I thought about telling Susan that Celeste’s motivations were slightly more complicated than that, that the better you knew somebody, the harder it was to claim things about them, to distill them down to one attribute, but Susan was getting energized by her ire, and in turn was energizing me. We worked together all through the night to revise the open letter that I’d written in my hotel room in Vegas. We interspersed the text with the screenshots from Susan’s computer with copies of all the poems I’d given to Wolf, complete with the date stamps from when they’d been written and completed. With hopes high, we posted the open letter at nine the next morning on all my social media accounts, emailed a number of feminist blog editors, and direct-messaged a number of Susan’s writer friends asking them to repost it. They did immediately. For a half hour, we felt that wonderful gritty joy that speaking one’s mind brings.
But then, nothing happened. Absolutely no one cared. It had taken mere moments for the tornado to destroy my life, but that was how news cycles worked. No one’s interested in what happens in the days after a tornado sweeps through a town; we’re fascinated by the tornado itself. No one likes looking at destruction unless there’s a whole lot of other people looking. I don’t know what this says about human nature; all I know was that my private wreckage, once revealed publicly, was not as interesting to people as the disaster that caused it.
Sure, yeah, there were a few Casey Speaks reblogs, a swell in support from sexual assault prevention organizations, a call from one site to boycott Julian’s books, but none of it gained much traction. As for Wolf, the people in the literary world who believed he was an asshole continued to believe he was an asshole, and the people who didn’t, didn’t. Susan said the best way for her to get revenge was to write a better book. And, once she had enough power from said book, she would, she said, “eviscerate him.” But we would see. In the aftermath of our efforts to hold these men responsible, we realized we didn’t possess the power to do that. We were just a couple of nobodies, a couple of ladies. Men were innocent until proven guilty. Women were crazy until they were believed.
* * *
—
After the initial swell of hope brought about by reconciling with Susan, I tried to keep my spirits up, but they fell. They fell until I seemed to not even have spirits anymore. I still bought groceries and drove my car and washed my hair and performed essential human functions; there was no Hollywood-style sadness montage where I curled up in my pajamas all day. But I had lost something, and not just my job or my boyfriend or my reputation. Grief, it knocks you flat, and never in the way you expect. I would be signing my name on checks or forms and would notice that even my own name seemed to have nothing to do with me. Casey Pendergast—who was that? The words were meaningless. I mean I did not recognize them, I did not recognize myself, because there was no self. I had neither strength nor will, no I-ness left, to put myself back together again.
After I left Susan’s house, I ghostwalked around the city for days, no longer myself but trapped in myself, haunted by my own body, its insistence on remembering what I would’ve rather ignored. During these drizzly, specter-filled walks, I figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to stay in my condo while unemployed—I wasn’t what you’d call a penny-pincher, my savings were nonexistent—so I did what I had to do and in short order found a renter, a twenty-two-year-old who’d graduated from college that spring. Her name was Savannah, and she had very nice hair and was very certain about her future success in the field of human resources. I upcharged the rent well past my mortgage so I’d have a little something extra to live on; Savannah either didn’t notice or didn’t mind.
I also started selling all my beautiful things. I said goodbye to decorative plates, artsy lamps, a two-hundred-dollar juicer. I said hello to pursed-lipped women at consignment shops who hung my best dresses up on a rack and decided how much they were going to pay me for them, which was never enough. I couldn’t afford movers, so I packed up what I couldn’t sell—the pilled sweaters, the misshapen cottons, the underwear—and gave away what I hated, which was pretty much everything, since it reminded me of a self that I was no more. The self that wore these things and blended these juices was a self that, if not untouched by suffering, did her damnedest to keep it at arm’s length through willful blitheness. Such compartmentalizing was no longer possible, and even if it had been, I wanted nothing to do with it anymore.
And at the beginning of October, about a month after I’d gotten home from Vegas, I arrived with two cardboard boxes and an overstuffed suitcase at the door of Lindsey’s condo.
“Hello, roomie!” Lindsey said, greeting me in a Japanese-print caftan. “I’m so glad you’re here!” She handed me a cup of ginger tea and gave me a giant hug. She’d offered to let me stay with her, rent-free, until I got back on my feet. “We’ll call it the Red Tent!” she’d said, referring to a novel where women in biblical times got their periods together.
“You really don’t have to do that,” I’d said, or groaned. The conversation where she’d invited me to cohabitate had happened on the phone. I’d been lying on the floor of my near-empty living room watching the ceiling fan circulate. Whatthefuck, it asked, whatthefuckwhatthefuck, on every go-around. I was at the stage where I felt I did not deserve anything, where what happened with Julian was my fault, where the best course of action seemed to be to isolate myself like a wounded animal until I’d either licked myself clean or died of infection. I berated myself incessantly. If only I hadn’t taken the job at People’s Republic. If only I hadn’t agreed to help start up Nanü. If only I had taken that sabbatical. If only I weren’t so greedy. If only I hadn’t taken those poems from Susan. If only I hadn’t bullied Wolf. If only I hadn’t gotten drunk on Numb Cappuccinos! If only I hadn’t spied on Ben. If only I didn’t have to seek retribution for every stupid thing. If only I hadn’t been so naïve about Julian. If only I had more self-awareness. If only I had more courage. If only I didn’t try so fucking hard to please. If only, from the minute I figured them out, I had set out to follow my dreams. If only, God, if only, if only. A different mother, a different father, a different boss, a different me. You could take all the if-onlys back to the day you were born, if you wanted. Spend enough time with yourself, you might find yourself pretty disappointing.
Which is why none of us should spend too much time alone, isolated without interruption. People need people, and not just virtually. And why I was so lucky the day Lindsey heard my refusal of her invitation and dismissed it so wholeheartedly.
Lindsey’s apartment smelled like a Yankee Candle and looked like a Barbie Dreamhouse. It was tidy and we both bent over backward to keep it that way, to put each other at ease. In the weeks to come, I would cook and make her smoothies; she would clean compulsively. Once I’d come home late from a walk and found her using a bleach toothbrush on the tiled kitchen backsplash while a meditation podcast played through her Bluetooth speakers. “I am the change I wish to see,” she was repeating, scrubbing in her pink rubber gloves. “I am the change I wish to see.”
* * *
—
I, on the other hand, was not the change I wished to see. I was a very sad and ashamed unemployed lady. Halfheartedly I filled out job applications, knowing that I wouldn’t get anything, since any employer googling Casey Pendergast received a very unflattering portrait of yours truly. Even though the Internet was preoccupied with me for a week at most, a week is a jackpot when it comes to data collection. In three months I didn’t receive a single call for an interview after applying for God knows how many jobs. Jobs not only in advertising, but anywhere and anything. But no one wanted me.
I would have perhaps plunged deeper into my depression, were it not for Dudley, dear Dudley, Susan’s boss, stepping in. Since his portrait studio was right next to Wendys’s Books, he’d gotten to know the three Wendys who owned it over the years. Completely independently of Susan asking—he’d j
ust heard her talking with me on the phone one day—he asked if they’d be willing to take me on for the holiday season. They were. After the holidays, there were no guarantees, but still. I showed up on the first day with a découpaged mug for each of the three Wendys and tears in my eyes after stopping into the portrait studio to thank Dudley. “Heavens to Betsy Jean, no need to thank me,” he chortled, patting me on the back in a grandfatherly way. “Simply a matter of common decency.”
Dudley knew what’d happened on Twitter—Susan’d had to explain it to him—and though he never mentioned anything to me, I could feel him trying all the time, in little ways, to remind me that there was indeed such a thing as common decency. That, even though fifty percent of the world or greater may be real shitty, the other fifty percent are made of people who try hard to do right by other people, people whose hearts are big enough to care about the whole world, not just the people they know in it. They were easy to forget, this other fifty, because they didn’t talk as much as the other half, aren’t as showy. But they are there, they always are, always have been. Mercy. Look around, train your gaze; you’ll see them everywhere eventually. They’re beautiful, I’m telling you. Beautiful as a painting.
* * *
—
“Can I help you with something?!” I asked. It was the three-month anniversary of my assault and humiliation, and at Wendys’s I was trying very hard to master the power of positive thinking.
“I’m looking for a book called, ah, The Incendiaries?” the woman on the other side of the customer service desk said, pulling out a piece of paper to make sure she’d gotten the title right.
“Oh!” I smiled very wide. “Yes, of course!”
The Incendiaries was Julian North’s new novel, out just in time for the holidays, and published to rave reviews.
“It’s for my book club,” the woman said apologetically. She had short gray hair and wore fingerless gloves that appeared to be self-knitted. I’d noticed during my so-far brief tenure in retail that a lot of women felt really apologetic about asking for anything, even if their asking just meant I had to do what was in my job description. “Have you read it?”
“You know!” I said. I tried to end everything I said with an exclamation point. “I haven’t read that one yet! But everyone who has seems to really”—I gritted my teeth—“love him!”
I led her to the bestsellers table in the front of the store. In the middle of the table, tucked into one of those metal holders, was a big poster of Tracy Mallard standing contemplatively next to a pond. There was a newspaper, a magazine, a notebook, and a pen on a rock next to her, along with a box of Nature’s Harvest granola bars. The poetry of silence, said the tag. Beneath it was a short paragraph from Tracy herself:
There’s nothing I love more than a walk in the woods to connect myself back to the earth. Our world might be fraught, but our minds don’t have to be. That’s why I always carry Nature’s Harvest with me. They feed my body and mind and, best of all, they’re natural. Just like you and me.™
The Nature’s Harvest logo was placed discreetly at the bottom of the ad. Nanü, by the end of that year, was up and thriving. Lindsey, Annie, and Jack had been brought on by Celeste with an attractive and standard start-up package that included stock options and equity. Jack was doing art direction—this poster had his name all over it—and Annie, along with a couple new hires, was doing my job now. Lindsey had taken over what Celeste was calling “asset maintenance”—hand-holding the writers to ensure their corporate projects went smoothly—though she was hoping, as soon as she could, loyal as she was, to get out from under Celeste’s gilded thumb.
Most of the other people at PR had not been as lucky. Celeste had sold PR, as expected, to Omnipublic. There were three rounds of huge layoffs, with no explanation from the bosses except that they were looking to cut costs. My and Lindsey’s guess was that Celeste got a better price by forgoing PR’s independence, and money had mattered more than ever once it was clear she had to get Nanü off the ground herself. (After the Vegas disaster and Julian’s public disavowal, the venture capitalists had gotten cold feet.) In a company-wide email that Lindsey had shown me only after I threatened to spill orange juice all over her newly cleaned kitchen floor if she didn’t, Celeste wrote that although she was “looking forward to new beginnings,” she was also “deeply sorrowful” that the era of People’s Republic was coming to an end. She also wrote that she never would have sold PR were it not for the riotously bad press a “troubled former employee” had caused the agency, thereby pinning all the bad blood from the layoffs on me.
If I had any sympathy left for Celeste, any understanding of how she, as my boss, might have felt betrayed by my less-than-honest and under-the-radar plots, it disappeared when I saw that email. People reveal themselves in writing more than anywhere else; they show on the page what in life they keep private. I saw who she was in that email, for the first time, in her entirety. And to be honest, it appalled me.
“Oh,” the woman at Wendys’s said, taking the hardcover brick with a look of apprehension. “This is longer than I thought it’d be.”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe his books do run long!”
What I did not say: because he’s a megalomaniac!
“My book club’s the day after tomorrow,” the woman said. “I don’t know how I’ll get it done.”
“Well,” I said. I put a hand on my hip and looked toward the ceiling, like I was considering what I was about to tell her for the first time. “I have heard it’s kind of slow going. You know what you could do, though? I mean, it’s a little rascally but—”
“What?” She was smiling. I really loved it when older people got mischievous.
“You could,” I said, “since you only have a couple days, just read the reviews on Amazon. Get the gist of the thing without having to”—I waved my hand—“you know, deal with the overwrought, blowhardy, self-important verbiage—”
The woman put her hand over her mouth and laughed. “Don’t tell anyone, but I have always thought he was a little too big for his britches—”
I clapped my hands. “See?!”
Encouraging customers not to buy Julian’s pretentious block of a novel was one of the high points of my days as a seasonal employee at Wendys’s. The other high point, of course, was reading. I devoured books on my lunch breaks, used my employee discount to purchase a novel a week, and disappeared into them during my days off. I hadn’t read with such voracity since college—I hadn’t had time. I’d put in such long hours at PR, plus the culture of advertising had turned my interests away from self-reflection and toward consumer spending—yet it didn’t take me long to pick back up the habit. To enter a world of make-believe painstakingly created by another person, to be told a well-crafted story at the exact moment where my life had no narrative: this was joy. A joy that relied not on money or status or reputation, but a joy created between me and a stranger who thought and felt as I did. For minutes, hours, even days at a time, this stranger offered respite from what seemed to me, when I looked out upon the earth, an endless desert of loneliness. Picking up reading again, too, allowed Susan and me to connect in a way we hadn’t for months. This made up for the lowlights of being a seasonal employee at Wendys’s: long hours and low pay and cranky customers, to name a few. But even with these lowlights, I often returned home with a lighter heart than I’d had when I arrived at the store, having spent the day surrounded by books, and people who loved them.
Including my new friend Chris, a fellow seasonal employee at Wendys’s and another one of those people whose presence in my life was a great gift and therefore a challenge to my more or less constant despair over the fact that the world was a shithole. Chris identified as non-binary trans, used the pronoun “they,” and, along with being the most millennial of all the millennials I knew, was also the funniest person I’d ever met, despite the fact that one of their favorite
sources of humor was making fun of how white I was (Chris was black). We originally bonded over slam poetry. Chris was way famous around town, in that milieu anyway; was friends with Gina, Susan’s friend; and had made it to the national championships the year before. When I told them I’d “done some slam” in college, they laughed so hard I thought I might need to pull down the defibrillator in the break room, where we were sitting at the Formica table. “GIRL,” they’d said, still laughing, shaking their head. “You? What the hell were you writing about, losing your Canada Goose jacket at a frat party? Or, no, let me guess—your eating disorder?”
“Um, no,” I’d said, though of course that was exactly what I’d written about.
It was at the same Formica table in the break room that I was reading the newspaper on my phone at the end of my shift, waiting for the bus since I was trying to save on gas money, when Chris burst in, septum bepierced, jean-jacketed, saying, “Oh my GOD did you hear the news?” Chris was like a sunbeam when they entered the room—bright light everywhere.
I looked up. I had just been reading about a drone strike. “What news?”
“Ellen Hanks is coming to our store!”
I dropped my phone with a clatter on the table. “She is?! Wait, you know who Ellen Hanks is?”
“I’m like obsessed with Real Housewives. If she turns up I’m literally going TO DIE. I love her! She’s like my favorite person on Instagram. Do you know she just wrote a memoir?” Chris paused slightly for a huge intake of breath. “Why didn’t you think I knew who Ellen Hanks was? Because—”
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 25