What Pretty Girls Are Made Of (4 page)

At 4 p.m. on Friday, Sally pulled up to the studio in her red Mercedes, ready to pick up the suitcases for QVC. She was known to hold impromptu mini-meetings with staff in her car—and not the good kind. Would she just be picking up her suitcases or would this be my first official drive-by ambush? Supposedly you sat in the passenger seat while she told you what was wrong with your work, and with you, and you couldn’t do anything but sit there looking out the window, wishing passersby on the street could hear you silently screaming for help. Then she would order you back inside and wait for you to send out the next victim.

I met Sally outside and loaded up the car, then handed her a shopping bag full of mail, a freshly brewed cup of coffee (I figured it couldn’t hurt), and the face chart I was so excited for her to see.

“I’m very concerned about this, Alison,” she said as she examined it.

Uh-oh. I thought the chart looked fantastic, a huge improvement. Her tone hardened into a barely recognizable dark voice.

“Please sit in the front seat so we can talk about how you’ve just butchered my face charts.”

A flash of heat ran through my body as my stomach tightened. “Okay?” I answered as more of a question than a statement, as was my tendency in unexpected and confrontational situations. I had no idea what she was going to say because I had simply followed her instructions. Well, maybe I added a few touches of my own, but just a few. She moved her magazines, a sweater, and a bag of pretzels to the backseat and I sat in the front, ready for . . . I really didn’t know. Could she see me sweating?

“First of all, why did you change the face image? I just don’t see why you would think you had the right to make such an executive decision. That’s the first thing.” She paused, and I waited, breathing deeply.

“Second, we don’t have a Sally Steele skin-care line, so putting slots for a skin-care regime to be written in was bad judgment and a waste of space. Come on, Alicat—I know you’re smarter than that.” Alicat. And this time, it didn’t sound so buddy-buddy. Not like the cute pet name my family used.

“But Sally—” I interrupted, only to be met with a palm in the face, accompanied by “Excuse me, I’m speaking.”

She went on: “Third, we have an issue with the nail polish. I don’t care what color people wear on their fingernails unless it is
my
brand. So if you want to recommend a Sally Steele Nail Care color, then go for it, but this is just too generic. It doesn’t work at all.” There was a long pause, a solid glare at the face chart. “And now I’m going to be late for QVC, which is entirely your fault, so please get out of my car.”

With wobbly legs, I exited the red Mercedes, closed the door behind me, and stood on the sidewalk for a second trying to process what had just happened. I leaned on a parking meter, too stunned to cry and too shocked to be angry.

She rolled down the window and called out, “And thanks for the coffee. But I said Beyoncé. This is Halle Berry.”

I had heard that Sally became nervous and on edge before TV appearances, but what I had just experienced was more than just “on edge.” It was passive-aggressive and mean. Auditioning was less defeating than this. When I walked back into the studio, the frigid air-conditioning hit my face, and I locked eyes with Helen, who was standing behind the register looking at me.

“Welcome to Sally Steele, sweetheart. You’ve just been initiated into the family.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Firming and Lifting

J
ust two hours later, my iPhone buzzed, jolting me back into reality as I stepped into the elevator and ascended to the tenth floor. Home.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Hey Alison

Hello Alison, this is Keith. I am a membership advisor at Equinox Fitness on 3rd Ave., where you dropped by the other day to try our gym. You should definitely join—I saw your form when you benched. Great biceps, by the way. So I wanted to give you my email and I was wondering if I could take you to dinner. Please let me know what your schedule is like, and have a nice day.

Keith

A fitness membership advisor. So maybe it wasn’t going to be an entirely bad day. I didn’t fully remember what Keith looked like. Though maybe he had me confused with someone else—good biceps? I mean, they were under there somewhere.

When I had thanked the membership office for letting me try out the gym, Keith’s friend had come running out after me asking for my info, telling me Keith thought I was cute. Supposedly, Keith was quite shy but very interested. It was a little gross that he saw me all sweaty in my ratty college T-shirt, but hey, maybe my general happiness of late and lack of daily angst had shone through. I wrote back, telling him that I was looking forward to dinner. And I was.

My only contact with Sally when she was at QVC was over voice mail. “Hello, therrrrrre?” dragged her greeting, inquisitively. “Clearly you’re not at your desk this Friday afternoon. Well, I’ve been invited to a meeting with the heads of Club Monaco next Tuesday at noon. Put that in my calendar for me, and since you generally have good ideas, I’d like you there as well. This should be a special treat for you. I’m on air in a few minutes so let me know on email that you’ve received this message. Thanks.”

Amazing! I emailed Sally back right away and started looking online at clubmonaco.com to see their latest collection. Sally’s response came in just as I was shutting down my computer for the weekend. I shuddered while reading it.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: RE: CM

Actually, Alison, u can only pencil in cm for now. This mtg is contingent on things beyond your control & behavior based so I’ll let u know if u can have this privilege.

Hmm . . . I guess I wasn’t yet out of the doghouse. Ignoring my pang of hurt, I chalked up her capricious behavior to television nerves.

Despite Sally’s recent lashing out, I thought it would be fun to have some friends over to watch an hour of her on QVC, so I planned a last-minute viewing party. This was my life now, and my friends had been constantly asking questions over the past two months about how the whole “sell makeup on television” thing worked.

Part of that concept was still foreign to me as well—purchasing makeup on TV that you couldn’t feel, test, or see in person. But clearly it wasn’t foreign to people all over the world, because Sally was expected to sell about a million dollars’ worth of product in sixty minutes of TV time. Unreal! We made popcorn, brownies, and cookies and settled on the couch to see the makeup maven do her thing.

“Bring it on, Sally Steele,” Bradley called out to the television. “I don’t wear makeup, and it’s kind of a female thing that I really don’t understand, especially since I don’t like dudes . . . but sell me, woman!” We all laughed.

“Cheers, guys,” Jill chimed in as she raised her Skinnygirl Margarita. “Here’s to makeup paying half of this apartment’s rent.” We clinked our glasses, and I felt so supported by the people I loved and who loved me. They had all been to my shows and various performances over the past few years (no matter how terrible they were), and now they were here for me at this new place in my life. And Madison was following along in real time in Los Angeles.

“Wow,” Jill said between mouthfuls of popcorn. “I didn’t realize how this all worked. So which one of those women is Sally? That bird of a woman on the right?”

“Um, not so much,” I said. “She’s the lady on the left with the huge smile and the bright pink floral top.”

“Oh boy,” Jill said. “She shouldn’t be wearing prints.”

And we watched in awe as my larger-than-life boss sold product after product with her Today’s Special Value. My friends were astounded by the amount of money she was making with every demonstration. Quality, Value, Convenience—sold by a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or a wolf in a red Mercedes.

CHAPTER SIX

Free Gift with Purchase

I
ra Kahn, our CFO, and Patti Williams, our director of operations, called me into the corporate office on Monday morning. Ira was a teddy bear of a man in his midsixties with a quick wit and a tight-knit family. He was happily married with a daughter and two sons, one, he told me, being the happiest mistake of his life. He and I bonded instantly and saw eye to eye on almost everything. I considered him a resource, an ally, and a friend, even though we worked from different office locations. He was also very good at his job, though the enormous stacks of paper on his desk indicated the amount of work and demand that Sally put on him. I sensed his frustration with her tardiness and her tendency to skip out on meetings if it was raining, if she didn’t feel like attending, or if she was avoiding decisions that had to be made. I respected Ira. It wasn’t clear whether Sally did.

Patti was Ira’s office “wife.” The two of them knew how to have a good time but bickered like spouses who had made it past their golden wedding anniversary. A workaholic with the extreme desire to please and to receive emotional approval and praise, Patti had a two-hour commute into Manhattan in each direction, since she lived upstate with her six cats (two indoor and four outdoor), four dogs, two horses, five pigs, three chickens, and her actual husband, Bob, who looked like Santa Claus.

Patti had recently lost fifty pounds on Weight Watchers and was aiming for one hundred. She was only about “five foot and an inch” tall, but without words, she would always make her presence known . . . and not merely due to the fact that she exuded an aroma—no, an odor—to put it mildly. Her stench actually provoked the corporate office members to discuss how to get her to bathe more frequently and wear clothing without food stains down the front.

Stench aside, Patti was a sweetheart who worked hard to keep her department running up to par and was great at her job. Her appearance wouldn’t have qualified her to work at a big corporate brand, and we benefited from that. It was Patti who made sure everyone’s birthdays and milestones were celebrated properly (on her dime), with cake or cupcakes and a gift. I liked her a lot, but her need to always please Sally made me feel like I couldn’t fully trust her. She swore that Sally was like her sister, but I suspected that if Patti ever left the company, Sally wouldn’t even be bothered. It was sad, really. And the more weight Patti lost, the more passive-aggressively Sally treated her—bringing high-calorie, tempting snacks to all of her meetings with Patti, encouraging her to nosh away her Weight Watchers success.

As I waited patiently for Ira and Patti to join me in the conference room, I overheard Keira on the phone in the next office and listened in, hoping for clues.

“Exceeded her goal, actually,” Keira said proudly. “We had a nine-million-dollar weekend—she was on fire. This
is
fabulous, but you know what happens when you exceed your goals—QVC sets higher ones. Look, we are all very—” And then the door shut.

You’re all very what?
Oh, man. It sounded promising. But unscheduled
meetings with senior staff made me nervous. I continued to wait, thinking about what I’d be doing if I wasn’t at SSC. Ten thirty in the morning—hopefully prepping for an audition but most likely just starting that morning’s
Sex and the City
tour: almost at Carrie’s West Village apartment, and I’d probably have answered multiple questions about where to buy the real Dominique Ansel Cronuts.
Soho. And they’re worth every calorie.

“Sorry for the delay,” Ira said as he took the seat across from mine at the conference table. Patti came in shortly after.

“We have an important matter to discuss with you, Alison,” Patti said.

“Two, actually,” chimed in Ira, giving Patti a smirk. Patti’s bewildered look told me that she was in the dark about the other matter to which Ira was referring.

Patti broke the ice.

“Well, I’ll start then,” she said, visibly confused. “Alison, after only two months, we are extremely happy with your work here so far, and we think, or rather we know, that it’s time to give you more responsibility in the company.”

I guess Sally had moved on after the face chart incident, though I hadn’t spoken with her much over the past few days.

“You’re smart and savvy, creative and intuitive, and we would like you to use those qualities to take on digital media responsibilities: creating a page on the Facebook, a Tweeter profile, and a ViewTube Network thing, to name a few. You know how to do that, right?” Patti asked, without pausing for an answer.

Oh boy, this woman is a dinosaur. But a complimentary one!

“We really need your help to create platforms to grow that business. And we believe you should handle our entire in-house PR and be the point person for our outside PR company. This will take some work off your coworkers’ plates and can be part of your new digital media realm. You will also work with Zeke, the head of Hotbox, our web company, to grow our Internet business.”

“Thanks,” I replied, not expecting to have heard what she’d just told me.
Digital
media realm?
I thought.

“Does this mean I’ll no longer be assisting Sally?” I asked, half hopefully.

“Sorry, kid,” Ira said, overlapping with Patti, who was less apologetic. “This is in addition to being Sally’s assistant,” she said firmly.

Just as I opened my mouth to ask title and salary questions, Patti added, “While we can’t give you a raise, since you’ve been working with us for only two months or so, we can aim for a title change at some point later in the year. Things are very iffy with the economy and our sales right now, and Sally has put a freeze on salary increases, promotions, and bonuses. So you’ll just have to be all right with that. But congratulations!”

Congratulations for what? Increasing my responsibilities but not my title or pay?

“Thanks, Patti. I’m flattered, especially since I’ve only been with the company for a short time. I look forward to the challenge, but I need to know that we can meet about a raise and title change in three months. This is a lot more for me to do and certainly warrants a greater salary than I’m receiving.”

I saw Patti meet Ira’s eye, and there was a pause. Each was waiting for the other to answer.

“I’ll speak with Sally,” Ira said. “But it’s fine for us to meet in three months to revisit this question.”
It better be
, I thought, given what I knew Sally was reeling in.

With the faux-promotion portion of the meeting already covered, who knew what would be next? Whatever was coming my way, I felt pride in being recognized for consistent good work. That part was new to me, and I liked it.

“Next up, do you know who Jane Morgan is?” Ira asked me.

“I don’t. Should I?” I replied.

“She’s a beauty industry recruiter who does a lot of work for Sally Steele, and who I’ve used at other companies as well.”

First a promotion, and now they’re going to have me meet with a recruiter to find another job?

“Jane has a son,” he continued, “and he’s looking for a nice Jewish girl. I believe they call them NJGs these days. Anyway, Jane asked me the other day if I knew of any NJGs who were out in the dating world to set up with her son. I thought of you. Are you up for a setup? Actually, before I ask you that, I should show you a picture.”

“Jane sent you a picture of her son?”

“Oh, yes she did. I wasn’t going to let this happen without getting all of the details for you. His name is David. He’s a lawyer but works in investment banking, grew up in Manhattan, and is thirty-seven years old.”

“A lawyer and investment banker—it’s like every profession I date mixed into one. If he has dark hair and is a little stocky, I may have already dated him,” I joked. “Do I get to see the photo or is this a true blind date?” I hoped Ira didn’t think that all I cared about were looks.

“First, the photo disclaimer,” he said with a smile.

“You are killing me here.”

Ira pulled out the photo, in the form of a printout from his computer.

“I’m supposed to tell you, per David’s mother, that this is a Thanksgiving photo taken after a large meal in casual clothing.”

Ira was nothing if not thorough.

“I’m not for pleated pants myself,” Ira said, finally showing me David’s photo, “but maybe you can change that part of his wardrobe.”

Perhaps it was the casual Thanksgiving wear that made David appear to be on the cuddly side, but I much preferred a huggable man to a skinny one. Though, lately, my taste in men had definitely started to shift from the conventional corporate suit into the unknown.

“Madison,” I had said the week before on my walk home from work, “Remember I told you that my building hired a new super?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Maybe now you can get your leaky air conditioners fixed before the summer.”

“He’s hot, Mad. So hot. I met him when I was running out to work this morning and he seems really nice.”

“Hot super—I like it. What’s his deal?”

“Well, you know I secretly love a man with a shaved head, but—you’re going to die—he’s covered in tattoos. Like sleeves. Roses inked up his arm. Now I have to look cute all the time.” I could picture her wide eyes and surprised smile before she even spoke.

“Who
are
you? Tattoos? Are you boycotting lawyers and finance guys now? Has this life change altered your DNA?”

“I actually think supers make good money,” I said, not knowing if that was true. “And yes, clearly this job has made me more open to things like a career I haven’t been dreaming about since I could say ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ or a cookie-cutter man who is perfect on paper.”

“Do I have to worry about you shitting where you sleep?”

“Oh no,” I said, fantasizing about an intrabuilding romance. “You have to worry about which one of my parents will have a heart attack and fall on the floor first when I bring Super home to meet them.”

Madison started laughing so hard that I had to remove the phone from my ear. “Well, get him to fix your air conditioners before you go all Aniston to Jolie on me, tiger.”

“I wish. He has a girlfriend. The unfortunate side to all of this. So he’s off-limits, but I cannot wait for you to see this guy. Muscles for days. Big muscles. What I would do to him!”

Madison started to giggle again. “I can’t take it—sometimes you surprise me, Alison.”

I know
, I thought. And I would run with it. Because maybe what I really wanted wasn’t what I’d originally imagined for myself at all.

“I’m game for the setup, Ira,” I said now. “But you should know that I do not have good luck with Davids. My last two relationships were with Davids, and since I’m still single, you can imagine how those worked out.”

Ira said he suspected that David was a bit of a mama’s boy, but he had heard good things and thought it was worth a shot. He continued: “Who knows? Maybe David will bring his mother on the date and you’ll get a boyfriend
and
a new job!”

Despite his being a fatherly figure, Ira’s displaced sense of boundaries made me squirm. Outwardly, I smiled.

For the next week, Keira, who had become much more friendly with me in the past weeks, and Ira were having a ball with the blind-date jokes.

“Call Jane Morgan and ask her about her son, unless she’ll be joining you for dinner” was a typical remark. Or my phone would ring and it would be Keira pretending to call me as David’s mother.

Just tell us where he’s taking you so we can show up. Come on—we can pretend not to know you. It will be so much fun
, said Keira over Gchat.

Fun for whom?
I typed back.
No way I could keep a straight face with you and Ira at the next table.

We were all enjoying the banter, but the real issue was that David hadn’t contacted me yet.

Then, finally, the pigeon landed.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Hello

Hello, Alison.

I have heard great things about you from my mother (through Ira Kahn) and in their attempt to play matchmaker, was given your email address. In an effort to get to know you in person versus email, can I take you out after work early next week? Let me know what days are best for you and we can make it happen.

Have a wonderful night.

David

After a few back-and-forth emails, David and I planned to meet the next week at the new Polo Bar, Ralph Lauren’s refined yet casual restaurant with both dinner and drink options. It was exciting to try a brand-new local gem on a first date. David told me multiple times that he had heard great things about me. If only he knew about his own popularity in my office! Maybe the third David would be the home run, after all.

I had never heard back from Keith, the biceps admirer, after responding to his initial email asking me out, but with David on the horizon, it didn’t seem to matter. In a way it was like auditioning—the more opportunities you had lined up, the less each one meant. I liked the fantasy of having to juggle men, but I wasn’t going to focus on the numbers of it all. Six months ago I would have checked my phone every three minutes, wondering . . . and wondering. Would he text? But somehow, after letting go and caring less, my phone kept buzzing with new activity. I had a feeling there was a lesson here, and it didn’t pertain only to my personal life.