by Heidi Pitlor
Gin turned to Shirley. “Yes, I think overall, it could be made into more of a story. Every time we get a good anecdote about Lana and Norton, we cut to some long study or dry advice that sometimes, frankly, came across as a bit patronizing. Many readers will already know about doulas and the business of infertility and why it’s so important to breastfeed.”
“They will?” I said.
“Right,” Shirley said. “I had the same thought. We don’t want Lana to seem patronizing. Or, god forbid, elitist. It’d be great if we could cut back on all the stuff about European family leave and, oh, gender equality in Iceland . . and that thing about ‘communism liberating women’?” She made a spooked expression. “We want to focus more on Lana’s love of this country.”
“I think it could flow better, too,” Gin said, her eyes on Shirley. “Actually, and I know this will sound extreme, but I’d cut every piece of data—and even most of the advice.”
The man in the glasses pivoted to look at Lana.
“I know, it means rethinking the book we have here,” Gin went on. For a small woman, she had the stature of a longtime general. “The story—the characters if you will—get obscured. The book only really moves when we’re with Lana and Norton. It just stalls out otherwise.”
“Interesting,” Shirley said.
I looked over at Lana, who gazed blankly at Gin.
“What do we have, three hundred twenty manuscript pages? At least half of that or maybe more isn’t even memoir,” she said.
Shirley nodded slowly. “You’re right.”
“I want to read the story of this revolutionary woman and her son. Period. All the stuff about medical monoliths and mothers in art, blah blah blah—no offense Allie, but you have to know that the reader will lose interest. The study about breastfeeding, Lilly Ledbetter, the income gap. All of that can go,” Gin said.
I saw something catch fire in Shirley’s eyes. “It really is that simple, isn’t it?” She looked over at Gin.
“In terms of the writing itself, the language and the level of discourse, I think it has to be made more accessible. You need to have more fun with it,” Gin said, in a tone void of fun. She pulled a laptop from her leather work bag, lifted open the screen, and typed a few times. “Like here—‘We had to teach Norton how to eat and sleep, how to sit and crawl, how to be kind and respectful, how to love and lose and win and fall, how to navigate a mostly patriarchal society and how to resist getting co-opted by the patriarchy, no matter its appeal.’ I mean, the first part is good, but even the word ‘navigate’ is fairly high-brow and, well, formal.”
Shirley jumped in. “And then we get, ‘patriarchal society, yadda yadda yadda, co-opted’? A lot of people won’t know what the words patriarchal and co-opted even mean. We don’t want this to sound like a textbook for some women’s studies course at Smith.”
“I don’t think the words navigate or patriarchal are all that challenging,” I managed.
“You want us to cut it by half?” Lana said, as if I had not just spoken. “This will be one short book.”
“You’ll have to do some filling in,” Gin said. “But then you’ll make room for more of your life. Lester’s barely in it. You can talk about how you two met and fell in love, all that.”
“Yes, you can talk about becoming a wife,” Shirley said, turning to Lana. “We definitely need more stories—like when Norton dropped that thing into the fish tank at the dentist office, or when you faced off against those teenage boys in Central Park. Or when that woman made fun of Norton for having a Barbie Doll? These scenes show you as a regular mom, a vulnerable, likable woman who just loves her son and wants the best for him. Everyone can relate to that.”
Lana nodded. “Okay.”
I waited for her to say more, to even glance in my direction. It did not appear that she was ignoring me as much as blithely continuing on as if I were not here.
I opened my mouth without any sense of what might emerge, but Shirley spoke before I could: “Also, I know you might not like this, Lana, and I say this only as someone who wants you to win this thing and knows that you can: I don’t think we should use the word feminism. The electorate is too polarized right now, even in New York. Same goes for other terms like that, like intersectionality and microaggression. Any of that kind of jargon is going to make nonurban voters’ toes curl. Listen, I’d like you and Allie to think about two people, two voters when you go off and rewrite this thing: one is a twenty-six-year-old Latino from Utica who just lost his job as a truck driver. The second is a rich housewife in Pound Ridge.”
“Republicans?” I said.
“Not necessarily.”
“All right, we need less preaching and less data,” Lana said. “But feminism and even intersectionality are pretty mainstream these days, right? Look at the Women’s March. Beyoncé was singing in front of a projection of the word feminist at some award show. Can’t we give people a little more credit?”
I nodded vigorously.
“Maybe,” Shirley said. “But let’s say you win, and let’s say in a year or so that you have become what I think you will become—this galvanizing force for good in the Senate, a real leader there. Let’s assume—although I’d rather not—that Sir Orange is still in office, and his people pull out this book and wave it around to stir up their base. You see how he treats Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters.”
“I hope he does come after me. I have a few things I’d like to tell him,” Lana said.
Colin spoke up, his eyes on his phone. “Listen, there’s no shortage of the feminist spirit in this book. That doesn’t have to change. I mean, like this, toward the end, I liked this part—” He tapped on the screen and read:
The other day, I got home to find Lester and Norton working on a huge jigsaw puzzle, a Van Gogh painting. Lester had been traveling so often and had just returned from another business trip. He later admitted that he had bought the puzzle knowing that it promised plenty of father–son time. I stood in the hallway and watched them sort through the pieces. How lucky Norton and I were to have Lester, I thought. I continued to watch them and let my mind wander toward the future; I tried to picture Norton in high school and later in college. When he was twenty-five, I would be almost sixty. In the end, I could not manage to visualize him as an older person, and I wonder if this is because I loved him so much the way he was in that moment, happily assembling a painting with his dad.
“That’s the tone we need,” Gin said.
“You get feminism and the hands-on father without shoving these things in readers’ faces,” Colin said.
“Yeah, great stuff,” Shirley said, tapping her finger against the table. “How about instead of an art puzzle, Lester and Norton are throwing around a football in the park? And now that I think of that other scene, could Barbie be something a little less, well, Barbie? Don’t forget about our truck driver in Utica.”
“The word feminism would have ruined that passage about the puzzle. Remember: show, don’t tell,” Gin said to me.
I loathed this adage. “Can I ask something?” I said. No one answered, but I went on anyway. “Why does a woman have to be warm and doting and motherly to win office?”
The man in the glasses let out a huff of laughter.
“Reggie, stop. She’s a civilian.” Shirley turned to me and said, “We’ve learned a lot since November eighth: a whole lot of people won’t vote for a candidate they think is a ‘militant feminist’ or who seems overly ambitious. Secretly, plenty of voters don’t even want to vote for a woman who kept her maiden name, let alone someone who dissed Tammy Wynette or slammed stay-at-home moms for baking cookies. A lot of people would rather have a misogynistic blowhard as a president than an intelligent, highly qualified woman they find annoying.”
“Well, yes,” I said, a little annoyed myself that she thought I could not have guessed these things.
“Listen, I don’t like this stuff any more than you do. Believe me,” Shirley went on. “I’m a huge feminist. I
can’t stand Tammy Wynette or baking, and I doubt I’ll ever have children, but if keeping this stuff to myself will help Democrats win? If it’ll help save us from fascism? You bet that I’ll be the first person to wave a flag from my American-made car. You bet I’ll be the first person in line at Chick-fil-A.” Her hand moved in front of her face for emphasis as she spoke. “You’ve really got to think beyond your bubble when you go off and revise this, all right?”
“My bubble?” I said.
“Let me guess: you live in Brooklyn. You grew up in Connecticut or maybe the Midwest, maybe Northern California. You went to Vassar or maybe Oberlin. You got your MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and then you probably taught expository writing for a while. And then you published a couple poems or short stories in some highbrow literary journals. You wrote a novel—something experimental or edgy, something really smart but kind of out there, and then you couldn’t sell it, so you became a ghostwriter. You shop at Whole Foods, you try to stick with only local or organic foods, you listen to NPR, you love Dave Eggers. I don’t mean to sound cavalier—I went to Vassar! I’ve have read every one of Dave Eggers’s books! We’re all on the same team here—we all desperately want our country back.”
“I don’t have an MFA. I don’t live in Brooklyn,” I said, stepping back through her words. “I mean, I guess I would call myself liberal.”
“My point is—”
“I think we know what we have to do with our book,” Lana interrupted, clearly ready to move on.
They chatted about some possible cover ideas—a photo of Lana and Norton? Maybe a picture of them walking down a forest path together, hand in hand? They all agreed that whatever it was, the cover had to convey tenderness, love, and tradition.
It all seemed wrong: these efforts to change Lana’s image would be transparent to voters. Wasn’t it authenticity that most people craved? Politicians who spoke off-the-cuff? How many polls had showed that people had voted for the presidential candidate who “said what he thought”? It hardly seemed to matter what these thoughts were, in the end.
“As soon as we’ve got final pages,” Gin said, “we’re going to want to set up a meeting with you all to talk about a publicity schedule and a tour.” They began to discuss media lunches and bookseller conventions.
Still reeling, I gathered my notebook and pen. Lana gestured for me to join her outside the dining room. “Give us a few minutes,” she told the others, and I followed her toward the living room, eager to hear what she had to say.
She moved toward a black armchair beside the Kusama painting, and I sat on a crimson leather sofa across from her. The dog appeared and settled at her feet, and she reached her fingers down to him. “This is Liviu. The name is Romanian.” Liviu licked her wrist and nuzzled against her arm. “I’d wanted to rescue a dog, some mutt that needed a home. But it was more pragmatic to find a breed that matched our busy lifestyles. We found a wonderful breeder of Italian greyhounds up in Bedford. Liviu has been just right for us. I don’t regret a thing.”
“That makes sense,” I said, trying to discern some latent message. Perhaps the message was that she did not regret her upward mobility, or what had just transpired in the dining room. “You know,” I began. “I can hardly hear your accent anymore.”
“Between you and me, I’ve been working with a coach over the past year. Now I can sound more American when I say, ‘Vote for me.’ ” She grinned.
“I always found it interesting that you escaped Bucharest with your mother. I wish I could have heard more about this. We might have been able to put some of it in the book.”
She nodded.
I went on. “You had to, I mean, did Shirley want you to work with that coach?”
“It was my idea,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I have lived here over twice as long as I lived in Romania. It was past time,” she said, and shifted back in her seat. “Shall we talk about our book?”
“Or what’s left of it.” I went for my laptop in my bag. So many pages would have to fall away. Long sections of chapters, so many hours of research that I had done, hours when Cass had been at Little Rainbows or Bertie’s house or under my feet. Hours spent online or at the library, writing and rewriting, questioning my words and even myself and whether I was doing a good enough job as a feminist mothering my own son.
“Always expect the unexpected, right? You’re clear about our new direction?”
“I guess so.” How easily she had just agreed to discard all that she herself had initially wanted for her book. “Will you miss her?”
“Who?”
“Your old self. Your blue hair and your accent. That woman.” It came out sounding accusatory, but I had only meant to convey compassion, as well as affection for that woman and her chunky eyeglasses (today she wore wire-rims) and her androgynous gray suits, the woman who once tweeted, “Lick your wounds, sharpen your claws, and prepare to maul this goddamn patriarchy. #PussyGrabsBack”
“Why do you think that was the real me? All women are more than one person, aren’t we? We have to be nimble, now more than ever.” She reached down for Liviu.
“I guess,” I said. “You know, with all these cuts, we’re going to have to fill a lot of empty pages. And I’m going to need to know what you want me to write.” My voice thinned as I spoke.
“Allie, you heard what they said. Your stories are what Colin and Shirley and everyone else really want. You are the real writer here—you have that talent. You don’t even need me. I spend all my time speaking to foundations and lobbyists, and now that I’m running? You should see my daily agenda. I’ve spent my life doing far more ‘working’ than ‘mothering.’ But the beauty of this whole thing is that with my name and your stories, with my platform and your wonderful writing, we make the perfect feminist mom, don’t we?”
I blinked over at her. An image came to me of Cass and his two newly missing front teeth—the soft, fleshy stretch of gums there. He had no say in this. “You want me to give you all my stories? You want me to hand over the few things that I can actually call my own—my life with my son?”
“That’s dramatic,” she said.
I tried to ignore a tang in my chest. “Isn’t that what men say when they are trying to gaslight women?”
“Oh, Allie. Come on. You’re not giving up your life or your child or anything else. This is a job. You are getting paid to do a job, plain and simple,” she said.
I kept my eyes on the rug.
“All right, how about if we take some time right now? You can ask me anything. And I’ll do the best I can to answer. You’ll at least come away feeling less martyred.”
“ ‘Martyred?’ ” But this was not nothing, and I raced to think of fruitful topics. It took me a moment to change tacks. “I guess I wonder, how old were you when you realized that girls and women were treated differently from boys and men? What was that like for you?”
“I don’t remember any sudden dawning. The difference was everywhere all the time. My stepfather was never at home. He was always at work, and then he left us.”
“My father died when I was a baby.” I do not know why I said this.
“Oh? I’m sorry.”
“I listened to your Fresh Air interview—do you remember that one? You talked about your sister. Is it okay if I ask you about her?”
“I guess, if you’re just going for context here, but I mean, in terms of raising Norton, it’s not hugely relevant.”
I filled my lungs with air, effectively enlarging myself, and went for my laptop. “You said, ‘My mother, my younger sister, Anita, and I lived in an apartment in Queens. Anita had cerebral palsy. I slept in the pantry so I didn’t have to hear her kicking the wall every night. My mother worked so much that I was the one to raise Anita. I brought her to school when I could. I fed her and I did all of her home care. We were very close. But it was hard work and some days—’ ” I looked up and said, “Sounds like money was a bit tight for your family.”
> “Why?”
I was taken aback. “Well, you slept in a pantry. And back in Budapest, with all the austerity measures. I can only imagine the contrast between those days and, you know, all that you’ve achieved now?”
“Our apartment in Queens was quite nice. Anita and I had our own bedrooms and bathrooms, but we did share a wall. I liked the pantry because that’s where our cat slept. And, as I said, it was quieter there. And in Budapest? My father was a banker. We didn’t suffer like others did. I may not talk a lot about that period of my life, but I don’t hide anything.”
I had a difficult time believing she was unaware of her image, the penniless, scrappy immigrant who had worked her way to great heights. I could understand why she might not want it known that she, an advocate for underprivileged women, had in fact come from money, that she was not in fact self-made. Still, she seemed a person made entirely of lies in that moment.
“You’re disappointed,” she said. “Again, women have to be multiple people. We just do. Any other questions?”
I returned to the reason I had broached Anita. “Sounds like you had to be a mother for your sister.”
“Yes, I guess that’s true.”
“Anita was only fourteen when she died. That must have been enormously sad.”
She nodded, and I waited for her to say more. But she only looked at her watch again. “To be honest, I’m still not seeing how this is pertinent to the book.”
“Your tending to her, your mothering?” I must have been aiming for more of an impact: a show of empathy, the muscle memory of hardship, a softening upon recalling her sister. The smallest detail had the power to evoke a rush of emotions, and I suppose I fantasized that she would blurt out something like, “I spent more time with my sister than I have with my own son” or “My life is so different from what it once was, but what a Faustian bargain it has been! I cannot even tell you Norton’s favorite food. We haven’t even shared a meal in weeks. I hate to admit this, but Gloria has been the one who’s done most of the parenting.” And then I would be vindicated, because even with my burdens and my overwhelming dearth of resources, I knew Cass’s favorite foods, and the books that he liked, and how well he drew pictures, and so wasn’t I in fact a better mother? Wasn’t I a better human being?