The Knockoff (18 page)

NOVEMBER 2015

T
he Human Resources department for Robert Mannering now mandated that two people be in the room whenever someone was being let go from the company in case the aggrieved party made a scene or later claimed they were fired under unfair circumstances. The decree was handed down after Eve fired three people by text message. For no discernible reason Eve decided that third party would be Ashley Arnsdale, and bearing witness to biweekly executions, as she had come to think of them, had become a part of Ashley’s job description that she never talked about with anyone.

Back in the summer of 2009, Ashley had been fired from Old Tyme Ice Cream out in Montauk, where her parents had their summer house.

“You are so good at so many things,” Mr. Wilson, the shop’s longtime proprietor had said to her. “But you are terrible at scooping ice cream.” It was fair and true. Ashley spent most of her time chatting with the customers about the ice cream, rather than serving it to them. Mr. Wilson at least let her go with a week’s pay and a kind smile. Eve smiled when she fired people, but it wasn’t kind.

“I just don’t see how you are useful to this site,” Eve said to the young male engineer sitting in front of her in the conference room, well after ten p.m. one night. Weren’t there rules about firing someone this late?

“Seriously,” Eve continued. “Prove to me that you should keep this job when the rest of your team has worked at least ten more hours than you have in the past three weeks.”

Oh jeez. Ashley wanted to hide beneath the big white conference table. Or hug him. Or both. Humans shouldn’t treat other humans like this. This was literally the worst.

“I’m here until midnight every night,” he countered meekly.

“The rest of your team sleeps here,” she said, her lips curling at the end. “You aren’t a team player. You don’t want to succeed. Plus…” Eve paused and made a show of looking at his grimy Converse sneakers and plaid button-down over a faded gray T-shirt with a Stormtrooper on it. He was tall and doughy, with a belly that belied too many nights of Seamless. His eyes were slightly crossed. “I just don’t think you are a cultural fit here.”

He looked like every other tech dude that Ashley knew. This was their uniform: sneakers, jeans, button-down. Eve just liked saying words like “cultural fit.” She learned them in business school. The lingo reminded Ashley of Benji, her college boyfriend who went to Northwestern B-school right after college. That guy was a douche.

There was no correct response to “cultural fit.” It wasn’t like Eve said, “You dress like a slob or a homeless person.” But it was a lie. Eve was trying to outsource all their engineering jobs to the Balkans, an apparent new hotbed of nerd talent. Ashley focused on a moth across the room, desperately beating its wings against the glass wall.
I feel you, buddy
, she thought.

Ashley felt the urge to make a joke to lighten the mood, but she didn’t dare. She’d learned six firings ago not to interrupt Eve. When she did, Eve turned on her. It was best to sit as still as possible. There really wasn’t a worse person for this job though. Ashley had no poker face. When she knew Eve’s attention was directed the other way she would silently mouth, “It’s okay,” and, “I’m sorry,” to the former employees. She’d have to bring this up in therapy tomorrow. She’d
been going twice a week since August and had just hit the amount for her deductible, so now she was going three times a week. Free therapy! Woo hoo!

“You’re just not good enough to work at Glossy.com,” Eve concluded this time and stood, walking out of the room without another word.

The engineer turned his tired eyes to Ashley in disbelief.

“I’ll help you clean out your desk,” she said before lowering her voice and handing him a slip of paper with her cell phone number on it. “I might have some work for you on a top secret project.”

Imogen worried she might be growing more invisible. She was no fool. Each day that she was still editor in chief could very well be her last. The fashion industry had always been cutthroat. You were only as good as your last collection, your last shoot or your last cover. To call this world judgmental was a grievous understatement. For a long time, Imogen had done all the right things. She’d craft a brilliant cover line she knew would sell. And it would. She would find a young twig of a girl and turn her into the next Kate Moss or connect a talented no-name designer with a massive label to make him or her the next big thing. Along the line the career hadn’t been so much a choice as something that was an inescapable part of her character.

What she couldn’t deny was that this new world was making her feel like a fucking dummy. Angry and stupid was not exactly a winning combination for an editor in chief. She nodded along to the metrics that the little girls in her office were showing her, but it might as well have been a bird’s nest of figures, for all Imogen could untangle them in her head. The rules ceased to exist. A career was no longer linear. Eve proved that, leapfrogging straight from assistant to a number two (maybe a number one).

Each day Eve found new ways to make Imogen feel subordinate. She left Imogen out of meetings and she made big decisions without consulting her, including the hiring of new staff.

Of course, there were some things Imogen loved about this new world. The instant connection to an entirely new group of people
through Instagram and Twitter was just as addictive as a jolt of caffeine. The favorites, the likes and the retweets all made her feel a strange sense of validation, which didn’t jibe at all with how she felt in real life. In the Insta-filtered world she was bathed in this kind of golden glamour that made everything look perfect, when outside the filter she sometimes had trouble remembering to breathe.

This must have been what workers felt like during the Industrial Revolution. All of a sudden their entire lives were upended. One month they had a small family business making horseshoes or cheese for their neighbors and the next they were forced into a factory to make things for nameless, faceless customers. That was how Imogen felt about the Internet. Sure, she never met most of the readers back when
Glossy
was a magazine, but she felt a connection with them. She
understood
them. She didn’t quite get the young women who clicked on “20 Essential Items to Make Pumpkin Picking Chic” or “The 10 Weight Training Tricks You Can Do in Your Car with a Water Bottle.” She desperately wanted to understand them, to climb inside their millennial brains and knock around the wires and coils to figure out what made them tick.

A heaviness enveloped Imogen the first thing every morning. Its weight dared her to rise out of the bed against it. No matter how early she woke up, her in-box was buried in emails, most of them composed of abbreviated words and phrases written in a Joycean stream of consciousness from Eve sent at all hours of the night. When you’re on top of the world, getting out of bed is such a simple thing. When life makes a wrong turn, just pulling off the covers can be the hardest thing you do all day.
I just want to lie here
, a voice in Imogen’s head whispered as she buried her face in her pillow each morning.

Where she had once left the office every night at six, she now found herself having to sneak out to make it home by nine p.m.

On one of those nights Imogen stumbled upon a girl weeping in the elevator.

It could have been any night of the week. The schedule never changed. There was no longer the rhythmic play of the monthly magazine schedule, when it became frenetically busy, then relaxed, before picking up to start all over again. She tried desperately to maintain
a small amount of editorial control, at least glancing at things now before they went up on the website, sometimes giving them a hard edit, approving and discarding photos.

She had never been a true line editor, but she had also never seen more errors in her entire life.

“Who is editing these?” she’d asked Eve that morning.

Eve barely looked up from her laptop as she shrugged her bare shoulders. “No one. They go straight on the site. It’s the Internet. It can always be fixed.”

“You don’t think it’s sloppy?”

“I think more is better.”

The conversation ended there.

It was nonstop. The site was updated twenty-four hours a day, content determined by traffic. If a certain celebrity got engaged then the site could do as many as thirteen related fashion posts on that celebrity’s style, her fiancé’s style, their future child’s style and the obligatory wedding style. Right now they averaged more than one hundred pieces of content a day. All of it ended with the same juvenile tag line: “Make sure you never miss any of our LOL-worthy stuff! Sign up for the
Glossy
newsletter today!”

Leaving at eight felt like a luxury when there was still an army of women inside the office clacking away at their keyboards, nibbling on the sushi platters Eve ordered in for dinner and chugging their cheerfully colored Organic Avenue juices and diet Red Bulls.

Imogen felt guilty about staying and guilty about going home. She never turned the lights out in her office. She would leave a sweater behind on her chair, her computer screen on and the office fully aglow, hoping to create the impression that she could be somewhere else in the building at any given time. At the end of the day she knew she wasn’t fooling Eve. Something told her that Eve knew exactly where she was at any given moment. There was probably an app for that.

The girl was already standing at the elevator bank when Imogen arrived. Her perfectly round head hung limp and her shoulders shook. She walked quietly into the elevator once it reached their floor and kept her face to the back wall instead of turning forward. It was
only after the doors closed safely behind her that she let loose a wail like an animal being led to the slaughterhouse. She was just a speck of a thing, with hair the shade of honey. She looked vaguely familiar to Imogen, but there were so many new faces in the office these days. They all blended into one another.

Moments like these made Imogen feel validated in still carrying a small embroidered white handkerchief in her purse. She had small bags of Kleenex as well, the kind you purchase in bulk a month after becoming a mother. Imogen tapped the girl quietly on the shoulder and offered up her proper handkerchief. The girl took it without glancing up and wiped mascara down her cheeks before blowing her nose and letting loose another wail straight from the bowels of hell.

“It can’t be all that bad.” Imogen patted her uncertainly. Why did she say that? She knew exactly how bad it was in that office.

“It is. She’s a witch.” The girl finally turned her exhausted eyes up at Imogen. “I did everything Eve asked me. I’ve been working for three days straight. Then I fell asleep at my desk. She told me that only losers need sleep. That was it. That was enough for her. She just fired me. Right in front of everyone. She told me to pack up my things and go home and not bother to come back tomorrow.”

Now Imogen recognized the girl as one of the editorial assistants Eve hired to do the typical assistant duties, transcribing, answering phones, setting up market appointments, the things she had done herself just a few years before.

“Why haven’t you been home in three days?”

“Didn’t you get the memo? She told us we all had to stay to help meet the traffic goals she set for the investors by the end of the month. She set up air mattresses back in the supply closet. We take turns back there, but it was loud. I had a hard time falling asleep.”

Now Imogen could see the dark circles beneath the young woman’s eyes, giving her the appearance of someone much older.

“I’ve seen a lot of people besides me get fired,” the girl said. “It’s sort of like, ‘Let’s see who lasts the longest.’ ”

There was nothing Imogen could say. She’d heard whispers of how Eve fired people, but she had never been around to witness it. She’d assumed she did it late at night. Eve was on such a hiring streak
that Imogen could barely keep track of who was coming in, and she definitely couldn’t keep track of who was going out.

“I’m sorry” was all she could think to say. “No one deserves to be let go like that.” Imogen didn’t even know if it was legal to let someone go like that. She had fired only three employees in her life and each time she’d had to create a monthlong paper trail of their offenses and had a member of the Human Resources staff present. For a second the girl looked at Imogen with pity in her eyes, as if she believed Imogen could be the next one bawling in an elevator.

There were only a few floors to go. “I don’t have any savings. I won’t be able to pay my rent next month.” It wasn’t a plea. The young woman said it as a fact, as if she needed to say it out loud to make sure that the universe knew it was true.

She didn’t have anything left to say to Imogen. The girl strode fast onto the street, not bothering to look back. Imogen stepped into the lobby and then pivoted into the elevator, pushed a button and watched it light up for the twenty-seventh floor.

As Imogen stepped back into the office, she saw Eve standing tall in the middle of the room.

“Go!” she yelled. Twelve young women were lined up on opposite sides of the room. Each of them held a silver spoon out in front of her and on top of that was balanced a white egg. When Eve shouted they ran across the room, eggs flying off half the spoons and splattering on the ground. The room was fraught with the anxiety of planned fun, the kind commonly experienced on holidays like New Year’s Eve and Halloween. You played, you partied, you danced, you drank, you balanced an egg on a spoon in a midtown office building. You did these things because everyone else was doing them and someone told you this was what you were meant to be doing to have a good time. But the women in the room just looked tired. Imogen knew they would rather be at their desks finishing whatever it was that was still on their to-do lists so they could go home to their own apartments and have fun with their real friends and real families.