16
Erin O’Donnell, Intern
One egg white frittata with steamed mushrooms; two ciabattas with tomato, basil, and mozzarella; five Diet Cokes; two large ginger cookies; one impossible-to-read-order-that-I-hope-isn’t-Helena’s; and one double cheeseburger with fries—which must be for the photographer, the only straight man on set. I’m dictating all of this to the server who clearly feels bad for me (this is a new low, the waitstaff taking pity on me), and when he asks, “Anything else?” I realize I better get something for myself if I’m going to make it through the photo shoot without passing out.
My phone is vibrating inside my pocket, and I play a personal Twister, readjusting the five large paper bags I’m schlepping in attempts to grab it. I give up and let the bags plunk to the ground, but the phone has stopped buzzing. The missed call is from the hospital’s main line, so I can’t call back, and cell phones don’t work in there. Damn it.
I lug the takeout to the fountain in Columbus Circle, where the crew is set up for part three of the four-part shoot: Helena Hope’s day of touring the Big Apple. She’s already posed on the top floor of the Empire State Building looking wistfully out on the city’s skyline, and among the throngs in Times Square carrying shopping bags from a dozen upscale brands (potential advertisers?)— never mind that the stores are all actually located fifty blocks south in SoHo. I drop everyone’s lunch by the staging area and watch Helena wade ankle-deep into the water, a pose I’ve previously only seen homeless men assume. The photographer yells for Helena to open her arms wide like she’s embracing the whole of New York City, and she scowls. Earlier she threw a fit about the sleeveless shift the stylist suggested she wear for the Times Square shot, and now she’s flying off the handle about arm jiggle, and how if anyone had read her rider they’d know she refuses to pose the very way the photographer is now suggesting.
“She does look about fifteen pounds heavier than she did on her last album cover,” I whisper to the photographer’s assistant, who gives me a look of scorn, like how lame am I that I know anything about Helena Hope’s album covers? Whatever, the assistant’s hacked-off hipster hair looks like a five-year-old cut it.
“Five-minute break, everyone!” I race to set up the battery-powered footbath that Helena carted to the shoot to warm her toes between shots, even though it’s eighty degrees out. Helena stomps her feet in, splashing water up at my jeans.
“Ouchy! Not so hot next time,” she says, more to the air than to me.
Jonathan swoops over to touch up Helena’s makeup, and I’m his trusty assistant, handing over the eyebrow pencil, then the eyelash curler, then the bronzer, like they’re surgical tools. One of the key things I’ve learned over the course of my summer internship is how to distinguish between items like concealer and under-eye powder, and cheekbone brightener and foundation cream. And while I’m grateful to Jonathan, whose personal makeup lessons have significantly upped my game on the bar scene this summer, I’m not sure his teachings are great fodder for the essay I have to write for school credit about my experience.
I admit I dreamed about writing feature stories for Hers, and not just that but raising the magazine’s bar by filing hard-hitting investigative reports that would land me on CNN. Still, I was realistic enough to know that my intern duties would likely not include such groundbreaking assignments. But having just finished a year’s stint as editor in chief of an Ivy League newspaper, I didn’t quite anticipate spending my summer planted at the photocopier and now fetching props for a spoiled-rotten redneck who calls herself a superstar.
“Hey, Erin.” Drew is plying me with her corporate card. “We need hot chocolate, stat. Helena refuses to get back in the fountain without a warm beverage, and apparently the set coffee won’t do the trick. She’s demanding Godiva. They have one in the shops over there.”
“Okay, I’m on it.”
“And while you’re at it, please get me a chocolate-dipped handgun. Thank you!”
I race across the street and into the upscale mall that’s crowded despite it being three o’clock on a Thursday. Don’t these people have jobs, I wonder, and if not, what are they doing shopping? My heart is pounding, anticipating Helena’s wrath if I screw this up, so I don’t immediately notice my cell buzzing again. I manage to grab it just in time. “Hello?”
“Hi, darling.” This is my father’s impression of my mother’s voice—sweet, soft, and gentle. For the past three months it’s become his permanent act.
“Hey, Dad. How’s Mom?”
“Sleeping right now. Snoring too!”
It’s hard to picture the shrunken version of my mother having enough strength to snore. “How is she otherwise?”
“She’s being a trooper, you know Mom. We’re going to get out of here probably by tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, how are you faring at the illustrious internship?”
I remember with a jolt that I’m supposed to be looking for Godiva. I book it down one of the mall’s arteries, scanning the shop names. “Great. I’m, uh, researching women who started their own education nonprofits, and later I’ll be interviewing our contributing doctors for answers to readers’ health questions.”
I spot the store and dart in. I cover the phone’s speaker to ask the clerk for one hot chocolate—extra whipped cream, please. “What’s that, Dad?”
“I said, I’m just so proud of you. Keep up the good work!” I hear the random beeping of machines in the background, and I can almost smell that awful hospital odor through the phone line. I think of my father there all on his own, hands shoved into the pockets of his pleated khakis, trying to make small talk with the nurses to ease the tension, as if that’s his responsibility. By now he probably knows all the names of their children and boyfriends.
“I love you guys. Tell Mom I’ll see her this weekend.”
“Only if you have the time, dear. I don’t want you disrupting your schedule to keep coming out to check in on us.”
I end the call without saying good-bye. Relief. I am constantly on edge waiting for my father’s calls—I’ve even been dreaming of ringing phones—but then when he does reach me, my desperation to disconnect comes on strong and immediate, an urge as palpable as the metal contraption in my hand. Each time I discover anew that what I really want is my mother to pull me in to her formerly doughy chest; the sound of my father’s voice is no substitute.
I look around at the mall shoppers and I hate them and their frivolous purchases. And fuck Helena and her dumb gourmet beverage, I think, stopping short at a trash can, where I consider tossing the drink. Someone jostles me and nearly knocks over the cup. “Careful,” I shout, thankful it’s remained righted.
“It’s about time,” Helena says when I hand her the covered cup. “This is skim milk, right?”
Drew nods at me frantically from behind her. “Of course,” I say.
At Helena’s request we’ve been listening to her own music all day long. Like everyone, I know that one song, and I think I’ve heard the Muzak version of a few others in Duane Reade, but a lot of it is new to me. We must’ve made it through her whole repertoire, because the last hour has featured repeats from this morning. At seven a.m., when her track about the power of emotions blared over the loudspeaker atop the Empire State Building, the lyrics rhyming “love” with “dove,” and “pain” with “rain,” I wondered if someone on set might feel compelled to jump. But now in the late afternoon, with the sunshine dappling through the fountain’s spray, gilding the whole plaza in a sort of magical sheen, I find myself reconsidering the words. I listen as, over the recording, Helena sings, “I thought my love was a locked gate, our togetherness God’s fate. We’d be bound forever, joined as one, the two of us so young and fun. We’d be lying in the sun, boy, I really thought we’d won. But, oh how I was wrong, how you strung me right along, told me I gotta be strong, left me with nothing but a song.”
“Erin, are you OK?”
“Huh?” Drew hands me a tissue, and I realize tears are trickling d
own my face. I was picturing my mother on my last trip home, oohing at the constellation of freckles newly revealed on the side of her bald head, trying to convince us—and probably herself—that the chemotherapy was a source of exciting new discoveries about herself. I’m not nearly as strong as my mother. “Yeah, I’m OK,” I say, embarrassed. “Cheesy music, huh?”
Drew smiles. “You’ve worked a full day. Why don’t you head on home?”
“No, it’s all right.” I picture my quiet, sterile sublet like a pit of quicksand. “I’m fine, really. I get allergies.”
“OK, well, next stop is the Staten Island Ferry. I’m warning you, it may be a rough ride with Miss Dixie Diva over there.”
“I’m up for the challenge.”
Drew’s prediction is right on the money. Helena discovers they sell beer on the ferry, and by the end of the shoot she’s slurring her words. She insists that Jonathan take her out on the town in Staten Island, where “town” seems to consist of one dusty thrift shop and a biker bar, and she begins weeping when her publicist tells her it’s time to return to the hotel. The upside of this debacle is that it makes me feel better about my own waterworks earlier in the day. But everyone is in a foul mood, and even Drew snaps at me when I botch up the packing of the lighting props.
We divvy up all the gear and pile into cabs. Most people are heading back to the office, but my apartment is nearby in Battery Park, so I direct my taxi to my address and plan to bring my share of the stuff into the office tomorrow.
The next day Drew and Jonathan are out on a different shoot, so I’m stuck taking orders from the editorial team. Laura enunciates her instructions on sending out mailers like she’s addressing a small, possibly slow child. I heard her mention that it makes her head hurt to read anything but the fashion and style sections of the newspaper, and sometimes it takes all my restraint to not yell out, “I’m smarter than you!” Johanna sends me to Starbucks with a dozen coffee orders, an errand I don’t totally loathe because it means I can get something for myself, too. I like working with Zoe best, since she’s the only one who gives me real tasks. It’s clearly her own work that she’s just too lazy to do—edit and format these blogs, write copy for those slideshows, respond to reader e-mail and tweets—but I don’t mind since it means I get to use my brain.
What makes me start counting down the hours and then eventually the minutes and seconds until six o’clock is an assignment from Victoria. She’s asked me to create binders that archive the last fifteen years’ worth of Hers stories that cover abstract notions such as “hope” and “faith” and “adventure.” There’s a digital archive where you can search by keyword, but Victoria says she doesn’t trust a computer system to net stories that may not include the actual word “faith” but may still embody the concept. So I’ve been flipping through hundreds of issues to create these binders that, Victoria explained, will give her a panoramic sense of the magazine’s history and its coverage of these topics. She’s told me she’d eventually like similar binders from all of Hers’ competitor titles, too, though I hope she forgets about it until after I’m back at college in the fall.
I dump the completed binders onto Victoria’s desk, with just five minutes to go until the weekend. “So what have you learned today?” Victoria asks, as she always does at day’s end, with that I’m-so-clever smile plastered onto her face.
I want to say I’ve learned that Hers has run a version of the same superfoods story about a dozen times over the past fifteen years. Ditto with pieces about the “ultimate, best-ever” beauty tricks, and the most effective exercise to attain a flat tummy, and nine—or sometimes thirteen, or seven—ways to raise happy, healthy, polite kids. “I’ve learned that Hers has a rich history in covering these topics that are crucial to today’s modern women,” I say.
“Very true,” Victoria says. “The cool part is that it’s only going to get better. You’re lucky to be here during such an exciting time.” And doing such exciting things!
“I’ve also learned that paper cuts really kill.” I’ve gotten about twenty of them in the past hour.
“You are adorable,” Victoria says. She fancies herself my mentor, and believes I’m as devoted to her as she is to me, a notion I’ve done nothing to contradict. “You’re just like me when I was your age. You know, I worked at the Daily Sun, too. I was the forefront reporter on student life.” I know girls like Victoria at Cornell, the ones who wear velvet ribbons in their hair and talk mainly about upcoming sorority formals.
“Go Big Red!” I say, and then scuttle out to catch my train.
It’s a reflex to feel a rush of relief and anticipation when the workday ends on Friday and you’re suddenly freed from the confines of the office, free to … in my case, go home and visit my sick mother in Connecticut. It takes about five minutes for my elation to fade away into this realization. My seatmate on the train looks around my age; I wonder if she too has an internship in the city and is going home for the weekend, if her mother will be doing her laundry and taking her shopping and cooking her “a decent square meal,” as my mom used to call it—all the things my mother did for me during past visits home. The girl catches me staring. Her “What’s your problem?” glare hits me like a physical blow. I wonder when the world got so mean.
My dad has offered to pick me up at the station, but I save him the trouble and grab a cab. As we round the corner to my street, a familiar dread trickles into my belly: Every plot of land is the same as always: the Ludlows’ lawn riddled with toys, the Kaplans’ prizewinning garden in full bloom. The familiar sights seem to mock me, a reminder that life has plodded along like normal for all of our neighbors, even as everything has gone to shit in the contained world of our quarter acre. The taxi pulls up to the curb in front of our house, and I observe a lawn that’s the color of weak coffee. No one has thought to water the grass this year. The driver has to clear his throat to get me to budge from the backseat.
I take deliberate steps down the path and into the house. I will myself into the dayroom, where my father has set up the hospital bed so Mom doesn’t have to climb stairs.
“Darling, it’s you!” My mother hugs me, her arms like wire hangers, and I blink away the moisture welling up in my eyes. As is always the case when I’m back in my childhood home, I feel the age drain from me, years and years slipping away; suddenly I’m a ten-year-old girl who’s just skinned her knee, and I need my mother. But not this strange-smelling version of her who’s still clinging to me.
I realize too late, as I do on every one of these visits, that I should have made plans. I should’ve packed more than ratty sweatpants and T-shirts; I should’ve brought my skinny jeans and rompers and cute tops so I could escape the fog of sickness and go out with my friends who are home for the summer. These visits are like my father’s phone calls: I so much look forward to them, eager to pack in the moments with my mother, but the minute I step over the threshold of our beautiful old Tudor now overrun with medieval looking medical equipment, I want to flee back to my cramped sublet in lower Manhattan.
“How’s it going, Mom?” I say, detaching myself from her hug. She smiles, but says nothing. I remind myself how happy she is to see me. My dad hands me a list of tasks. He needs me to go grocery shopping and cook dinner and clean the kitchen. These things I can handle. “Look, I bought an immersion blender,” he says proudly, holding up the contraption like it’s show-and-tell. I’ve never known my dad to prepare anything more elaborate than a turkey sandwich. “She’s keeping down soups these days,” he adds in a whisper.
My mom goes to bed early, and my dad and I stay up late watching terrible talk shows on TV. At some point I conjure the energy to stumble up to my childhood bedroom and pass out.
In the middle of the night I’m awoken by strange, guttural sounds, and before my mind can tune out or deny them, I understand it’s my mother dry heaving. I half sleepwalk to the bathroom, where she’s crouched over the toilet, a mop of someone else’s hair askew on her head. I hate t
hat she feels the need to wear that thing even to bed. Saying not a word, I trace the length of her back with the pads of my fingers, avoiding the jutting nubs of her spine. I soak a towel in cool water and lay it onto the back of her neck. I open a bottle of seltzer and feed her sips, pushing grim thoughts from my mind. I see in the mirror that, even now, my mother and I share the same profile, the same way of smiling with the edges of our lips curled up unevenly. Eventually my mother kisses my head and tells me to go back to bed. She has no energy for a speech. So I leave her. I feel guilty turning on my noise machine, but do it, anyway. I sleep deeply until eleven o’clock, which also makes me feel guilty.
Saturday morning, I’m grateful to flee to Pathmark. I weave the aisles of the store—so vast compared to the D’Agostinos and Associated Markets in the city. I pretend I’m a suburban mom, shopping for her husband and three little rugrats: I’ll need juice boxes and macaroni and ground beef. That kind of life feels so distant from my own that I nearly laugh out loud. On my grocery list are Saltines and applesauce and ginger ale. Huh, funny that shopping for a cancer patient is pretty much the same as shopping for someone with a hangover.
So far I’ve managed just half of a Wikipedia article about my mother’s condition. I’m a researcher by nature, usually driven by intense curiosities that lead me down long paths to yet more curiosities. But in the case of my mom’s disease, the shallowest forays into Google have left me close to full-on panic attack. I don’t know her prognosis or the functions of the army of pill bottles on her bedside table or what it feels like to endure a round of chemotherapy. I don’t know how or where the tumor has spread, or where it might spread further still. My father issues palliative statements like, “I think she’s really fighting this” and “She seems like she’s getting stronger every day,” and I take his words at face value. As much as possible, I think of my mother as a fun-house mirror reflection of her real self, like one day soon we’ll all step out of the carnival and return to regular life.
Pretty in Ink Page 23