“No, I never noticed.”
She turned to me in disbelief.
“What do you mean, you’ve never noticed? How could you not have noticed? Ever since she and I were kids, she’s been backing out of rooms. Walking backward to avoid turning around. Angling herself around corners or up against walls to prevent anyone from seeing it. I don’t even think her husband’s seen it. Not that her ass needs to be hidden like my ass needs to be hidden.”
She stood up and turned so that her back was to me. “
I’m
the one who should be backing out of rooms.” She grabbed the bags of flesh that were her buttocks so hard, her hands made a slapping sound against them.
“Look at this!”
she said, peering around to see my reaction before sitting down.
Karen half-swiveled nervously in her chair and tried to smile. She took a sip of bottled water from her glass and popped an Altoids mint into her mouth:
lunch
.
“I don’t know what’s so wrong with your ass that you won’t let anybody see it,” Gail continued.
“It’s
wide
,” Karen finally said, enunciating through clenched teeth. “And it’s
flat
.”
Gail turned to me again. “She’s ill,” she said. “My sister is ill. Don’t you think she’s ill?”
Since that time, I’d been acutely aware of Karen’s secret “part,” as I was that morning in the elevator, only this time I couldn’t afford to indulge myself in the hilarity of her neurosis or in my shock at the reason for her hugeness: I had to say hello. I took my sunglasses off and checked my posture.
“Good
morning
!” I said with exaggerated cheerfulness. Though Karen knew that I was good at my job and had grown quite dependent on me in that regard, her one complaint about me had always been what she perceived to be my negative attitude. Or oddness, as she sometimes called it. This, she felt, was primarily manifested by my facial expression—furrow-browed, unsmiling, and altogether too serious for someone in the fashion business. Karen Lipps expected those who worked for her—her “family,” as she always referred to us without a trace of irony—to be happy.
And, up until she had Marissa, to never have children.
“None of you better ever get pregnant,” she used to say to Renee and Annette and me whenever someone she knew in the business announced they were going to have a child. “Because if you do, I’ll have to fire you.” She’d smile at us then with her alien blue eyes and her slightly too-long obviously
capped teeth and reach for her bottled water and a breath mint.
And while we were never quite sure whether she meant it or not, we were sure about this: Karen Lipps would never be a mother.
“Which is fine with me since I never want kids, either,” Renee would say.
And which was fine with me, too, since it was before my egg-filled gum-ball machine appeared and began to embody my existential angst, and since I’d already decided that Karen should never have children even if she wanted them because she was a Vulcan: Looks human. Acts human. Seems human.
Not
human.
Only Annette, who was from a big Italian family in Queens where having children was like eating and breathing, would look shocked and disgusted and dissolve into silence.
“That woman is
sick
,” she’d say, rushing back to her office as if to escape whatever disease Karen carried and was trying to spread.
Those of us who had been with her since the beginning of her meteoric rise in the fashion business knew Karen’s fierce ambition; her ability to play the master chess game of corporate politics; her obsession with her work and her intolerance of anything and anyone that interfered with it. And we had a hard time believing that she’d mellowed in her second marriage and that the birth of her daughter had softened her and made her see, finally, that there were more important things in life besides money and fame and licensing deals. And skeletal thinness.
Yet it was hard to be sure.
Karen’s husband, Arthur Klein, a short, quiet, balding man famous for collecting art and channeling his family’s vast wealth into philanthropic causes, worked at home and functioned,
more or less, as vice-nanny and house-husband—allowing his wife to sustain the same grueling work and social schedule she’d had before the baby. But something had changed. Where once her life had been an open book for self-promotion—homes shot for the architectural/decor glossies; lengthy interviews given for profiles in the women’s magazines; beauty rituals, exercise regimes, and spa vacations divulged and documented to anyone with a circulation over two million—now it was not. Karen had closed the curtain on her life and allowed no one—no journalist, no photographer, not even a staff member—to penetrate the new force field of privacy she’d created. The only thing that was unclear was who she was trying to protect behind that veil of silence: her daughter or herself.
It took a few seconds for Karen to acknowledge me in that tiny elevator, and in that short time I noticed the little beads of sweat that had appeared on her upper lip, making me wonder momentarily if she might not be well. She wiped herself quickly with a tissue and then turned to me.
“How was your trip?” I asked.
“Productive. I’ve found my palette of browns for next fall’s line.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a Polaroid—a close-up of a huge glass display case, inside of which were rows and rows of chocolate. “I came across this chocolate shop in Belgium. I mean, just look at those colors!”
“Great!”
She put the photo back in her bag and turned back to me. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
As usual, she was not convinced.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said, desperately trying to relax the muscles in my face in case they had been fixed into an unwitting
grimace. But it was too late. Her eyes were all over me, now.
“Not having any luck with the Bloomingdale’s people?”
“No. They’re fine. Lunch with three of them on Friday.”
“The spread in
Vogue
fall through?”
I loved working for someone who had so much faith in me.
“No. The shoot’s all set for next Monday.”
“Then what is it?” She continued to examine my face with intense curiosity. Clearly she needed some reason to explain my mood, so I put it in terms I knew she could understand.
“I’m just pissed because I’m late and I really wanted to get in early so I could get started on everything.”
This she could process. The desire to get one’s hands into one’s work—the frustration at being kept from doing so by some hapless force of nature—this she understood.
“I know. I cut my trip short because our nanny is sick and Arthur’s in Los Angeles until tomorrow. I was supposed to get here hours ago, and I would have if the substitute nanny hadn’t been late.”
“What’s wrong with the real nanny?”
“Mumps.” She rolled her eyes skeptically, as if mumps—along with ulcers and pneumonia and cancer—were just another lame excuse in the pantheon of lame excuses that lazy people used to get time off from work.
“What about Marissa? Could she have been—”
“No. She was not exposed. She’s fine.” Suddenly Karen dropped her bags on the floor of the elevator and shoved her hands up under the black tunic, grabbing and pulling at the fabric around her waist.
“These … fucking … leggings!”
she said over the snap of an elastic waistband. “I’m going to kill that fucking Annette. I told her these waistbands were too big. Look at this!” She
tried to grab a fistful of puckered Lycra but was unsuccessful. Which didn’t stop her. “With all this extra fucking material, I might as well ask three people to join me in here!”
The elevator doors opened, and in one swift, surprisingly graceful movement, she picked up her bags and stormed off toward her office.
Down the hall I could see Simon sitting peacefully at his desk, lazily twirling the ends of his hair around his index finger and then into his mouth, while enjoying what was obviously a personal phone call. But he hung up the receiver the second his otherworldly dog-hearing detected the telltale sound of her arrival—the
squeak-squish squeak-squish
of one Lycra thigh against the other—and dove toward her office. She slammed the door behind him, then a second later he reemerged and ran past me, his body bent at the forty-five-degree angle of indentured servitude.
“Where’s that fucking Annette?”
I sat down at my desk and contemplated my encounter with Karen. Did she really believe her leggings were too big on her? Or was this just another flagrantly demented piece of her motherhood-denial puzzle? A denial puzzle that, for starters, included never ingesting anything in the office except for bottled water and Altoids and wearing Lycra leggings that were (usually) three sizes too small for her.
The idea that a woman with no pictures of her child anywhere in her office was a mother and I wasn’t made me furious, then sad, but before I could indulge myself further in the deep dark vast well of injustice, I needed to deal with the work on my desk.
It was piled high with mail and message slips and press kits and invitations and newspaper and magazine ads in various stages of completion and all the other detritus that had accumulated the previous Friday afternoon, when I was out of the office for a lengthy lunch with the buyer from Bergdorf
Goodman. I slipped my jacket off and onto the back of my chair and tried to get my eyes to focus on all the paper on my desk, but I couldn’t. I felt overwhelmed, the way I always did on Monday mornings.
I swiveled around in my chair and looked out the window.
From this perch on Fifty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue, I had an incredible view of the city south of midtown. Staring at the buildings and at all the teeny-tiny anonymous people with cars and buses swarming around them, I thought about the first time I came to New York to find a job, almost thirteen years ago.
How big everything seemed then. How big everything seemed still, though for very different reasons. Now, instead of facing merely the giganticness of the buildings and the giganticness of the egos inside them, I faced the pressure of my job; the endless sea of work that needed to get done every week and somehow did in spite of my waning interest and passion; how disconnected I felt I’d become in the midst of all this chaos and noise and perpetual motion. The veneer of glamour and allure that my career had once held for me—briefly, and without deep roots—had vanished long ago, and all that was left now was a persistent dread of the day that lay ahead.
I looked at my watch.
It was already eleven.
I picked up the phone and dialed the Pickle.
Naturally my sister answered.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How’s work?”
“Please.”
“I saw the new ads you were telling me about. For the lingerie. The stuff looks great.”
I glanced over at the color ads mounted on boards lined up on the floor along the windows—bras; panties; camisoles; teddies; silk; lace; satin; cotton, smooth or ribbed. If Malcolm had cared, I would have bought one of everything with my employee discount, the way every other single woman in the office had done months ago when the line first came in.
“I’ll send you some,” I said, searching my desk for a scrap of paper to write a note to myself on. “You want black or white or—”
“Don’t bother.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too fat for lingerie.”
I stopped looking. “You are not.” It was truly ridiculous—and frightening—how much time and energy we women spent discussing our collective distorted body image.
“I am, too.”
“Stop it.”
“You have no idea.”
Ever since she and Paul had moved from Boston to Portland so he could be a full professor of American history at the University of Maine and she’d quit her graphic design job and had Nicole, all Lynn ever complained about was her alleged fat.
And her inability to form a complete sentence.
And her fear that she might never be able to hold her own again in a roomful of adults because she had nothing to wear except sweatpants and also because sometimes she suspected people thought she was a loser because she stayed home fulltime with the Pickle and wore sweatpants all the time.
“Lingerie probably looks great on you, though.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Lynn paused, and I knew she was wondering if she should ask about Malcolm or not. But I knew she could tell that I wasn’t in the mood to talk about him. She and my parents
worried enough about my personal life—or seeming lack thereof—without my having to confirm their worries on a daily basis.
“Have you talked to Them?” I asked, changing the subject.
“I tried to, but they’re packing.”
“Packing?”
“For the Elderhostel.”
“Another Elderhostel?” Why our parents couldn’t stay home and take up golf like every other retired couple in the world was beyond us. Trips like these meant weeks of preparatory prepacking even before the actual packing—What suitcase should they take? Would they need dressy clothes or just casual? Could they get away with six pairs of shoes each or would they need the seven?—and because I was in the clothing business and was considered an expert on such matters, every trip required numerous phone calls to consult with me on these questions.
But my sister’s perceived weight gain and my sexless sex life and my parents’ packing problems weren’t why I had called.
“So what’s she wearing today?” I asked, getting down to the true purpose of our conversation.
This was a call I made every day, though not at any specific time—just at whichever point I needed to feel connected to a human being. Albeit a human being who was three and a half and still pooping in her Pull-Ups.
As usual, Lynn obliged my question with absolute earnestness. It had become as much a part of her day, I supposed, as changing diapers had, or cutting little tuna-fish sandwiches into tiny bite-size squares had, or whatever other weirdly specific request required her to indulge her daughter. Lynn had never become as hard and as cynical as I had; she accepted my obsession with Nicole without jealousy, without a sense of competition. What was hers was mine—clothes and books and record albums when we were growing
up, and now her family. And while I felt guilty at times for placing this extra burden on her, of asking her to indulge me, too—another child, or simply a childish adult—I couldn’t help myself.