitten. He began to jump up and down, bored. Something was stuck on my eyelashes, but I let that be for the moment and resumed walking. Lana stepped in front of us and over a heap of what looked to be frozen horse manure, and we followed. “How much farther?” he pressed.
“We just started, honey. You’ll be okay,” I told him. “He does best with large doses of patience,” I said to Lana.
“How long do we have to be here?” he said.
I looked at him.
“My boogers are frozen,” he said.
“Cass,” I said. I finally brushed a crumb of ice from my eyelashes.
“You are far more patient than I am!” Lana said.
How to respond? “He’s just being a kid.” Maybe she did not recognize challenging—or any childhood behavior, since she had spent so little time around it.
“I—” She slid on a wide patch of ice. “Oops!”
“Here, take my hand,” I said, and she clutched my forearms and tried to balance. Although she was considerably taller than I, she was far less steady, like a hat rack in a strong wind, and I struggled to keep us both upright.
“Any other thoughts about Chapter Four?” I had written of her discouraging Norton from playing with fake guns and toy soldiers, although, for all I knew, he had a collection of BB guns and planned to enlist in the army someday.
“No, just the discipline part.”
“Did Norton like preschool?”
“Yeah. He went to West Side Montessori. You know, you might advocate for Montessori in the book. West Side is terrific. Although I’ll be honest, I was a little jealous when I heard about the green renovation that happened after Norton left. Every inch of the place is sustainable now. They even installed nonglare lights to help the kids focus.”
“Preschool has not exactly been the haven for us that I hoped it would be. Sometimes I worry it’s because Cass is an only child. He hasn’t learned to share like he might have if he had a sibling. We have to be their siblings, right? We have to be their friends and parents and fathers and mothers all at once,” I said, prompting her to say more.
“Right,” she said. “I like that—‘their friends and parents’ part. You should put that in the book.”
I hid a sigh. “Did Norton have trouble making friends?”
“Not really. He’s a personable kid.”
Apparently Norton had no real problems, and no real personality.
We continued to walk, Cass stopping now and then.
“How about if we set up a schedule, you know, some goal dates for each chapter? Gin asked if we could get her a draft of the manuscript a few weeks before the new deadline that you two worked out.” I tried not to betray my resentment at Gin having been the one to tell me about this.
“Okay.” Lana slid on another patch of ice and grabbed onto a nearby birch tree.
Cass sat down beneath a small tree now and looked over at me with a long face.
“You need to get this boy home,” she said, although I had the sense that she was the one who was done with this trail. “I’ve heard that sticker charts can be helpful. People say they can work magic with kids.”
“Yes, I’ve tried them.”
“I think you have to do them a certain way. You have to break it all down for the child, offer a sticker for every single thing he does right. And then at the end of each week, he earns something he really wants, like a fun trip to an amusement park or a new Lego set.”
“Right, yeah.” For a while, I had thought myself pretty smart; Cass curbed his complaining and stopped fussing whenever I left him with my mother and Ed, and in return he got little smiley stickers on a piece of paper that hung on our refrigerator. This worked for about a week or so, until he earned enough stickers to win the big prize, a stuffed version of Lambie from Doc McStuffins. The minute I had cut off that tag and handed him the animal, Cass, like some wily con artist, reached for Lambie and said, “I’m not going to Grandma and Ed’s tonight. Their food is disgusting. I’m staying here with you and Lambie, and I’m never eating broccoli or peas ever again.”
“Things are getting even busier for me, so I can’t guarantee how quickly I’ll be able to give you feedback on the chapters,” she said. “But this morning I had an idea. What’s the soonest you could finish a draft of the whole book—without our back and forthing?”
I was thrilled. “Two months? Maybe less?” But did this mean she would give me no more input?
“All right. What if you went ahead and finished on your own, and came to New York after that? We’d comb through the pages together and knock it out as quickly as possible, probably even in a few days or so. We could even ask Gin to come and weigh in. What do you say? You could bring Cass. I’ll have Gloria watch him. I can clear my schedule once I know the dates.”
“You sure Gloria won’t mind?” It seemed like a lot to ask.
“She won’t, but I’ll let you know if she does,” Lana said, getting into her idling cab. “Give me a ‘heads up’ when you are almost finished and we can make a plan.”
I drove home, relieved and excited about moving things along more quickly now.
I emailed Gin to tell her about the new plan, and she asked me to send the next couple of chapters once I had them. When I called Colin, he said, “Wow, that’s generous of Lana. When was the last time a client agreed to give you whole days of her life and cover your childcare? And this after our lunch in the fall and your walk today?”
“She’s not giving me anything. She’s giving her book something.”
“You are writing her book.”
“We both are. Lana’s different from all my other clients. She’s more hands-on, but at the same time she gives me nothing. And you wanted me to recreate her whole personality, remember?”
“I’m not trying to antagonize you.”
“She can sacrifice a few days to work on her book. Yes, she’s busy, but she has enough time to work out with a personal trainer.”
“Who doesn’t? Priorities, right? Listen, just bang this thing out. Come down to New York, but don’t stay a minute longer than necessary. I don’t want her heading into publication all irritated about how the writing process went. I don’t want any negative associations with you and me and the book. People like Lana take on more than they can manage. Please tell me she didn’t offer for you to stay with her?”
“No,” I said.
“Three nights at a New York hotel aren’t cheap. You two need to stay with me?”
I was surprised. “That would be so helpful. You’re the best, Col. Even if you are an overprotective mother hen to your clients sometimes.”
“You should be the same way.”
“How did we ever end up in bed ten years ago?”
“That was the luckiest night of your life,” he joked. “You think you’d be working for Lana Goddamned Breban right now if that didn’t happen?”
“Jeez,” I managed. “I like to think I might.”
It was already January, and I had to deliver in less than eight weeks. That next morning, a Saturday, I woke early and set up Cass with crayons and paper, and then turned back to my laptop. I remembered a reality show that I had watched with Bertie one night after we had put Cass to bed: Rescue Sitter. A stern but likable twenty-five-year-old went to a nameless suburb to meet Stephanie, a gaunt thirty-eight-year-old woman, a former paralegal whose husband traveled three of
every four weeks. Rescue Sitter—her civilian name was Amber, and she kept her hair in a tall maroon Mohawk, a spiked steel ring hanging from her septum—moved into the family’s guest room for a week and her work with the triplet boys began. Video clips were shown of six-year-olds blowing raspberries at the camera, drawing with their mother’s lipstick all over the windows of her car, pig-piling on the family’s labradoodle. The scene changed to their father. He said, “It’s really Steph I’m worried about. The boys walk all over her. I need to have clients over for dinner sometimes and I never know if Matt and Miles are going to break into some food fight or if JJ will start a belching contest at the dinner table. I’d like to have kids I can be proud of, you know? Steph seems really burnt out.” He was away on a business trip that week and spoke via Skype, but would join Amber and Stephanie and the boys at the finale of the show. Amber turned off the video on her laptop and faced Stephanie at her kitchen table, reiterating her lack of control in the house. Stephanie simply hung her head and nodded, wiping away a tear. Then came a lot of role playing between Amber and Stephanie before the real journey to tame the triplet boys could begin. Amber told her slumped client, “Stand up straight. Put your hands on your hips. Raise your voice. Really raise it. Steph, repeat after me: “Belching IS NOT allowed at the table. You boys will NOT throw your food. If ANY of you does either of these things, you will be sent IMMEDIATELY to your room.’ ”
Stephanie tucked a strand of ash blonde hair behind one ear and did her best. “You guys can’t just burp or do whatever you feel like—”
“Stand up straighter. Start again.” Amber crossed her arms beneath her considerable breasts, lifting and joining them as if they, too, might want to berate this loser woman.
“You boys can’t belch at the table, or you’ll be sent to your—”
“LOUDER.”
Stephanie pulled up the collar of her turtleneck almost to her chin. “You boys can’t—”
“Steph! Don’t be a candy-ass. Look me in the eye. Emphasize your words,” she said. She jutted her head forward and her septum ring bobbed as she spoke. “Really YELL at me! Show me your power!”