Pretty in Ink

by Lindsey Palmer

  I add to the cart one of those fancy grass-fed chickens, a bunch of specialty vegetables, and a box of Godiva chocolate–dipped strawberries (they’re sold in the supermarket, too, apparently). At home my dad unloads the groceries. “What’s all this?”

  “I figured I’d make a nice meal for us tonight, a treat.”

  “Oh, all right, honey.” I catch him checking the receipt. I bought everything organic, and I’m remembering now that he’d asked me to stick to the generic brands. But Mom has cancer, for God’s sake; surely we can spare her pesticides or whatever.

  Then I remember what my dad said about Mom and soups, and I cringe imagining her pretend to enjoy a big meal. So that evening I wait to start cooking until after she’s nodded off. The chicken and vegetables are roasted just so—delicious. Still, with each bite, I can’t help feeling I’m eating up funds that could have gone to doctors’ bills or medication copays or whatever. Dad and I converse in stilted sentences, and I’m equal parts relieved and disappointed when he flicks on the TV. I forget about the box of chocolate strawberries. Several weeks later, when I’m up at night ravenous (apparently we’ve all started skipping meals along with Mom), I’ll come across the strawberries rotting in the pantry.

  I leave earlier than I should on Sunday. I mow and water the lawn, wash a load of laundry, and help my dad cook up a big batch of minestrone, then I invent a lie about having to get back for an acoustic concert in Central Park. It’s the type of thing I’d planned to do when I decided to spend the summer in Manhattan, back before my mother got so sick. I board the train and immediately begin missing my parents.

  I spend the rest of the day sprawled out on the bed in my rented apartment, watching episode after episode of a terrible show about the country’s worst mothers. I picture the show’s children growing up and their terrible mothers, aged by twenty years, getting diagnosed with cancer; I wonder, even though long ago the moms insisted the kids get ankle tattoos at age eight and howled at them when they chose to do homework instead of massaging their moms’ bunioned feet, would the grown-up kids still feel sad?

  Monday morning, Zoe dumps the stack of entries to the Mother’s Day essay contest on my desk. “I was supposed to go through these back in May, when they came in, but they got lost in the shuffle when Mimi started, and I really can’t stand this sentimental crap,” she says. “Mimi’s asked for my winner picks this afternoon so we can get them up on the website. In other words, it’s über-urgent. Hopefully you’re a speed reader.”

  “I can’t,” I blurt out. “Photo needs me.”

  “Oh.” I see that Zoe suspects I’m lying, but calling me out on it would risk my calling her out on passing off all of her work to me.

  Drew doesn’t mind my hanging around in the photo department. She’s in the retouching studio, and invites me in to watch. They’ve picked out several images of Helena Hope as options for the November cover—none from the ferry, unsurprisingly. A fountain shot is up on the projector screen: Helena is laughing and kicking up a spray of water, looking carefree and joyful—pretty much the opposite of how she actually seemed that day on set. I’m impressed the photographer was able to create this happy fantasy.

  “We haven’t retouched it yet,” Drew explains.

  Lynn, the creative director, is taking an inventory of Helena’s body parts with a red-tipped laser pointer, dictating notes: “Erase crow’s-feet and under-eye circles. Even out skin tone. Gloss up hair, particularly around the temples. Let’s see. Brighten teeth, re-contour bump on top front tooth, plump up lower lip. Fix folds along shirt collar, darken dress color to contrast better against sky and water. Airbrush underarm, define waist. I think that should about do it.” Drew has been nodding and scribbling down notes as if Lynn were reading out a grocery list. I wonder how she can possibly make all those changes and still have the photo resemble the Helena pictured before us.

  “Mind if I stay and watch?” I ask.

  “No problem-o,” she says. “Prepare to get supercynical.” Drew begins tweaking, and it’s amazing craftsmanship—how she can adjust the line of a cheekbone just the slightest bit so you can barely notice a difference, but also think, Oh, right, that’s what we call beautiful.

  “Newsstand sales spike in inverse proportion to a cover girl’s wrinkles and weight,” she explains. “But only up to a point. Watch this.” She smoothes out the tissue-papery lines around Helena’s eyes, but leaves the faint indents in her forehead. “She’s got to look aspirational, but not totally out of reach. Women want to buy the issue and think, How does she do it, so I can do it too? The reality is, I do it in the retouching studio.”

  As Drew tweaks the colors—deepening the hue of Helena’s dress, lightening a shadow here and darkening another there—I remember the set of paper dolls I had when I was little. I would sit on the living room floor for hours at a time with all the separate hairdos and dresses and accessories splayed out around me, and I’d work on assembling the perfect dressed-up doll. My mother would crouch beside me, pick up my construction, and very seriously consider whether to supplement it with a pillbox hat or heart locket necklace. I thought her final touches were genius.

  Drew is gradually shrinking Helena’s upper arm, and I flash on my mother’s own arm. My family used to have arm wrestling contests, and she would triumph even against my father. “It must be from mixing all that cookie batter,” she’d say sarcastically, flexing an impressive bicep. I picture a photo of my mother up on Drew’s screen, her clicks of the mouse melting the muscles and fat, adjusting the rosy reds and ivories to greens and grays until my mother has become the new, surreal shell of her former self. I feel nauseated.

  “I need to use the ladies’ room,” I say, and bolt from the room. It’s a shock to move from the studio’s dark to the office’s florescent lights, and my unadjusted eyes distort the view. Everything looks like it’s been retouched, overly bright and garish.

  I’m sitting on the toilet, doing a deep breathing visualization exercise I read about in an old issue of Hers—an article about the surprisingly high prevalence of anxiety disorder in American women.

  Someone enters the stall next to me. “She’s supposed to be smart—in the interview she bragged about her perfect GPA—but she’s a sloppy worker.” It’s Jane.

  “I know, and she acts like it’s all beneath her.” Zoe’s voice. “She totally bailed on a project I gave her this morning, like she couldn’t be bothered to do something so lowly.” Despite the deep breathing, my heartbeat lurches to a sprint.

  “And this is awful, but—”

  “I know what you’re going to say. That dress, right?”

  “What was she thinking?” Their cackling mixed with the angry grunts of a toilet’s flush is one of the crueler sounds to have rattled my eardrums. I stare at the crack in the door in front of me as the editors gather by the sinks and then exit. Then it’s just me and the whirring white noise.

  I look down at my dress. I pulled it from my mother’s closet this past weekend, a retro-print shift, pink and green polka dots, fringed on the bottom. There’s a photo of my mom at around my age; she’s wearing the dress along with big green sunglasses and steep wedged sandals—totally glamorous. It’s true that I’m wider in the hips and a bit stouter than her, but when I looked in the mirror this morning and twirled around, I felt like I’d stepped right out of the photo. I guess I must’ve done my own spontaneous retouching.

  It feels like half an hour before I can peel myself up from the toilet. I skulk back to the retouching studio, and Drew gives me a warning look. The entertainment director, Johanna, is perched over her chair, the veins popping from her forehead. “Never in a million years will Helena go for this,” she shouts. “Her arse is the size of Texas! She looks like a bloody cow!”

  “I shaved off a good inch and a half from her waist and practically performed a virtual tummy tuck,” says Drew.

  “Rubbish! Look at her arms, her thighs, her double chin, for Christ’s sake! You’ve got to cut
her down by at least another size or two.”

  “What did Lynn say?”

  “Never mind Lynn. She’ll understand that we have to appease Helena. We can’t send her photos where she looks like bloody crap or she’ll go off her trolley and call the whole thing off.”

  “But if we do more editing she won’t even look like herself.”

  “She’ll look like all the photos the whole jolly world sees of her, a slightly lovelier version of herself.”

  “Slightly?” Drew whispers under her breath.

  “And oh, Christ, fix her giant earlobe—it looks like an alien’s ear.”

  “If you say so,” Drew says. “Let the games begin.” As Johanna looms over her, I watch Drew perform what amounts to severe plastic surgery on the photo, until it looks like Helena’s “after picture” if she were featured in one of those gastric bypass ads. It’s amazing and disgusting both.

  “Perfect,” says Johanna, then exits.

  “Puuuh-fect,” mocks Drew. “For the record, Mark would never have OK-ed this kind of a hack-up.” I remember Mark, the old creative director, vaguely from the first few days of my internship. He was knee-deep in boxes.

  Zoe catches up with me in the afternoon and asks me again about the Mother’s Day essays. I’m out of excuses, and I can’t stop thinking about her words in the bathroom, so I let her unload the stack on me. I set it aside on my desk, ignoring it in favor of Facebook and celebrity gossip blogs. I scroll through people’s dumb photos of their kids and pets and the stupid things they ate for lunch, and then celebrities “looking just like us,” feeding the parking meter, hailing cabs, and cavorting in the ocean. It all feels so fake, like this can’t possibly be what we all covet and crave and care about. I try to be a good citizen and click over to The Economist, but my eyes immediately glaze over. I resign myself to the drivel, and head to MAGnifier.net, the snarky blog about the publishing industry.

  PHOTOSHOP CONTEST: $10K prize! the home page reads. I click through to the post:

  Ladies, we all know that women’s mags are notorious for computer artistry otherwise known as Photoshop: the red-pen-wielding editors are brilliant magicians, er, airbrusher-retoucher-digital-alterers, so that the so-called photographs we see on covers are nothing less than remarkable (read: horrifying, unconscionable) reimaginings of reality. (Mini-rant alert!) We buy the issues, desperately feeding on the articles about diets and workouts, hoping and praying that—please, God have mercy!—maybe just maybe we can look like these perfect pod people pictured on the pages, meanwhile hating what we look like now. But it turns out even the models don’t look like the perfect pod people, not to put too fine a point on it.

  Well, we wanna expose this forgery once and for all. So kindly help us, mag insiders, by getting your grubby little hands on an unaltered, original cover photo and sending it our way. Pretty please! Our not-so-little thank you? 10 G’s direct-deposited into your bank account. Spend it on diet pills or personal trainers or Spanx—whatever it takes to get you in tiptop cover-girl shape. We’re talking to you, editorial assistants barely earning enough to pay the rent in your rundown, 300-square-foot studios in Crown Heights. May the most shocking photo win!

  I immediately click out of the screen, peering over my shoulder to catch any lurkers. My heart is beating madly and my mind is racing. I think of my father’s insistence on buying the store-brand food, the crazy-elaborate medical equipment in my mom’s sick room, and the bedside table crowded with pill bottles. My shitty $1,000 stipend for this internship. The loads of equipment from the shoot I’ve been meaning to return to the office.

  “Did you pick your favorites?” Zoe materializes in my cubicle. I wonder if she can hear my heartbeat.

  “I sure did,” I say, the words rolling off my tongue. I hand her the top three essays from the pile. “These ones really moved me. The imagery, the descriptions—I felt like I truly know what it means to be in those particular mother-daughter relationships.”

  “Awesome, great.” Easy, no questions asked. I care not one bit what will happen if Zoe reads the essays and discovers they’re terrible. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she handed them straight off to Mimi without even bothering to look them over. Of course she never gives me credit for my work. I smile, imagining Mimi calling her in to discuss the “winning” essays that were most likely penned by illiterates.

  That night in my apartment, I draw the shades (as if the neighbors across the wind shaft have any interest in my activities) and I dig through the duffel bag from the Helena Hope photo shoot. Among the various tripods and props I find a container of duplicate memory cards and a card reader: jackpot! I stuff the items in my pocket and walk the two blocks to the local library branch, picturing myself the heroine of a film noir. I push from my mind the image of Drew, so kind to me—would she be blamed?—and instead think about Jane and Zoe, as cruel as classic high school mean girls. I think of my mother’s medical bills. The unachievable standards of beauty and womanhood and self-hate that magazines like Hers perpetuate with their bogus, fraudulent images.

  I meditate on these facts as I download the photos, and then find the copy of the one that was up on Drew’s screen this afternoon: Helena frolicking in the fountain’s spray with her arms at her sides, left foot kicking up a cascade of water. I open a new e-mail. Into the “To:” slot I type “tips@magnifier.net,” add the subject “Photoshop contest: for the Hers November issue,” upload the photo, and click Send.

  Momentarily my mind’s eye fills with cash—loads of it, stacks of dollar bills and mountains of coins, so much that it covers my entire bedroom and I can leap into it like a pile of leaves. Then the image recedes and in its place appears the black-and-white fuzz of a TV channel empty of programming. I find I don’t feel a thing.

  I wander the library like a zombie. I pass through an echoey alcove of weighty reference books that look as if no one has consulted them for a decade or more, and then I find myself in the children’s section, brightly painted in pastels. I weave through the stacks, perusing books whose covers show cuddly kittens and puppies, voluptuous princesses and broad-chested princes, big imposing dragons and lions. Are these images fakes, too? I wonder. I crack the spine of a book called Naughty Nan. Turns out, Nan has done many things wrong: colored on the wall with crayons, shoved all of her stuff under her bed instead of putting it away properly, and stolen from her brother’s candy supply. As a result, she’s been sent to bed without supper. Denied her mother’s pot roast, Nan pigs out on candy. The book implies that this is some sort of tragedy, all that sugar and artificial flavor instead of a decent meal, but if you ask me, Nan was smart to raid her brother’s stash, and she looks pretty damn smug tucked away in bed, her stomach filled with sweets.

  I leave the library and, inspired by Nan’s antics, pop into the ice-cream shop on the corner. I splurge on a triple scoop of chocolate chip with whipped cream. I gorge on the sweet, creamy cold, taking in spoonful after spoonful until I’ve scraped the bowl clean, meanwhile ignoring my phone’s vibrations in my pocket. On the way home, my stomach performs achy somersaults. Its flips become increasingly more treacherous, until I’m forced to lean over a trash can. The ice cream has barely had time to melt. “Sicko!” a homeless man yells out.

  I’m hunched over the garbage, trying to catch my breath, when an anonymous hand rests itself on my back. I let myself be soothed, imagining my mother’s warm touch. But then the person speaks—“Are you OK?”—and the sound is unfamiliar, the voice nasal and wrong. I flinch, right myself, and hurry away, my mouth sour with acid.

  I consider calling in sick the next day to work. But instead, when the alarm sounds my wake-up call, I get up, take myself through the motions of getting ready, commute, sit down at my desk, and turn on my computer. I feel calm and cool and ready to photocopy.

  17

  Leah Brenner, Executive Editor

  Mimi looks uncharacteristically upbeat, standing at the front of the conference room before the whole staff. “You guys
have worked your butts off all summer long,” she announces, “and now we’re in the final stretch, heading into the November ship. Just two more weeks until the first issue of the relaunch is totally, completely, 100 percent out the door. Let’s hear a round of applause for everyone in this room.”

  A chorus of claps fills the space. Laura queues up an iPod, and as pop music pumps through the speakers, Mimi thrashes her limbs about in a way that vaguely resembles dancing. I exchange across-the-room eyebrow raises with Debbie.

  Next comes the slideshow. A series of pictures projects onto the wall: women blowing at dandelions, women sipping at cocktails, women lifting children up onto their shoulders. Bold words stamp themselves onto the pictures: “vibrant,” “daring,” “joyful,” and “fun.” This inspirational fare is interspersed with screenshots of Hers’ new pages and sections. This slideshow may actually be a clever brainwashing trick, because with the flash of each new image I find my skepticism fading further. Soon I’m sitting there spellbound, rapt with the visual evidence of all our team has accomplished this summer. Four months ago, none of this existed. Even more miraculously, the October ship came and went, and here I am two weeks later, still gainfully employed. Maybe Mimi is keeping me on staff after all. I let myself feel proud of the summer’s work: We created all of these concepts, all of these pages; they’re ours.

  A buzz in my pocket snaps me out of my revelry. I open my phone and see five missed calls from Rob. I slip out of the meeting and dial him back.

  “They accepted our bid,” Rob shouts into the receiver, in lieu of hello. “The dream house is ours!”

  “No!” I truly don’t believe what I’ve heard. Maybe he misspoke, I think, or maybe I misheard. This can’t be real. It’s all too fast—we just put in our bid two days ago.