But for a second there, in the bookstore, when time spanned vertically instead of horizontally, and love was at the center of the line, I forgot all about that.
It’s so simple, I know, but perhaps all it takes to mend, in the end, is people who love you. Who find you when you are lost, who come out with a flashlight when you’ve gone too far into the woods. They call out your name, you hear it, you are reminded of yourself. They remind you. They remember you. They re-member you.
And so you return the call. You put yourself back together again. Because, my God, you love them too.
“What are you going to say to her?” Susan said.
“You know, I haven’t gotten that far? I was hoping to just lay down at her feet and start weeping.”
“I like it. Very efficient.”
“And elegant!” I said. “My modus operandi these days. Hence why you might have found that I am smelling of women’s toilets.”
She sniffed me. “You smell fine.”
“You sure?”
Before Susan could respond, Ellen came blasting up to the podium out of nowhere with a cloud of white fur trailing behind her. The shape and texture of her jacket was not unlike that of the abominable snowman from the Claymation adaptation of a popular Christmas story Lindsey and I had just watched on network television while waiting for our Korean skincare face masks to dry.
“Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.” Ellen was shrugging off her jacket and panting into the microphone. The microphone was squealing. Her hair, as usual, was a perfectly coiffed brunette helmet, her body fatless as a chicken breast, her fingers covered with jeweled rings and her skin an evenly sprayed bronze. To her right I saw Chris motioning furiously to their AV team, a.k.a. Alex, who was standing next to a single amplifier. Chris drew a finger across their neck.
“Hi, hi, sorry I’m late, everybody. I’m Ellen Hanks, but I guess you know that already.” The audience laughed appreciatively. We were primed to appreciate Ellen, prepared to adore everything she said. Hell, she could have spoken through a dirty sock puppet and we would’ve been thrilled. “It’s been a god-awful day, my Uber driver got lost, and I have no idea where my assistant is right now. I lost her at the mall. But look—you’re all working women. You know how it is.”
We laughed appreciatively again. I looked around. It was true, the audience was made up entirely of women, mainly age thirty-five to sixty, though a few skewed younger like Susan and me. I saw Ellen’s eyes scan the audience, looking for a familiar face. It was her adopted hometown, after all. When her eyes met mine, I gave her a shy little wave. Immediately her face lit up. And then mine lit up, because being excited to see someone, and seeing they’re excited to see you, is the best possible outcome of the human impulse to mirror, not to mention one of the best feelings in the world.
“To be honest, I don’t even know what to say to you ladies tonight,” Ellen said after a beat, throwing both elbows on the podium and leaning forward. “You’ve probably all read the book already. Even if you haven’t, you probably know everything there is to know about my life. My life’s an open book, right? I’ve been traveling around talking about this book for, what, a month now. And one thing I’ve learned from this experience, or whatever, is that, my God, you ladies have a lot of stories. Story after story! I sit at that table back there”—she motioned to the table piled high with her books—“after readings, signing books and chatting with you girls, and it’s unbelievable, you come up to me and tell me things that freaking blow my mind! I’m thinking to myself as they talk, Jesus Christ, why am I famous? You’re the one who should be famous! This one woman in Seattle, to get out of her shitty marriage, she started working secretly as a seamstress and taking small amounts of money out of the joint checking account so she could leave her asshole husband and have some money in the bank already. And another woman? This was in Boston, she got fucking—excuse my language—raped walking home one night after bar close and you know what she did? She started her own business! An all-girls taxi service! Talk about making lemonade, am I right?
“Anyway, the reason I bring this up—it’s gonna sound a little crazy, but let’s be honest, you know I always sound a little crazy—is I got this idea after Boston that I want these readings to be more like conversations. Seems stupid to stand up here and read something you guys have already read and tell you stuff you already know. I’m tired of talking. I’ve been talking my whole life. I’ve been talking for a month straight. You talk. At this point you’ve got a lot more to say than I do.”
She stepped back from the podium and gestured toward us.
“Come on then!”
Those of us in the audience, who were prepared only to passively receive entertainment that evening, stirred uncomfortably. We were not sure how to proceed, how to initiate, how to, oh, what do you call it: create something for ourselves out of negative space instead of waiting for someone to give us instructions.
Chris, for their part, was looking like they might shit their pants. This had not been written into the Emmy broadcast!
“Come on!” Ellen said. She flapped her arms like a hype man. “Up, up!”
When no one came forward right away, she leaned into the microphone. “Casey Pendergast,” she said in a singsong voice. “I’m lookin’ right at you.”
I waved. Hi! my hand said. Stop that right now, thanks!
“Yes!” Susan whispered, poking me in the ribs. “Go up there!”
“Come on uuuuuuuup heeeeeeeeeere,” Ellen sang. “You guys, Casey’s a dear friend of mine who’s freaking hilarious, a freaking star. I’ve known her for a while now and she’s a total nut job, a real great girl. She got into some trouble a while back but—well, I’ll let Casey fill you in on that. Anyway, Casey, we need you up here! Girls, can we get some applause for Casey?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and stuck my hands in my armpits. I looked at Ellen and smiled. STOP! my smile said. I am trying to erase myself from the public record, please and thank you!
“Come on!” Susan whispered. “This is perfect!”
“I can’t!” I whispered back.
“Yes, you can!”
“I don’t want to!”
“Yes, you do! When have you ever said no to a microphone?!”
“I’m not ready!”
“You’re never going to be ready! You just have to do it!”
I looked at her as she said this, the bright hopefulness in her face. “I’ll be here the whole time!” she said. This coming from Susan, of all people, who had buried herself away in books and papers for so long and was finally, finally, inching her way back out into real life with the help of Mary London and Gina and her agent and maybe, just maybe, in spite of all the fuckups, with a little help from me. Maybe this is all friends really need to do for each other. Find refuge in each other, yes, but also nudge each other forward; because love is both risk and refuge.
“Casey!” Ellen yelled. She waggled her fingers at me. “We’re waaaaiiiting!”
I looked at her. I looked at Susan.
“Casey,” Susan said. “You have to go.”
“Ugggggghhhhhhh,” I said. After a pause: “FINE.”
I was met with a warm smattering of applause when I got to the podium. A sea of fifty pale, wintry faces stared back at me. “Ah,” I said. “Hello.” The microphone shrieked, as they tend to do in these more vulnerable moments.
“My name is Casey Pendergast,” I said slowly. “Some of you, um, may have heard of me. As Ellen hinted, I got into some trouble a few months back and my name was briefly sort of all over the Internet.”
I didn’t know what else to say. It was clear that my name registered, among about a fifth of the audience; there was at least a shred of recognition. These were bookish people, after all. I saw furrowed brows and cocked heads from some of them, as if they were trying to place me. Crossed arms
from others, as if they’d already heard what’d happened and made up their minds. A few pulled out their phones, I imagined, to do a Google search.
I felt a wave of dread, watching this, but it was coupled with the sense that what was happening was already happening. It was too late to run, to hide. I had to speak, to act. In ancient Rome, the word fata denoted words spoken by the gods, but by the Dark Ages, fate started to mean something a little more nuanced: something like “the spirit that guides you.” What this spirit is—divine or ordinary, neurochemical or fantastic—well, who am I to say. But what cannot be argued is the presence, across space and time, of a plain old human impulse to do something about what plagues us. To be our own remedy, as well as our own worst enemy. I have felt this impulse toward remedy before and I felt it then. Which is why I plunged ahead.
“Anyway, that incident from a few months back has got me thinking. I’ve had a lot of time to think lately, haha, after losing my job and apartment and, ah, identity and whatnot. I’ve been spending a lot of time alone, away from my computer, and I have to tell you, it was hard at first. I was kind of addicted to social media. Who isn’t? But I got used to the silence eventually, and honestly, I prefer it. Not all the time, of course, but it sure is better than falling into pits of self-loathing on Facebook and Instagram.
“Now that I’ve got a little distance, I can see that all that—What do moms call it?—screen time doesn’t do great things for my brain. You can’t squeeze a life into two dimensions. Or you can, but it comes at a cost. For me, that cost has been a gradual whittling down. Not just of my waist, because of course we women always are trying to do that, but of my, you know, personness.
“I just thought, well, maybe if I can make myself and my life the right size, and document myself and my life in the way I’m supposed to, some of these more—how can I put it—longstanding personal problems might get whittled down, too. Like my longing for purpose beyond self-interest. My desire for meaning too, I guess. Plus grief, and rage, although grief and rage are basically the same thing. I really thought I could fix these immutable problems by focusing on aesthetics. Which I know sounds deranged, but isn’t this what visual culture teaches us? What advertising teaches us? That so long as things around us are beautiful, nothing will hurt?
“But things do hurt. I don’t know about you, but people have messed me up. Worse, I’ve messed myself up. And I’ve messed other people up, because I was messed up. It’s a vicious cycle. And when I finally realized I’d been sabotaging myself, putting rotting eggs in rotting baskets, it was too late. I didn’t know how to stop. Luckily, or unluckily, who knows anymore, I didn’t have to. Someone—some man—stopped me.”
Hmm. This was a strange beginning, and not the direction I thought I was going to go. The audience looked a little bewildered. Except for Susan, who gave me a thumbs-up.
But what I was figuring out, whether I liked it or not, was that the best-laid plans ended up in disaster just as often as the unlaid ones. Life, generally speaking, was a disaster, and ended the same way for everybody. Might as well, my mouth was informing me, speak from the heart. A heart that was not just broken apart but spreading out, expanding, covering so much more territory than it used to.
Yeah, yeah, I’d heard other people refer to adversity—a word I loathed for its scrubbed-clean quality—as a gift. Illness, loss, suffering. I would never personally refer to my eager participation in a morally bankrupt business venture, my increasingly shitty behavior therein, a sexual assault, and a Twitter shaming campaign as gifts. But that’s just me. If you were to ask me, I would say gifts are good friends and funny jokes and oral sex, not the crude and pitiless end of life as I knew it.
And yet. As time went on, I would begin to think of all this stuff that’d happened as my rock. My rock of ages, an element of my life that was heavy and unmovable. No matter how hard I tried to shove it away, or chip at it, it was going to live with me, in me, as permanent as my clownishness and the color of my eyes. Which meant that if I was going to live, if I was going to become who I was, I was going to have to, if not love this rock, at least make a bargain with it.
I was going to have to say, hello, rock. I see you. I know all your edges. I understand the cost of your presence. I understand the rights you give me too. The cost, thanks a lot, buddy, is very expensive, and, because the body remembers, I’ll be remitting payment for the rest of my life.
But at the same time, I see that the rights you entitle me to are many. Thanks to you, I know what it means to suffer. Thanks to you, I know my suffering is not that special, because everybody suffers, and believing I am somehow entitled to a suffering-free life is not only very silly but a recipe for despair. I feel that now when I meet people, every single day: that life is hard and everyone’s doing their best and most of us know that our best still isn’t good enough for at least one person we’ve let down, or one element we’ve forgotten, and somehow we have to keep going, we have to live with that. It’s all the same, we’re all the same, don’t you see? Our struggles are so similar. I try to no longer ignore this sameness, even though I still do sometimes, because I’m human. Thanks to you, I’ve never felt more alone. But I’ve never felt less alone, either.
Because if there’s one thing that you’ve given me, rock, that could maybe be called a “gift,” it’s that there’s a kind of love in the world that is fundamentally impersonal and therefore ever-present. And so when things fall apart, as they always will, that love will always be around. Because it’s not the kind of love you see in movies and television, it’s not romance and fireworks. It’s just a feeling of not being separate. From anything. Not being separate from pain, not joy, nor birds or refugees or mass shooters or trees. It’s a feeling that I am the world, and the world is me. And I will not close off that world, rock. For that love is what keeps me living.
Anyway.
I continued. “It’s funny, isn’t it? How size in men is bragged about—big dicks, big guts, big egos, big personalities—and rewarded in all sorts of creepy ways. How size in women is discouraged conversely. I’ve spent my whole life watching men dominate women and watching women be dominated. Show me a powerful man and I’ll show you a string of silenced women in his wake. Politicians. Business moguls. Hollywood stars. Writers. It’s always been bad for these women—but it’s even worse with the Internet. Do you know how many death threats I got after the incident I was involved in went viral? And I’m nobody—this pales compared to what real public figures go through. People were telling me to kill myself. Our public square has become a public whipping post. For a while I thought I would die of shame.”
The room was silent. I heard only breath and the swish of fabric adjusting on seats. My brain was silent too, that synaptic hush that occurs when the mind settles and syncs up with the body.
“But Ellen is shameless, and I mean that in the best way. Nothing about her is small, save for her tiny, tiny body, which we’ll set aside for—well, whatever, girl wants to work out two hours a day to keep herself tight, that’s her prerogative. But think about her personality. It’s huge! She’s not afraid of anyone, any man, and she doesn’t want you to be, either. You know her story: South Jersey, tough family, bad marriage, a thousand failed enterprises. But the story you don’t always hear—and what I’m so glad is in the book—is how ferocious her past has made her, how loud she is when she cares about something, and how loyal she is to her friends.
“So this trouble I ran into a while back? Here’s some context: a dude stole some work from my best friend and passed it off as his own. When I confronted this dude about it, he claimed he hadn’t done anything. What’s worse, he called me crazy. Which made me feel crazy! But Ellen made me feel the opposite of crazy. She listened to me. She believed me. What’s more, she helped me out.
“Did her help actually work out for the best? Well, no. It ended in catastrophe, the aftermath of which ended up going viral. But catas
trophe or not, there aren’t that many people in the world who a hundred percent have my back, and Ellen’s one of them. She’s loyal as hell, and in her own bizarre way, she really wants to make the world a better place.
“So if Ellen writes a book? Of course I’m going to read the book. But not just because she’s my friend. Because she’s honest. The only thing dishonest about All Real is the airbrushing on the cover—sorry to blow your cover, Ellen—”
Ellen honked a laugh, uncrossed her legs, and shouted a conciliatory “it’s true” to the audience.
“—And aren’t we all, at this moment, starved for honesty? I guess what I’m trying to say is…” I said. At some point I had taken the ratty foam mic off its stand and was pacing around the front of the reading area like an evangelist at a rinky-dink revival. “I think that if we stop shouting for a second and listen to each other like Ellen is suggesting, if we speak and write about what really matters, and do it with honesty, we can make a better world than the one that’s currently provided. A world where we’re not inflicting pain and violence. A world beyond vanity and money and self-documentation. A world where we don’t have to shrink ourselves down to a little two-dimensional box. A world, like Ellen was saying, made of stories. Shared stories. Stories that matter. A world where we speak and receive a common language.
“They are women’s greatest currency, you know. Stories. They keep a lot of us alive. But we’ve stopped sharing them. Instead we parrot what other people say and cut each other off at the knees and sometimes cut out speech entirely in favor of a duck-face selfie, and I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of that.
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 27
