Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

  “But how can you call her a hero? We’re certainly not treating her like one, anyway, dragging her name—and her marriage—through the gutter.”

  “Now, that there’s erroneous thinking,” Ian told me. “Proper heroes need their flaws like the rest of us, don’t they? Look at Icarus, Napoleon, Marilyn Monroe. Their lives all went pear-shaped soon enough.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following,” I said.

  “Without us, Linda Ross and her friends would be mere mortals. We elevate them to great heights, and then we get to watch them fall back to earth. Besides,” Ian went on, “it’s how we arse-brained folk at A-ha! make our living. Quite simply, it’s what we do. Look at the bright side,” he said, patting my arm. “Nobody cut into your soul.”

  To: “Unclesam9”

  From: “Mimicita86”

  Date: July 8, 12:10 p.m.

  Subject: Yo, stranger!

  Sam,

  Thank you for your e-mail. I had no idea people our age could write in full paragraphs. I’m impressed—and touched. But enough about you. How, I wonder, did you hear about my crazy adventure? Are you really surprised that Berlin with Mommy Dearest didn’t work out? I gave it a real shot, I swear, but in the end I just couldn’t stomach it. Now we’re chatting on the phone for a few minutes every week and things seem to be “on the mend,” as they say around here.

  You, meanwhile, sound good. I think I know a girl from Houston whose older sister did the Bennington summer program, and she ended up falling in love with one of her instructors and marrying him when she graduated high school. It was disgusting!

  As for me, I’m staying with Lily in this ridiculously glam house with a family to match. The one weirdo of the household, Adrian the antisocial computer/rodent addict, just left to study sea cows in Australia, so now all is total perfection. As you know, I’m Little Miss Gossip Hound, and Lily’s gotten really into her life as a “thesp” (did you know she’s studying acting?), so unfortunately we don’t see each other much. In addition to running around overorchestrated media events and spying on “slebs” (I.e. celebs—and you’d have NO idea who any of them are), I’m trying to squeeze in more of the real London.

  Last night, after a big gluttonous lunch at my host family’s house, Lils brought me to this weird space in Whitechapel to see an “arresting” piece of performance art—an adaptation of A Doll’s House, the Henrik Ibsen play about the ultimate frustrated housewife. It was unlike any theater I’d ever seen before, mostly because all the actors stayed backstage, and the only thing on the stage was an overlarge dollhouse with random objects (a lit match, a prosthetic hand, a live mouse!) shooting out of its windows. I can’t say I’m dying to go back, but it was definitely an interesting experience.

  xxxxxM

  From: “Jessieg”

  To: “Mimicita86”

  Date: July 10, 11:32 a.m.

  Subject: Aloha from el cubicle

  Hey babes, how you holding up? Lily e-mailed me and said you’re going out with one of the Sex Pistols. I almost believed her, until I looked him up and realized he’s dead. But now I’m wondering—what ever happened with that Ant guy? Last I heard you were heading to some underwear fashion show together. How was it? And how come I never get invited to those?

  NYC in the summer sucks. It’s hot and sticky, my father and his new family just announced they’re moving into an even bigger house, and all my friends are thousands of miles away. Me, I’m at the only computer at the bank with complete Internet access—crazy, right? All the other computers are blocked to ensure that all anybody does is work, work, work. I had no idea it would be so money-obsessed and personality-free here—it’s so bad it hurts. Trevor, the hot guy who interviewed me, turned out to be a total idiot. There isn’t a single summer intern he hasn’t hit on. I guess he really takes the company’s equal opportunity policy seriously. Now the only part of the day I like is lunch, when we can order from any restaurant on the company’s dime.

  My writing class is going well. I’ve been working on a story about a girl whose father leaves home and starts another family, but the new family ends up being exactly the same as the one he tried to get away from. (Sound familiar?) It’s still a work in progress. I’m definitely taking Kim’s advanced writing next year. And you? OK, off to Xerox a receipt for some banker now. You’d think people who earn millions of dollars a year would know how to operate a photocopier, but then you’d think wrong.

  Tons o’ Love,

  Jess

  How I Grew Arctic Ferns Under My Arms

  GROWTH SPURT NOTWITHSTANDING, SEVENTH GRADE was probably the smoothest year of my life. School was still easy, and every weekend I had at least three bar mitzvahs to attend. When I look back now, the year blurs into one giant procession of grinning grandmothers and chocolate fountains and taffeta dresses. Not once did I feel lonely or rejected.

  My social life was similarly simplified at A-ha! There were always parties to cover, and most evenings found me roaming some event venue—usually a tent or a roped-off portion of a rooftop—and cramming in the hors d’oeuvres. Unfortunately, I saw very little of Lily, and was excited when she invited me to the birthday party of a theater school friend Friday evening.

  That afternoon, Sophie and I were writing the text for “Stars and Their Stripes,” a monthly feature devoted to celebrities exhibiting embarrassing splotches of sweat. Earlier that week, Arctic Fern deodorant—which always took out a full-page ad opposite the feature—had sent sample kits of their product to every employee at A-ha! Though the deodorant, smelled a bit like those pine-scented air-freshener trees that hang from the rearview mirrors of New York taxis, I’m genetically programmed to accept any and all free toiletries.

  Sophie and I were finishing up when Charles Lappin strolled by our worktable and glanced at our caption suggestions. “It’s getting hot in here,” he read. “More dots for Dotty . . . What’s Cassie up to? Only Garreth nose. Perfect.” He chuckled to himself before walking off and telling us to get lost and have “cracking good” weekends.

  “Can we go before Rebecca gets back?” I asked Sophie.

  She gnawed her lip nervously. “She did tell us to wait for her to sign off, but I suppose Charlie is the boss.”

  “Right, so it’d almost be disobedient not to leave.”

  “You reckon?” Sophie said, and skipped off to her desk to retrieve her belongings.

  A few minutes later, Sophie and I were saying goodbye in the downstairs lobby when we all but collided with Rebecca Bridgewater, who was carrying a huge shopping bag from the nearby Waitrose supermarket with several Pukka Supper for One frozen dinners poking out the top. She wanted to know who had told us we could go. “I thought we’d established that I was going to sign off on your project,” she said harshly.

  Sophie shuffled back toward the elevator, leaving me to explain that Charlie had given us the green light. “Oh, he did, did he?” Rebecca sniffed suspiciously. “Well then, carry on. Have a lovely weekend.”

  Thus released, I took the Tube to Shoreditch, where Lily and I had arranged to meet. I found her standing by a newsstand, flipping through the latest A-ha! I involuntarily cringed whenever I saw that week’s lead headline, in huge, impossible-to-miss chartreuse letters: “LINDA GIVES RICHARD THE BOOT! An Inside Look at a Broken Marriage.”

  More like a repaired sleep cycle, I thought with a sigh. I tried to remind myself of what Ian said that night—it’s what we do— but at the moment his words didn’t provide much solace. “Am I late?” I asked Lily.

  “You’re fine,” she said, putting the magazine back on the rack. “I don’t know how you extricate yourself from that place at all—so many planet-realigning news stories must break every minute.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, and told her about the celebrity perspiration project that had consumed my day.

  We walked out of the station and turned onto Brick Lane, a street I’d been meaning to visit since coming to London two weeks ago. Right away, I saw that it li
ved up to its fame: I felt as if I’d stepped into some parallel universe, a teeming city populated in equal parts by Bangladeshi grocers and trendy Morrissey look-alikes. The twenty-some curry houses we passed alternated with minimalist Swedish furniture boutiques and off-license convenience stores. The air smelled of Indian spices and the slightest hint of rain.

  “By the way, if you’re on a perspiration kick, you should like this party,” Lily said. “All my friends from school are, well . . .” She paused to find the right word.

  “What, stinky?”

  She nodded. “You’ll love them, but they’re not exactly the deodorant set.”

  When I told her about the Arctic Fern roll-on that I was sporting, Lily laughed, and I volunteered to bring home more complimentary samples next week. “I think I’ll pass,” she said. And then, gesturing at the busy street we were walking down, she asked me, “So what do you think of the real London? Does it measure up to your ultralame celebrity world?”

  “Of course it does! It’s way better,” I said lightly. “Not that I know where I am, but this neighborhood seems like the coolest I’ve been to yet.”

  “I think so, too,” Lily said. “But I wasn’t sure it’d measure up to your jet-set expectations.”

  Because she’d grown up around celebrities, Lily liked to make plain her scorn for them. I, on the other hand, had grown up around goateed psychology students and struggling photographers in Birkenstocks—could she blame me for being a little starstruck? Still, I decided not to respond as we continued down the street. The sky was blanketed with clouds and the light was silvery and translucent. We passed two men shouting at each other in the doorway of a sari store, and I wished Lily and I could stay in London forever.

  We soon turned off Brick Lane and after a few more swerves ended up on a main road, outside a pub called The Old Lamb and Sack. A rusted plaque next to the door boasted that the establishment had been in continuous operation since the eighteenth century—and as we stepped inside, I wondered if it had been swept out since. A real pub at last—and how! The front room centered on a gigantic television tuned to a soccer game in Denmark. A bunch of middle-aged men with scraggly facial hair and glaring dental issues were sitting at the bar, watching the screen and issuing frightening “OOOIER!” sounds.

  “These guys practically live here,” Lily told me. “But don’t worry. The other room is totally different. And you have to tell me what you think of Harry.”

  “You mean another Harry?” I asked. Lily smiled enigmatically.

  “Will there be Indian food at this party?” I asked, trailing Lily behind the bar and into a small parlor with flocked wallpaper and a few hunting souvenirs—geese, I think—hanging precariously off the walls. Lily’s friends all looked like they were a few years older than us, with outlandish hairstyles crafted with industrial-strength hair gel. I recognized several of the faces crowded around the tables from our backstage visit to A Doll’s House the previous weekend.

  “Don’t you love it?” Lily effused.

  “Yes, especially the geese,” I said. “How about some beers?” At the bar I ordered two insanely expensive lagers, no fake ID necessary. On my way back over to Lily, nobody stepped aside for me, and I kept having to tap people on the shoulder to get by. I found myself longing for the company of Anthony and Ian—or even of the Foxes, whose careless chattiness always made me feel welcome. At The Old Lamb and Sack, not a single one of Lily’s friends even smiled at me, so I half crouched in the corner, pretending to study the chemical composition of my beer.

  One girl, Jules, was telling jokes at her messy flatmate’s expense, while her friend Lally, was arm wrestling different guys. But they were the exceptions. Almost everyone else was engaged in a heavy debate about “the craft.”

  “What craft?” I whispered when Lily joined me. “Are these people witches?”

  “Very funny,” she said. “No, it’s part of the program. We’re encouraged to talk about acting all the time.”

  Lily left me and I sat down at one of the tables, next to a guy with a shaved head who looked older than the other students in Lily’s theater program. He was lecturing two enraptured girls on the merits of the “graphic imagination.”

  “Ninety-nine percent of the greatest thoughts don’t get recorded, yeah, because they occur as images, not words,” he was saying. “Make that ninety-nine-point-nine percent. Sentences, by their very being, yeah, are limited. A sentence, by definition, has structure.”

  “That’s dead right, Harry,” one of the girls rasped.

  “Language inhibits creativity,” the other put in. “Utterly mangles it, doesn’t it?”

  “We should just be,” the first girl said. “Wordless, like cave dwellers.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I checked out Harry, trying to figure out what his admirers saw in him. He wasn’t unhandsome exactly, just greasy and a little undernourished. The trouble arose whenever he opened his mouth to talk. “Do any of you read the New Scientist?” he asked. “Right, well, there was this study, yeah, positing that nonverbal animals have higher emotional connectors than humans.”

  “Oh, yeah, nonverbal animals,” said one of the girls. “That’s wicked.”

  “It’s certainly true of my cat,” the other said.

  And then a third, more familiar voice asked: “Have you ever thought about doing a performance piece about this? It’s so fascinating.”

  I looked up to see the person responsible for this last comment and was shocked to find Lily Morton pulling up a chair to Harry’s table. So that’s what she was doing instead of talking to me? Like the other two girls, she oohed and ahhed and batted her eyelashes when he set about comparing the “auric composition” of orange and indigo moods. I felt acutely embarrassed on Lily’s behalf—what was her deal for losers named Harry? At least Harry Feder, her Baldwin crush, had a sense of humor.

  “Hey, Lily,” I said, “can you let me know where the bathroom is?” I was hoping she’d join me, but instead she just pointed to a black door in the distance.

  I survived another hour, but by eight I was tired, hungry, and sick of being ignored. I got up to tell Lily goodbye. To my surprise, she rocketed off her upholstered armchair and cried, “What do you mean goodbye? I’m coming with you, obviously!”

  Immediately, and with no evident regret, she picked up her shoulder bag and—after a quick exchange with Harry—guided me onto the street. “Mimi, thank you so much for coming with me,” she said, her eyes bright with happiness. Then, as if to prove she hadn’t noticed how neglected and uncomfortable I’d felt in there, she added, “I had so much fun, I’ll even treat you to a minicab home!”

  The minicab was a cheaper, skuzzier alternative to a proper black cab. Drivers used their own cars and were known for speeding and running red lights. I’d never ridden in one before, and I was looking forward to the long ride to Little Venice. But as soon as we got into the beat-up old sedan, Lily burbled excitedly, “Look what Harry just gave me! Two tickets to Lambeth Nightingale, the play he wrote and directed. They’re for tomorrow night, and the cast party’s afterward. You’ll come with me, right?”

  While I could think of few less appealing Saturday-night activities, I hated to disappoint sweet Lily. So what if she hadn’t been the most attentive friend at The Old Lamb and Sack? She’d jumped the instant I expressed a desire to leave. Most people would demand that you “wait ten more minutes” and then strand you at the door for the next hour, but not Lily. As the minicab chugged down the City Road, I slid closer to give her a good long whiff of my Arctic Fern underarm.

  From: “HWYates”

  To: “Mimicita86”

  Date: July 17, 7:06 a.m.

  Subject: Bear Nest

  Hi, squirt,

  Thank you for the update. So FANTASTIC you’re in London and getting all this global experience under your belt. You must be busy busy busy, but I beg you not to miss the British Museum. My old friend Otto Jackman curates the Assyrian wing there. He’d love you�
��you must give him a call for an unforgettable private tour.

  Here in NYC, love is working wonders on my complexion. The FIANCE (!) and I have been shacking up together in the country. After a nightmarish weekend in the Hamptons, where I was surrounded by jerks and BMWs and girls who made me feel like my body was sagging to Ecuador, I confessed to him how much I hated that whole scene. To my astonishment, he admitted that he did, too! So he rented his house to a screenwriter doing “research” on the Park Avenue set, and the very next week, he BOUGHT me my very own rustic cottage in the Catskills. It’s very no-frills, our little hideaway, and we’re planning to do all the renovation work ourselves. I love it up here—no emaciated supermodels, just chipmunks and bears, the real deal. You must visit before school starts, with or without your White Russian escort.

  Looking forward,

  H

  P.S. Those magazines—whoa! How about that “Whose Bum Is This?” contest? I won’t say another word, but please promise you’ll return to the pants-on world of high school journalism in the fall. Only say this cuz I love you, squirt.

  Bridezillas in Our Midst

  THE NEXT MORNING, I WAS DREAMING about walking past Big Ben to find Anthony passed out on top of the clock tower, naked but for a strategically placed issue of A-Ha!, when Imogen shook me awake. “Mimi! Wake up, will you?”