This Is Not Chick Lit

by Elizabeth Merrick

  When we finally took the children down to the playroom, I couldn’t shake a feeling of agitation. While Elsa was holding hands in a circle with Na’Shell and Marcella and, in an English accent, singing the My Fair Lady song “I Could Have Danced All Night,” I said I needed to go make a phone call. Upstairs, I knocked on the frame of Abigail’s open door. “Are you busy?”

  “Come on in,” she said.

  “I have this weird feeling,” I said. “Like maybe Elsa had something to do with Derek’s disappearance. She’s kind of obsessed with him.”

  “Frances, Elsa found Derek.”

  “Yeah, supposedly,” I said.

  “I’m not certain what you’re getting at.”

  “She came here once in the middle of the week just to give him a present. And she showed up late tonight, which she never does.” I took a breath. “I wouldn’t put it past Elsa to have hidden Derek in some closet so she could be the one to find him,” I said. “I just don’t trust her.”

  For several seconds, Abigail looked at me. All she said was, “Let me think on this.”

  We were leaving the shelter when Abigail stuck her head out and said, “Frances and Elsa, come into my office for a minute.”

  She sat at her desk, and we sat in side-by-side chairs, facing her. “I understand there’s some tension between the two of you,” she said. “As far as I can see, you’re both doing a terrific job, but I’d like to take a minute and clear the air.”

  I felt Elsa looking at me, and then she said, “Is this because I asked Frances about her OCD?”

  I jerked toward her. “Excuse me?”

  “I know that conversation we had was sort of awkward,” Elsa said. “But I have a cousin who has it, and it can be treated. My cousin’s on medication and now she’s doing real well. It doesn’t have to be this debilitating thing.”

  I felt that if I did not grip the arms of my chair, I might spring from it. “I’m not obsessive-compulsive,” I said. “And it’s none of your business.”

  “Frances, it’s okay. It’s not—”

  “It’s okay?” I said. “You’re telling me it’s okay?” I could hear my voice growing louder.

  “Frances, relax,” Abigail said.

  “When you’re the one who has no grip on reality?” I said to Elsa. “It’s pretty obvious that you live in this imaginary world where you believe—you believe—” I paused. Our faces were only a few feet apart, and I saw a tiny dot of my spit land on Elsa’s jaw. She didn’t rub it away; she seemed paralyzed, staring at me with curiosity and confusion. “You believe that people are watching you go through your life,” I said. “That if you use a big vocabulary word, someone will be impressed, or if you make a joke, someone will laugh, or that you’re scoring points by buying glitter for underprivileged children because someone sees you pay for it and makes a note of how generous you are. But no one cares. Do you understand that? No one gives a shit what you do. And everyone can see how desperate and messed up you are, so you might as well just stop pretending that you—”

  “This is unacceptable,” Abigail said. “You’re way out of line.”

  “Next time she’ll probably kidnap Derek for good,” I said. “Then tell me I’m out of line.”

  “Frances, an accusation like that—” Abigail began, but I cut her off. I had always respected Abigail. She had struck me as both smart and down-to-earth, and I’d admired the fact that she was devoting her career to a cause for which I spared only two hours a week. But in this moment she seemed dismissive of me because I was young, and fundamentally indifferent to what was happening. What was it to her if two of the volunteers didn’t get along? I stood up.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  I was almost out the door when Elsa said, “We just want to help you, Frances.”

  I whirled around. Though this was when I placed my hands on either side of her throat, though I pressed them inward and I could feel the delicate bones of Elsa’s neck beneath her warm and grotesque skin, I really didn’t mean to hurt her; it’s not that I was trying to strangle her. Her eyes had widened and she was blinking a lot, her eyelids flapping as she brought her own hands up to my wrists to pry my hands away. But that gave me something to resist. I squeezed more tightly, and she made a retching noise.

  “Let go of Elsa immediately,” Abigail said. “I’m calling the police.”

  It actually wasn’t the threat so much as the interruption—an outside voice, a third party—that made me release my grip. Elsa coughed and panted in a way that struck me even then as theatrical. On my way out, I stopped and looked back at her once. “You’re sickening,” I said.

  I never went back to the shelter, and I never spoke to any of them again. I received five messages at work from Abigail—I was purposely not answering my phone—and in the second one, she said they wouldn’t press charges if I sent a letter from a therapist proving that I’d sought counseling. When you work for a graphic-design firm, or even, I imagine, when you don’t, this is not a particularly difficult thing to fake.

  Three months had passed and it was a Sunday morning when I saw Karen. Actually, what I noticed first was a couple who emerged from the bagel place near my apartment holding hands, the guy carrying a brown bag, and I watched them for a moment before I realized the woman was Karen—tall, cheerful Karen, the self-declared spinster. Was this a new development? They were talking and then he turned and kissed her on the nose; he was also black, and slightly shorter than she was. Before she could spot me, I crossed the street.

  Around Christmas, I received a donation request from New Day, which, given the circumstances under which I’d stopped volunteering, was probably an oversight. New Day was affiliated with two shelters on Capitol Hill, and the request came with a calendar that said on the front Volunteers Are Shining Stars! For each month, the picture was of kids and adults at the various shelters playing, and Elsa was featured for the month of March. Had she been posing with Derek, the calendar would have felt karmic and punitive; in fact, she was doing a puzzle with a boy I’d never seen.

  I couldn’t help wondering if any of the children noticed my absence or asked where I’d gone, or if I was just another in a long line of adults who slipped without explanation from their lives. For a while, I contemplated what I’d do if I saw one of them on the street. Because of the shelter rules, it would have to be a subtle gesture, less than a wave, something a mother wouldn’t notice—a wiggle of the eyebrows, a flare of the nostrils, a flickering pinky finger. In the end, it didn’t matter, because I moved away from Washington without running into any of them.

  As for the adults, I can’t say that I cared much what Abigail or Elsa thought of me after the incident in Abigail’s office, though I did regret that they must have told Karen about it. In Karen’s eyes, I probably became a person she once knew who turned out to be crazy.

  Jennifer Egan

  Dolly’s first big idea was the hat. She picked teal blue, fuzzy, with flaps that came down over the general’s large, dried-apricot ears. The ears were unsightly, she thought, and best covered up.

  When she saw the general’s picture in the Times a few days later, she almost choked on her poached egg: he looked like a baby, a big sick baby with a giant mustache and a double chin. The headline couldn’t have been worse: GENERAL B’S ODD HEADGEAR SPURS CANCER RUMORS/LOCAL UNREST GROWS.

  Dolly bolted to her feet in her dingy kitchen and turned in a frantic circle, spilling tea on her bathrobe. She looked wildly at the general’s picture. And then she realized: the ties. They hadn’t cut off the ties under the hat as she’d instructed, and a big fuzzy bow under the general’s double chin was disastrous. Dolly ran barefoot into her office/bedroom and began plowing through fax pages, trying to unearth the most recent sequence of numbers she was supposed to call to reach Arc, the general’s Human Relations Captain. The general moved a lot to avoid assassination, but Arc was meticulous about faxing Dolly their updated contact information. These faxes usually came at around 3:00 A.M., waking
Dolly and sometimes her daughter, Lulu. Dolly never mentioned the disruption; the general and his team were under the impression that she was the top publicist in New York, a woman whose fax machine would be in an office with a panoramic view of New York City, not ten inches from the foldout sofa where she slept. Dolly could only attribute this misapprehension to some dated article that had drifted their way on Google. Or maybe the general had known four years ago that he would want a publicist eventually, and had saved old newspapers or copies of Vanity Fair or In Style or People, where Dolly had been written about and profiled by her then-nickname: La Doll.

  The first call from the general’s camp had come just in time; Dolly had hocked her last piece of jewelry. She was copyediting textbooks until 2:00 A.M., sleeping until 5:00, and then providing polite phone chitchat to aspiring English-speakers in Tokyo until it was time to wake Lulu and fix her breakfast. And all of that wasn’t nearly enough to keep Lulu at Miss Rutgers’s School for Girls. Often Dolly’s three allotted hours of sleep were spent in spasms of worry at the thought of the next monstrous tuition bill.

  And then Arc had called. The general wanted an exclusive retainer. He wanted rehabilitation, American sympathy, an end to the CIA’s assassination attempts. If Qaddafi could do it, why not he? Dolly wondered seriously if overwork and lack of sleep were making her hallucinate, but she named a price. Arc began taking down her banking information. “The general presumed your fee would be higher,” he said, and if Dolly had been able to speak at that moment, she would have said, That’s my weekly retainer, hombre, not my monthly, or Hey, I haven’t given you the formula that lets you calculate the actual price, or That’s just for the two-week trial period when I decide whether I want to work with you. But Dolly couldn’t speak. She was crying.

  When the first installment appeared in her bank account, Dolly’s relief was so immense that it almost obliterated the tiny anxious muttering voice inside her: Your client is a genocidal dictator. Dolly had worked for shitheads before, God knew; if she didn’t take this job, someone else would snap it up; being a publicist is about not judging your clients—these excuses were lined up in formation, ready for deployment should that small dissident voice pluck up its courage to speak with any volume. But lately, Dolly couldn’t even hear it.

  Now, as she scuttled over her frayed Persian rug looking for the general’s most recent numbers, the phone rang. It was six A.M. Dolly lunged, praying Lulu’s sleep hadn’t been disturbed.

  “Hello?” But she knew who it was.

  “We are not happy,” said Arc.

  “Me either,” Dolly said. “You didn’t cut off the—”

  “The general is not happy.”

  “Arc, listen to me. You need to cut off the—”

  “The general is not happy, Miss Peale.”

  “Listen to me, Arc.”

  “He is not happy.”

  “That’s because—Look, take a scissors—”

  “He is not happy, Miss Peale.”

  Dolly went quiet. There were times, listening to Arc’s silken monotone, when she’d been sure she’d heard a curl of irony around the words he’d been ordered to say, like he was speaking to her in code. Now there was a long, long pause. Then Dolly spoke very softly. “Arc, take a scissors and cut the ties off the hat. There shouldn’t be a goddamned bow under the general’s chin.”

  “He will no longer wear this hat.”

  “He has to wear the hat.”

  “He will not wear it. He refuses.”

  “Cut off the ties, Arc.”

  “Rumors have reached us, Miss Peale.”

  Her stomach lurched. “Rumors?”

  “That you are not ‘on top’ as you once were. And now the hat is unsuccessful.”

  Dolly felt the negative forces pulling in around her. Standing there with the traffic of Eighth Avenue grinding past beneath her window, fingering the frizzy hair that she’d stopped coloring and allowed to grow in long and gray, she felt a kick of some deep urgency.

  “I have enemies, Arc,” she said. “Just like the general.”

  He was silent.

  “If you listen to my enemies, I can’t do my job. Now take out that nice silver pen I can see in your pocket every time you get your picture in the paper and write this down: ‘Cut the strings off the hat. Lose the bow. Push the hat farther back on the general’s head so some of his hair fluffs out in front.’ Do that, Arc, and let’s see what happens.”

  Lulu had come into the room and was rubbing her eyes in her pink pajamas. Dolly looked at her watch, saw that her daughter had lost a half hour of sleep, and experienced a terrible inner collapse at the thought of Lulu feeling tired at school. She rushed over and put her arms around her daughter’s shoulders. Lulu received this embrace with the regal bearing that was her trademark.

  Dolly had forgotten Arc, but now he spoke from the phone at her neck: “I will do it, Miss Peale.”

  It was several weeks before the general’s picture appeared in the paper again. Now the hat was pushed back and the ties were gone. The headline read, EXTENT OF B’S WAR CRIMES MAY BE EXAGGERATED, NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS.

  It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

  La Doll met with ruin on New Year’s Eve three years ago, at a wildly anticipated party that was projected, by the pundits she’d considered worth inviting, to rival Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. The Party, it was called, or just the List. As in: Is he on the list? There were nominal hosts, all famous, but the real host, as everyone knew, was La Doll, who had more connections and access and juju than all of these people combined. And La Doll had made a very human mistake—or so she tried to soothe herself at night when memories of her demise plowed through her like a hot poker, skewering her in her sofa bed so she writhed in agony and drank brandy from the bottle—she’d thought that because she could do something very, very well (namely, get the best people in the world into one room at one time), she could do other things well, too. Like design. And La Doll had had a vision: broad, translucent trays of oil and water suspended beneath small brightly colored spotlights whose heat would make the opposing liquids twist and bubble and swirl over everyone’s heads. She’d imagined people craning their necks, spellbound by the shifting liquid shapes. And they did look up. They marveled at the lighted trays; La Doll saw them do it from a small booth she’d had built high and to one side so she could view the panorama of her achievement. From there, she was the first to notice, as midnight approached, that something was going wrong with the translucent trays holding the water and oil: they were sagging a little—were they? They were slumping like sacks from their chains and melting, in other words. And then the trays began to collapse, flop and drape and fall away, sending hot oil onto the heads of every glamorous person in the country and some other countries, too. They were burned, scarred, maimed in the sense that a fall of tear-shaped droplets of scar tissue on the forehead of a movie star or small bald patches on the head of an art dealer or model or generally fabulous person constitute maiming. But something shut down in La Doll as she stood there, at a safe distance from the burning oil: she didn’t call 911. She watched in frozen disbelief as her guests shrieked and staggered and covered their heads, tore hot, soaked garments from their flesh, and crawled over the floor like people in medieval altar paintings whose earthly luxuries have consigned them to hell.

  The accusations later: that she’d done it on purpose, that she was a sadist who stood there delighting as people suffered—were actually more terrible, for La Doll, than watching the oil pour mercilessly onto the heads of her five hundred guests. Then she’d been protected by a cocoon of shock. But what followed she had to watch in a lucid state: they hated her. They were dying to get rid of her. It was as if she weren’t human, but a rat or a bug. And they succeeded. Even before she’d served her six months for criminal negligence, before the class-action suit that resulted in her entire net worth (never as large as it had s
eemed) being distributed in small parcels to her victims, La Doll was gone. Wiped out. She emerged from jail thirty pounds heavier and fifty years older, with wild gray hair. No one recognized her, and after a few gleeful headlines and photos of her new, ruined state, they forgot about her.

  When the headlines relating to General B had definitively softened, when several witnesses against him were shown to have received money from the opposition, Arc called again. “The general pays you each month a sum,” he said. “That is not for one idea only.”

  “It was a good idea, Arc. You have to admit.”

  “The general is impatient, Miss Peale,” he said, and Dolly imagined him smiling. “The hat is no longer new.”

  That night, the general came to Dolly in a dream. The hat was gone, and he was meeting a pretty blonde outside a revolving door. The blonde took his arm and they walked inside. Then Dolly was aware of herself in the dream, sitting in a chair watching the general and his lover, thinking what a good job they were doing playing their roles. She jerked awake as if someone had shaken her. The dream nearly escaped, but Dolly caught it, pressed it to her chest. She understood: the general should be linked to a movie star.

  Dolly scrambled off the sofa bed, waxy legs flashing in the street light that leaked in through a broken blind. A movie star. Someone recognizable, appealing—what better way to humanize a man who seemed inhuman? If he’s good enough for Her… That was one line of thinking. And also: The general and I have similar tastes: Her. Or else: She must find that triangular head of his sexy. And even: I wonder how the general dances? And if Dolly could get people to ask that question, the general’s image problems would be solved. Gone. It didn’t matter how many thousands he’d slaughtered—if the collective vision of him could include a dance floor, all that would be behind him.