Been There, Done That (2 page)

“I don’t have any money with me.”

He roared, his face getting even redder, and pulled a money clip from his suit pocket. “Don’t you worry about a thing, dear. A pretty little girl like you shouldn’t have to pay for lunch, anyway.”

 
It was enough to turn a person back to Lifestyles. I was good at Lifestyles. Home décor, food, entertaining—it was shallow, it was fluff, but it was fun. Besides, it was comp heaven: samples of this, free admission to that. But how could I turn down a promotion? Sheila Twisselman, the editor-in-chief, guarded the Lifestyles section closely, and she would never leave. In the midst of building a ten-thousand-square-foot “cottage” on Boston’s North Shore, she needed all the Mexican tile samples she could get. She couldn’t string two sentences together, but since she was married to Richard Twisselman, the publisher of
Salad
magazine (“A mix of fresh ideas”), chances of a layoff seemed slim. So when the previous education editor, an abrasive middle-aged woman who had long maintained she was underappreciated, quit the magazine to teach high school, declaring the pay better than
Salad
’s and the students more polite than Richard, I dug out my college notebooks, convinced I could do a better job. I had taken a handful of education courses during my brief save-the-world phase, and they supplied me with enough jargon to sound like I knew what I was talking about, at least when talking to Richard, who knew even less than I did. The job was mine.

To be honest, I never truly understood why
Salad
had an education section in the first place. Richard claimed it was indispensable because, “Boston is the education capital of the world.” Most likely, Richard kept it because it allowed him to pretend that he ran a serious magazine. Or maybe it was a shield for even deeper insecurities. Far too many of his sentences began with the words, “When I was at Harvard . . .” For a long time, I took that to mean that he had, well, gone to Harvard. And he did: he took an extension class there. In creative writing. Anyone can take an extension class at Harvard. I once took an art history class there. It was an excellent class. But I would never say I went to Harvard.

My new job wasn’t the self-actualizing, world-changing power trip I’d hoped for. I liked the title, of course, but my raise barely covered the cost of an extra frapuccino per week. I missed having interior designers (never call them decorators) back to my place for a little input on paint color. My bedroom’s red accent wall is nothing short of inspired. And what I’d counted on as the biggest perk—an assistant—meant being subjected to a twenty-two-year-old named Jennifer saying things like, “You know NutraSweet? Like they put in diet soda? It causes cancer in rats? And I drink, like, ten Diet Cokes a day?”

When I got back to the office, Jennifer was hunched over my computer. Her own outdated model had crashed last week, and none of the former English majors who populated the office had the slightest idea how to fix it. Today Jennifer wore a cropped navy-and-lime striped shirt. Bent over the computer as she was, her shirt rode up in the back, revealing half a foot of freckled white skin, a long, bony spine, and a blue butterfly tattoo. One could only assume it had flown out of her ass.

“What you working on?” I dropped my bag in the middle of the desk as a way of reclaiming my territory. Then I nudged it to the side when I remembered the work I’d left her. “Those the interview notes?”

“My novel.”

“How’s that coming?” I tried to sound like I cared, but not too much.

“Really, really great.” She leaned back and stretched. Today’s navel ring was a lime rhinestone. Her powers of accessorizing never ceased to amaze me.

“And the, uh, interview notes? How are they coming?”

“I didn’t get to them yet. But your article? About magnet schools?” She jabbed at they keyboard until she pulled up the file. “Okay . . . you’ve got: ‘Ask whether magnet schools are a good thing or a bad thing, and you’ll get a different answer depending on who you’re talking to.’ It would be cleaner if you just said, ‘Ask whether magnet schools are good or bad . . .’ Then, technically, it should be, ‘to whom you’re talking.’ But that sounds kind of stuffy. So maybe we could reword.”

I understood why my predecessor had hired Jennifer, who never listened to writing teachers who advised their students to write they way they spoke. Jennifer spoke like a moron. But she wrote like—well, like a writer. The problem was, I didn’t need her to write. I already knew how to write. I wanted someone to free up my time so I could write more. I wanted a good typist with excellent phone manner. I wanted a woman who found inner peace through the creation of color-coded file systems. When I’d been sick the week before, Jennifer cancelled an interview by saying, “I’m calling for Kathy Hopkins. She was going to meet with you today. She’s got to reschedule because she’s got, like, a major case of the runs.”

I moved my briefcase back to the center of the desk. “That’s just the first draft. I hadn’t gotten to the editing stage yet. Did anyone call?”

She stuck one electric blue plastic platform shoe on the edge of my desk. Jennifer has a preference for colors not found in nature. She smiled. “Not officially. But some guy named Dennis? First he said to tell you he called to say he had a great time last night. Then he said, no—just tell her I called. Then he said, no, never mind, I’ll just call her later.”

She grinned up at me and tapped her orange gel pen on my desk.

“Anyone else call?” I asked.

“Is that Dennis Stowe? From the ad agency?”

“Yes. Anyone else?”

She uncovered another scrap of paper. “Some guy named Tim McAllister. He left his number.”

My face must have frozen—or shined or grimaced, or something—because she said, “Is this bad news? Or good news?” She dropped her foot off my desk and leaned forward.

“Neither,” I said. “Just an old friend from college.”

A few minutes later, when Jennifer had finished backing up her novel onto a disk, I returned my calls. I dialed Dennis first. I took that as a sign of growth and healing; I didn’t particularly want to talk to Dennis, so I must really, really not want to talk to Tim.

I got Dennis’s voice mail. I love voice mail. It means you get credit for calling without actually having to talk to anyone. “Hi, Dennis. It’s Kathy, just returning your call. Thanks again for last night. I’ll be in and out of the office this afternoon, but maybe we can catch up later in the week.” In truth, I didn’t plan to leave my desk all afternoon, except maybe to visit the candy machine, which had just been restocked with Three Musketeers bars.

I’d been supremely annoyed when Richard first instructed me to work with Dennis, who had several clients willing to place ads only if they were assured of getting positive mention in the editorial content. “People don’t trust ads,” Richard explained, as if this were a big revelation. “They are more likely to believe something if they read it in an article. They figure it’s un-, un- . . . that the person writing it is giving their own opinion.”

“But an article is hardly”—I looked him in the eye—“
unbiased
if we are, in effect, being paid to write it.”

He shrugged and put up his hands, as if in defeat. “It’s the way the game is played.”

Still, I’d liked Dennis immediately. (Just not, you know,
in that way
.) Until he asked me out to dinner, I’d smiled every time I heard his voice on the phone. The date had ruined everything. It’s not that he was ugly; I just didn’t find him attractive. At all. And now that I knew he wanted more than friendship from me, I felt profoundly uncomfortable around him.

I took the message from Tim and centered it on my desk. I stared at it for a minute and then picked up the phone. As I dialed, I was dismayed to discover that my heart was throbbing all the way up to my esophagus, and my armpits were growing damp. The receptionist answered, “
New Nation
?” I hung up and trudged down the hall in search of a Three Musketeers bar.

two

Sometimes I wish our society encouraged arranged marriages. This free will stuff is a pain in the ass. Tim could have been forced to marry me, or I could have been forced to marry Dennis. It wouldn’t matter. It would be a done deal, with no guilt involved, no hours spent wondering about missed opportunities, no relatives patting my tummy and saying, “Any men in your life? Tick, tick, tick!”

I said as much to Sheila Twisselman in the health club locker room as we were swapping silk for lycra. Half naked women were everywhere. It was five-thirty, and we were all determined to work off the bulging sandwiches and dressing-sodden salads we had eaten for lunch.

I pulled on a faded Cornell T-shirt, trying to remember when it had last seen the wash. Sheila yanked on flesh-sucking, lemon yellow shorts and a sports bra to match. Yellow, she swore, was the next Big Color, and she wanted to be ahead of the trend. Since she’d spent an hour a week in a tanning salon ever since she was about three, the color didn’t look bad on her. “Oh, noooo,” she said in response to my arranged marriage diatribe. “Then I might not have married Richard.” She pulled her hair (also yellow, and in need of a touch-up) back into a ponytail and smiled. Rumor has it that last year, when Sheila said she was going to tour the American West for decorating ideas involving shed antlers and distressed beams, she was actually recovering from her first face-lift—a present to herself for her forty-fifth birthday. I believe it. Every time she smiles, I think, “Oh! I thought she was already smiling!” Her grin reveals crooked eyeteeth. She hates the imperfection, but I like it; it makes her seem less manufactured.

“Why did you and Tim break up, anyway?” she asked. She knew all about Tim, since we were still living together when I’d started at the magazine.

“We had a difference of opinion,” I said. “I thought we should be together forever, and he thought eleven years was long enough.” I’ve used that line before. One of these days, it’s going to get a laugh.

“You and Richard seem like a good couple,” I said, not so subtly changing the subject. Was Sheila really in love with Richard? Or with his trust fund? The buzz in the office was that Richard’s father had made his fortune manufacturing the Porta Potti. Whenever Richard sent down some especially loathsome ruling, we called him “The Prince of Poopness” behind his back.

Sheila pulled a compact out of her bag and began applying pink-tinted powder to a face that would be dripping with sweat in about five minutes. “We’re more than just spouses. We’re partners.”

She snapped the compact shut, popped up and did a little jog in place. “You ready to work off that candy bar?” Women were irritating enough when they talked relentlessly about the food they shouldn’t have eaten. But a woman who polices another’s fat intake is nothing short of evil.

I once believed that if I attended step-aerobics classes regularly, I would grow to enjoy them, or at least to stop confusing my left foot with my right. I believed that when our instructor, Stacey, shouted, “FEEL—THAT—BURN! DOESN’T—THAT—FEEL—GOOD? OH—YEAH!” I would work that much harder instead of just entertaining fantasies of whacking her over the head with one of those hateful plastic steps. Now, after coming three times a week for six months, I no longer dreamed of hurting Stacey. I merely pondered how much nicer it would be if I were shopping.

After a half-hour of stepping up, down, forward, backward and sideways in time to some horrid techno music, Stacey had us take our pulse and drink water. At the water fountain, Sheila, her hair plastered to her skull, said, “Here’s an idea for an article: home gyms. Like it?”

I did, and I told her so.

She drained her paper cup and threw it in the wastebasket. “Maybe Richard and I should put a gym in the cottage.”

“That would really help you on the article,” I said, trying not to smirk. I would love to see Richard and Sheila’s tax return. Against her inflated income, she deducts the typical journalist write-offs: the computer paper, the stamps, the steam room, the koi pond . . .

Stacey gave us oversized rubber bands and instructed us to lie on our sides. Then she told us to stretch our foot out against the band. This hurt so much that my Stacey-bashing fantasies returned. She turned on ocean sounds intended to focus us but that instead made me realize I needed to pee.

“So,” Sheila grunted. “How’s. Education. Working out.”

“It’s really. Challenging.” I replied to the back of her head. The industrial carpet reeked of disinfectant that didn’t quite cover up the sweat of so many yuppies.

Stacey told us to release our legs and turn to the other side. Now Sheila was looking at the back of my sweaty head. “You have any. New. Story ideas?”

“Yeah. Not exactly. Fleshed out. Yet. But. Soon.”

Stacey told us to relax, lie on our backs, spread our legs out straight and jiggle them. They felt wobbly, but it was near enough to the end of the class for me to feel virtuous.

“These story ideas,” Sheila continued. “Are they like the ones you’ve done so far? Or are you going to do anything, you know . . . racier?”