All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  “We’ll have to borrow from our savings,” I admitted.

  “And you see how the interest will then dwindle,” he added, officiously.

  It was always difficult for me to believe that there weren’t plenty of ways for us to spend less. We bought things we didn’t desperately need—candles, for instance, and health insurance. We ate better than we had to, and we contributed regularly to retirement funds. We were middle class, for God’s sake. If we were willing to eke by for a while, how could we not have enough money? “Fine!” I said. “You’ve convinced me! I’ll give up shampoo!”

  “Margaret, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I wanted to work on this together, remember? But you can see, can’t you, that dirty hair isn’t going to make all that much of a difference?”

  “What about,” I whispered, my eyes fixed on a clump of cat fur under the table, “credit cards?”

  “Margaret, you don’t mean that.” Ted equated credit card borrowing with selling a firstborn child. “Anyway,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder, “we’ll be fine as long as you’re finished by June, which it sounds like you will be. And if you need another month or two, I could probably sell an article.”

  I squeezed my head between my palms to create a counter-pressure. I could imagine the conversation we’d have in June when there was no book and no money.

  “You know,” I said, as Ted neatly inserted the envelope of figures between two pages of the ledger for safekeeping, “maybe I should look for a part-time job. Trollope, you know, worked in the post office, and look how much he produced.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. You don’t want to slow the work down. Sally Sternforth turned down an assignment to do a piece on Cuba once she got into her book. She didn’t want other projects distracting her.”

  “But just because I’m into it,” I argued, following him to the door, “I could probably afford the distraction. I think it’s only a matter of organizing my time efficiently.”

  “Let’s think about it,” he said and kissed me goodbye. At the landing, he turned back. I was closing the door, but I heard his words distinctly. “Work hard,” he said.

  Work hard! I would have been happy to work hard. It wasn’t that I was lazy. It was just that I didn’t know what, exactly, to do. Telling a person to work hard on a novel is like telling a person to think. You can’t just do it on command. I slumped in the chair and laid my head for a moment on the table, my face in the figures Ted had written. Why not get a job, I thought, something part-time? If I were making money, finishing the novel by June—which was obviously not going to happen—would be less crucial. Also, it might in fact be true, as I’d argued to Ted, that curtailing my hours could actually help me to focus and get more done in the remaining time. I clearly didn’t need to keep the entire day free so that I could peruse the back of the credit card bill.

  I remembered the card the freelance guy had given me. Having been a student and a teacher, wasn’t I qualified to do all manner of research, writing, and editing, or even perhaps seminar or conference running, what with my experience in front of a class? I could freelance as a communications specialist. I was not sure what “communications” meant in the business world, having previously thought of the term only as a long way to say “talk,” but I could learn.

  Dear M—

  The children and I were invited to swim today. At Jeanette’s. When she gave me directions and it was clear we’d be crossing Sunset, I suspected her house would be nice, maybe even nicer than Zoe and Brad’s, so I thought I was prepared, but, in fact, a person like me cannot be prepared for such a place. I may have left some drool on her windows.

  The house was hidden from the road, of course. And the driveway was blocked with the usual mechanical gate, the security device of choice among those living north of Sunset and aesthetically preferable to the bars people south of Pico install over their windows. I spoke into the intercom, as if ordering hamburgers, and then the gate swung slowly open, its little motor humming.

  “Hurry, Mom,” Hunter said. He was worried that the gate would close on us before we were through (in disgust, I suppose, when it realized it was admitting a car equipped with crank windows). The driveway slipped gracefully through a small grove of eucalyptus to a parking area where we left the Tercel next to a silver Lexus SUV and a bronze BMW coupe. (Jeanette’s husband must drive the gold car.) Along the walls of the house huge terra-cotta pots held flowering trees. Do you have any idea how expensive a pot large enough to hold a tree is? Not to mention the trees themselves. I counted ten of them.

  Jeanette came out to meet us in a chic little sunsuit, wincing as her bare, pedicured feet touched the hot brick of the back patio. Jake and India, her children, gamboled beside her in all-cotton bathing suits available in Neiman Marcus and certain Malibu boutiques. Needless to say, I was shuffling along in gym shorts and rubber flip-flops from the drugstore, as were my children.

  How can I describe the tastefulness of her house? The gracious width of the hallways between unscuffed, custard-colored walls. The brown-sugar-stained floorboards. The whimsically hung paintings by California artists. The buttery leather couch cushions. The grand piano with its slightly yellow keys.

  Jeanette had assured me that her house, like mine, was full of junk. There is, however, absolutely no similarity between the Peabodys’ furnishings and ours. Her children’s desks are made of “reclaimed” pine, their well-grained surfaces gently “distressed.” They evoke history: the farmwife scrubbing, one hand spreading the scouring sand, scooped from the creek bed at dawn, the other wielding the rough, homespun cloth, dipped in clear water, also scooped from the creek at dawn. Or the young scholar, sleeve secured in an elastic band, polishing the wood with his elbow, as he declines his Greek nouns with a quill dipped in ink. Indeed, a discreet and lovely blotch of black ink near one corner endowed Jake’s desk with character. Marlo (thus far, the only child of ours with her own desk) works on plastic laminated “wood,” produced when sawdust left over after boards have been cut is pressed into an incredibly heavy slab that bears no resemblance to the tree from which it came. Her brothers’ trucks and her mother’s X-acto knife have painfully scored its hard, impersonal finish, and markers, overreaching the page they were coloring, have fringed the surface here and there with their unnatural hues.

  The field of chocolate leather on Jeanette’s horsehair fainting couch is artfully broken by a paisley cashmere throw in subtle golds and muted reds that the Peabodys picked up in London. The grape juice stains on our foam-core loveseat, on the other hand, are hidden by an afghan crocheted in hot pink and lime green acrylic by my grandmother. Most impressive is the huge Oriental carpet that covers their living room floor. Even I, who know almost nothing about carpets except to avoid those of the zebra patterns and acrylic sheens that hang for sale over the chain-link fence on La Cienega and Olympic, can tell that this is the real thing. The colors are faded—obviously nothing but vegetable dye touched these yarns—and the pattern is intensely intricate, more detailed the closer you look. (I know this because I knelt to examine the fibers while the others were in the kitchen. They smelled vaguely of camel.) A really good carpet makes all the difference, Margaret.

  “Where are the dolls with the matted hair?” I wanted to ask. “Where are the action figures and the dinosaurs? Where is the plastic truck with the missing wheel?” In the bathroom, wild grasses were suspended in the soap, and the bar was clear all the way through, not white and gummy underneath. The house overlooks the ninth hole of a golf course so exquisitely landscaped that the green appears to be a fairy glen nestled among tree-covered hills.

  “This looks familiar,” I said as we approached the pool, where a twelve-foot sculpture of a woman lounged on her side, her head propped in one hand. “Is it a copy of the Dumeule that was at the Armand Hammer?”

  Jeanette playfully covered her face with her hands and shook her head, “Oh, I was so annoyed when they got one. Theirs is the
fifth cast. Ours is the second.”

  Jeanette and I lay on teak pool chairs, sipping ginger iced tea. I actually lay on my chair only intermittently and for scant seconds at a time, since Ivy, who was supposed to be entertaining herself with an assortment of hand-carved wooden farm animals, kept toddling off in the direction of the water.

  “So what have you been doing since KSMC?” Jeanette asked. “Tell me everything.”

  With four children, two dogs, and three cats, I have mostly been picking up poop. “Oh, this sort of thing,” I said, jumping up to herd Ivy back to the farm.

  Marlo was practicing her dives and India and Noah were splashing contentedly on the steps at the shallow end, but Jake seemed to be dunking Hunter relentlessly and with a bit too much vicious fervor. I drew Jeanette’s attention to the roughhousing Tactfully, however, I did not single her son out as the perpetrator.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeanette said. “Jake’s used to wild kids. His cousin, Colby, is a handful, too.”

  “Hunter,” I said, “c’mere a minute.” I crouched over the pool, which was lined with a lovely dove gray slate. “Are you all right?” I asked, when he was hanging on to the slippery side. He nodded, but I know my kids. “Do you want to get out for a while?” He shook his head. “Why don’t you two do some races? I’ll start you. And Mrs. Peabody can judge the finish.”

  “Mrs. Peabody! That makes me feel so old!” Jeanette hopped off her chair athletically and swooped Ivy up to carry her to the finish line. “I don’t think anyone even calls my mother-in-law Mrs. Peabody. Possibly Mrs. P. Anyway, your kids have to call me Jeanette. You don’t want my kids to call you Mrs. MacMillan, do you?”

  I did, actually. Or Aunt Letty would be all right, if it seemed I would become a permanent part of their lives. “You are old,” I wanted to say. I trace the loss of civility in modern society to adults’ efforts to hold on to their youth by instructing three-year-olds to call them by their first names. However, “Letty’s fine,” I said.

  “So,” she said later, when the kids were eating a wide variety of sandwiches—Jeanette gave them choices, which I hardly ever do. “Allowing children to express their preferences, within reasonable boundaries, of course, develops their sense of autonomy,” Jeanette said. This is probably true, but it also creates a great deal of work for the sandwich-maker, in this case, the nanny, Carmelina. Jake, by the way, requested peanut butter and jelly on rosemary ciabatta—Anyway, “So,” she said, “I always thought you’d be a producer, or actually, station manager somewhere, by now.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I was just sort of filling time at the station after college. You know, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. But you seemed really to get it. To understand what made good radio. You were always coming up with those story ideas, remember?”

  I’d had probably six ideas in the two years I worked at the station, only one of which—a weekend-long demonstration in which participants constructed a colony of sandcastles and then filmed the tide washing them away to show solidarity with the homeless—a reporter pursued. (Radio was perhaps not the best medium for a story centering on water disintegrating sand structures, although we recorded some great-sounding waves as background.) Still, when she said that, some small, ridiculous part of me thought—“Yes, yes! She’s absolutely right! I was a budding radio genius, who gave up fame and fortune, or at least dignified cocktail party chat, to focus on potty training! What had I been thinking?”

  “Aren’t you ever bored?” she asked, pushing a heavy silver fork made to resemble the sort one would find laid out on fresh white paper over a white linen tablecloth in a French bistro through the multicolored layers of a vegetable terrine.

  “No,” I lied. “Are you?”

  “Bored!” She laughed and shook her head before sipping her freshened iced tea. “I’m under way too much pressure to be bored. Every event brings a whole new set of demands—staff problems and food preferences and venues I have to get special permission to use. And people always want themes. I did something for the Philharmonic—everything …” She drew an arc with one hand in the air here, “modern classical music.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Japanese,” she said. “Exotic vegetables julienned. An asymmetrical cake with pure black frosting. Every taste very distinct, inharmonious. But delicious. It was a challenge. But that’s what I love about this job. It taps both my practical and my creative sides. It combines business and art. And I meet a lot of celebrities. Which is fun, because you can talk about them later. Discreetly, of course.” She giggled. “It’s hard,” she went on, sighing, luxuriating in self-pity. “But I love it. It’s my life, really. After Charlie and the kids, of course.”

  Love,

  L

  CHAPTER 12

  Margaret

  “MARGARET SNYDER! Of course, I remember you. How’s the war going?”

  “It’s all right. Almost finished, actually.” Why was I lying to Irving Wolcott? “How’s your book?” I asked this, although I believed it morally wrong to encourage someone like Irving, whose novel resembled a Hardy Boys mystery without the plot.

  “Oh, you know. I’m giving it a break for a while. Recharging my batteries.”

  So he was stuck, too. It disturbed more than reassured me that he and I were in the same boat. Not only that, but I was about to ask to share his paddle. “Irving, I’m calling about your business, the card you gave me? You know, your freelance group?”

  He laughed. “I know my business, Margaret.”

  “Well, of course, but …” I couldn’t think how to ask what I needed to know. Perhaps my communication skills were not quite what I’d assumed.

  “You want to do some freelancing?”

  “Well, I thought I’d look into it.”

  “That’s great, Margaret! We’re always looking for smart people like yourself.”

  I was flattered.

  “You know, I loved the comments you gave on my work. First chance I get, I’m going to try reorganizing the way you said, putting the action up front and so on.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “I’m glad they were helpful.” And helpful to me, too, maybe, if they’d given him the impression I was smart.

  “We’re having a networking meeting next Thursday at the Hilton. You should come, see what’s out there, and we’ll match you up with some employers.”

  Ted was skeptical. As usual.

  “But you’ve never done anything remotely businesslike,” he said. He was sitting on a stool in the bathroom over several sheets of newspaper, while I cut his hair with electric clippers. Unfortunately, this would not save us any money, since we’d been doing it for years.

  “That isn’t true, Ted. That summer I worked at Just Desserts I completely redesigned their menus. That would be marketing.”

  “That would be a summer job.”

  “And I was the faculty liaison with the parents’ association. Public relations.”

  Ted sighed.

  “Look,” I said, raising my voice over the sound of the razor, “I’ve been reading and writing for years; I’m pretty sure I can handle any work that makes use of the English language. Also, I could translate for ancient Assyrians.”

  Ted laughed. “I just worry that you’ll lose your momentum on the book. This other thing—whatever it is—is never going to be a career, you know.”

  “I know,” I said with irritation. “Hold still.”

  “If you want to give up on the book, you should give some serious thought to what you want to do with the rest of your life, not run around after part-time work you don’t even understand.”

  “Damn it! I said to hold still. Now look what I’ve done.”

  I had let the clippers sink too close to his scalp and an inch-long white gash appeared in the dark hair on the side of his head. He held up the hand mirror to study it. “That’s all right,” he said. “It’ll grow back.”

  “I’ll color it in.”

&nbs
p; This sort of thing had happened before and we’d learned that I could disguise it fairly well with black Magic Marker as long as I worked in little hairlike strokes.

  “Look, Ted,” I said, marker in hand, “I’m not giving up on the book. I just don’t want it to cost us everything, so I’m going to spend a few hours a week earning a little money. Aren’t you the one who said we needed more money?”

  “I thought we figured that out together.”

  “Anyway,” I said, razoring around his ears now, “I won’t let it take time from the book.”

  The next morning, as I blew the curl out of my hair, I wondered if I would soon be writing investors’ newsletters for a Wall Street bank or composing the text to accompany the installation of new works by an up-and-coming artist/welder in Tribeca. I told myself, however, that the book was merely stalled, and that I should on no account take on too many projects. No more than fifteen, absolutely no more than twenty, hours a week. The novel was still my priority.

  When I exited the elevator on the windowless floor that housed the hotel’s conference rooms, I was somewhat dismayed by the banquet tables tiled in name tags and the overeager crowd clutching Styrofoam cups of coffee lightened with nondairy creamer. Was I to be the sort of laborer whose sweat, induced by pressure from the bosses and overheated cubicles, remained a clammy secret under an ill-fitting jacket? I reminded myself that when I published my novel, whatever paper pushing I’d do as a member of this group would make a charming story for radio interviews and smiled at the woman who sat behind the “Freelance Network” table. It wasn’t her fault that this was the best she could do.

  “Can I help you?” She smiled back and placed her fingers on the faux wood veneer in readiness.

  “Well, I’m hoping to find some sort of freelance work. I’m quite skilled in anything that has to do with manipulating language. I majored in English at Penn and completed all the requirements for a major in Near Eastern archaeology, except for statistics. I know archaeology might not sound helpful, but, in fact, it teaches one how to think logically better than most disciplines. And, of course, there is a lot of language work, mostly with dead languages, I admit, but that teaches one grammar, you know, from the inside out …”