by Meghan Daum
“Faye,” I said, “those are good women out there. They’ve been really nice to me and they really care about the book. So we need to go out and do the segment.”
I was surprised by how much truth there was to that. They were good women. Maybe it was only in seeing them in the same room with Faye that I had finally realized it. This was pathetic, I knew.
“You mean you’re, like, friends with them?” Faye asked.
“Please don’t embarrass me in front of them,” I said.
Faye looked at me as though I’d just drooled all over myself.
I left her to pick up the shells in the bathroom, one of which had broken, and returned to Brenda’s living room. Randy Abrams was holding court with the Coalition of Women, telling them about his recent interview with Bruce Willis.
“Moving right along!” I said. “We’re very lucky to have Faye here to guide us in our discussion.”
“It’s wonderful to see a woman in a position of authority,” Dee Dee said. “You’re lucky to have her for a role model, Lucinda.”
Jeb turned the camera back on and pointed it at Dee Dee. She stared into it, flustered, and finally said, “M.J. and I could sing a song!”
“Oh yes!” Valdette shouted.
Faye came back into the room and surveyed the group until she fixed on Christine, who was twirling a piece of her straightened hair between her nails. I could see Faye’s eyes growing wild with excitement. She whispered something to Jeb and he shifted the camera toward Christine.
“You,” she said, pointing at Christine. “I want to hear what you think of the book.”
“Well, unfortunately,” Christine said meekly, “I haven’t had a chance to read the book.”
“She’s reading Harry Potter,” Valdette said.
“So what do you think of Harry Potter?” Faye asked.
“It’s good,” Christine said.
“What else?” asked Faye.
“I don’t know,” Christine said. “It’s entertaining. It’s suspenseful.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know,” Christine said. “It’s just . . . cute!”
Faye was nodding and obviously hoping that Christine’s adjectives about Harry Potter could be spliced into the segment so that they appeared to be about Clip My Wings and I’ll Grow a New Pair, not that there was anything terribly “cute” about Idabelle Sugar’s work.
“One of the reasons book club is so special here,” I said, “is that the book often opens the door to other topics of discussion. For instance, I thought we might pick up on that thread about feeling like we’re being kept down.”
“Excellent idea,” said Sue.
“Were you really fondled by your gynecologist?” asked Dee Dee.
I saw Faye’s eyebrow arch.
“No, I was just throwing that out as a topic,” I said.
“Well, I can’t say I’ve been,” said Brenda.
“Me neither,” said Sue. “Though I suppose we’re all vulnerable.”
“Any other issues anyone wants to raise, then?” I asked.
“Especially you,” Faye said, pointing at Christine.
“Not really,” Christine said.
“There is something we wanted to get to,” Sue said, “but we wanted to do it when we were done filming. So if you’re done, maybe these guys can take off and we can, you know, get to it.”
“We’re shooting every thing,” Faye said. “Just pretend like we’re not here.”
“Yeah, but it’s kind of personal,” Sue said.
“That’s fine!” I shouted. “The more personal the better. As long as you’re comfortable with it.”
“It’s more like if you’re comfortable with it,” Sue said.
“Of course I am!” I said. “That’s what we want! Is it the NOW versus COW softball game?”
In an effort to make herself less conspicuous—though it was Randy Abrams, stealth reporter that he was, who had managed to disappear into the corner, where he was furiously scribbling in his notebook—Faye had begun pacing around the living room and now stood mesmerized by the portrait of Brenda’s children above the fireplace. Her cigarette ashes were falling on the carpet.
“It’s not the softball game,” Sue said. She shifted in her seat on the sofa and looked at Brenda. “What do you think, Brenda? Should we do this?”
“I’m not sure this is the time,” Brenda said, glancing at the camera, which was still pointed on Christine.
“Please,” I said. “Go ahead! Nothing’s off limits.”
“Okay, Lucinda,” said Sue. “For lack of a better word, this is an intervention.”
Faye whipped around, the remainder of her cigarette ashes cascading through the air like a disseminating dandelion tuft. I sat there, holding my wineglass to my lips, afraid to take a sip. The entire Coalition of Women stared at me somberly. Their drunkenness seemed to have emptied out of them. Valdette had her “concerned” face on; her head was cocked to the side and her mouth was spread into a half smile as if she had discovered an abandoned puppy on the road. Dee Dee reached over and put her hand on my knee.
“It seems like you’re having a hard time,” Sue said.
I looked at Jeb. Inexplicably, he still had the camera poised on Christine. I motioned for him to stop the tape.
“Maybe this isn’t the best time for this,” I said.
“No!” Faye thundered. “Keep going!”
“Faye,” I said, “this is totally off topic.”
“Thank God for that,” she said.
“I do feel a little uncomfortable reaching out to Lucinda with the camera on,” said Sue. “It doesn’t make for a very safe space.”
Faye had taken a position right behind Jeb. She had her hand on his back as if she would dig her nails into him if he stopped the camera. She paused for a moment, studying each coalition member once again and then set her gaze on me. My hand was shaking, so much so that the wine was almost sloshing out of my glass. I took a gulp and tried to set the glass down on the coffee table, knocking Valdette’s leopard print lighter onto the floor.
“The truth is,” Faye said slowly, glancing over at Randy Abrams, “that I have been concerned about Lucinda myself. That’s actually why I came. I care deeply about my employees and when I feel like one of them is in trouble I do every thing I can to help them.”
The members of the Coalition of Women looked like they would cry. They buzzed among themselves, whispering words like “sisterhood” and “real support system.” Valdette offered me a cigarette, which, although the camera was still rolling, I took from her and lit with the leopard print lighter.
“What bullshit, Faye,” I managed to say, coughing through the smoke. “How patently untrue!”
“Don’t be defensive, Lucinda,” Faye said. “I’ve been very worried about you. I’m here not as your boss but as your friend.”
“Did you join The Forum or something?” I asked.
“It’s very natural to feel defensive in this kind of situation,” said Sue. “But we really feel that you’re in an unhealthy situation at home. In fact, we all discussed it at the February meeting. And we took a vote and decided we had to intervene.”
“You had a meeting in February?” I asked. “I thought it was canceled.”
“The usual order of business was canceled,” said Brenda. “We decided we needed to talk about you . . . and Jason.”
“Mason,” said Sue.
“I mean Mason,” said Brenda.
“Is he physically abusing you?” Dee Dee asked.
“Wait!” Faye screamed.
“Yeah, wait,” I said. “He’s not abusing—”
“Stop!” Faye interrupted. She moved from her place behind the camera and grabbed Christine’s arm and pulled her from the overstuffed chair.
“I want this one to sit next to Lucinda on the couch,” Faye said. “You two, with the earrings, get off the couch.”
“Jesus, Faye,” I said.
“Shut up!” Faye
yelled at me. Then she softened. “We’re just trying to help you.”
Faye made Jeb, who seemed utterly terrified of her, stop the camera as she moved Sue and Valdette off the couch and positioned Christine next to me. Then she got her purse, took out her compact, and began rubbing foundation on my face.
The Coalition of Women seemed terrified of Faye, too. She had managed to herd all of them but Christine to one side of the modular sofa, where they sat like patients in a waiting room. Dee Dee muttered something under her breath about “exploitation” and Faye, without missing a beat, turned to her and gave her a shy smile.
“When we’re done I’d like to hear you sing,” Faye said to Dee Dee. “We’re always looking for new musical acts to book on Up Early.”
“Really?” said Dee Dee.
“We had on Ani, what’s her name, Frankendyke,” said Faye.
“Ani DiFranco,” I said.
“Whatever,” continued Faye. “But I thought she was too socially constructed. We need something fresh.”
“Really!” said Dee Dee.
“But let’s focus on Lucinda and her needs right now,” Faye said.
“I’m still not sure this is something we should do with the camera on,” Sue said. She was squeezed on the left side of the sofa between Brenda and Valdette. “It seems a little unfair.”
“Let me tell you something about Lucinda,” Faye said. She smeared lipstick on me and stood in the middle of the room. “She is the kind of person who thinks nothing is worth doing unless it’s a public event. It’s either on TV or it doesn’t count. This is a common malady of our media-saturated culture. It’s quite sad really. But she’s kind of like Madonna in that sense. I’ve known Lucinda for years. And I know that to really reach her you have to meet her on her level.”
“I see,” said Valdette.
“Well, whatever works,” said Sue.
Faye knelt down and whispered something in my ear that I couldn’t entirely understand, though I did hear the words “or your career will be over.” She resumed her position behind Jeb and nudged him to turn the camera on. No one was in the shot except me and Christine.
“Okay,” said Faye. “One of you was saying that Lucinda is being beaten up by that Unabomber of a boyfriend she has. Anyone care to elaborate?”
The room was silent. Christine was tapping her nails on her wineglass. Finally Sue cleared her throat and spoke.
“It just seems to me,” she said, “that you’re in a situation that you’re refusing to get out of. Or maybe you feel like you can’t get out of it. And we just want to tell you that you can get out of it.”
A surge of nausea rose from my stomach and seemed to well up in the bottom of my throat in the form of tears that I immediately vowed not to shed until I was out of Brenda Schwan’s house. I tried to concentrate on how to respond. The challenge, of course, was to figure out what exactly, in their minds, constituted “the situation” without revealing any more about it than they already knew. Did they know about the drugs? The heat going off? Erin sleeping in her own fecal matter? Weighed on their own, did any of those misfortunes warrant an intervention? I looked at Faye for some kind of cue, but her attention had wandered and she was examining a tiny glass giraffe on Brenda’s fireplace mantel, turning it around in her hands and cringing as if it were a piece of debris from a car crash.
“Has Mason hit you?” Sue asked.
I snorted out a little laugh. “No!” I said. “Oh God no.”
“Has he threatened you?” asked Valdette. “Does he hurt his children?”
“Never,” I said. “Is this what the intervention is about?”
“Sometimes,” said Sue. “You don’t know what the intervention is about until you actually do it.”
“Okay, stop right there!” Faye yelled, dropping the giraffe back down on the mantel and causing Brenda to wince. “Can you say that?”
“Me?” I asked.
“Not you, the one next to you,” said Faye. “What’s your name?”
“Christine,” Christine said.
“Christine,” said Faye. “I want you to say exactly what she just said. The thing about not knowing what the intervention is about until you actually do it.”
“You want me to say that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” asked Christine.
Because everyone else is too ugly and you’re the only one who’s going to wind up in the segment, you idiot, I thought to myself. I couldn’t believe Faye was being so completely unethical right in front of a reporter from New York Magazine. This was a new low, unmatched even by the time she made Samantha Frank go undercover as a phone sex operator as a way of testing the job’s effect on one’s libido. I turned around and looked at Randy Abrams. He was sitting in the corner by the coatrack with his mouth hanging open.
And then Christine, like Helen Keller learning the sign for water, lit up suddenly. She smoothed out her already-smooth hair and sat up even straighter.
“Oh!” she said. “You mean, you want me to act as a sort of moderator?”
“Precisely,” said Faye.
“Christine is brilliant at that,” Valdette said.
“I’m very glad to hear it,” said Faye. She poked Jeb in the back again. “Okay, we’re rolling.”
“Lucinda”—Christine said, turning to me and gazing into my eyes as if she’d suddenly become another person—“sometimes you don’t know what the intervention is about until you actually do the intervention. Maybe you could describe briefly your situation at home with your partner.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, you do feel like your situation is a bit . . . out of control?”
“Not really,” I said.
Perhaps Christine had beamed her former personality into my body.
“You have so much going for you,” Christine said. “We just can’t understand why you’d choose to be with someone so . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Limited,” said Sue off camera.
And right there, with the wisdom of a thousand interventions she’d no doubt overseen at the P.C. Recovery Center for Women, Sue had managed to hit me where I lived.
“He’s not limited!” I exploded. “He’s a meth addict!”
The room fell silent, as if someone had dimmed the lights. The Coalition of Women gawked at me like I’d stripped naked on the median of Highway 36. Faye was salivating. Randy Abrams was scribbling again.
“And more important,” I continued, addressing the whole group, “he’s not my partner, he’s my boyfriend. And most important of all, Idabelle Sugar is a hackneyed, self-exploitive thief of bleeding liberal hearts. Her book is execrable, as are her twenty-three other books, and if you continue to treat Christine as your own personal pet of color I’m going to buy you a dog house that she can lie in when she’s here because she obviously has nothing to say to you anyway!”
They said nothing, just sipped from their wineglasses without putting them down. Somehow I had failed to intimidate them.
“Let’s try to stay on the topic,” Christine said.
Faye was bouncing on her toes and silently clapping her hands together.
“A meth addict?” Brenda said finally. “Didn’t you come here to report on methamphetamine in the first place?”
“And now she’s an addict herself,” Faye said. “Christine, ask her how she got addicted.”
“I’m not a meth addict!” I yelled.
“It’s okay, Lucinda,” Sue said. “We’re here for you.”
Jeb started to pan the camera around to Sue but Faye slapped him and made him go back to Christine.
“How long has this been going on?” Brenda asked.
“Has what been going on?” I asked.
“The addiction,” said Christine. She put her hand on my knee.
“I don’t know,” I said. My lip was suddenly trembling. My head was spinning. I must have had three glasses of wine without eating. I tried to speak but couldn’t get any words
out.
“Just let it out,” said Sue. “There are no judgments here.”
“Bullshit!” I screamed, though I was crying now, which made me furious at myself. Tears were streaming down my face. Faye’s makeup was dripping onto my lap. “All you do is judge me!”
Why had I said that? My eyes were so cloudy now that I could barely see the Coalition of Women, only Faye’s dark figure gesturing for me to keep going. Valdette handed Christine a tissue to hand to me.
“Why do you think you’re being judged?” Christine asked.
“Never mind,” I said.
“No, tell us,” Sue said.
“I don’t think that,” I said.
“Fucking tell them!” Faye screamed. “Don’t be unprofessional!”
“Because,” I began, though I had no idea what I was saying, “not everyone can have your perfect lives! Not everyone can be empowered and not need men and reach out to people all the time. Not everyone can get out of their driveways without someone helping them, even if he does happen to be a meth addict! And so what if he’s a meth addict? He makes good meat loaf. All I wanted to do was see what would happen if I left New York. All I wanted was to improve my quality of life! I didn’t think any of this would happen!”
For the next five minutes, I cried harder than I ever had in my life, harder than I had for those seventeen minutes in my old apartment the night before I left New York, harder than I had on that freezing evening in bed with Erin and the dog. On the lime green sofa, I held my face in my hands and bawled like a bereaved mother. Jeb got every second on tape. Faye pushed him into me so that the camera was practically in my lap. The camera rolled as each member of the Coalition of Women hugged me and put their hands on my shoulders. Faye made sure Christine’s light brown, perfectly manicured hand was on top. Then she finally yelled “Cut.”
“That was genius,” she said.
“Fuck you,” I blubbered.
“I’ve gotta say,” said Randy Abrams, who had finally abandoned his post in the corner, “that was a pretty damn good intervention.”
