Oh! You Pretty Things

  “Well,” I say, shooting for a measured tone and utterly failing. “I live here, for starters.”

  “Really?” She sets her bags on the countertop and regards me coolly. “Because last I checked, you’d pretty much abandoned ship.”

  “Yeah, about that,” I say, grateful for the transition, however awkward. “I found an apartment.”

  Donna springs into animated enthusiasm. “You did? That’s so great, buttercup. Where? Tell me everything.”

  Everything? Is she kidding? I don’t even want to tell her the zip code. “I’m just here to pack my shit. And to remind you that you need to be out in a couple of days.”

  I’m waiting for the screaming to start, but instead she opens the refrigerator and plucks a half-empty bottle of white wine from the door, her nails clacking against the door handle as it shuts, just forcefully enough to tip me that she’s having a feeling.

  “Would you like a drink?” she says, taking two of Megan’s Riedel wineglasses from the cupboard.

  The outward lack of a reaction to my bombshell makes me edgy. “Would I like a drink from my refrigerator?”

  She uncorks the bottle and fills her glass. She takes a sip, then pulls a bunch of scallions and a bag of gluten-free crackers from the bag. “Are you still eating gluten?”

  “Those are Megan’s favorite wineglasses,” I tell her, my voice quavering. “In fact, this is Megan’s favorite apartment, and did you hear me? You have to leave.”

  “Oh, I’ve made other arrangements.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well,” she says. “I talked to those nice landlords of yours.”

  “The landlords?” I repeat. “You talked to the landlords?”

  “They’re so sweet,” she says. “It seems there was some unsavory business about the lease not being in your name, but I’ve worked that all out.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I took over the lease from that girl you and Megan were ‘housesitting’ for. What do you think of the new walls in my bedroom? It’s called sandalwood.”

  I don’t say anything. I can’t. Star constellations explode like fireworks in my peripheral vision.

  “Or tell me about your new place,” she says, into the silence.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Now you’re just being difficult,” she says. “It’s ugly. And you know what else?”

  “Here it comes,” I say. “Let me guess: ‘I sacrificed everything for you’?”

  Donna rolls her eyes theatrically and takes a big sip of her wine.

  “No? How about ‘You had everything handed to you on a silver platter, and you dumped it in the trash bin’? Or is it the old chestnut about how you got screwed by the network in fucking 1922, when you were seven years old, and you should still—”

  Donna raises a hand in my direction as if she’s warding off evil spirits. “Just stop,” she says wearily. “For someone who’s so fucking smart, you’re acting like an idiot,” and the resignation in her voice makes me cringe. She’s still my mother, after all. “Everything I’ve done, I did to take care of you. Of you, of Gloria . . . and now Emily. Don’t you get that?”

  “To take care of me? To take care of—” Now I’m the one who’s yelling. “I don’t give a fuck about Emily. She’s another fucking fabrication in your lizard brain. Screw Emily. Let her die already.”

  “She’s falling apart.” Donna crumples into a faux-leopard-upholstered Louis IV chair I’ve never seen before. “One T-cell at a time. All she wants is to connect with her kid before it’s too late.”

  It’s not like I ever bought into the existence of Emily, but now I’m utterly confident she’s a figment, because Donna has taken it completely over the top. She doesn’t have enough empathy to care this much about anyone other than herself. It’s a rookie manipulation mistake, and, frankly, I’m a little surprised at her.

  I stand there for a minute, listening to myself breathe too heavily. Then I say, “And is there one good reason why Emily’s kid might want to connect with her?”

  “Because they’re family.”

  “Family,” I say, “is not a fucking excuse.”

  “Never mind,” Donna says, burying her face beneath her perfectly manicured hands. “Just go.”

  “Not a problem,” I say, though there’s something sitting so heavily in my chest that it feels like I’ve swallowed an anvil.

  I drag my moving boxes into my room and slam the door, hard, behind me. Because I’m twenty-nine. Going on nine. I pack all my stuff, my head throbbing and my jaw clenched.

  “So you’re leaving?” she calls through the closed door, five minutes later. “The room will be free?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Let me know if you need any help, buttercup.”

  Like nothing happened. Which pretty much encapsulates my drama with Donna, right there in one interaction.

  Thirty-two

  The move into the new apartment is freakishly smooth, and working for Eva is literally a dream come true. And I mean literally literally: I’ve dreamed of this a hundred times. I’m talking on the phone with Eva Carlton like we’re friends, I’m making plans and running errands for Eva Carlton.

  For the first time in my life, I’m inside the circle of real celebrity. That’s not me with my nose pressed against the glass, that’s not me feeling left out, left behind. Maybe I’m not famous, but I’m famous-adjacent, and the glow from the nearby klieg lights is good enough for me.

  Also, this is pretty much the easiest job I’ve ever had. For the first few weeks, I hardly even see Eva—which is thoroughly disappointing—because she’s on a break from her soap and working on a different show, which she mockingly calls Thirtysomething High. She’s in practically every scene because they’re maximizing the time they have her, stockpiling pieces of story that they’ll drop in for weeks or months after she’s gone.

  Mostly my job is cooking for her at my new apartment, then delivering the food to her before she gets home. I keep offering to cook at her house—I’m dying to get all Top Chef on her completely unused six-burner Viking range and Bosch double wall oven with the convection feature I’ve only read about in cooking magazines.

  She’s still brushing me off, even though I’m pretty sure we’re past the Star magazine suspicions. Maybe it’s just the privacy issue. She told me on my third day on the job, “This is the most important thing you need to learn: I don’t like people knowing my business. Especially about money. And that includes everyone.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “A lot of people—my manager, my mom, even Scout—are going to want information from you, stupid shit that may seem unimportant, but it’s the most important thing, above anything else, that you protect my privacy.”

  Which is easier if I’m never in her house, I suppose. Whatever. My new kitchen is the size of an airplane bathroom, but there’s something to be said for working at home in your underpants.

  My first big purchase with my Eva money is a Mazda GLC that I buy for two thousand bucks. It’s metallic gold and I tell myself that the upholstery smells like Cheetos, but it’s really closer to feet. It’s a three-door, and there’s a hole in the hatchback where someone removed the wiper-blade mechanism, but other than that, the car is cherry.

  I start running errands for Eva—easy things like picking up clothes from the dry cleaners or purchases from Barneys and Fred Segal. It’s amazing how quickly the anorexic salespeople at Les Habitudes morph into caricatures of fawning kindness when I say who I work for. I’m not gonna lie, I love it.

  It takes me ten days to fall for Eva. I find myself doing all of the silly, obsessive things most girls do when they’re pining after a guy: I check my phone every thirty seconds to make sure I haven’t missed a call or e-mail; I spend inordinate amounts of time choosing my outfits, piling
discarded clothing like a haystack on my unmade bed. I let imaginary conversations unspool in my head where I’m witty and poignant and just the right amount of self-effacing.

  I know I’m deep into a friend crush, but it feels intoxicating and perfect. For the first time, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’d always imagined that all I needed was one victory for myself—hell, one moment for myself—to lay the ghosts of my childhood to rest, to start my own life instead of feeling Donna looming over me. But this is even better.

  I feel the first rough swells of love when I finally start working at Eva’s house. She acts like she doesn’t know what to do with me, like she’s never had an assistant before. Maybe it’s because her previous assistants were all culled from her handful of close friends, either ones who went way back or ones like Scout, whom she met when she was a cocktail waitress at Skybar on Friday and Saturday nights. Or maybe she was just trying to make me feel comfortable, like I was a part of her family. I’m such a sucker for women who want to make me a part of their family.

  Sadly, I’m still in a phase with Eva where I’m hypercritical of everything that comes out of my mouth, constantly taking the temperature after every sentence I utter and beating myself up for always sounding too something: too eager, too agreeable, too desperate to please.

  I think it’s the flip side of the problem that most girls have with boys, all fluttery and insecure about their breath or if you can see that little bulge of back fat over their bra straps. Weirdly, I don’t have that. Boys are easy. Girls see everything and tuck it away to use against you later. Girls smile in your face and then spit in your hair when you bend down to tie your shoes. Boys are Labrador puppies, eager and sniffy; girls are coyotes, lurking in packs, waiting for a weak animal to cross their path.

  And for the first month, my working life with Eva feels like one long date with a boy I’m really, really into.

  “Oh, you like Okkervil River? I love Okkervil River.” Truth is, I barely know who they are—a couple guys with train-conductor beards and a skinny girl playing a lute?—but I forge ahead anyway. “My favorite song? Um, you know, that one they play all the time, I can’t remember what it’s called.”

  This is where a normal person would let the silence happen. Nope.

  ME: What’s your favorite?

  EVA: Right now it’s “Stay Young.”

  ME: Yeah, I really like that one too.

  The way Eva flips through magazines while we’re talking doesn’t do anything to ease my worry about my inadequacies.

  Why can’t my insecurity take the form of uncomfortable silences? That would be such a gift. Instead, I rush to fill any open space with words that clatter like the beads from a broken necklace onto the sidewalk.

  Then a crazy thing happens. We start talking about our childhoods.

  I’m standing in Eva’s capacious closet, hanging up dry cleaning; she’s sitting cross-legged on her king-size Duxiana bed, piles of magazines strewn around her, a couple scripts folded back to various places, scribbled with notes in red ballpoint pen. She’s wearing a white cotton romper with frilly eyelet around the leg holes and a pair of suede, knee-high UGG boots.

  “Do you ever think things would be easier if you’d had a different childhood?” she says.

  I freeze with my arm still outstretched toward the space I’ve created to hang up a handful of Rag & Bone denim. “What do you mean?”

  She doesn’t answer, so I gather up the wire hangers and dry-cleaning bags and step into the bedroom, where I find her hugging a pillow to her chest and peering up at me, her eyes wide and engaged.

  “My dad used to beat the shit out of me for little things,” she says. “Like forgetting to pick up the dog bowls from the kitchen floor. He’d drag me out of my bedroom and into the living room. I guess it wasn’t satisfying if he didn’t have an audience.”

  I feel like I’ve hit the emotional jackpot, but I’m clueless how to proceed. “That’s hideous,” I say, internally cringing at the hollowness of my tone.

  “My mom would beg him to stop, but she’d always close the living-room curtains so the neighbors couldn’t see.”

  “Wow,” I say, “that’s as bad as what your dad did.”

  She shoots me a sharp frown and my stomach plummets. Then her face crumples and she starts to cry. “You’re right,” she says, wiping her tears with the scalloped edge of the white Frette sheet. “You’re right.”

  “I never met my dad. Donna calls him the sperm donor.”

  “Who’s Donna?”

  “Oh,” I say. “My mom.”

  “You call your mom Donna?”

  “Yeah, she lost ‘Mom’ when I was fourteen.”

  “What does that mean?” Eva says, and she’s morphed from being a teary rumple into an eager sponge, sopping up the details of my story like it’s spilled wine.

  “That’s when I moved out,” I say, and I’m not sure why, but I’m not feeling nearly as freaked out as I was a couple minutes ago. There’s something easy about just telling the fucking truth.

  “So what did you do? Did you get emancipated?” Eva sweeps a pile of magazines onto the floor with her UGG-booted foot. “Here, sit.”

  “No,” I say, flopping down beside her. “I just, you know, found a roommate on Craigslist and got a job at a catering company that hired undocumented workers.”

  “Is that how you started cooking?”

  “No,” I say. “I made shitty sandwiches in a commercial kitchen that girls in booty shorts and tank tops sold door-to-door in office buildings.”

  “Seriously?” Eva says, laughing. “Who does that?”

  “I know, right?” I say.

  We sit in her darkened bedroom for an hour, swapping mother stories, which absolutely cements my girl crush on her. I find myself telling her about meeting Trent Whitford, about that first failed photo shoot on the beach.

  “Two days later,” I say. “My mother hoses me down with Calèche like a cosmetics-department lady and says she convinced Trent to give me another chance.”

  Eva’s big eyes get even bigger. “What did you say?”

  “I told her I wasn’t going,” I say. “She told me I was.”

  “So you did?”

  I shrug. “He took me to ‘this killer beach pad’ up past Paradise Cove, all palm trees and hibiscus and bougainvillea. I remember thinking that my mother would shit herself. There were other cars there, so I figured at least we wouldn’t be alone, but when we walked in through the unlocked front door, there was no one.”

  “Shit,” Eva says.

  “Yeah. Then, y’know, we split a bottle of champagne, and he took me outside and stopped in front of this golf cart with a fringed canopy. He asked if I’d ever driven a golf cart. I was peeing my pants.”

  Eva edges closer to me. “What did you say?”

  “I told him to ask me again in five minutes.”

  “Oh my God, do not stop talking,” Eva says, and she flips her bare, tanned legs across mine, like she’s not going to let me up until I finish the story.

  I tell her that Trent laughed, hooking his leg around the console between us in the golf cart and mashing his foot on top of mine onto the gas pedal. I tell her that I burst into squealing giggles as we went careening down the path toward the ocean. We swerved and swooped downward until we reached a contemporary, two-story house. It was dark inside, but I could see straight through the sweeping walls of glass to a lit-up black-bottomed swimming pool and the waves cresting in the ocean just beyond.

  “Whose house is this?” I asked.

  Trent pushed my hair over my shoulder, letting his fingers linger on my neck for just enough time to make me shiver.

  “Darling,” he said, like he was talking to a small child. “This is the pool house.”

  I was grateful for the dim light of the driveway to hide my embarrassment. �
��Well, obviously.”

  Trent clinked the open bottle against my wineglass and we both drank before heading inside.

  Everything was fine. Trent showed me to a bathroom near the front door with white hydrangeas in a mirrored silver vase and a stack of fluffy white hand towels in a silver basket. I ran a brush through my hair and slicked on some lip gloss. My eyes were shiny and wide-open, like I was surprised about something. I took my pink bikini from my purse and slipped it on under my dress.

  The swimming pool was spectacular, a black-bottomed kidney shape with a Jacuzzi and a tumbled-rock waterfall down at the deep end. There were twinkle lights in all the trees.

  Trent had a flash attachment for his camera, a big, round disk with a little bulb at the center that sizzled and popped every time he clicked the shutter.

  I perched on a wrought-iron lounge chair and pulled my dress over my knees, looking up into the big, black eye of his camera lens.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  “Lie back and put your hands behind your head. Like that. That’s great.”

  Pop.

  “Move your dress up higher on your legs. Fantastic.”

  Pop. Pop.

  Then I was in the swimming pool, my dress billowing around me and the lights from the bottom of the pool shining through the white stripes gone sheer in the water.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  Pop.

  He wrapped me in a big, white towel. “Take off that dress and I’ll get some shots of you under the waterfall. You look amazing.”

  He topped off my champagne and I was shy about stripping down to my pink bikini, even though I’d worn it to the beach and the swimming pool at SMC all summer. It felt different in the dark, with champagne and cigarettes. What if he looked at me and realized he’d made some horrible mistake?

  “Are we gonna do this, beautiful?” Trent said.