Pretty in Ink (25 page)

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

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 “[email protected],” 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

M
imi 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.

As if he can read my mind, Rob says, “It’s really happening, baby. Aren’t you thrilled? Say something!”

“Wow” is all I can manage. I’m not thrilled, actually, although I’m not upset, either. I simply can’t get my brain to process this turn of events. I suppose this is what they call shock.

“Listen, I have to call our realtor immediately and get things going on this end. Love you. We’ll talk later!”

I hang up and stand dumbstruck, gaping at my surroundings: The office is a ghost town, with everyone gone from their desks and crowded into the conference room for Mimi’s praisefest. I feel as if I’m on a movie set of my life, the shooting wrapped for the day. I begin weaving the aisles of abandoned cubicles without pattern or direction. I don’t suspect myself of a motive until I notice that I’ve stopped in front of Laura’s computer and that I’m suspiciously checking my peripheral vision. Her e-mail window is right there, open on her screen—and below Laura’s in-box is Mimi’s (Laura has full access to keep track of her boss’s schedule).
It doesn’t matter,
I tell myself, as I reach for the keyboard.
I’m out of here, moving to Vermont.

And then it’s happening. It doesn’t feel like it’s me making the decision or like it’s my own hand launching Mimi’s in-box and conducting a search for my name, then wading through a flood of meeting invites and all-staff notes in order to locate something interesting. I feel one step removed, like an actress is playing the role of me.

A header jumps out: “Staff changes.”
Aha!
Under this subject line lies a string of e-mails between Mimi and Mrs. Winters, Schmidt & Delancey’s editorial director (her signature actually says “Mrs. Winters,” as if she doesn’t even possess a first name). Their exchange reaches back to Mimi’s first day on the job, May 2, when the new editor in chief sent Mrs. Winters her first impressions of the then-members of the staff. I scan for my name: “Leah Brenner is deeply entrenched in and loyal to the old vision of
Hers.
She seems smart, more or less.”

More or less?
I’m fuming, but I’m also aware that I have to work fast. At any moment someone could emerge from the conference room and catch me, head bent over the wrong computer. Fingers keep guiding the keys, eyes keep skimming the back-and-forth. Shortly after Mimi delivered her snap judgments of the staff to Mrs. Winters, the latter e-mailed a lengthy spiel on the best ways to bolster staff morale during a time of upheaval. She writes about scheduling group brainstorms and providing opportunities for feedback so staff members are made to feel valued, like their opinions count. (Notably, Mrs. Winters’s stated goal is to give the staff the
impression
that they are thought well of; she offers no advice on how to
actually
value your staff or listen and respond to their feedback.) I skip over a series of bullet points on the blah blah blah of establishing authority.

The next section is entitled, “The importance of timing.” In the dense paragraph that follows, Mrs. Winters lays out the thesis that, when a new editor in chief is rejiggering a staff to build a revised team, it is crucial for her to move quickly, but not too quickly. While she shakes up the old way of doing things, Mrs. Winters goes on to say, a new boss must maintain a certain semblance of stability. An easy way to do so is to temporarily keep on two to three members of the old establishment’s senior staff. Still, a new boss must be careful not to drag out the layoffs over too long a period, so as not to create a culture of fear and distrust among the remaining staff. According to Mrs. Winters, a window of three to four months should be sufficient.

After this manifesto, Mrs. Winters ends with a section labeled “Big Blowout Party!” The gist is, Mimi should notify Corporate once she’s completed all of her staff changes, and then they’ll arrange and fund a fabulous party. This will serve as both a celebration of the magazine’s relaunch and an assurance to the remaining staff that they’re solidly and safely part of the new team—that they’ve survived.

I stare at this last sentence, feeling wholly back to myself, knowing full well that I am violating my boss’s privacy and perhaps even breaking the law. Not only do I not care, but at the moment neither do I care about the house—
our
house—in Vermont; all that concerns me is that Mimi has not yet scheduled this Big Blowout Party. She’s closing in on four months at
Hers,
and there’s been no mention of such an event.

I’m about to ex out of Mimi’s in-box when a new e-mail pops up on the screen. It’s a one-liner from Suzanne in Human Resources: “Meeting is on the books, 8 a.m.” I scroll down to find out what Suzie’s responding to, what this meeting is that she’s put on the books. The original e-mail from Mimi reads: “Please schedule an appointment for us and Leah Brenner on September 4, the earlier in the day the better.” The day after Labor Day, two weeks from today. My knees give out, and I plunk down into Laura’s seat.

I still haven’t moved when I hear Abby’s voice. “Leah, is that you? What are you doing?”

“Borrowing a Post-it,” I say on reflex.

Abby eyes me warily. “Come on back to the meeting, OK?”

She leads me, the walking dead, back to the conference room. Maybe it’s just paranoia, but as I enter the room I sense my coworkers’ looks of pity like spiders on my skin. I imagine this is what it would feel like to be bald and underweight after chemotherapy. (I immediately scold myself for the comparison.)

Mimi is raising a glass of champagne. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am so enormously proud of what this magazine is becoming, and I can’t wait to keep up the momentum we’ve started. Cheers!” Someone places a glass in my grip, and I feel my eyes blur with tears as I raise my champagne to the thing I’ve been fearing and dreading and half-hoping for all summer. I toast what I now know for certain will be my last ever issue of
Hers.
As the bubbly liquid slides down my throat, I think about how every single month for the past fifteen years—my entire working life—I have been instrumental in putting out a magazine. That’s nearly two hundred issues that I’ve used to measure the progress of my career, and more than that, my life. I wonder, next month and the month after and the month after that, how will I mark the passage of time?

 

I arrive home bursting with the news of my official end date, but the moment I open the door and discover my house in the cleanest state I’ve ever seen it, the information flees my brain. The front hall, usually a disastrous wreckage of shoes and coats and toys, looks like the set of a
Hers
lifestyle shoot, all clean surface and calm. The sight of a vase with actual fresh flowers poking out nearly moves me to tears. I step into this alternate universe of my home, and there is my husband in the living room, dressed in slacks and a button-down instead of his standard uniform of jeans and ironic T-shirt, splaying out my magazines in a fan on the coffee table.

“What the hell is going on?” I ask. Maria emerges from the kitchen carrying two platters of catered cold cuts. My mother trails behind her, stealing a slice of Swiss from one of the trays. “Mom? What are you doing here?”

“Your husband called me to come help out.” She plops down onto the couch and grabs a magazine, disrupting Rob’s stylized design. He swoops in to rearrange.

“Help out with what? Rob, hello, can you hear me?”

“Hey, baby.” My husband leans in for a kiss, then grabs a broom and sets about sweeping around my feet. “Sorry, I’ve been running around like a crazy person. The realtor was able to pull together a last-minute open house for tonight. She said to expect at least a dozen people. She also recommended we clear out, but I thought it would be fun to attend. So Maria’s going to take the girls out driving—let’s pray they fall asleep in the car—and your mom offered to do the appetizers.”

“I ordered from Zabar’s,” she says. “It’s my not-so-secret scheme to get you to stay near Manhattan. Fix yourself a sandwich and you’ll realize what morons you are to move. What kind of bagel do you think you can get up in Vermont, in the middle of nowhere?”

I roll my eyes. “I love you, too, Mom.”

I squeeze Maria’s arm. “Thank you for staying late. The girls tend to nod off at twenty-five miles per hour.” Our nanny’s nod is gracious, like I’m enlightening her with information she doesn’t already know. Last week we finally told her about the probable move. We invited her to come with us—wherever we ended up, we knew we’d have room to spare—and she said she’d think about it. I consider Maria to be family; still, I know her real family all lives here in New Jersey.

I turn to Rob, trying to tamp down my panic at this sudden turn of events. “Why didn’t you call me? I would’ve come home early. How can I help?”

“I didn’t want to bother you at work. Everything’s under control here. Just try and relax.”

“OK.” But I can’t relax when everyone else seems to have a job to do. Rob and Maria buzz around like it’s their calling to transform the house into a pristine museum of itself. Even my mother looks like she’s on a mission, though in her case it’s to lounge around on the couch with her boot-clad feet propped up on the coffee table. I loiter, still clutching at my work purse, feeling like I’ve already been displaced from my home.

“What time are people coming over?”

Rob checks his watch. “T-minus ten minutes. Prepare to be one half of the charming couple who owns this charming house.”

“Aren’t I always?” I say, thinking I better rush to kiss the girls good night if I’m going to have time to chug a glass of wine before the home invasion.

Ten minutes is not nearly long enough to prepare myself for the pockets of strangers gathering in my living room, peeking into my private spaces, and sizing up my home. Rob insisted our presence would be a selling point for the house—we’re a young, attractive couple that others will aspire to be like, he claimed—but now I’m seeing why people generally hit the road for their own open houses.

From my hideout in the kitchen, I can hear Rob in the next room parroting our Vermont realtor, singing the praises of our light fixtures and original moldings. I’m shoving my eighth slice of turkey into my mouth—my mother is right, this stuff is addictive—when I sense a woman at my side.

“I hate to say it, but you’ve got a beautiful home,” she says.

“Excuse me?” I ask, mouth full.

“Sheesh, I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I’m Isabella.” She sticks out her hand, and I wipe my own greasy one on my shirt before reaching for a shake. “I figured you were the owner, since you’ve been standing around looking so wistful and uncomfortable.”

“Oh.”

“Plus, the décor in here is to die for, and you’re the best-dressed person in sight. It all just added up.”

“Thanks,” I say, thinking maybe I like this woman. “Picture the place covered with toys and dirty dishes and you’ll have a more accurate idea of what it’s usually like.”