“Whatever,” Jack said, in that no-man’s-land between kidding and not. “Love you too.”
Which was true, so much as you can love people whom you don’t know well, or whom you only know in one setting. It was only four-something in the afternoon, and Susan and I weren’t meeting until six, but I figured I’d surprise her by showing up at her work, a photography studio out in the burbs, where she assisted a guy who specialized in senior pictures and family portraits—cheesy, Sears-style stuff. She claimed she hated it, but I’d always thought it was sort of perfect for her, as a way of paying the bills while she worked on her novel. It got her interacting with people, she got to play with kids, and it was so anachronistic, just like Susan. Who knew there was still an industry for senior pictures when teenagers were snapping a hundred selfies a day?
“I’ll see you guys tomorrow, yeah?” I said, rummaging around my workstation for the lipstick I’d stuck somewhere. When I found it, I swung my purse over my shoulder and blew them a kiss. “You’re the best.”
“You’re the best,” Lindsey said, blowing me a kiss back. She was sitting at her desk, probably about to open Photoshop. That and Illustrator were what, as junior art director, Lindsey used to execute Jack’s so-called visions, but a lot of nights she stayed late to use the software for her own creative projects. Recently she’d taken to refurbishing old dollhouses and taking photographs of the rooms, before and after she wrecked them with razor blades and matchstick fires. I think if Lindsey had been living her best life she would have lived in a remodeled barn in the countryside and engaged in gentle activities all day, but Lindsey had $140k in student loans from RISD that were not going to pay themselves.
“No, you’re the best!” I said.
“We’re all the best,” Annie said from behind her computer. She was going to stay late too, most likely to try and come up with some tagline ideas. Sometimes I felt sad for Annie because she worked so hard but so often had very little to show for it, but I couldn’t get wrapped up in other people’s sadness. It derailed me. It’s why I had to stop watching the news. All the refugees, fighting, shootings—how can people stand it. Watching it, I mean, let alone living it. I’m not saying tuning out’s the best way to cope, but listen, some of us have got to keep our heads above water for the sake of sound government, slimming underpants, and bustling commerce.
“We’re the best,” Jack said, motioning to himself, Lindsey, and Annie. “And you’re ridic.”
“So true,” I said airily, and headed for the elevators.
I’d wanted to be a star for as long as I could remember. All babies emerge from the womb screaming for attention, but most people seem to grow out of this impulse. I never did. As a lonely only child, my favorite way of amusing myself was to pretend I had many friends—imaginary friends who let me entertain them. My Middle Western childhood was a blur of make-believe and community theater and homemade movies shot on a camcorder so heavy my mother had to buy a tripod before it busted her shoulder. When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would scratch my head and explain that while I couldn’t say for sure, I was considering comedian or talk show host.
“You know, you could be both,” my Aunt Jean told me once. I was six years old, and we were playing in my room as I composed a new song on my thumb harp. Aunt Jean lived in Los Angeles, where she produced experimental films. She had short silver hair and a sharp sense of humor and wore trousers with a sharp crease and big shoulder pads and T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up halfway. I trusted her because she bought me neon sweatshirts and didn’t laugh at bad jokes and rolled her eyes at half the things my father said.
That visit, I snuck out of my room to eavesdrop one night. Louise was telling Aunt Jean—her sister—she was hoping to write a book on parenting, and Aunt Jean was saying all these nice things about me. “I think she might be the first artist in the family,” she said. To which Louise replied, “She also gets very high scores in math.”
When Aunt Jean told me I could be both comedian and talk show host, I remember looking at her gap-mouthed. Everything shocks you as a kid. Over a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup, Aunt Jean told my mother to introduce me to Lucille Ball, Gilda Radner, and Lily Tomlin. “You know what,” she said, “I’ll even send you some tapes. I’ve got reams of SNL.”
“She’s too young for that,” Louise said. This was before I knew that when adults who have known each other a long time talk about one thing, they are actually talking about a hundred other things, some of which are too molten for the bounds of civilized conversation. “She won’t understand the humor. It’s vulgar.”
“It’s not vulgar,” Aunt Jean said. “It’s political.”
“It’s gauche.”
“Oh for God’s sakes, Leezy, listen to yourself.”
Louise took a small sip of soup. Then she put her spoon down on the place mat and dabbed delicately at her mouth with her napkin. When my mother finally broke the silence, it was so big and strange you could have fit a beached whale inside. She tried to make her voice sound sweet but the sweetness had cracks all over it. “Children need routine, especially a child as sensitive as Casey. You learn this quickly as a parent.”
Aunt Jean was not a parent. She lived with a woman my mother insisted on calling her roommate until I was in my twenties. In her eyes I saw all sorts of things I didn’t have words for at that age: something about their own mother, the drinking, how even when the drinking was really bad everyone had to pretend it wasn’t happening. These thoughts were making Aunt Jean sad, but also mad. It didn’t make any sense to either of them, how such a gap could exist between them, when they’d come from the exact same place.
I couldn’t take the pressure of this gap. So I spilled the rest of my tomato soup in my lap. “Owwww!” I wailed. “It’s boiling!”
Aunt Jean and my mother sprang into action, temporarily united by my error—grabbing paper towels, ordering me to change my pants so we could run the soiled ones under cool water, scolding me for not being more careful. I still got in a little bit of trouble, but I didn’t mind. I had done what was necessary.
* * *
—
Back in the day, Louise had been a first-rate PhD candidate in clinical psychology. She was at the top of her class when she found out she was pregnant and had originally put her dissertation on hold only to get me up and running. Yet for various reasons, including my father, Rake, and the intensity of his work travel, she’d never returned to it. Louise checked off the era’s requirements for good mothering—dinners from scratch, packed lunches, school chaperoning—as easily as she’d breezed through her orals, but something was off about the delivery. I couldn’t find her, even when she was right in front of me. A thick wall of glass. By my tweens I’d run headfirst into the wall often enough that I grew wary of her, though at the same time I could not stop ramming my head into the glass, trying to make her see me.
Of course, I didn’t know what anxiety meant back then. I didn’t know that the glass wall might not be a wall at all, just the insularity of a quicksilver mind that, bored and hungry, had begun to cannibalize itself. I also didn’t know that the hard stuff that happens to someone when they are little never really goes away. I was the center of the universe, or so I thought, and believed that my mother’s off-ness was my fault. After I did something dumb like knock a glass of grape juice over with my jazz hands, I’d kneel beside my mother as she mopped it up, offering help she always refused, all the while hearing the thoughts in her brain, clear as speech. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When I heard this, I tried to transmit straight from my brain into her brain using my antenna, I’m sorry, I’ll do better, I’ll be the daughter you wanted instead of me. But the thing is, it seemed a flaw in her original experiment, my falling so far from the tree. I never could do better, the conditions weren’t right. For a long time I tried to change the conditions so she could finally be happ
y, but I didn’t know how. Eventually I got angry instead.
Given all that, my ambivalent relationship with my mother, I mean, it meant a lot when Ellen told Celeste I was a star. Mama! But it had also given me a funny little tremor in my brain, one I’d first felt around my twenty-eighth birthday, a shimmering feeling of existing in two places at once: the life I’d imagined for myself, and the life I was currently living. Before turning twenty-eight I had been able to maintain, as many people did, that however many hours I worked at my day job, however successful I was becoming at PR, advertising wasn’t really what I was doing with my life; it was just what I was doing right now. Then one day I opened Us Weekly and realized half the celebrities in it were my age or younger. I began waking up in the middle of the night with sweaty half-baked thoughts: when will I start living the life I’ve always wanted, like my refrigerator magnet tells me?
* * *
—
My car was a little silver import that had seemed California-hazy with glamour and luxury at point of sale, but now seemed more and more like the car a teen starlet drives until she gets a DUI and her parents take it away. It moved with zippy ease through the snarly downtown traffic and toward the portrait studio where Susan worked. Right as I turned on Top 40 radio, my phone rang. I looked at the screen. It was my mother. Speak of the devil. Reluctantly I answered, because I still couldn’t bring myself to ignore her. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hello, Casey,” my mother said. Unlike other loved ones who adopted nicknames for me over time—Case, Case-Face, Case-a-rama—Louise only called me by my given name. Funny enough, it was not even a name she wanted. My father had chosen it. I think it still horrified Louise, WASPiest of WASPs, that her daughter was called something so quotidian, because she said “Casey” gingerly, like it might spoil in her mouth. “How are you?”
“Fine.” I pulled onto the highway. It did not occur to me to go into further detail. Louise did not have what you might call active listening skills. She preferred conversing in one of two ways: giving advice, or monologuing the concerns of her own life. Whatever I said was usually followed up with a “that’s nice” before she cleared her throat and deposited her entire existence upon me.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“What’s up?” I passed a billboard advertising something called a fruit-blasting chiller. The next billboard offered a four-thousand-dollar reward for the return of a young African American boy who’d gone missing.
“Just calling to say hello. Did you receive the book I sent you?” This was Louise-code for Why didn’t you call to thank me for the book I sent you?
“Uhhh…yes! I did! Thank you.” A package from Amazon was sitting on my mail table, unopened. This was another of Louise’s favorite forms of communication, sending books she thought I needed. The last one was called The Spirit of Intimacy. The one before that was a collection of poems chosen by the host of her favorite public radio show, and before that a book on parenting adult children. “Your children are not your children,” it began.
“Very thoughtful of you,” I added.
“What do you think of it so far?”
“It seems”—I wondered how much of a refund I’d get if I returned it unopened to Amazon—“really useful, I think.” There were things in my wish list I was coveting, including the latest from a Nigerian novelist I loved, also these Kegel balls that were supposed to make you tight like a virgin.
“We read it in book group,” she said. My mother did not have any friends, really, but she did have activity partners. “I thought of you because—”
Right about here I tuned out, because I no longer listened to my mother. It seemed important to listen to her when I was a kid because no one else did except Aunt Jean. Sometimes if my mother talked for a long time some of the sadness around her mouth and eyes would go away, even if she wasn’t talking about the source of the sadness, but about dumb things like the neighbors’ garden and our washing machine. But I stopped once I went to college and heard other girls talking to their mothers in the dorm and realized that some mothers actually listened to their daughters. I had not forgiven Louise for not being these other mothers yet.
“Huh,” I said as I drove and Louise continued speaking. “Huh. Interesting.” I was thinking about how I needed to get groceries delivered; I was out of leafy greens.
“Anyway, I should go,” I said finally as I pulled into the portrait studio’s parking lot. “I’m meeting Susan for dinner.”
“Oh,” my mother said. She sounded confused. “Okay. Say hi to her for me.”
Susan had a soft spot for my mother, one of the few flaws of her character. Whenever I complained about Louise, Susan would say I was being too hard on her. Susan would say it wasn’t her fault; it wasn’t even that special. Mothers have been messing up their daughters since the beginning of time. Hello, just look at my grandmother. I’d say, well, hell, that’s why I’d never have daughters and Susan would say oh, classic Casey, always taking the easy way out.
* * *
—
The studio was sandwiched in a strip mall between a Panera and an independent bookstore named Wendys’s, unrelated to the fast-food chain—it just happened to be started by three women named Wendy. Susan was crouched down trying to stuff a very fat toddler into a very red snowsuit. The studio had been rearranged to resemble a festive winter scene, complete with a snowy, coniferous backdrop and a couple of toboggans perched in front of an artificial tree. Susan’s boss and the owner of the studio, Dudley—a bald little toadstool of a man—was talking to the toddler’s father, one of those corporate guys who stands with his legs far apart and talks so loud his face and thick neck are always red. The guy was wearing a white turtleneck and a Norwegian sweater. His wife, one of those yoga-gaunt women, also in a white turtleneck and a Norwegian sweater, was standing above Susan, giving her instructions about the zipper. “Try not to pinch him,” she said. “He doesn’t like being pinched.”
Then why not dress your fat baby yourself? I wondered. At that moment Susan looked toward the door. I waved and mouthed, “Don’t mind me!” and pointed toward the cramped lobby and the plastic chairs that looked like they’d been stolen from an elementary school classroom. In a stage whisper: “I got off early.”
She gave me a thumbs-up before turning her attention back to the toddler, whose mood had changed like weather on his face and the forecast said squalling. The wife’s supervision was irrelevant. Susan was better with children than anyone else I’d met; I think she felt less anxiety being around them than she did around grown-ups. While the family completed an elaborate sequence of Christmas card shots, which seemed preposterous, seeing as it was March, I checked my Instagram, my Facebook, my Twitter; I scrolled through my RSS feeds and pretended to read The New York Times. Time disappears a little when you’re on your phone. Space, too. Or maybe it wasn’t time disappearing, it was me.
I rattled back to real life only when I heard something that seemed worth hearing: the wife telling Tad (her husband) that she didn’t like the way his sweater pulled. Tad barked, “Jesus Christ, Lisa, can I get off this goddamn sled?” Susan was reassuring them that everything looked great, they were beautiful, such a beautiful family, it would be a lovely Christmas card, no they were smart to do it early, you know how busy the holidays get. Dudley, committed but talentless, snap-snapped the photos dutifully. How he stayed in business must have been through word of mouth and sheer affection, because he was the least businessy man on earth.
Time passed, how much, who knows. I was filling out quizzes about what kind of person I was and looking at panda GIFs. Before I knew it Susan had plopped down in the plastic chair next to mine, smelling as she always did of cigarettes and hair and the French perfume she wore, her only concession to luxury. Meanwhile, the family was being pushed gently out the door by Dudley. “Tallyho!” Dudley was saying. Dudley always said odd things like that.
“God, yes. You okay here, Dudley?”
“A-okey-dokey-chokey!” Dudley said.
“You’re not going to stay too late, are you?”
Dudley chortled. “Me? Why, this fella’s got his card full at the dancing pavilion this evening!” His Adam’s apple bobbled under his teal turtleneck and sweater.
“Can you at least go get a panini? You love those Panera paninis.”
“I’ll grab something in a bit here, don’t you worry.”
“Really? Will you?” Susan looked at him, hard. She crossed her arms.
Finally Dudley put his hands up. “All right, all right,” he conceded. “I’ll get a panini.”
“You take care of him like he’s your doddering relative,” I said as we walked across the parking lot. I beep-beeped the doors unlocked.
“He is my doddering relative,” Susan said, opening the passenger side. “He’s got a cot in the back and a hundred cans of tuna fish stacked by the sink and catastrophic health insurance.”
“You don’t even have health insurance,” I reminded her.
“I’m afraid he’s going to break a hip.”
“It’s not your job to take care of him,” I said. “He’s your boss. He’s supposed to take care of you. By paying you more than $11.50 an hour and overtime when you stay late helping screaming babies with bows scotch-taped to their heads.”
“That was one time. And he can’t afford to.”
“Then why not stay his friend and look for a better job?”
“I like my job.”
“But the money!”
Susan frowned. When we were together, in diner booths and darkened movie theaters, Susan and I played a fun game of make-believe where things like salaries, taxes, and student loans didn’t exist. She looked out the window. “I don’t care about money.”
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 3