You Think It, I'll Say It

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “When did you guys get here?” Ashley asked.

  “Just today,” I said.

  “Oh, you’ll love it. We got here— Ed, what day was it? I’m already losing track.”

  “Sunday,” Ed said.

  “Right, of course, we’re staying Sunday to Sunday. How stressful is it having your whole wedding and then you’re supposed to jump on a plane the next morning? We almost missed our flight.”

  “Jason and I actually got married four months ago,” I said. I felt a sort of hierarchical confusion about how to act toward Ashley, how nice or standoffish to be. If she hadn’t started gushing so quickly, I’m sure I’d have been willing to take the deferential role—old habits die hard—but clearly I now had the opportunity to present an aloof version of myself she’d never met. My confusion was different from the usual confusion I felt when approached in public, which almost never happened anymore. Back when it had happened, I couldn’t be sure if the person was going to praise or attack me. The biggest clues, I’d realized over time, were age and gender: My peers, both male and female, tended to be like Ashley in thinking it was cool that they’d seen me on TV, while women my mother’s age were likelier to scold me, taking me to task for betraying feminism. The first time this had ever happened was at the gym near my office in downtown Chicago; it was a middle-aged woman, and I ended up talking to her for half an hour by the elliptical machines, defending myself—I went on a monologue about due process, and by the end of the conversation, I was very flushed, even though I hadn’t yet started exercising—but I quickly realized that trying to explain my job, or the American legal system, served little purpose. Within a few weeks of that gym encounter, I stopped saying anything more to my critics than “Obviously, you’re entitled to your opinion.” Then I’d walk away.

  “Be sure to take the cable car up Mount Majesty,” Ashley was saying. “That was our favorite thing so far, right, Ed? Oh, and we’re hiking to Moose Lake tomorrow, which is supposed to be amazing.”

  Oh, Jesus, I thought, because that was what Jason and I had been planning, too. Then I thought we could easily go to Moose Lake on a different day, and then I heard Jason say, “We’re going there tomorrow, too. It’s clearly the place to be.” I knew that if I made eye contact with him, it would be to glare, so instead I looked at Ashley.

  “Well, I don’t know what time you’re taking off,” she said, “but if you wanted to, we could all…” She giggled a little, and it was such a tentative sound that I almost felt sorry for her. But even then I was conscious of feeling sorry not for Ashley Frye but for Ashley Horsford. She added, “I mean, probably you guys want alone time, since you just arrived….”

  There was a momentary silence—Jason was deferring to me, at least now that he’d set this situation in motion—and because I couldn’t deal with the awkwardness of declining, I said, “Why don’t we touch base in the morning?”

  “Oh, this’ll be so fun!” Ashley exclaimed. “We’re in Room 412. What number are you?”

  “We’re in one of the cabins.” I turned back to Jason. “It’s called Juniper, right?”

  I saw Ashley registering this information—the rooms cost $400 a night, and the cabins cost $800—but all she said was “Great, then. We’ll call you tomorrow.” She stepped forward, setting her hand on my arm. “And really, Maggie, I know this sounds corny, but I’m so impressed by your success. I always knew you’d go far.” Her last comment was such an enormous lie that I longed for the courage to dismiss it, right there and to her face, for the bullshit it was. The reality, however, is that my balls aren’t as big as my husband imagines, and I simply said “Thanks.”

  I waited until Ashley and Ed had left the bar before saying to Jason, “Why did you do that?”

  “Man, was she fawning over you.” He shook his head.

  “That’s what you want to listen to all day tomorrow?”

  Jason laughed. “Maybe she got it out of her system.”

  “I don’t understand why you invited them to join us right after I told you I never liked her.”

  “She suggested it, and you agreed to it, not me. Relax, Magpie.” Jason himself seemed perfectly relaxed—he pretty much always does, which is one of his best qualities, except when it’s infuriating.

  “I don’t think you get it. It’s not like she’s this annoying but harmless person. She’s kind of evil.”

  At this, Jason really laughed, and I said, “I’m not kidding. She once—” I hadn’t thought about this for years. Even though I wasn’t cool in high school, I’m not haunted by it. I’ve lived in Chicago since college, I go back to Cleveland for a couple days at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and that’s it. My sister and I revert to our much younger selves, we bake chocolate-chip cookies and order pizza and watch The Cutting Edge or the Anne of Green Gables miniseries from the eighties, while Jason and my dad play basketball in the driveway. I never call anyone from my past—I’ve never gone to a high school reunion, never tried to, like, redeem myself in some public setting, among the people I once knew.

  “Ashley wasn’t in my grade,” I said. “She was a year younger. And when she started as a freshman, right away, she got a lot of attention. She was sort of crowned the official prettiest freshman. And in my class was this girl who was our year’s equivalent of Ashley, Jenny Josephson, and Jenny Josephson went out with a guy named Bobby, who—”

  “Wait,” Jason interrupted. “Am I supposed to pretend I’m actually following this?”

  “I think you’re up to the challenge,” I said. “Early in our sophomore year, which was Ashley’s freshman year, rumors started that Bobby was going to dump Jenny Josephson for Ashley. I didn’t believe it because, you know, Jenny and Bobby were our super-couple. But it took on this tone of inevitability, like someone somewhere had decided that Ashley was even hotter than Jenny, and so Bobby had no choice but to pursue her. He was the quarterback—did I mention that?”

  “Of course he was,” Jason said.

  “So Ashley and Bobby become a couple, and Jenny is completely traumatized. She didn’t come to school for a week, and I heard she’d started cutting herself. This was in 1989, and I barely even knew what cutting was. Ashley and Bobby are dating, and then at a party a few weeks later—needless to say, I wasn’t there—Ashley cheats on him with some other football player, so she and Bobby break up, Bobby and Jenny Josephson get back together, and Ashley starts going out with the other football player. I don’t even think she’d ever really liked Bobby. It had just been some big ego trip, but she’d practically destroyed Jenny Josephson in the process.”

  “Why was it Ashley’s fault?” Jason said. “Wasn’t Bobby equally responsible?”

  “Bobby was in the wrong, too,” I said. “But Ashley shouldn’t have poached another girl’s boyfriend.”

  Jason raised his eyebrows, which was supposed to show that he was restraining himself from remarking, as he does on a regular basis, that I’m too hard on my own gender. I strongly disagree with this assessment and consider myself an equal-opportunity faultfinder.

  “Anyway, none of that is the reason I don’t like her,” I said. “Ashley and I were both on the volleyball team, and once we were the last ones leaving the locker room before practice. We weren’t talking. I was just standing by my locker, and she came over and said, ‘Will you tie my shoe?’ She put her foot on my thigh—I was wearing shorts, so the sole of her shoe was pressed against my skin—and I tied it, and she kind of smirked and walked out of the locker room. This was stupid of me, but when she’d asked, I’d assumed she’d injured herself and that’s why she couldn’t tie her own shoe—because otherwise, why would you ask someone to do it for you? But I watched her at practice, and she obviously wasn’t injured at all, and I realized she’d just been trying to, like, degrade me for her own amusement. That was the most obnoxious part, the pathological part. It would have been meaner but less weird
if she’d had an audience and was trying to impress them by humiliating me. But she was just getting her jollies by herself.”

  “Strange.” Jason’s tone was calm.

  “That’s your only reaction?”

  “What do you want me to say? She doesn’t seem like that person anymore. Obviously, if anything, she’s intimidated by you. But I couldn’t care less, so let’s blow them off.”

  “We’ll keep running into them until they leave.”

  “Who cares, if she’s this person you don’t like and never plan to see again?”

  “I don’t want to spend the next forty-eight hours hiding from her.”

  “Do you want to switch hotels?”

  I scrutinized Jason’s face. “Are you joking?”

  “This is our honeymoon,” he said. “You’re supposed to enjoy yourself.”

  I was quiet before saying, “How old do you think her husband is?”

  “Forty, maybe.”

  “What do you think his job is?”

  “Gynecologist.”

  “Seriously.”

  “How should I know? I-banking or something.”

  “Do you think Ashley’s hot?” I asked.

  Jason pondered the question for a few seconds. “She’s hot, but in a cheesy way. You know, what she looks like is a pharmaceutical rep.”

  I felt so filled with love for him in that moment that, honestly, I almost teared up.

  “Magpie,” he said. When our eyes met, he gestured at the table, where I’d set my cards down at Ashley’s approach. “It’s your turn.”

  * * *

  —

  The way it came to pass that Ashley saw me on TV, the way I came to be scolded by strangers for betraying feminism, is that I entered law school right after getting my BA; worked very, very hard; became editor of the law review; was offered a job as an associate at Corster, Lemp, Shreiberg, and Levine, the civil-litigation and criminal-defense firm in Chicago where I’d spent the summers interning; continued to work very, very hard; and in 2005, after seven years, became the youngest person in the firm’s history, male or female, to make partner. Eight months later, while he was in Chicago to receive an award from a national organization dedicated to mentoring at-risk youth, Billy Kendall, a linebacker for the Carolina Panthers, invited a cocktail waitress back to his room after an evening of flirting at the bar in the lobby of the Sofitel and proceeded to either rape her (her version) or to have consensual sex with her (his version). Kendall hired Corster, Lemp, Shreiberg, and Levine to represent him, and how could it hurt the defense if one of Kendall’s lawyers was not only a woman but a woman about the same age as his accuser?

  I’m not under any illusions; I realize the fact that I was the second seat for the trial, and that I was the one who cross-examined the cocktail waitress, wasn’t entirely due to my legal prowess, but I was not, as I know cynics suspected, just loitering around the counsel table, buffing my nails. Indeed, I prepared more rigorously than I’d ever prepared for any other trial—researching similar cases, poring over the police reports and witness statements, drafting and redrafting my cross-examination. Still, it’s indisputable that if not for my age and gender, I wouldn’t have been picked to appear on the cable-news shows during the three-week trial. I appeared mostly via satellite, when—I had never realized this was how TV worked—I’d be in a television studio in Chicago, looking at a blank screen and trying to seem engaged while the voice of the show’s host in New York or Atlanta was piped into my ear. I’d met with a media coach for four hours before my television debut, at Billy Kendall’s expense—in fact, probably unbeknownst to him, Kendall was not only paying for the coach but also paying me for the hours I spent with the coach—and the guy had recommended, as a way of not looking zoned out when I wasn’t the one talking, that I pretend the blank screen was a beloved elderly relative and that I smile in an open and encouraging way, but not to excess. The week after Billy Kendall was acquitted, I flew to New York for a fifteen-minute sit-down interview—an eternity in television time—with the host of a broadcast evening-news program. I actually found all the TV stuff stressful, but people who knew me, including my family, got a kick out of it, even if what I was on TV for was defending a man accused of rape.

  The one person consistently unimpressed by my role in the trial was Jason, whom I’d been dating for a little less than a year and who was still in law school, spending the summer interning for an eight-person nonprofit that specialized in immigration services. After my first interview on national television, when I’d called Jason as I rode home from the local studio in a cab, I expressed surprise that the news anchor hadn’t seemed to know the difference between civil and criminal trials—he had kept referring to “the plaintiff’s side”—and Jason said, “ ‘Television is a medium because it’s neither rare nor well-done.’ Isn’t that how that saying goes?”

  Sitting in the back of the cab, I thought, Really? I was just on CNN and that’s your reaction? Then again, I had been disparaging first, and he had merely concurred.

  I’d met Jason shortly after I made partner but before I started working on the Kendall case. A law school professor, a woman I consider my mentor, invited me to speak to her Criminal Procedure class, and Jason was a student, a 2L. He was actually a year older than I was but had spent the decade after college working in Honduras and El Salvador for an American aid organization, as I learned at the reception afterward when he came up to me, made small talk, then asked for my email address. Two days later, he emailed to ask if I wanted to meet for a drink. I was skeptical at first because Jason was not only significantly better-looking than my previous boyfriends but also a more attractive man than I am a woman, which, if you start paying attention, is a highly unusual dynamic. (I’ve concluded that there are more attractive women than men in the world, so the numbers work in men’s favor.) At first I couldn’t believe that this smart, even-keeled guy with curly brown hair and bright blue eyes was into me, and I still mostly feel this way—Jason is indeed smart and even-keeled, with curly brown hair and bright blue eyes—but it also strikes me, in retrospect, that if a young male partner from a law firm had come to talk to my Criminal Procedure class when I was a student, I would never have had the confidence to ask him out; I’d have asked him for a job, possibly, but not for a date.

  Jason and I hadn’t been one of those couples that immediately become inseparable. I didn’t have time to see him more than once or twice a week, because I routinely worked until ten o’clock. After that first time we had drinks, Jason called to see if I wanted to get dinner—dinner on a Saturday night, a full-on date of the sort I’d been on only a handful of times, even though I was then thirty-one—and afterward we went to watch a movie at his apartment and I fell asleep ten minutes in. We hadn’t kissed yet except for a brief peck after the first date. Jason told me later that my falling asleep plus my general unavailability made him doubt that I liked him, and it’s occurred to me that he kept pursuing me for that very reason.

  Because honestly, to this day, I don’t know what made him interested in me. It’s not that I hate myself, at least not most of the time—it’s just that it wouldn’t have been difficult for Jason to find a woman who was prettier, or more of a fighter for the underdog, or both. The one time I asked him about it, and I tried to ask as casually, as unpathetically, as possible, given that it’s an inherently pathetic question, he said, “Because you had your act together.” I think he was referring less to my career than to my not being anorexic or flat-out insane, in contrast to his previous girlfriends; one of them had literally weighed all her meals on a postage scale. Then he added, grinning, “And because you were a good lay.” I made a face when he said this, and he said, “What? That’s the ultimate compliment!”

  I wonder, of course—it’s my deepest secret, and would likely be guessable to even a distant acquaintance—if Jason married me for my money. No
t only for my money, but if my income nudged me into some category of desirability I might not otherwise have attained. Jason is for the little guy, yes, but he has quietly expensive taste. He spends more on clothes than I do—on Italian leather loafers or simple crewneck sweaters that, lo and behold, are cashmere—and he enjoys a good steak and a nice cocktail. Whereas my own enjoyment of these things is always accompanied by uneasiness—I still can’t order a thirty-dollar entrée without thinking, Holy shit, thirty dollars for an entrée?

  These days, I make twenty times what Jason does, and we spend money in a way he never could on just his salary, and in a way neither of our families did when we were growing up. We’ll get a seventy-dollar bottle of wine with dinner at a restaurant on an ordinary Tuesday; we have a cleaning service that comes twice a week to the condo that I paid for in cash before we got married. And we almost willfully blew through money when planning our honeymoon. For months, we didn’t make any decisions about when or where we were going, and then one night in late spring, Jason said, “Let’s just hammer it out before we never go at all,” and so we ordered Thai food and brought our laptops to the dining room table and separately poked around websites for a destination and hotels and flights. Mostly we wanted it to be easy—no long flights, no intricate research required beforehand or on our arrival—but Jason also thought that lying on a beach for a week sounded boring, so we settled on coming out west. He was the one who found our hotel. At our dining room table, he said, “They have these cool little cabins.”

  I leaned over so I could see his computer screen and said, “For eight hundred dollars a night?”

  “What? We can afford it.” Sometimes when we discussed finances, Jason’s pronouns made my skin prickle—how casually he’d say we instead of you. Also, there was the fact that if he were the one earning more money, as in a traditional couple, there were certain ways I’d probably defer to him, accommodations I’d make that he seemed either unconcerned with or unaware of: He did significantly less of the cooking, rarely sorted the mail, and never made our bed. He would do any of these things if I asked, but he didn’t do them, as if they didn’t need doing, as long as I didn’t ask. We hadn’t signed a prenup because, against my better judgment and legal training, I’d pretended I found it persuasive—I’d pretended I wasn’t afraid he’d change his mind about me—when he said, “So not only do you think we’ll end up divorced but you think I’ll try to screw you over when we do?” We kept our savings accounts separate, but you don’t need a law degree to know that that’s legally meaningless. As a wedding present, I paid off his student loans. I’d wondered ahead of time if he’d let me, but declining didn’t seem to occur to him. He’d said, “Really? Thanks.” If I’d expected him to gasp, tear up, or otherwise express touched astonishment, I’d mistaken him for someone else.