Sad Desk Salad

by Jessica Grose

  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.

  “But remember that one time you guys got into that huge argument in class about Deleuze? And when you were walking out of the room she called you a De-loser?”

  “Now you’re being deliberately obscure.”

  “I’m just trying to help! Honestly, I can’t really think of anyone else you’ve mortally offended,” Jane says.

  I sigh. “Well, think on it and get back to me,” I say just as our waiter arrives. He’s got neck tattoos and his ears have big floppy gauges in them, but he’s wearing a crisp white shirt tucked into black slacks. “A blood orange margarita, no salt, please,” I tell him. He sneers at my smile, so I drop it.

  “Hair of the dog?” Jane asks after he’s left the table.

  “Yes. I need it to deal with this latest fresh hell. Do you remember that book that came out last year, How to Raise a Genius, Times Four?”

  Jane frowns. “Vaguely? Some fertile midwestern lady crowing about how great her kids turned out, right?”

  “Basically. It’s by this former executive Darleen West and it’s about how well her radical parenting techniques worked on her quadruplets. I found out that one of those ‘great kids’ apparently loves coke, and I don’t mean the soda.”

  “Oooh, juicy!” Jane exclaims. “How did you find out?”

  “Someone sent me video of Darleen’s twenty-year-old daughter snorting a ton of the stuff and taking her top off.”

  “Geniuses gone wild, huh?” Though I’m judgmental about my job, Jane’s mostly amused by it, if not actively entertained. Like most of the girls we hung out with in college, she holds the New Yorker and Us Weekly in almost equal regard.

  “Pretty much. Mostly I’m wondering if I’m going to destroy this girl’s life if I post the video. I sort of enjoy the fact that we’re going to prove that Darleen West is an enormous hypocrite, especially because she’s shamed so many other women into thinking they’re bad mothers. She’s running for office in Nebraska now, so proving what a fraud she is could actually be kind of important. And it certainly won’t hurt my status at work. But the kid, oy. She’s going to be totally humiliated. She might also be prosecutable because of the coke. Is it worth it?”

  “You’re right, that is a pickle,” Jane says just as the waiter returns with a snarl on his face and roughly sets down our drinks. “Uh, thanks?” Jane says as he storms off.

  “Be nice,” I tell her. “We come here for the dirt-cheap booze, not the service.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But doesn’t he rely on our tips to pay for all those Magritte tattoos?”

  “True, true.” I laugh. But I don’t want the conversation to get away from my dilemma. “So what do you think I should do?” I ask, pushing.

  She considers it for another moment and then says, “If the lawyers are okay with it, I think you should post it.”

  “Really?” I thought she would probably take the high road on this one because she works with teenagers.

  “Yes. That girl was stupid enough to record it. It’ll be a hard pill for her to swallow but I don’t think you’re responsible for her bad decisions.”

  “I’m surprised you’re on board with this.”

  “Why?” Jane says, her face unmoving, almost hard.

  “Well, I thought maybe because the girl is only twenty, you’d be against my posting the video. That’s not so much older than your kids . . .” My voice trails off a little at the end.

  “Those girls are nothing like my kids,” Jane says sharply, taking a big swig of her drink. “Most of the kids I counsel will barely graduate from high school. Nobody’s writing bestsellers about how great they are. You’re high if you think a cute rich girl like this is going to go to jail because of this video. This little brat deserves to be taken down a peg.”

  “Way harsh, Jane.” While I hold only contempt for Darleen, my whole problem is that I’m sympathetic to Becky. I can imagine being in Becky’s shoes—but I guess the always-pragmatic Jane can’t. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to.

  “Real talk, Alex.”

  “I guess you have a point,” I say, conceding.

  “Just do me a favor?” Jane says as she sucks down the rest of her margarita.

  “Shoot.”

  “Do not mindfuck this to death. If you decide to do it, do it and just move on with your life. Do not endlessly obsess about it afterward.”

  “Um, do you know me? In the seven years we’ve known each other, have I been able to ‘just move on’ without obsessing about anything?” I smile at Jane across the table.

  Jane smiles right back at me. “No. But a gir
l can dream, can’t she?”

  The waiter finally comes back to our table and Jane orders a second margarita while I opt for a club soda. I get up to go to the bathroom and as I’m walking toward the back of the restaurant, dodging the fake palm trees, I see a girl about my age who looks really familiar. She’s got curly brown hair, the kind of perfect sproingy curls that you see in photographs of children from the thirties. Her nose is small and inoffensive; her standout characteristic has to be the dimples in her cheeks. You could fit dimes in those suckers. I’m about to walk past the table where she’s having a muted conversation with another, slightly older, woman when I place her: It’s Molly!

  I do the mature thing: I turn my face away from her and rush toward the bathroom.

  In the bathroom I lock myself in a stall and sit for a while, trying to decide what to do. I really don’t feel like exchanging fake pleasantries with Molly.

  I get up to splash some water on my face. I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I tell mature mirror Alex, You are older and wiser than Molly is—a whole two years older. You should go over and introduce yourself, which is the polite, adult thing to do. This girl has been nothing but nice to you, and you shouldn’t resent her for being a hard worker.

  Also, if I go over and show my face, I can say something just a tad menacing so she will get the message that she needs to step off my beat.

  I check to make sure my ponytail is high and proud, leave the bathroom, and stride confidently over to Molly’s table, where she’s still chatting quietly and intently with her friend.

  “Molly?” She looks startled when I say her name, and since I’m standing over her, I feel powerful for a second, like I could take my hand and smush her curls into oblivion if I needed to. “I’m Alex Lyons. I recognized you from your Twitter photo.”