Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

by Anna Breslaw

  “Wow, you look so different!” says Kira, smiling widely. She looks perfect as usual, the kind of person who’s glowing with invisible makeup and secrets about staffers at the Paris Review. My dad looks basically the same, just a little older and a little happier, probably because he is.

  “Let me take that.” He shoulders my backpack and grunts. “God, what do you have in here, bricks?”

  “Your birthday present.”

  His eyes light up. “Oh! Did you start reading it?”

  I nod.

  “What do you think?”

  Truthfully, it kind of annoyed me, but I don’t want to let him down.

  “It’s amazing!” I enthuse, swallowing my real opinion. He beams, a smile like a blinking neon That Is Correct! sign.

  Dad and Kira’s place is the real estate version of a Wes Anderson movie. The Astonishing Bespoke Writerly Apartment. I throw my stuff down on the sofa, the poor-kid voice in my head immediately chastising me for making this really nice place filthy. They made up the couch for me.

  There’s a huge framed vintage poster of Antonioni’s Blow-Up in the bedroom and a reclaimed-wood dining table. The apartment has high ceilings, expensive-looking light fixtures, eclectic art, and the unfamiliar house smell that I associate with rich people. Halfway through a glass of Diet Coke, I look down and notice I’m drinking out of a mason jar. Dawn and I don’t even put napkins on our laps when we eat takeout.

  “Before the book party, we should probably talk,” says my dad, shooting a look at Kira, who nods.

  “I’m gonna put her down,” Kira says, carrying the baby into the other room. Matilda waves goodbye at me, her fat little hand opening and closing like a fleshy starfish. I smile a little bit, unable to help it.

  “She’s, like, the Tom Cruise of babies,” I say.

  “I know.” He beams. I stop smiling.

  “Did you eat?”

  “Yeah,” I lie.

  “So I wanted to talk to you about my book.”

  “You don’t have t—”

  “I just didn’t want you to go in without knowing a little bit about it.”

  I shake my head. “Dad, I don’t need to know anything. I’m really happy for you.”

  “Scarlett, I really think you should listen to me. I wrote it a long time ago, and things were very different, and I don’t want you to go into this without knowing some context.”

  I understand why he’s worried—he wrote this a long time ago, when he was married to Dawn, and it’s probably at least a little semiautobiographical. But I get it. Fanfic Scarlett is at once me and not me, and Gideon is him but not him, and that’s hard for people to understand. I wish there was something I could say to make him feel better. The party is only a few hours from now, and he must be freaking out.

  “It’s gonna be great,” I say. “And I do have some context, considering I was there.”

  Kira glides back out from the bedroom, sliding a coaster under my mason jar. I stare at her helplessly.

  “Will you tell him not to be such a worrywart?”

  She glances at him and says nothing, which is a little strange.

  The party is at a little indie bookstore near their apartment, bursting with people and exposed brick and staff recommend-ations of obscure poetry I’ve never heard of. Jazz plays quietly in the background, like something out of a Woody Allen movie, and by the time we get there, an absurdly long and twisty line has formed around the bookshelves for the free wine a cute twentysomething girl dumps unceremoniously into Solo cups.

  The minute we walk in, people are hugging my dad and coming up and congratulating him, air-kissing Kira and crooning over Matilda’s pretty dress and matching bow. I am wearing the red dress I wore to the Halloween dance, and I’m getting looks that are very different from the looks Kira, Dad, and Matilda are getting. It is the difference between looking at an expensive and coveted objet d’art and looking at a slab of meat on a grill. I think I recognize some of these writers, like I’ve read or at least skimmed books they’ve written.

  After I wander around the bookstore and flip through other new releases, sipping on my wine, I join the small group that has formed around Dad and Kira, where some balding guy is talking.

  “. . . it’s almost like if you’re a straight white man, you’re not allowed to have an opinion anymore. When you think about it, we’re the most oppressed group in America.”

  I make a face at Kira. She gives me the tiniest, imperceptible shake of her head: Not worth it.

  I go back for a second glass of wine. Ahead of me on line, a guy with a flannel shirt solemnly tells another guy with a flannel shirt, “I’ve decided I’m going to try to take myself more seriously.”

  When I return, some older man in a suit with purple wine lips is talking my dad’s ear off, and I tune in and out.

  “. . . wanted to talk to you about the Observer review because I immediately thought he didn’t get the point about the epigraph. That Tolstoy quote is overused for a reason, you know? In any case, that guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and I heard that your editor at Random House gave his novel a pass, so of course he’s not going to . . .”

  I get on the wine line and wait for somebody to stop me. Nobody does. He must be talking about that Tolstoy quote about families, I guess: They’re all fucked up in their own way, or whatever it is. Meanwhile, that guy is still braying drunkenly from across the bookstore.

  “. . . and you know how it is. They really rolled a lot of PR out for this title, and whenever anything is presented as the Next Great American Novel, the critics are going to want to be contrarian. So you got panned in a few major outlets! Who cares? Nobody reads the Washington Post anyway!”

  “Sure,” Dad says mildly.

  “And yes, naturally some of their thoughts are valid, you know that. It’s a debut. I mean, the daughter character is an issue. . . .”

  Dad nods politely.

  “But stay strong, buddy! I remember what this is like, and I was a kid when my first novel came out, so at least you’re not a twenty-nine-year-old ‘literary genius,’ you know?”

  Jesus, this guy.

  “Hey, you want a drink? Let me get you a drink; everything’s gonna be okay. Don’t take it so personally.”

  Then he starts talking about Paramount unfairly low-balling Dad on the movie rights—which I had absolutely zero knowledge of, incidentally—and he should really switch agents. Wine in hand, I walk over to them.

  “There’s gonna be a movie?” I’m incredulous. “What? That’s insane! How could you not tell me that?”

  Dad rolls his eyes. “It’s a circus.”

  He doesn’t elaborate.

  I hit up the ladies’ room. When I come out of the stall to wash my hands, I find Kira trying to juggle a sleeping Matilda and simultaneously reapply her eyeliner; for once, she’s not effortlessly succeeding. I walk over to her and take Matilda, a soft, warm weight in my arms. Kira looks in the mirror and says nothing, just smiles tersely at me. She places her eyeliner back into the zip pocket of her purse, I hand Matilda back to her, and she walks out of the bathroom.

  At this point, maybe from the wine, I start to feel a little nauseous.

  But after I leave the bathroom, I go back on the wine line again, and then again, and finally wander over to the display of signed copies of my dad’s book. The daughter character is an issue, I think, fairly tipsy now. I pick one up, running my finger over his signature, a burst of pride washing over me.

  I read the blurbs, from writers famous enough that even Dawn has probably heard of them.

  A tragicomic roman à clef that may well be the modern answer to Updike’s Rabbit, Run . . . A male protagonist in the vein of Roth and Bellow . . . One man’s emotionally fraught journey from an unhappy marriage and frustrated life to salvation . . .

  I turn to the epigrap
h:

  Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  I feel a spike of annoyance as I begin flipping through. He couldn’t have picked a more original epigraph?

  John had long ago tired of being the only adult in the house, remembering to pick up Sara from school while Kelly forgetfully guzzled a bottle of white wine and sang along to Avril Lavigne.

  John watches as Kelly flirtatiously asks the twenty-two-year-old waiter his zodiac sign, then checks out his ass as he walks away.

  John wonders why Sara turned out so unlike the cute, sunny teenage girls he’d had crushes on in high school.

  John doesn’t understand why Kelly won’t talk to Sara about why she’s stopped eating, the evasive jokes she makes to the many therapists they’ve spent thousands of

  John wants to scream at them both about how selfish they

  John looks at Sara’s babysitter’s low-cut top and can’t help but notice her

  John wishes he could just

  John knows

  John is

  John feels

  John feels

  John f

  Little dots of hurt flash white in front of my eyes. I feel smothered with jazz and the buzzing conversations and one-sided stories and stifling self-congratulation.

  If John is being honest with himself, it bothers him that his daughter is the kid at school nobody likes.

  I chug the rest of my Solo cup down. I lose count of the times I get back on the wine line.

  Kira is kissing my dad goodbye; Matilda has stopped dozing and started getting fussy and needs to go to bed. Kira waves goodbye to me and says I’ll see her at home. I think I say goodbye to her. My dad is talking to more men. I realize there are an equal amount of men and women in this room, but only the men are talking and the women are listening.

  “. . . daughter is about to start reading David Foster Wallace, and it makes me want to reread Infinite Jest.” Dad gestures for me to come join the conversation he is having with three plaid-shirted, hip-bespectacled acolytes. I drink the remainder of my thousandth cup of wine, let it roll off my limp, flat palm onto a bookshelf, and walk up behind them. Almost immediately, someone from the publishing house leads Dad away to shake hands with some other people.

  One of the flannels is smirking at me. I don’t like the way they’re looking at me. They’re not leering—I’d almost prefer that. They just look smug.

  “So what are you, seventeen?” asks Flannel B.

  “Sixteen,” I say.

  “God, I can’t imagine comprehending Infinite Jest at that age,” says Flannel A, shaking his head. The other two flannels nod, and they all look slightly envious, like, Yeah, totally, what an awesome thing to be a super-worshipped brilliant literary guy, he was so lucky other than the horrific mental illness that tortured him to death.

  “You're a writer too, I heard,” Flannel B says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fiction?”

  “Fanfiction.”

  Flannel A chuckles. Flannel B nudges him, like, She’s serious.

  “About what?”

  “Lycanthrope High.”

  “Isn’t that that werewolf show?”

  I bristle.

  Dad glances over, senses some kind of tension, and comes back.

  “Right now she’s reading The Corrections,” Dad says and puts a proud hand on my shoulder.

  “I saw Franzen speak last year. He was brilliant,” says Flannel B. “How are you liking the book?”

  “It’s bullshit,” I snap. “Are you aware that there’s a line, an actual line in that book, that goes: ‘At thirty-two, Denise was still beautiful’? At thirty-two. Denise. Was still beautiful.”

  There is a moment of reproachful silence with jazz under it, as if I’d just crapped on the floor and only Duke Ellington did not seem to mind.

  “And it’s not just Franzen! I tried to read Infinite Jest, but I had to stop on page 167 when Orin is screwing that single mom because he does that, because that’s indicative of how interesting and tortured and fucked up he is? And it says in the paragraph—do you remember this?—that after they had sex, he traced an infinity sign on her back, and, to paraphrase, that she was so stupid that she thought it was an eight.”

  “I don’t know if it says—”

  “This woman is a single mom, holding down some awful job so she can feed her kid, and being judged for dating when she has the time, and just doing the best she can . . .” I get a little choked up. I can tell by Dad’s face he just figured out why I’m upset.

  “—and she sleeps with a guy who thinks he’s smarter than her. And she knows that. Because she’s not stupid, even though he thinks she is, or even if everybody thinks she is. And he traced what could be an eight or an infinity sign on her back after they had sex. Of course she wouldn’t think it was an infinity sign. Because that would be romantic. It makes no sense that some asshole who doesn’t respect you would do that. She’s not stupid.”

  I’m being too loud. People are looking over at us, but I don’t care. I don’t want to make a scene, I’m just a little tipsy and a lot sad and I just want to ruin everything that everyone in this room holds sacred.

  Flannel C, the oldest, says gently but authoritatively, “Orin’s not supposed to be a nice char—”

  “It’s not Orin saying he thinks she’s stupid, it’s the God voice saying she’s stupid. It’s not the character, it’s the writer. I understand the difference between omniscient narration and a close third. That’s your problem, you assume everyone else is stupid, but they’re not!”

  Now everybody’s actively staring at me. Dad smiles briskly at onlookers, trying to pull me aside.

  “Scarlett, calm down.” He looks pained, like he’s the prom queen and I’m dumping a bucket of blood on him. He gives the Flannels a look and tries to take me aside into a quiet corner, shushing me. “This is why I wanted to talk to you—”

  “Leave me alone,” I yell, backing away, knocking over a pile of his display copies. A fierce burning behind my eyes threatens to spill out any second. I can’t stand it in here for another minute, and I stumble out into the street without my coat, my whole body tingling all over with panic, trying to breathe through the sudden tunnel vision, feeling like I might throw up.

  I am waiting for xLoupxGaroux to come get me, in a very public Starbucks where I most certainly can’t get chopped into tiny pieces and hidden under his floorboards. Luckily, he was on Gchat when I logged in from my phone and put out an SOS call. It took me a while to persuade him to meet me. He kept saying he didn’t think it was a good idea. But finally he relented.

  “Scarface?”

  I look up, shocked by the voice. An attractive, bigger, thirtysomething woman in a cute cardigan is standing over me, a preppy-ish trench coat folded over her arm.

  “Umm, hi,” she says.

  I feel like I may have stumbled into an alternate universe. “What?”

  “You’re Scarface, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Real name?”

  “Scarlett. You?”

  “Maura.” She breaks into a really lovely smile. “It’s so nice to finally meet you!”

  We hug.

  “Wow, I am just—I don’t know what I was expecting, but . . .”

  Maura nods, understanding. “You assumed I was a gay man.”

  “Kind of. Yeah.”

  “There’s a really large contingency of lady slash fans, y’know.”

  “Yeah, I do know that. Or, you know, intellectually, I was aware of that. I just . . . yeah. Looking back, nobody ever . . .”

  “Asked me if I was a man or a woman? Yeah. It happens. Not that I’m making it clear myself.” She shrugs and sits down.

  It all makes sense now, I realize, and say, “And that’s why you did
n’t want to meet up with me.”

  She sighs, stirring her coffee. “I was afraid if we met IRL, you’d be all surprised, and it would ruin everything.”

  “I know the feeling.” I sigh.

  “I hope I haven’t disappointed you.”

  “Of course not!”

  She raises her eyebrows—the exact expression I’d pictured on xLoupxGaroux whenever (s)he said “spill it” or “waiting for the truth.”

  “No, really. Assuming things about people makes an ass out of you and me.” I stare into the swirling eye of my caramel macchiato. “Mostly me.”

  We chat a little bit over our coffee. Maura tells me she’s a freelance graphic designer for a few major companies, but what she really wants to do is draw comics. We mourn Lycanthrope High for a while and finally get back to talking about ourselves IRL.

  I give her the latest on Gideon and Ashley (whom Maura keeps accidentally referring to as Ashbot, sending us both into fits of giggles). I mention he was into Lycanthrope too and flaked on lending me some of the graphic novels.

  Maura rolls her eyes.

  “There’ll be more. God, so many. You won’t even remember him eventually.”

  “Are you . . . with someone? Married?”

  “God no. Single, dating.” Maura shrugs. “It’s so early to settle down, you know? There’s so much I haven’t done or haven’t seen. I still feel pretty young. Most of my IRL friends have had babies, and it’s like . . . I feel like entire friendships have devolved into just . . . trying not to say that their baby is ugly.”

  I laugh. Relieved I’m not judging her, she laughs too.

  “But I guess everything seems dull compared to the show, you know?”

  “Totally.”

  “I want a William.” She pauses, then adds, “And a Connor. And a video camera. I had really high expectations of New York. I thought this was where all the freaks go! No such luck.”

  I laugh. “Right, I thought . . . Actually, I always thought I knew that I wanted to live in New York after high school. Now, I’m not so sure.”