by Heidi Pitlor
Then again, I had not been the one to meet with three senators just last week about safeguarding women’s overtime pay, military childcare, and retirement. I could hardly seem to manage a household of two, let alone launch a campaign for U.S. senator.
I had the desperate thought that if I revealed some vulnerability, she might do the same. “I don’t have the support system that I need,” I admitted. “I have to be paid for this book as soon as possible.”
“I wish I could help you more,” Lana said, as if she had already helped me plenty by allowing me to write this book in the first place.
Giving so much of myself to her book had to merit something more. Gratitude, credit, anything at all. I reached for the last thing I had, almost nothing, really. “Right before I started your book, I was working on another one, but it ended up getting canceled.” Without naming names, I went on to describe what had happened with Nick. I mentioned an “enormous” advance, the long-needed chance to crawl out of debt, the sickening phone call from Colin. As I spoke, I became aware that I was dropping crumbs of information that might well lead her to guess Nick’s identity.
“He sounds like a real prize. Has he been charged?”
“Yes.”
“Did he ever harass you—or anything else? If you need the name of a good lawyer, I can easily give you one.”
“No, I just meant to say that I’m still in the hole and—” I heard how feeble I sounded, more concerned with losing a few bucks than having been employed by a rapist. “I don’t need a lawyer. The last I read, he was in jail awaiting trial.”
“How come you didn’t tell me any of this before now?”
“I try never to talk about my clients. Anyway, I signed an NDA with him, too,” I said and dropped my head.
“Look at you. You’re presenting yourself with the poise and confidence of a frightened deer. You are asking me to help you make money, but at the same time, you are telling me with your tone and body that you don’t deserve it. Are you even aware of this?”
“Maybe. I guess I’m not you.”
“Did you ever ask Colin for full payment from that awful man?”
“The publisher was the one who canceled the book. I got my kill fee, but it wasn’t much.”
“You got taken down by that man’s horrific behavior,” she said, shaking her head. “I assume you’re earning partial royalties for my book?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you negotiate that?”
“I’ve never earned royalties on a book.”
“Then good lord, ask Colin for what you’re worth. At the very least, you have to ask for what you need. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that before?”
“It’s not so easy.” I explained the field of ghostwriting: how we could be seen as disposable when celebrity held more currency than writing skills, at least in this country. I looked above her at the Kusama, the abstract lines and dots that to me resembled the chloroplasts inside a leaf as seen through a microscope. I had only ever wanted this work to be fair.
“At least you did the right thing in talking to me. That’s the first step. And you know, you weren’t entirely off-base,” she said, reaching for Liviu again. “I did have to be a kind of mother to my sister. I was the one to get Anita dressed and brush her teeth, use the bathroom, all that stuff. I used to take her clothes shopping. I had to register her in middle school when I was sixteen. I was with her in the hospital after her accident, after, you know. Those were not easy times.” She made a strange expression, a sad kind of smile. It appeared as if she was experiencing a memory that she would not share with me. “You aren’t even going to try to negotiate with Colin?”
“Maybe for the next book,” I said.
“When that time comes, you tell him exactly how much you put into your work. I mean it. Tell him how many hours of daycare you’ve spent, how many hours of side labor you had to do in order to fill in the gaps. You’ll have to estimate of course. Multiply what you’ve got by 1.5. Any more and you’ll lose your nerve. I’ve seen that happen too often.”
I nodded, unable to imagine saying any such thing to Colin. We knew each other too well. He would easily detect a manufactured stance of strength and determination, and probably turn it into a joke, or tell me that his boss would never green-light a raise. And then there was Ed’s advice about never talking about your needs with an employer.
“I should go join everyone in the dining room. Listen, you are a writer! Just keep doing what you do best.”
“Which is usually memoir, not fiction,” I said without thinking.
Her face changed. “You pretend to be other people all the time.”
Liviu began to sniff his tail.
“But these people don’t pretend to be me.”
“Do you even want this job? It seems as if you’re trying awfully hard to sabotage it right now. It would be very easy for me to walk right into that room and tell Colin that I’d like another ghostwriter, and that you’re not on board with this book anymore. Vendrich, Grob has plenty of other writers, don’t they?”
“That sucks.” It was all that I could manage to say.
“You’re not wrong. But do you think I haven’t been in your position before? That I never had some privileged person force me to pretend to be something I’m not? Were you even in that other room an hour ago with those people?”
I turned and looked out the window at the park. A horse-drawn carriage plodded between lamp posts.
“I am to thank for writing a bill that, if it passes, will mandate paid family leave for women. I am right now working on another for paternity leave. But the funny thing is that you know all of this already because you know everything about me. Do you want your son to have healthcare? You want to be able to send him to college? Every single day, I do something for women just like you,” she said. “Do you know how many pro-life bills are floating around congress? Planned Parenthood is on the chopping block. There is no majority support of equal pay. Medicare may well become voucherized. Roe v. Wade may well become history.”
I nodded once.
“You can say goodbye to the Violence Against Women Act. No more protection for students or immigrant women. No free lunch programs in public schools. And get ready to pay higher taxes so the government can buy more private jets and vacations. Golf resorts don’t come cheap.”
“I know. I get it.”
“All right.” She looked at me, waiting.
I pictured the newly confirmed Secretary of Education, a cartoonishly wealthy woman who seemed to know little about public schools, who had expressed comfort with keeping guns in classrooms as a way “to protect from potential grizzlies.” I thought about Carlos and Luana, whose brother had just come to Houston from El Salvador and was worried about being deported. I thought about Jimmy and Strummy and Cass and the cost of college and Pussygate, that awful recording, those ugly words that no president should ever say.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay? You’ll do it?”
I nodded, still overheated.
“We’ll turn this country around yet, Allie. You and me together, right?”
The Kusama also resembled worms rushing over ice and leaves in different directions. “I hope so.”
On the f train to Brooklyn, Cass and I found two empty seats next to a woman who was whistling an old Prince song. I once knew every word to “Purple Rain,” and I wilted on remembering that Prince had died. She turned to gaze at me as if she knew just how I felt.
Cass moved onto my lap and said, “When can we go back home?”
“Tomorrow.” We had missed the last bus to Great Barrington that day. Colin had given me the keys to his apartment.
We headed out of the station and into the chilled late afternoon air. We passed a yoga studio, a record store, a blonde woman dressed in a sari. We passed a homeless couple holding a sign that said Lost everything, please help. I fished a dollar out of my wallet and handed it to them. Maybe Cass might do the same for someone else
one day. The air in Brooklyn smelled of sandalwood and weed.
Cass and I skipped, not easy in my heels, the rest of the way to Colin’s building. Soon enough, he would be too big for such a thing.
Colin’s apartment was located on Tenth Street, and an iron fire escape obscured most of the front of the building. A shuttered liquor store covered in graffiti stood next door. We walked up two dim flights of concrete stairs. The place was more run-down than I had expected, but his apartment itself was nice enough. His narrow living room was shrouded in long-limbed, round-leafed plants, and global art covered nearly every inch of the walls. Several clay and wooden statues stood beside the plants.
When Colin came home later, he went to change into a T-shirt. He came back and showed us around a little. “That folds out,” he said, gesturing toward the yellow sectional sofa. “Look at this boy! Isn’t he beautiful?” He went to pinch Cass’s cheek and Cass shrunk away from him.
Colin poured two glasses of wine and took the couch while I sat cross-legged on the floor nearby. Cass laid across the triangle that my legs had made. Colin took a long sip, set down his wineglass, and placed his hand on the top of my head, and despite everything, despite my sense of defeat, despite the fact that Cass had stood and was now heading toward a ceramic statue that looked about as delicate as an egg, I smiled up at Colin and squeezed his wrist. We did not love each other, and he could have gone easier on me back at Lana’s, but we did take care of each other, mostly, and that was a sort of love.
“You did good back there,” he said. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
“No, it really wasn’t.”
“Was your talk with Lana okay?” I considered laying out all that had transpired in Lana’s living room, but I did not have the energy. It was done now. “Yeah,” I said.
At Cass’s bedtime, I read him The Lorax, that sad and hopeful book.
“ ‘You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds,’ ” I read, and closed the pages. He was tucked beneath the sheet and blankets there on the fold-out. I held the book against my stomach.
“Can I go to sleep now?” he asked.
“Did you like that book? Wasn’t it good? You know, you are one of the people who will make the world a better place.”
“Okay.”
“What was your favorite part of the book?”
“I don’t know. What’s a thneed?”
“Maybe we’ll try it again when you get a little older.”
“No, thank you.”
“All right,” I said. At least he was being polite. “Well, good night, then.”
“Will you draw pictures on my back?” he said, turning over on his stomach.
I drew his name and a heart and a tree that he guessed was a lollipop. When he began to breathe heavily, I watched his mouth fall open, his stuffed lion against his cheek.
The sound of a chirp near my head woke me early the next morning. My phone showed a text from Kurt: Call me when you get this. Cass was still asleep beside me, so I took my phone into Colin’s bathroom and closed the door behind me.
Kurt answered on the first ring. “Jimmy got a call from Norm with some bad news.” He waited for me to say something. “Al? Allie? You there?”
“I’m here.” My heart thudded. I sat cross-legged on the cold tile floor, filling the small wedge of space between the toilet and shower. “Kurt, don’t tell me yet? Don’t say any more right now. Give me a minute. I’m not ready. It’s been pretty trying here.”
“All right.”
I pictured us both sitting there, our phones to our ears. Every breath was a nervous flutter. I kicked at the frosted shower door, and it clanged inside its frame again and again.
“Now?” he said.
“Not yet.”
“So it’s not going well?”
“I can’t make small talk,” I admitted.
“Okay.”
I pulled my foot away from the shower door. “All right. Just go ahead.”
“Bertie had a stroke,” he said.
“Did she make it?”
He did not respond, and I said, “I’ve got to go.”
“Allie, talk to me for a second.”
“I can’t.”
“Come on,” he said.
A pained noise slid from my mouth, followed by another. I considered hanging up so that Kurt would not have to hear any more, but some sliver of decorum stopped me.
“I know,” he said at last. “Me, too.”
I sniffled and pressed my palm against my mouth.
“The funeral’s next week. In Wichita, though.”
I cried a little more, and chokingly told him of our plans to return that night.
“Good. I’m glad you’re coming back early.”
My first thought after saying goodbye was a question—what to tell Cass? He had never known anyone who had died. My next thought was that Bertie had passed away in her son’s home, not her real home in Western Mass, where she had lived for so many years with her husband.
At least in the end, the move to Kansas had been her choice. She’d had a good and long life, I thought, something we always tell ourselves in such moments in order to make ourselves feel better.
I would tell Cass the news later, maybe after we had left New York, and gotten home. Or maybe tomorrow.
Kurt picked us up at the bus station. He had shaved off his beard, but had left behind a bushy mustache that gave him a sexy, porny seventies look that I quite liked. I went to him and let my head fall against his chest.
“Welcome home,” he said into my hair.
It seemed as if we had just returned from some war-torn place, and I held onto him. “Don’t go away for a while, okay?” I said. “Stay with us.”
“Sure.”
“You don’t hate me for asking you that?”
“I love you for asking me,” he said, his face going pink.
“You do?”
He nodded.
“I do, too,” I said, as Cass mashed himself against the back of my legs and hugged us both.
I noticed Jenny Kane, now Jenny Beck, an old classmate, walking toward the ticket booth, glancing over at us and maybe recognizing me. I half-waved at her, but she had already turned away. She must have thought this was my family. I suppose it was.
Chapter Sixteen
I gut-renovated Lana’s book. I cleared out Dr. Boyle’s advice, everything about medical monoliths, the fertility industry, Lilly Ledbetter, the evidence of the pink tax—the higher cost of products geared to women—and I made room for the new occupants: the truck driver from Utica and the housewife from Pound Ridge. In came me and Cass’s birth and my difficulties breastfeeding. In came barely disguised versions of Little Rainbows, Suze, Kurt, a more athletic version of Cass, and an alternate version of our visit to the Rockwell museum. Whenever I grew reluctant to continue, I would read the day’s news: the efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the impending decreased protections for trans people, the president brazenly firing the head of the FBI—and my resolve would reignite. I turned the scene with the Van Gogh puzzle into a game of catch in Central Park. I turned Barbie into a teddy bear. At least I was hiding our lives a little.
Two long weeks later, I sent my revision to Lana, and this time, she read it promptly. She texted: No birth plan? You didn’t have one?
Me: I did, but the nurse lost it. Honestly, I know of nobody whose birth plan was implemented the way that she intended. Or at all. I guess we could blame doctors and hospitals and the medical establishment, but there are other culprits too: life, traffic, weather, spouses or lack thereof, etc.
Lana: How’s this for a thwarted birth plan? I was in San Fran when I went into labor. I’d bullied United into letting me fly. Lester missed the birth of our only child, because Norton came a week early. I felt TERRIBLE. So did Les. (Still does.) (This stays between us, of course!)
I stared at her words.
Me: But I bet you were doing something incredible and revolutionary in San
Fran.
Lana: I was at a friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah.
Me: Yikes!
Lana: How about Norton learning Aikido instead of catch? We just signed him up for one-on-one lessons with the man who used to train Steven Seagal!
Would the Utica Truck Driver be put off by private Aikido lessons with a celebrity trainer? No matter; this could easily be finessed. I replied, Super! When’s his birthday? Cass’s is in a couple weeks! He’ll turn the big 0-5.
Lana: Tell him I say Happy Birthday! Norton turned 13 a few weeks ago. I cannot believe I have a teenager.
We chatted a little more about the boys, and she thanked me for my hard work. I do appreciate all that you’ve given me, she wrote. I hope that I’ve been able to give you some invaluable things, too.
My thoughts skimmed back over Nick Felles, and all those dark weeks after I had stopped writing for him, and then Disney World, my mother and Ed leaving. And Bertie. Something rose like a fast wave within me, a sense of the magnitude of all that life hands us, and in such rapid succession. Working with Lana had been disorienting, sometimes terrible, but also, in a larger sense, necessary and good. It had been depleting and confusing and inspiring, and now, somehow, it was done. The book, at least. I had the sense that this mash of emotions would linger in me a long while. I wrote back, Absolutely. Thank you.
That may, Cass graduated from Little Rainbows. He even got a certificate and walked in a ceremony. I was the only mother there without flowers or a graduation gift—who knew that four- and five-year-olds received these things?—but I made up for it by taking him for ice cream afterward.