Anyway, instead of talking about my qualifications in the interview, which I’d assumed would impress Celeste about as much as a baby chimp could wow a hanger, I’d done a little emotional jujitsu. Celeste was closed to me; I wanted her to open. But how? In jujitsu, you use the energy of your opponent against them. If Celeste were a stone, I would be…the dynamite that blasts apart the stone in a rather haphazardly controlled detonation.
So I decided on the element of surprise. Instead of listing my extracurriculars or five-year goals, I’d embarked on a stream-of-consciousness think piece about the previous night’s episode of Survivor. I told her that, if I were on the show, I’d start by wearing my tribe bandanna as a bikini top so everyone would underestimate me. “Then,” I said, leaning forward, “just as they start making nice, letting their guards down, because they think big whoop, who cares, I’ll be voted off anyway, right? BAM! I’ll get immunity in a physical challenge thanks to my high-intensity interval training and exploit all their weaknesses in my alliance-building.”
When I was done with my exultations, Celeste had uncrossed her arms and was tapping the pads of her fingers together. “Fascinating,” she’d said in the voice I now know means that she can smell money. “Tell me. How would you describe yourself?”
“A real bulldozer!” I’d said.
Celeste hired me on the spot. She said that we were going to hone that skill, capitalize on it. And we did. Which is how I became the youngest creative director at PR. Authenticity and innovation were fast becoming buzzwords, and apparently I had both in spades. While my colleagues went off to silent retreats, hired life coaches, and joined soulful gyms in order to quote-unquote tap the strength within, I could no more untap myself than Zeus could prevent Athena from springing out of his head. That’s what ideas felt like when they came to me: it was involuntary, occasionally painful, and a lot of times it was all I could do to get to a pen and paper fast enough to scribble it down before another one was shooting through my synapses like cannon fire, ready to spring out of my head again.
It didn’t take long for this quality to shine through at PR. We had a client, early on in my tenure, who sold backyard equipment and trampolines. Trampolines had been getting a bad rap for years in parenting magazines, and the company wanted a campaign geared toward the discerning, safety-first mother. Something cheeky, they said, but classy. The ideas being thrown around were literal to the point of being excruciating. Take the leap. Jump high—all bland inspirational mumbo jumbo. Then I said, “What about something like, ‘Ladies, meet your tramp’?” And all eyes turned in my direction.
I took over that account soon enough, and others. I was complimented on my “freshness.” I became a praise-seeking missile. It wasn’t hard to hit the targets, because it turned out advertising was full of people trapped in some awful purgatory between expression and repression, and while a good many of them did their best to unravel whatever was trapping them so they could, you know, come up with their own ideas or be themselves or whatever, others seemed perfectly happy to live this weird half life, half-ass their work, and bide their time. Though of course, that being said, other people are always more complicated than we make them out to be.
* * *
—
I heard the elevator ding and looked up from my computer, where I’d been toggling between websites dedicated to eating naturally, decorating minimally, and spring fashions I desperately needed, and social media. I’d posted a photo on Instagram of my and Lindsey’s shoes—we were wearing the same brand, but different styles—and added a ton of hashtags, but so far only three people had liked it. Three people! It was rude, the lack of attention. But these apps were designed to addict you. Like any addict, I loathed my dependence just as desperately as I craved a hit. I kept refreshing every few minutes, toggling between despair that no one liked me and the hope that soon they would so the post might, algorithmically, ascend atop the heavenly news feed. Sure, this emotional yo-yoing was kind of tiring, but what else does one do at three-thirty on a Tuesday?
Celeste and Ellen stepped out of the elevator, both shortish brunettes in towering heels. The difference between them was that Ellen looked like she belonged on reality TV. Her hair was blown out—I think she might have had a weave—and even at a distance I could see the layers of painstakingly applied makeup on her lips and eyes. Everything she wore was tight: tight jeans. Tight silk blouse, tight leather jacket, casings for her tightly wound interior. Tightly wound in a fun way, though, like one of those pistols in cartoons that only shoots bouquets of flowers from the muzzle. She was so skinny her head looked like it was the wrong size. So did her purse, which was leather and the size of a tent.
Celeste, on the other hand, dyed her hair so brown it was almost black. She only wore black, too, billowing tunics and tailored pants. Her hair was air-dried and tucked behind her ears, and she wore no makeup. I guess when you’re successful enough you can stop caring so much what you look like—that is, unless you became successful because of what you look like, as Ellen had. The thing to know about Celeste is that she wore a gold rectangular pendant every day that was secretly a switchblade. She’d cut anyone who messed with her; I should know. I’d seen it, metaphorically of course, all the time.
Jack, Annie, Lindsey, and I were all at our desks, which was actually just a long, shiny white table that held our computers. PR didn’t believe in hierarchy, or privacy, or personal space. The only person who had an office-office was Celeste, and even that had glass walls. I liked the open layout, it made me feel like I was a part of something, like movies set in newsrooms, where everyone’s sitting on top of desks, one foot on the ground, all pleated khakis and rolled-up sleeves, trying to figure out how to take down the big guy. The difference between those movies and my office was that we had much nicer furniture, no one would be caught dead in pleated khakis, and we offered up the best parts of ourselves as choice meat for the big guys.
Celeste signaled to us without looking—just an arm in the air and a snap—and we knew to gather our things and meet them in the conference room. Which wasn’t a room at all, just a cordoned-off area with raw wooden beams, like the frame of a house under construction. It was furnished with sofas, very square armchairs, and a reclaimed-barn-wood coffee table. When I got there, having speed-walked the way you did in elementary school right after a teacher yelled at you to stop running, I saw Ellen tapping away on her phone like her life depended on it.
“Ellen!” I said. “Casey Pendergast. Creative director, Real Housewives devotee, and huge fan of the Shape UP.” I lifted up my shirt a little, to show her I was wearing some. “Huge fan of you in general. And just so you know, if Monica had come to my house and accused me of trying to come between her and Jacqueline, I totally would’ve started a fight too.”
Ellen looked up. “Jesus Christ, finally!” she said in her Jersey accent. “Someone sees it from my point of view!”
Turned out Ellen was just like me: she could strike up a conversation with a stranger as if she’d known them forever. While Jack, Lindsey, and Annie filtered in, and Celeste returned with a Venti-something from the Starbucks on the building’s first floor, Ellen and I talked a lot of shit about Monica and how unfair it was that the producers got to cut and splice whatever they wanted in the editing room. “I swear to you,” Ellen said, “I swear on my mother’s grave, it was Monica who pushed me first. Do you believe me? It wasn’t my fault! You don’t push a girl from Jersey, anyone could tell you that. What’d she want, a peace treaty?”
I could feel Celeste’s eyes on me as Ellen and I chattered on, could feel that she was pleased with my performance. If I won Ellen over, Celeste might even compliment me after the meeting. A compliment from Celeste was like Genghis Khan telling one of his conqueror-minions that he hadn’t done that terrible of a job lighting that village on fire. It meant a lot, both because a compliment was hard to come by and because he had the power to kill
you.
“All right, let’s get going,” Celeste said when Lindsey had finally returned after she had forgotten her crystals and had to run back to her desk. I could see her fingering them in the pocket of her blazer, finding a solace in them that made no sense to me. You can’t squeeze love from a stone! I wanted to tell her. But Lindsey, as I’ve said, was a sensitive being. Once, when I joked that her purse sounded like maracas when she walked because of all those supplements she carried, she excused herself to the bathroom and didn’t come back for twenty minutes. When she did she was red-eyed and quiet for the rest of the day. I felt so bad that I texted her that night to apologize. i was being stupid, I wrote. overcaffeinated and punchy. Lindsey, being Lindsey, not only forgave me immediately, but had a vial of something called Rescue Remedy waiting for me the next morning. “For your anxiety,” she said.
“Everyone, Ellen. Ellen, everyone. Casey you’ve already met, it seems, but this,” she said, going in order around the table, “is Jack, Annie, Lindsey. Senior art director, copywriter, art director. Oh, and this is Simone.”
Simone, Celeste’s assistant, whom I loathed, appeared behind the Eames chair Celeste had brought in to avoid the indignity of a couch. Simone was tall like me, but two sizes smaller, because she ate raisins and Diet Coke for lunch. “Pleasure,” Simone said. Her voice had the sweetness of a rotten peach. Simone’s family was rich, which made her careless, insouciant. She didn’t care about paychecks, and it showed. For whatever reason this made Celeste like her, which in turn made me want to destroy her. Plus Simone had a terrible habit of walking into the kitchen right as I was trying to eat junk food secretly.
Celeste tucked a piece of hair back behind her ear. “I want to keep this short and sweet. Ellen has somewhere to be, I have somewhere to be, and nothing ever gets done after a half hour in meetings.” She waved a hand toward us. “Tell her what you’re thinking. I know it’s only been a couple days, but you’ve been working hard.” She looked at Ellen. “I work all my girls hard. They don’t like working hard—they can leave.”
Jack opened his mouth to speak, but I caught his eye: Leave this to me. “Ellen,” I said, “we are all dying for this campaign. Dying. DY-ING. I don’t even know how many hours we’ve spent so far, hundreds maybe, imagining where we might take this. So far we’re really committed—I mean, literally obsessed—with using just your face as the image. Your face in Times Square, your face along Mulholland. Billboard size. Your face on the back of Us Weekly. Ellen Hanks, Ellen Hanks—everywhere you go, there you are. People can’t escape you, you’re gazing down at them, looking up at them, you’re all around them, you’re everything they see. You’re everywhere, they can’t escape you, but they can’t get enough of you either.”
“Huh,” Ellen said. “I’m listening.” She leaned forward and recrossed her legs.
“So what draws them in is the face. Your face. Your face becomes even more of a household name—well, household something, faces don’t have names I guess—anyway it becomes even more famous than it already is. The more familiar it becomes, the more they like it, they warm up to it, they forget that you broke Monica’s nose—”
“Barely broke it,” Ellen muttered.
“—and got indicted for tax evasion. And then,” I said, pausing for a breath. I was making this all up as I went along, following my instincts, which is generally how I did my best work. “Then what we’ll do is consolidate and streamline all your brand logos—the vodka, the nutrition stuff, the shapewear, whatever else—”
“Hello, don’t forget my skin care!”
“Right. Your skin care—so they’re all complementary. Jack here”—I motioned to him—“has a better eye than anyone I’ve ever met, and he is determined, DE-TER-MINED, to give you something better than these girly silhouettes and cursive writing that these other Housewives are using. The brand logos will go in the corners of the page, or billboard, sort of like a playing card. The fine print at the bottom shows all the retailers where the brands are sold. We just feel that you’re so beautiful,” I said, leaning forward and looking her in the eye, “and so popular, that anything else will just get in the way.”
Ellen smiled involuntarily, the way a person smiles when someone tells them something about them they already know to be true.
“But we have to come up with a tag,” I said, “something that lets the consumer know that it’s not just your brands we’re selling, it’s you we’re selling. Because, hello, people want to be like you, they want to be your friend, and it’s our job to make them feel that’s possible. So whatever it is we come up with has to really, like, represent who you are. What it is that’s so unique about you that people should not only be buying, but emulating. We already know,” I said, “that you’re an amazing businesswoman, a white-hot MILF, a reality star, a badass Jersey girl—and that might be enough for some people. But what those other people want?” I leaned back and settled against the couch, opening my arms in welcome. “Is you. The real you. The Authentic Ellen Hanks. The you The Real Housewives doesn’t let us see. And we believe that if we can get our customers to see that, you will have a very lucrative—not just fan base, but brand base.”
It surprised me sometimes, how moving I could be. Sometimes I even gave myself goosebumps. I felt in that moment that I had been charged with very important work—not just for Ellen, but for society. By helping Ellen reflect her core values to the world, we were, by proxy, helping all women do the same. They would see her face everywhere, and it would empower them. Women are taking over the world! they would think. Yes, it was very valuable what we were doing. Female empowerment was a cause I cared about deeply.
“So tell us,” Lindsey said. She stopped fingering her crystals and reached across the table to grab Ellen’s acrylic-nailed hands. “Who are you, really?”
Her words hung in the air for a second. Annie was busily taking what I assumed were minutes on the awkward keyboard of her iPad. Jack fiddled with his bow tie and sniffed, miffed, I was sure, at how little he’d been allowed to speak. Jack thought that just because he’d been bullied in high school he had the right to bulldoze over us girls in meetings like every other guy I knew. Over the past couple years I’d corrected that assumption.
Finally Ellen turned to Celeste and said, “Holy shit, I’m, like, crying right now.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a Kleenex. She dabbed her eyes. “I’m fucking crying right now and I don’t even know why. I love it. You guys are amazing. You’re fucking geniuses. Let’s do it.” She turned to Celeste. “I thought you were full of shit when you said you invested in your clients, but now I know you do.” She blew her nose. “You really do.”
Celeste looked over at me and nodded imperceptibly, code for well done. My heart soared. I felt, as I always did in such moments, as if I’d been offered a rare jewel, which was, I guess, true, since nothing is more rare than a withholding person’s admiration. Once in high school I’d approached my mother after my friend told me her parents gave her twenty bucks for every A she got. It had got me thinking, or rather stewing. “Why don’t I get rewarded for good grades?” I’d complained that evening. “I got an A last quarter in every class except drawing.”
And Louise, without even looking up from rubbing Curél into her hands, said, “Because good grades are what we expect from you.”
I sank farther into the couch and daydreamed about a future where Celeste introduced me to clients as her protégée and took me out for weekly lunch dates. “Just the two of us,” she’d say when she invited me. Meanwhile, Annie was tap-tapping away on her iPad as Ellen began telling her life story with the aim and accuracy of a sawed-off shotgun. This was Annie’s job as a copywriter: to pull the vague, half-formed ideas out of clients and knit them into a cohesive story, a story that could then be distilled all the way down to a tag. I heard bits and pieces of her childhood (“Parents hated each other. Of course they stayed together, they had no
money, what else were they gonna do?”), her youth (“I don’t remember a lot of it, to be honest. Lots of cigarettes, though, a lot of chicken fingers”), and her marriage (“Scum of the earth. If it weren’t for that restraining order I would’ve set his house on fire”).
She must have talked for some time, I was daydreaming and only half listening. The next thing I knew, Celeste was tapping her watch and saying something about getting Ellen to her next thing. We all stood up, then, did that weird dance of trying to figure out if it had been a handshake or cheek kisses or hug kind of meeting. I personally went for a hug and kiss, because it wasn’t every day that I had the chance to meet Ellen Hanks. Her body felt like a hanging skeleton against mine, but I could feel the energy zinging through her like a live wire.
“You,” she said to me as we embraced, “are a fucking star. A star. Hey, Celeste,” she said to my boss, who had stepped outside the scrum so as not to bother herself with animal rituals of comings and goings. “You know this one’s a star, don’t you?”
“Oh, I know,” Celeste said. “That’s why I hired her.”
After Ellen and Celeste headed for the elevators, Jack, Lindsey, Annie, and I all congratulated ourselves, and each other. “Such great note-taking, Annie,” I said, giving her a hug, which made me feel very doting and maternal seeing as the top of little Annie’s head only reached my chin. I took Lindsey’s hands and squeezed them as earnestly as I could without ruffling my sense of irony. “You were so giving to her, I could totally feel you shining out all that positive energy.”
“I was really trying!” Lindsey said, as sincere as a person could be.
“And Jack,” I said, putting a hand on his checkered back, “I know I didn’t let you talk, but you know that was just for the sake of the company, right? Because I mean”—I smiled not unbeseechingly—“you know I love you. I cherish you.”
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