“Thanks,” I say, grateful for the easy interaction. I pay for my sandwich and head back home, but the second I step outside my myriad anxieties hit me along with a blast of truck exhaust and hot air. “Shit shit shit shit shit,” I chant quietly as I dart back into the street.
As quickly as possible I open the door and throw my canvas bag onto the Saarinen chair my grandparents gave us. That chair is the one nice thing in our apartment, and instead of using it to actually sit in, Peter and I have turned it into a crap receptacle. The second we enter the apartment we dump all the day’s detritus directly onto the chair. I slump back onto the crusty couch and flip my laptop open again.
There’s an IM waiting for me from Jane.
JaneRivera (12:47:11): Hey gurl.
Jane and I met during the second week of our freshman year at Wesleyan. A friend of hers from boarding school lived down the hall from me, and Jane came with us to a white-trash party that was being thrown by a French Canadian hockey player who lived in our dorm. We all wore gleaming white wife-beaters and multicolored bras without even coordinating. I don’t remember much from that night (blame the Everclear punch) but I do recall Jane making a really viciously funny joke about our truly dumb Canuck host and his unformed “fetus face.”
After that Jane and I were fast friends. We lived together the summer between our sophomore and junior years and continued to be roomies when we moved to New York. When my dad died, Jane was the one who made me get out of bed every morning even when I was plastered to the sheets with tears still crusted to my face. My mom has decreed that Jane is an honorary Lyons, and she has come home with me every Thanksgiving since we were nineteen—her family lives in Iowa so the trek was always too long and expensive to make just for a few days.
The thing about Jane is that she isn’t all biting humor. She’s also got a very strong sense of character. She’s a social worker who works with teenage girls, and she cares about her adolescent charges with her entire being. Which is not to say she’s smug or preachy about what she’s doing for a living—just sincere. Since I started working at Chick Habit I’ve seen less of Jane than I used to—at the end of the day I’m so tired I just want to couch-melt. We try to see each other on weekends but now that she lives with her boyfriend, too, our shared tendency is to hole up in our respective apartments.
Alex182 (1:05:27): Hey, hon.
JaneRivera (1:05:33): What’s going on?
Alex182 (1:05:42): Merrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
JaneRivera (1:05:49): ???
Alex182 (1:06:02): http://www.breakingthechickhabit.com And that’s not all! I had a huge fight with Peter this morning, which was probably my fault.
JaneRivera (1:09:21): Are you around tonight? We should hang out. I haven’t seen you in forever! You can tell me all about it.
Alex182 (1:10:14): Let me check with Peter. If he’s working, I definitely want to play. But if he’s going to be home I should really be here with him. I need to weasel my way back into his good graces.
JaneRivera (1:11:46): K.
I am actually desperate to see Jane. My sense of self has been so altered by the BTCH, I need to see someone who has long known the real me as opposed to the virtual me. I e-mail Peter at his work address to be sure that he gets it.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Tonight
Hey Love,
I’m really sorry again about last night. I never meant to worry you, I’m just having a hard time with everything that’s going on.
Anyway, I was wondering if you’re going to be late at work tonight. If the answer is yes, I am going to see Jane. If the answer is no, I’ll cook something amazing.
Hope you’re surviving at work.
xoxox A
Peter responds immediately.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Tonight
I am going to be here until at least 11. Go be with Jane. Don’t worry about this AM. We can talk about it more later but it’s nbd.
Love,
P
I sigh with relief and IM Jane as soon as I get Peter’s e-mail.
Alex182 (1:21:22): Peter says it’s cool—I think he’s mostly forgiven me. I can’t wait to see you!!!
JaneRivera (1:21:45): Yaaaay! Me too. Let’s meet at the Cactus Inn.
Alex182 (1:22:31): Yessss! We haven’t been there in forevs. I’ll see you after I’m done with work.
JaneRivera (1:22:58): Awesome. xoxoxo
This part of the summer is notoriously slow news-wise, and there isn’t even a good celebrity wedding that I can fawn over and/or mock. My RSS feed is a wasteland, same with Twitter and Facebook. As a last-ditch effort, I decide to check my inbox for tips.
The first thing I see when I click to my Chick Habit account could be spam, or it could be that big break I’ve been looking for. The sender’s name is just a series of symbols, but the subject line has traffic landslide potential:
Daughter of “Genius Mom” Author Darleen West: Snorting Coke in Her Skivvies
Darleen West has made a mint off telling America’s women that they’re just not working hard enough at being good mothers. She made a huge splash last year with her book, How to Raise a Genius, Times Four. You see, Mrs. West has a set of quadruplet daughters, all of whom go to top-tier schools: Raina is at Yale, Rachel is at Harvard, Renata goes to Columbia, and Rebecca—who invented a new kind of robot when she was still in high school in Omaha—is the toast of MIT.
West was an executive at a big petrochemical firm until she had the quads when she was thirty-seven. It was the result of in vitro, of course (not that she would ever admit to it). When she realized that she was pregnant with four, rather than one, she figured a large brood was part of God’s plan for her. Her husband, Bob, a fellow exec, kept working for the Fortune 500 company, but West decided that she was going to put all her considerable gumption into raising those four girls to be the best women they could possibly be.
In her book, Darleen outlined the countless hours she spent drilling the quads on their times tables before kindergarten and how she taught all four girls to read ancient Greek before their seventh birthday. “Rebecca fought me at first,” Darleen conceded in the New York Times excerpt, “but eventually she came around and said, ‘Mama, eukha’ristos eimi—thank you for making me learn.’” The problem with today’s moms, Darleen has said, is that they’re too lazy. Her perfectly coiffed and expertly dyed blond bob makes frequent appearances as a parenting expert on various morning shows.
Now that Darleen has become a national figure, she’s decided to take her influence to the next level: She’s running for state senate in Nebraska’s twentieth district in a special election to fill a vacant seat. The previous state senator had to resign earlier this year because of a scandal involving improper use of funds. He was making state troopers drive his mistress to the salon and his kids to soccer games. A brief perusal of the brand-new darleen4senate.org website shows that Darleen is a Republican in a pretty red district. Her platform is the usual “yay babies, boo taxes” GOP agenda. If she can win the primary, she’s got the election in the bag.
I open the e-mail to find a link inside. Is this for real? I try responding to the sender, asking that question, but my e-mail bounces back. Could it really be one of Darleen’s perfect children, fucking up on the World Wide Web?
Chapter Four
I click on the link, which brings me to a password-protected YouTube URL. The e-mail informs me that the password is TheInvisibleWoman. I hesitate for a second—is this going to be a virus that infects my computer with endless porn pop-ups?—but my curiosity outweighs the fear. I click over to the site and type in the password.
A grainy image of a standard dorm room appears on my screen: two uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs and a well-made bed topped with a Laura Ashley quilt. The only light in the room appears to be coming from a kitschy lamp shaped li
ke an owl, which is perched right next to the bed. I hear a barely post-pubertal man’s voice say, “Come here, Becky. I have a surprise for you.”
If this video is legit, then its star is Rebecca West, the rebellious, robot-making MIT wunderkind, and it will be Chick Habit gold. In all the press Darleen received, Rebecca was always cast as the true success story: She was not only the most accomplished but her spunkiness (she stood up to her mom sometimes!) proved that Darleen’s draconian parenting tactics did not break a child’s spirit.
Darleen and the four girls appeared on the Today show around the time How to Raise a Genius came out. I remember Ann Curry turning to Rebecca and asking her if she ever regretted spending so much of her childhood inside learning a dead language rather than outside playing with her sisters.
Rebecca smiled condescendingly at Ann and said, “I don’t regret a thing.”
Now, on-screen, a lithe, slightly gawky blonde comes into frame. The video quality is mediocre, but she does look just like the cardigan-clad girl from the Today show sofa. This time the prim sweater has been discarded in favor of a lacy bralette and what appear to be bathing suit bottoms. I have to smile at her ensemble. This is definitely collegiate “I haven’t done laundry in two weeks” chic. But I’m also impressed with its brashness—Becky is definitely not thinking about her dear old mom or the Today show in this moment, prancing around half-naked in front of a camera.
Suddenly a textbook covered in tidy lines of cocaine slides onto the table in front of the camera. I try to make out the book’s title. It looks like it’s called Understanding Intelligence.
“Surprise!” the guy’s voice exclaims. Becky’s face lights up and she does a little victory dance. A twenty-dollar bill is pushed toward her, and she rolls it up with expert precision, her snub nose wrinkling with the effort. “You go first,” she tells the guy off-screen. “You paid for it this time.”
The camera is put down for a second and all I can see is the Laura Ashley pattern up close while a deep snort reverberates. Becky’s companion picks up the camera again and points it right at her delicate face as she snorts one line, then two, then three. “Hey, hey!” the guy says. “Slow down, sister. Save some for tonight.”
Becky picks her face up from the textbook and looks directly at the camera. As she dabs at her nose with her fingers, I notice what a guileless face it is. She’s got a wide, open expression and a smattering of freckles across that baby nose. She’s so pale that even in the terrible lighting you can see the faint blue veins on her forehead, which is surrounded by fine hairs so blond they’re almost white. I take a screen shot of her face, so that I can compare it with other photos later if I decide to post this.
“Fine.” She sighs and puts down the rolled-up twenty.
“Since I just gave you all that sugar, how about you give me some sugar?” the guy says to her.
At this suggestion, Becky smiles a shy little grin. “Okay,” she says. She stands up, so her face is out of frame. She lifts off her bra in one swift motion and walks toward the camera.
The video ends and for a minute all I can do is sit there and stare at the screen. Then I look Becky up on Facebook.
I start clicking through her photos—her settings are so lax I can see everything. At first they’re staid and boring: Becky standing hand in hand with the robot she made; Becky with her arms wholesomely slung around her sisters’ shoulders; Becky riding a roller coaster at the Nebraska state fair. She certainly resembles the girl in the video, but her corn-fed good looks are so generic that I need something more substantial to prove that it’s really Becky blowing all those lines.
After a few more clicks, I find exactly what I’m looking for. In the background of one of the photos, clearly taken in a dorm room, is the telltale Laura Ashley bedspread. The sweet pink flowers nearly throb through my screen.
My first thought is: This is going to be the biggest page-view bonanza in the history of Chick Habit.
My second thought is: This is really going to tank Darleen’s nascent political career.
My final thought is: Do I really want to ruin this poor kid’s life? Becky West’s only worldly significance at this point is that her mother is a fame-seeking missile. It’s not her fault that Darleen has cast her as a superior being in a national morality play. Sure, she’s been happy to fill that role when confronted by Ann Curry about it—but I’m sympathetic to the desire to please one’s mother and to look like a princess on national TV. But it’s not just her good-girl status that’s at risk here. I’m no lawyer, but I wonder if she could be prosecuted for the sheer amount of coke strewn around her dorm room. I guess she could always take the Miley Cyrus route and argue it’s an “herbal supplement.”
When I was a kid, I would never have dreamed that I would earn my living investigating the allegedly drug-addled children of semi-celebrities in order to write about them on the Internet. For one thing, the Internet didn’t really exist when I was little. And for another, I wanted to be an actress before I wanted to be a writer.
I always got the leads in the local theater productions in our small Connecticut town, but mostly because the competition wasn’t especially fierce. I was Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web in first grade because I was the only precocious kid who could memorize all the lines without faltering (though I must say, my spider dance of death at the end of the E. B. White story was worthy of Sarah Bernhardt). My being an actress was a fantasy my mother always encouraged, even though my talent was middling at best. She supported any and all of my creative pursuits. Probably because deep down she felt like she had shelved her own.
My parents moved to Stanton in the late seventies, right after grad school, where they had met. My father had finished his Ph.D. in chemistry at U Conn but hadn’t fared well in the university job market. He had too much pride (and too much debt) to keep putting himself out there at the collegiate level. When he was offered a job teaching advanced chemistry at Manning prep, he took it.
Dad finished his degree before my mother did. She had already completed all her coursework toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so she decided to come with him to Manning to write her dissertation on the realist works of Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. As my parents told it, she set up a workspace with carefully thrifted lamps and cozy fluffy chairs in the attic of the lovely old Greek revival that Manning had provided my parents.
While my father adapted to the rhythms of the school year and the excesses of his wealthy students (“Donny will not be able to take his chemistry test this week because he must visit his father at the villa in Switzerland”), my mother floundered up there in the attic. She started out on a strict schedule, writing at least a thousand words a day. But as she reached the middle of her dissertation, she became completely blocked. She would sit at the typewriter for hours and for every sentence she’d write, she’d erase two more. It got so bad that she became phobic, she’s told me: She would start to shake and sweat just walking up the steps to the office she had so lovingly appointed.
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 m
y 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.
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