Sad Desk Salad (9 page)

My father didn’t have much patience for my mother’s freak-out. My mom’s baseline personality is placid and bright; my dad was more of a brooder. The pattern they had set from the beginning was that my mother was the ray of sunshine that brightened up his default gloom. He couldn’t understand how his cheerful wife had become such an anxious mess—all he knew was he wanted her to get control of it. In order to yank her out of her doldrums he suggested a cross-country road trip to Berkeley the summer between his first and second years at Manning.

As they rambled through Wisconsin in their beat-up 1969 Bug, my father gave my mother a bombshell ultimatum: Either finish your dissertation in the six months after we return from this trip or take a job I’ve secured for you in the English department at Manning. I don’t know how the conversation played out after that. My parents never went into the particulars. All I know is my mother took the job at Manning. The half-finished dissertation is in a locked file cabinet in that attic office, where my mom grades papers to this day.

When my dad was still alive, my parents told this story so many times that the pathos got ironed out of it. They tried to make my mother’s panic seem silly, rather than harrowing, but I never really took it that way. And yet, my mom has never seemed unhappy as a teacher—she takes pride in her work and genuine succor from the connection with her young students. But there’s a palpable wistfulness about her. I suspect she always wonders what might have been if she had really pushed herself to write.

As if living out her sublimated fantasy, I wrote for the college newspaper at Wesleyan, and I took that writing very, very seriously. I didn’t want my dad to feel like he’d wasted his money, and I wanted to be proud of the articles I e-mailed home to my mom. I wrote some culture pieces about a subset of girl bands I liked and referred to as clit rock. But I also wrote investigative features that I thought would really change the world—or at least change Connecticut.

I was most proud of the eight-thousand-word exposé on an underfunded Bridgeport shelter for victims of domestic violence that won me the creative-nonfiction award for advocacy journalism at the end of my senior year. I was a favorite of the English department, and several of my fellow newspaper nerds complained that I wasn’t enough of an activist to deserve the award—like my piece was wasn’t worthy because I’d never chained myself to the nearest Planned Parenthood.

That was around the time I started applying for jobs. I thought I would be a shoo-in for intern or assistant gigs at liberal bastions like
American Prospect
and
The Nation
. But I heard nary a peep from any of them—even
Mother Jones
wouldn’t have me. Turns out that all the other earnest college kids from Vassar and Brown had already scooped up every position possible.

Then I tried to get a gig at every newspaper in the country, from Traverse City to Tarzana. I would have been happy to have covered the sanitation beat, writing about changes in street-sweeping for some tiny local daily in the hinterlands, but none of them would hire me, either—not even in an unpaid position.

After that second round of rejections, I decided to try for the gig at
Rev
. Sure, it wouldn’t involve the hard-hitting reporting I wanted to be doing, but I was hardly in a position to be picky. I knew that the industry had been slowly dying for years and I would be lucky to get any kind of job. Behind my dad’s back my mom secretly slipped me money for health insurance and other incidentals, since
Rev
wasn’t about to give me any benefits even though I worked full-time.

I’m still paying for my own health insurance these days out of pocket—and I can’t afford to lose my job. What’s more, my mom would be crushed. These are the prevailing thoughts in my head when I forward the e-mail to Moira, adding a single exclamation before the link: “OMG!!!!”

Moira IMs me right away.

MoiraPoira (1:45:38):
This is remarkable. Are you sure it’s the real thing?

Alex182 (1:45:45):
Pretty sure. I took a screen shot of that close-up of her face, and it looks just like her Facebook photos.

MoiraPoira (1:46:04):
That’s not enough.

Alex182 (1:46:13):
Okay, how about this: The quilt on the bed in the video matches the quilt on the bed in her Facebook photos.

MoiraPoira (1:46:25):
Better! I need to ask first: This girl is over 18, right?

Alex182 (1:46:57):
She’s 20.

MoiraPoira (1:48:35):
I need to send this to our lawyer now. If he says it’s kosher for us to post, you’re going to have to reach out to Rebecca and Darleen for comment. Can you handle that?

Alex182 (1:48:59):
I guess?

MoiraPoira (1:49:33):
Guessing is not good enough. If you want this, you’re going to have to reach out to them. If not, I am happy to give this scoop to Molly. But you’d have to be a fool to give this away—this post just saved your ass.

Smart Moira: She knows that I am way too competitive to allow any of the other girls—especially Molly!—to get credit for this. And she knows I need the page views. So do I.

Alex182 (1:50:01):
I’ll contact them as soon as we get the lawyer’s okay.

Curiously, my stomach churning has disappeared. My heart is racing but my previously hungover brain feels clear and sharp. I do two posts in quick succession. One is about the tabloid treatment of Jennifer Aniston. Headline: “How Does Gorgeous Multimillionaire Jennifer Aniston Get Called a Loser?” The other is a video of a Siamese kitten who has wedged himself into a large Mason jar. Headline: “Jar Jar Awwwwwwww.”

Doing those posts takes about forty-five minutes and I then have a lull. I catch my breath after the brief frenzy of work, and it is just enough time for the shame spiral to take hold. I start thinking about the potential repercussions of publishing this video. I can’t even imagine what a field day the hate blogger will have with my posting this. She’ll probably Photoshop my face onto Muammar Gadhafi’s corpse.

I bet the commenters will be worked into their highest self-righteous lather about this video. As much as we like to say we don’t care about the commenters and we try to downplay their importance, they manage to burrow into our skulls. Rel and I have had long conversations about the most prolific ones, as if they are distant cousins we are forced to tolerate at family reunions: “Oh my god, did you see what Weathergrrrl said yesterday about our beauty Q & A? ‘The world will only change through revolutionary action. Not through satisfying advertisers with stories about makeup.’ She really is a lunatic,” Rel once told me. “She’s always e-mailing me, trying to get me to write more about ‘oppressed peoples.’”

Which is not to say we’re not exceedingly fond of some of them: They mention us by name in the comments, occasionally to support us or tell us we made their day better. Once I posted something more personal than I usually do; it was a thinly veiled anecdote about my relationship with Caleb, pegged to some new book about how it’s a mistake for girls to try to gain acceptance from guys by aping their behavior. My favorite commenter, MrsDarcy25, sent me a personal message, telling me about her own failure to join her boyfriend’s dudely social circle. “This post made me feel less alone,” she wrote. Without sounding too Hallmark about it, I was touched.

But posting something like the Becky West video will be like detonating a nuke in a crowd of readers—and I don’t know if I have the thick skin to do it. I picture Becky back on that
Today
show couch, trying to explain to the new anchor, Savannah Guthrie, why she was wearing a bikini bottom for underwear while snorting coke off her robotics textbook.

Normally when I am this anxious about something work related I call Peter, but I tell myself that after our explosive morning I want to give him some space. If I’m being honest with myself, that’s not the only reason I don’t call. One of the pillars of Peter’s self-construction is a firm moral fiber. Maybe it’s the former altar boy in him, I don’t know. But if I tell him that I’m nervous about making this live, I’m pretty sure he’ll tell me not to post it. Even if I explain about the page-view pressure and about how horrible Darleen West is, he’ll stand firm. He might launch into a jeremiad about personal privacy and media responsibility. He’ll heave that deep, chesty sigh he always makes whenever he’s disappointed in me.

I can hear his voice now: “Alex,” he’ll say, “don’t do this.”

Chapter Five

I need to get ready to see Jane, so I peel off the muumuu, which is starting to smell like wet dog. I put on a bra and a clean madras sundress. I pull my air-dried hair back into a ponytail. Since the Cactus Inn, where I’ve arranged to meet Jane, is only a ten-minute walk from my apartment, I decide to take the time to mask my under-eye circles with some expensive French concealer that Tina swears by. I slop the beige goop in the deep troughs under my eyes and the dark pigmentation on my eyelids. Now I look like I’m wearing flesh-colored swim goggles. I accept this as an improvement, spritz on some perfume, and head out the door.

Jane is sitting at a sidewalk table as I approach the Cactus Inn, and she starts waving wildly as soon as she sees me in the distance. Every time I see her, the first thing I notice is her crooked grin, and I’m reminded anew of how much I love her. The sun is shining on her face, so she has on great big Elizabeth Taylor seventies shades. Her nearly black hair is in the chic bob she’s had since we moved to New York, and it looks freshly washed.

She gets up to hug me and promptly says, “You look like shit.” Even underneath the enormous sunglasses I can see her zeroing in on my shoddy makeup job.

“I know. I only got a few hours of sleep last night.”

“Is it because you were freaking out about that stupid hate site?”

“Kind of?” I can hear my voice swing up at the end of this sentence, as if I am asking a question. I don’t really want to talk to her about the Coney Island shenanigans. Jane doesn’t have a whole lot of patience for my misbehavior if she thinks I’ve been thoughtless about it. If I tell her the truth about my fight with Peter, she’ll tell me I’m being a jerk. So I change the subject. “How are you?”

“Oh I’m fine, truly. Today that punk Janelle O’Reilly called me a Chink bitch under her breath, which is a new one. I guess in the right lighting I could pass for Chinese,” Jane says. She is actually Peruvian, and Janelle is one of her favorite, and most vexing, kids. “But she’s just moody because I tried to get her to talk to me about why she suddenly has scratch marks on her inner arm that she’s trying to cover with about a thousand rubber bracelets. It’s a challenge. Hence the margarita.” Jane lifts it up, like a toast to the air.

Every time I hear about Jane’s job I feel guilty about spending so much time contemplating our cultural feelings about Jennifer Aniston.

“But my stuff is boring,” Jane says, setting her drink down and looking at my face. “I want to hear more about the latest crisis.”

“It’s not boring,” I tell her. “It’s great. How’s Ali?”

“He’s good. He got this enormous smoker that looks like R2-D2 and now he spends most of his free time in our crack yard figuring out how to smoke the hell out of large quantities of meat.” Jane and Aleister live in an apartment in the neighborhood next to ours. While they were drawn to the place because of the outdoor space, that space is a little, shall we say, rustic. It’s entirely concrete, and when Jane and Ali first moved in, it was filled with broken stroller parts and beheaded Barbies that had been left behind by the previous tenant. They’ve cleaned it up quite a bit, but Jane still refers to it as the crack yard.

“Ah yes, men and their meat,” I say. And then I can’t help bringing the conversation back to what’s been going on at work. “My coworker Tina is supposed to be doing some Internet recon to see if she can find out who owns the Breaking the Chick Habit domain, but I haven’t heard back from her on that. But I do have one major clue about the hate blogger’s identity: She’s definitely someone who knows me.”

“What?” Jane squeals, delighting in the gossip. “How can you tell?”

I explain about the newspaper clipping and how it has me spooked.

Jane’s thoughtful for a minute. “Hmm, I guess it does sound like it’s someone who knows you. Though there is the possibility that it could be a stranger who is really committed to digging up relics from your past.”

“I am a nobody! Just some girl who writes for some website. I refuse to believe that someone out there who has never even met me is demented enough to do all of this: to figure out where I grew up; to travel to the local Stanton, Connecticut, library; and to copy microfiche from 1992 so they can scan it into the Internet to prove a point,” I say.

“You never know. But you’re probably right, so let’s put our thinking caps on. Is it that girl who was dating Roger when you made out with him on your twenty-first birthday?” Jane asks.

“OMG, soul mates!” I laugh. “I thought of her, too. But I would hope that she’s over something that happened one night four years ago.”

“What about that weird girl who was in our French hypertextualism class? The one with the midget hands?” Jane waves her hands around for extra effect.

“She was just weirdly obsessed with those Parisian student protests in the sixties. She wasn’t psychotic. And I don’t think she hated me.” I’m a little defensive. I already feel like so many strangers hate on me in the Chick Habit comments that the idea of a random, distant acquaintance wishing me ill makes me shift around uncomfortably, uncrossing and then recrossing my legs.