I spend another ten minutes asking Becky more questions, but they drop out of my mouth without much oomph or consideration. When I stand up to leave, Becky gives me a big warm hug. She’s almost a head taller than me and her lanky arms drape lightly across my shoulders. She smells like Ivory soap and, somehow, water. “Thanks for coming by!” she says.
“Don’t thank me,” I tell her, wanting to be honest at least once in our conversation.
“Um . . . okay!” For a half second Becky looks confused, before she tames that emotion with her ever-present smile.
I take two steps away from her but then abruptly turn back around. “Are you really going to be all right?” I ask her.
“Of course,” Becky says. “We West women are resilient.” She smiles once more, politely, then closes the door.
While riding down in the elevator I consider everything I’ve just seen and heard. I’m still trying to parse the experience of being face-to-face with someone I’ve thought so much about as a moving image on my computer screen, comprised of pixels and sound. Certainly Becky is more calculating than I ever imagined, but she’s also just another twenty-year-old with a complicated relationship with her mother. How much of this charade is Becky and how much of it is just her responding to Darleen’s expectations? Even though my mother and Darleen West are like night and day, I’ve definitely pushed myself harder and farther because of what I thought my mother wanted for me.
As I walk back across the grand checkered lobby of the Pierre and out into the sunlight, I realize that I don’t think Becky’s canniness absolves me. Though it’s going to work out for her in the end, I still regret publishing the video. If I had gotten the full story first, if I had done the investigating and spoken to Becky and Darleen and Danny and even this shadowy Cassandra figure—would that have made it okay? Maybe, maybe not. But I could at least tell myself that I had tried to be fair.
I cross Fifty-ninth Street and head toward a bench right outside the bounds of Central Park. I find a place far enough away from the carriage horses and their barnyard stench where I can sit and collect myself. I play back a little bit of the interview to be sure that it recorded, and Becky’s girlish lilt is clear and fresh. I don’t know what to do with it. Should I just take the Internet drubbing I clearly deserve, allow the blackmailing BTCH to publicly humiliate me, and protect Becky’s (probably quite lucrative) deal with People? Or should I spill Becky’s whereabouts and let the Internet draw its own conclusions about her behavior?
I can’t decide just yet so my mind drifts back to Becky’s boyfriend, Danny. How must this be affecting him? I imagine him up in Boston, walking gloomily next to the Charles under an overcast New England sky. Even though she’s a master manipulator, I bought that Becky really had feelings for him, and I know that losing your first love is a special kind of devastation. This makes me wonder what Peter’s doing right now. Is he at work, plugging away and pushing out all thoughts of me? Is he distraught, sniffling over his financial models? While I’m picturing Peter’s office and his sleek desktop, I suddenly shift to a mental screen shot of Becky West’s Facebook wall. Danny Crandall—the one who said simply that he was sorry and that he loved her. That’s her boyfriend.
Wait a minute. Cassandra Crandall. Cassandra Crandall. Why does that name sound familiar? I’m thinking about that alliterative name as I rummage through my canvas sack for my iPhone and go straight to Facebook to look her up.
Her full profile emerges immediately. It turns out we’re Facebook friends. I have a strict policy of not friending anyone I don’t know personally, so she must be someone I’ve met before and don’t remember now. She’s from Palm Beach, Florida, and she went to Andover—that means she’s not a Manning kid. Then I notice she’s in the Wesleyan network, so we must have gone to college together.
The photograph she uses for her main image is one I vaguely recognize. It’s not of Cassandra—it’s a grainy photo of a wan woman with strawberry blond hair tucked into a bandanna. It looks like it’s from the late sixties. Is she one of Charles Manson’s girls? Yep, that’s definitely Squeaky Fromme.
I scroll down to the rest of Cassandra’s photos and try to find some that are of the girl herself. Most of her photos are of other sixties radicals who liked to blow shit up: Weather Underground beauties Kathy Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn in short skirts, Angela Davis and her huge afro. She also has a photo of the patron saint of all literary girls of a certain age and education: Joan Didion, wearing her trademark giant sunglasses and severe expression.
Finally, I see a photo of Cassandra herself. She’s a shrimpy little thing, wearing Lucite frames and a too-long dress that looks like it was salvaged from the trash. She’s giving the black power salute with her tiny fist. I can’t tell if it’s ironic or not; judging from her other photos, it isn’t.
The sun beats down on my shoulders as I try to place Cassandra’s face. It suddenly occurs to me: She was at Cheyenne’s show! She’s the one I worked with at the newspaper whose name I never remember! Oh Jesus, that tiny midget fist: She’s De-loser! The one who hated me so much from our French hypertextualism class!
I go back to her main page and switch to the “Info” tab to see where Cassandra lives. I almost drop the phone when I see her address listed in clear black characters on my screen: The Phthalo, 79 Carlton Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205.
Cassandra is the hate blogger. And Cassandra fed me the Rebecca West video. But why does she despise me so much? Because I never remember her name? That doesn’t seem like enough of a reason for her to have devoted hours and hours to mocking and harassing me, for her to have created an elaborate website. And why did she feed me the video and then tell me to take it down? That just seems schizophrenic.
The time on my phone reads ten thirty. Now that I know that Becky West isn’t dead or seriously injured, my immediate priority is making sure that Cassandra doesn’t post whatever mysterious incriminating materials she has on me. I have thirty minutes to get to Fort Greene and convince Cassandra to halt whatever she’s doing.
I ask the bellman outside the Pierre to hail me a cab. He puts his arm up and immediately, just like in the movies, a taxi pulls up and screeches to a halt. I climb into the back of the car; tell the driver to take the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, and fast; and we’re racing downtown within moments.
Chapter Fourteen
As we’re rumbling over the bridge, I listen to the Q train whoosh past us, and I wonder what I’m getting myself into. Cassandra seems pretty obsessed with ruining me—there’s no telling how she might respond to whatever I have to say. Should I tell Jane where I’m going? Make the cabbie stop at a bodega so I can pick up some pepper spray? The only thing I have time to do is text Jane:
Alex Lyons (10:48 AM): I’m going to the Phthalo. If you don’t hear from me in an hour, call the cops.
Hopefully the police won’t be necessary. I do have three years of kickboxing classes at my local gym—surely those evenings with Misty will help me out if I need to get physical!
We pull up to the glitzy, modern façade of the Phthalo at 10:53. I throw a twenty and a ten at the driver and rush into the lobby.
Even though this is a pretty fancy building, there’s no doorman anywhere to be seen. A gardener is tending to the enormous Japanese rock garden that takes up most of the entryway, but he completely ignores me as he draws intricate patterns in the sand. There is a directory to the right of him, and I find a Crandall, C, who resides in unit 3R.
I am too impatient to wait for the elevator, so I take the stairs up to the third floor and turn right, where I find a heavy gray door with a batik of Patty Hearst, replete with beret and machine gun, plastered across it.
I ring the doorbell once. There is no answer. I ring it again. Still nothing. I don’t even hear anything stirring behind that thick door. It didn’t occur to me that she might not be home and my panic notches up another level. I’m sure I would survive my sex tape taking over the Internet, but I really would prefer for my
most private grunting to remain, well, private.
I start banging on the door and screaming. “Cassandra Crandall! I know you’re in there! Open this door right now!” I keep banging and banging—it’s 10:56, then 10:57, then 10:58. “I will bang on this door until you open it, so help me God!”
At 10:59, the door swings open, and the small, wild-eyed figure of Cassandra Crandall stands before me. She’s wearing those Lucite glasses, and her bony body is clad in ratty madras shorts and a hole-filled black sweatshirt. Her face has the wan color of someone who hasn’t been outside during daylight hours in weeks, which is to say we have similar complexions. She squints at me—the light of the hallway must be too bright for her mole eyes.
“Who are you and what’s your problem?”
I’m momentarily speechless. Does she really not know who I am? After everything she’s done to me? But before she can close the door in my face, I barge into her enormous pad—and turn my digital recorder on, just in case.
“I’m Alex Lyons,” I say once I’m firmly in the apartment. Keep your cool, girl, I tell myself. Don’t let her see you sweat.
“Oh,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “You woke me up.”
“Oh? That’s all you have to say to me right now?” I’m so angry that I’m immediately shouting at her. Good job at maintaining that calm, dummy.
“Give me a minute to collect myself,” Cassandra says as she takes off her glasses and cleans them with the tatters of her shirt.
This gives me time to take in my surroundings. There’s no doubt that this is a nice place—there’s exposed brick everywhere and huge bay windows that are covered with dark curtains. The tin ceilings have been meticulously created to echo the architecture of the older buildings in the neighborhood. But though the bones of the apartment are lovely, the place itself is a mess. Because the curtains keep out all natural light, the apartment has a thorough mustiness. There are yellowing newspapers everywhere and cheap prints thumbtacked to the mostly bare walls.
I glance back at Cassandra, whose lips are now quivering with . . . fear? Anticipation? She’s clearly waiting for me to say something.
Only one word comes out of me, almost by its own volition. “Why?”
“Why what?” she says, goading me with a superior smirk.
“A million whys!” I can’t help myself; I’m shouting now. “Why did you create that hate blog? Why did you send me that video of Becky West? Why did you try to get me to take it down almost immediately? Why do you keep threatening me? Why are you such a fucking loon!?”
Every “why” seems to hit Cassandra directly in the gut, and she flinches with each question. She looks so small and ineffectual that I believe she’s just going to break down and apologize to me on the spot. But instead her face stiffens and her mouth becomes a hardened circle. Her eyes narrow and she looks like she might spit on me.
“If you’re going to be rude, I’m not going to answer your invasive questions,” Cassandra snaps.
I catch my breath. If this is how she’s going to play, I will calm myself down. “Fine. Will you please explain the motivations behind your actions of the past week?”
She smooths her holey sweatshirt as if it were the finest silk and calmly explains. “I started that hate blog because you—all you Chickies, but especially you, Alex—have this amazing platform that you could use for real social change. But instead you clog it up with celebrity tweets and your own self-absorbed bullshit about boys. I thought if I created Breaking the Chick Habit, you would see the error of your ways and start posting about things that really matter.”
I don’t entirely disagree with her, but I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing. “So? Start your own website if you want to change the world.”
“I have started my own nonprofit website and my own quarterly magazine. It’s called Logos. But it doesn’t get the kind of traffic that your trash gets. I bet twenty-five people read the ten-thousand-word feature one of my writers did about her experience living among the Langi women of Uganda, but tens of thousands of people read your two-hundred-word post about vagina crystals or whatever.”
“Vajazzling?”
“Whatever. Yes,” Cassandra says, getting visibly angry now. Dots of white spittle are starting to collect in the corners of her mouth. “It’s infuriating.”
I can’t believe this. She’s infuriated? I’m the one getting threatened! “If you had sent me that article about the Langi women or ‘whatever,’ I would have been happy to link to it,” I tell Cassandra, trying to make my voice drip with as much smugness as possible.
“Fuck you!” Cassandra screams, whatever composure she had quickly going out the window. “I did send it to you! Just this week! And you ignored it.” She’s right, I realize, dredging up a vague memory from Monday—God, that seems so long ago now! I open my mouth to defend myself, but Cassandra’s rage is unstoppable. “You’ve always been like this! Even when we were in college, you got all the breaks! You don’t give a shit about the Langi, and you probably didn’t give a shit about those women at that domestic violence shelter in Bridgeport, either. I was the one who spent a full year covering the journey of one undocumented immigrant in New Haven! My piece about Jose deserved the Silent Spring Prize for advocacy journalism! Not your piece!”
“What are you even talking about?” The fury radiating from Cassandra is starting to unnerve me. I’m wishing I had stopped for that pepper spray. “That was three years ago! And college prizes don’t even mean anything in the real world.”
It occurs to me as I say this that Cassandra doesn’t really live in the real world. From the looks of this apartment, she doesn’t go outside, and she clearly doesn’t have to pay her own bills if her work time is spent running a nonprofit website that twelve people read and she’s not even awake at eleven A.M. I decide to dial back the tone of this conversation to see if I can get her to calm down.
Putting on an even, distant, diplomatic voice, I tell her, “At Chick Habit we do try to include a wide variety of subjects. Yes, our readers may enjoy a post about the latest trends in pubic hair, but they also like to read about serious issues women across the world are facing. It doesn’t have to be all one or the other.” It occurs to me as I’m speaking that I actually believe what I just said. It’s just the recent quota pressure that’s made my posts exclusively frivolous.
I look closely at Cassandra to see if she’s relaxed at all, and at first I can’t tell. But just then her eyes narrow again and she screams, “Bullshit! Alex, that is such bullshit. The world will only change through revolutionary action. Not through satisfying advertisers with stories about makeup.”
That sounds scarily familiar. Where have I heard that before? Then it hits me. Cassandra is the commenter Weathergrrrl. It all makes sense now: The Kathy Boudin photos in her profile, her grandiose notion that she can shame Chick Habit into being the kind of site that she wants to read.
“Does sending me a video of your brother’s girlfriend topless really qualify as a ‘revolutionary action,’ Weathergrrrl?” I ask her.
“Oh, that,” Cassandra says, unclenching for a minute and even cracking a smile. She doesn’t seem at all surprised that I’ve identified her by her commenting handle. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist publishing that one. I figured that sending it to you would kill two birds with one stone.”
“What do you mean, ‘kill two birds with one stone’?” I am completely befuddled by this—and the fact that Cassandra’s using the word “kill” in any context isn’t exactly soothing. In fact, I feel a chill run through me.
“Well, I’d read everything you’d written about Darleen West, and I agree. She’s an agent of evil who does not respect the dignity of the proletarian woman.” I want to ask what Cassandra really knows about the proletarian woman, but I stifle it and let her continue. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist showing Darleen for the hypocrite that she really is. So I’d be destroying Darleen’s political career and toying with you at
the same time.”
“But what about your brother? Didn’t you care that he loves Becky West? Don’t you want him to be happy?”
“Not especially,” Cassandra says, pushing her glasses back up the bridge of her largish nose. “My brother is a simpleton who has never understood the need for revolution. He is content to spend his spare time playing fantasy football and drinking watery mass-produced beer. He and those troglodytes we call parents have made no attempt to understand the struggle.”
Translation: The Crandall parents have always preferred Danny and Cassandra isn’t over it. I am starting to feel slightly sorry for this misfit waif.
“But what about Becky? What did she ever do to you?”
“That she is the spawn of that hateful woman makes her part of the problem,” Cassandra says. “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.”
That must be a quote from someone else, but I can’t place it. Still, I’m losing my interest in playing ball with her. “Okay, crazy,” I say. “So you got what you wanted. You got me to publish the video. Darleen’s reputation is tarnished, and I’m getting death threats. So why did you then ask me to take the video down? And why are you threatening me with these alleged ‘incriminating videos’ that you have on me?”
Cassandra snarfs an ugly laugh. “That was just to mess with you. It didn’t really matter whether you took the video down or not. Even if it’s no longer on Chick Habit the damage has been done to Darleen West. That video’s everywhere.”
I let that sink in for a second. I’ve been going crazy for the past few days with fear and guilt, while Cassandra was just sitting here, cackling her evil little cackle and picturing me twisting in the wind. All because I wouldn’t link to her article about the Langi women and because I won a journalism prize in college.
Sad Desk Salad Page 20
