A Lady's Guide to Selling Out

by Sally Franson

  “Yes, I’m furious, and what’s more, I’ve finally recovered my speech. And I have things I need to tell you. You have things to tell me. Dare we disturb the universe by raising our voices? Can we? Will we? We can, we will, and what’s more—we must.”

  When I put the microphone back into the podium slot I saw that my hands were trembling. Not because I was frightened, as before. But because I had told the truth, and the truth had released something. The truth had set me free.

  Sure, not everyone needs to tell the truth in front of a live audience to feel that kind of liberation. But I, Casey Pendergast, am not most people. For a long time I thought that was the worst thing about me—the whole not-being-most-people thing—but it turns out it’s the best thing about me. Turns out it’s the best thing about everybody.

  The audience burst into whoops and applause. Ellen gave me a giant hug, which gave me a mouthful of white rabbit fur. “That was amazing,” she said over my shoulder. “Fucking brilliant. Tell me, does my breath smell bad? I’m worried I ate too much garlic.”

  I smelled it. “No, it smells fine. Do I smell like toilets?”

  “What?” she sniffed. “No, I don’t think so. Oh, wait—” she dashed up to the microphone. “Casey Pendergast, am I right, ladies? Give her another round of applause.”

  They did. I stood there, hands clasped bashfully in front of my chest.

  “You guys can line up in the back there for the signing. There’re free bottles of Ellian! and samples of Hankfurters!, and if we’re out someone’ll run out and get some more. Thank you all for coming. Be sure to say hi to Casey here also, and if you’re not following me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you better freaking start! Goodnight, everybody!” And with that, she stepped away from the mic.

  “Hey,” she said a second later in her typical ADD way, rummaging through her purse and shrugging off her jacket. She found what she was looking for, a tiny vial of roll-on perfume, and exposed her wrists. “What are you doing at five-thirty tomorrow morning?”

  “Um,” I said. “Sleeping?”

  She capped the perfume, then, as an afterthought, handed it to me. “You wanna meet me at the Channel 27 studios?”

  I took off the cap. It smelled like Ellen. “Why?”

  “Whaddaya mean, why? Do you want to or not?”

  “Um—” I paused. There were many reasons not to go. Sleep, for one. Two, I had been too fragile as of late to do anything spontaneous. Number three, I had also been keeping my life carefully contained, wherein I could wear leggings as pants and remain certain that I would never again harm anybody, that no one would ever again harm me.

  “Sure,” I heard myself say.

  Curiosity killed the Casey! But look, maybe it saved her, too.

  “Attagirl,” Ellen said.

  “Attagirl!” Susan said, appearing beside me. She gave me a big hug. “I don’t know where that came from, but wow.”

  “Really?”

  “YES.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “No, I mean for—”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Okay,” I said. I looked at Susan, but I got shy all of a sudden and hid my chin in my shoulder. “I love you. Oh, Ellen, this is Susan, by the way. My best friend? The one I told you about.”

  “I love you too,” Susan was saying, right as Ellen burst in. “I love both of you!” she said, blowing out of our vicinity toward the back of the store for her signing. “Jesus Christ, you whack-a-doodles. You do my heart good.”

  “We’re on in five,” our PA, Tony, said, dabbing my face with pancake foundation. I was already blown out and wardrobed and arrayed splendidly in a Danish modern chair that half faced the chair beside it, the other half facing our three-camera setup and live studio audience. My little local daytime talk show that could, A Lady’s Guide to Literature, had reached its hundredth episode, and we had a very special show planned.

  About a year had gone by since Ellen had dragged me at five-thirty in the morning to the Channel 27 studios and demanded they take a look at the YouTube video someone had uploaded of my, I’ll admit, unfocused but very impassioned speech at Wendys’s the night before. “You see this kid?” she said to the producers. Ellen had already regrammed/tweeted/Facebooked the clip, and it had received a surprising number of views. Not as many, of course, as the video of my going apeshit on Julian North, but enough for Ellen to be convinced that there was an audience for my kind of kooky but heartfelt public performance. “She’s a star, I’ve known it from the minute I met her. Haven’t I, Casey? You guys are idiots if you don’t find a way to use her on your network.”

  We had arrived there, ostensibly, for Ellen to record a holiday fitness segment for the morning news show, one of those “don’t get fat at Christmas with tips x, y, z!” bits. So you can imagine the producers were surprised to find themselves in a pitch meeting when they only had about thirty minutes to get her makeup on and mic affixed and go over the segment with the morning hosts. But that was the thing about Ellen. You didn’t really have much of a say about what was happening when she was around. It was good to have friends like that, friends who saw the world not only as their oyster, but themselves as its pearl. They encourage you, these people; what I mean is, they give you courage. And so these producer guys, who ordinarily might have dismissed a gal like me outright for not only having zero experience in television, but also a terrible online reputation, eventually found themselves nodding in agreement with Ellen.

  It hadn’t hurt, of course, that the old judge who’d presided over the network’s ten-to-ten-thirty-A.M. time slot with his cantankerous but ultimately good-hearted courtroom show had been killed in an unfortunate Segway accident over Thanksgiving. And that also, even at his show’s peak, the judge had grabbed only about three percent of the market share. But the truth of life is that sometimes what it takes to get somewhere is talent and hard work, and sometimes all it takes is being in the right place with the right people at the right time. Sometimes this works for us, sometimes against us. In this case, after a string of bad luck that had felt more like a ball and chain around my neck, I finally caught a break.

  “What kind of show are we talking about here?” one of the producers, his name was Gary, said. He had a New Zealand accent and spoke to Ellen as if I wasn’t there.

  Ellen looked at me. “Well…” I said. I was hesitant at first; I pulled at the ends of my sleeves. “So you know how Oprah had a book club, right?”

  Ellen stomped on my foot beneath the round table. Get after it! the pain in my foot said. I raised my voice. “And it was, like, really successful?”

  Gary and the other two nodded.

  “But then—” my voice was quavering. I steadied it. “Oprah went off the air, and along with it, the televised book club did too. And so far no one’s come forward to replace it. Right?”

  Gary and the other two nodded again.

  “So in business terms”—emboldened by their not-immediate dismissal, I sat up straighter, continued with my shoulders back—“you could say that no one has replaced this particular element of Oprah’s market share. There are plenty of women trying to replace Oprah, of course, in syndication, but none of them have been able to replicate what she did in terms of reading and readership. In business terms”—I cleared my throat in what I hoped seemed to be a businesslike way—“we would call this a blue ocean. An uncontested market space, if you’ve never heard the term. In this case, the uncontested market space has not only financial incentives, both for the network as well as the publishing industry, but also cultural incentives for women who are at home during the day, maybe working, maybe with small kids, who want more options beyond home repair or cooking shows or celebrity news.

  “I’m not saying I want to or can be the next Oprah—no one can ever replace Oprah, may God rest her soul. No, I
know she’s still alive,” I hurried to correct Gary, who’d raised a paternal finger. “What I am saying, however, is that I’d like to replace Oprah’s Book Club. Just think: an interactive book club with a live studio audience, where people at home can also participate through social media. We’ll bring in authors—I already know a ton—and we’ll have segments, too, where women, regular women, can write and tell their own stories. Nothing like this has ever been done before, and if we don’t do it, someone else will. And anyway, I promise you that this need will make the network way more money than that judge, God actually rest his soul, has been making you, if you want to get all bottom-line about it.

  “So,” I said, finally taking a breath. “What do you think?”

  I’d had another strange feeling when I finished. Another one of those fated moments. Guided by the spirit things. I had not consciously thought about any of what I’d said before. Everything I’d said was brand new to me. And yet, there it was, fully formed. Waiting for me to be ready to say it.

  The producers had nodded in approval.

  “You’ve got yourself a deal!” Ellen had said, and stuck out a hand to Gary.

  “Are you her manager?” another one of them had said.

  Ellen had looked offended. “No, I’m not her manager,” she’d snapped. “I’m Ellen Hanks, do I look like I’m someone’s manager? I’m her friend! You should get one sometime.”

  * * *

  —

  Not to think ill of people—oh, but who am I kidding, I think ill of people all the time—but I think one of the reasons Gary and the producers had originally agreed to the show was because they thought it was going to be a train wreck. People like watching train wrecks. The original sizzle reel for the show called me “disgraced Internet phenomenon Casey Pendergast.” I think they were hoping people would tune in out of schadenfreude.

  And the thing is, A Lady’s Guide to Literature was a train wreck, at least at the beginning. Audiences didn’t know what to make of a book club that met Monday through Thursday. How were they supposed to talk about one book for an entire week? Without getting distracted and digressing into conversations about men and children and TV shows? On top of that, were women really that interested in hearing real-life stories from other ordinary women like them? Were authors really that interesting to talk to? Were enough people even reading books to assemble a critical mass? There were a lot of questions we didn’t have the answer to.

  Yes, people were put off by the newness of the format, and initial Nielsen returns were low. The network started breathing down our necks right away, but one of the things that Ellen, who was the executive producer, kept pressing upon them was that they had to be patient. “She’ll grow on ’em,” Ellen had told them. “She grows on everybody. Just wait and see.”

  And I had. Slowly and steadily. Ellen co-hosted with me every Thursday as much as her schedule allowed. I’d also brought on Susan’s friend Gina for a poetry segment called Slamz A Lot, Chris for a segment called YQY, focusing on “literature from the margins,” and Susan for a weekly segment called A Room of Your Own, comprised of advice and prompts for aspiring writers. By the time Susan’s debut novel, I Don’t F* With You, was ready to burst onto the literary stage, she had enough of a social media platform that her big fancy New York publishing house agreed to send her on a nationwide tour. Her first stop was our hundredth episode. The plan was for her to blog about her tour for the show’s website, which hopefully would be good publicity for both of us.

  So it was true what Ellen said about all boats rising, what went around, came back around. But it happened, I’d found, so much more slowly than I’d hoped. I wanted change to happen all at once; I wanted the arc of justice to hurry up and finish its rainbow right in my lap. But that’s not how it works. Real change, lasting change, takes a long time.

  But like the melting glaciers gradually raising the sea levels, the show and my friends were slowly moving up in the world. Lindsey had quit Nanü, sold her equity, started massage school, and had spent the summer training with a shamanic healer somewhere in Alaska. She was hoping to establish an LLC for herself in “healing and ceremonial leadership.” I employed her from time to time for the crew during stressful stretches, and she also came on the show once a month for a roundup of the newest self-help books. All the old pain she’d been carrying behind her eyes had been left up somewhere in the Arctic Circle, and she seemed peaceful. She lived a life that suited her more than advertising ever could, a life of quiet skin care treatments, yoga, and monasticism. If I did not always understand what the hell she was talking about, I always knew her heart was in the right place.

  And speaking of hearts and their right places, Louise had started writing me letters after I got back from Vegas, though I’d never returned her call. The first one quoted a line from a storybook that she had read to me, over and over, when I was a little girl. I’ll love you forever/I’ll like you for always/as long as I’m living/my baby you’ll be. Under her name there was a postscript. I am here for you in whatever way you need me. Though the lines from the story only seemed to underscore the fundamental problem—I was not a baby, for one, nor was I hers—it was clear that my mother was sincerely sending me love from the height of her capacities, and though those heights were, well, a good fifty feet lower than what I thought I needed, I would no longer ignore her; I would not keep her out of my heart. So I wrote her back, and she wrote me back, and that was how we had stayed in touch for months now, a letter a week from both of us, both signing them with love. She had floated a suggestion in her last letter that she come visit me, but I had not responded to it yet; the odds of my saying yes were around fifty-fifty, about the same odds that the visit would be a catastrophe.

  As for my other mother, Celeste had called me up after Lady’s Guide had started getting good press, ostensibly to congratulate me, but more likely to make sure that whatever influence I was acquiring would never be used to go after hers. We had a very civil ten-minute conversation, and I haven’t spoken to her since. I had less and less time for people with a lot of self-interest, comparatively little empathy, and zero interest in mucking with the proportions. I wished her no harm, though, especially when I imagined her keeping very, very far away from me. Say, on Pluto. Yes, when I imagined Celeste on Pluto, I had so much kindness in my heart; I felt so much inner peace.

  * * *

  —

  When it came to Wolf or Julian, well, my heart had a more complicated position. As the viewership and influence of Lady’s Guide continued to grow, I thought of them more and more. Not because I was “grateful for adversity” or felt I owed them anything, but because I could see myself in them, truly. I was as human as they were, the part of me they had wounded I would and could not remove, and the part of me that could wound other people, I would and could not remove either. And I became more aware of power and abuses of power, became more watchful of my own actions as I gained a little power, became more determined to use my influence wisely, ethically, and never at the expense of others.

  Which is maybe a better place, a more thoughtful place, to end up than the land of forgiveness, a place that might just be too saccharine for me. Susan says forgiveness is just a philosophical construction anyway, a con put in place by those in power against those who have no power, so that the responsibility of coming to terms with bad shit keeps falling to the latter.

  So I believe instead in forgiverness, which for me means waiting for these assholes who fucked with me to take some responsibility for their actions. And I, in order to make this practice copacetic, will have to in turn approach those with whom I grievously fucked, bowing my head and admitting that I, too, must take responsibility, and no, I don’t want their forgiveness; I’m just coming around to own up to what I did. If they forgive me, great. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s not just useful but necessary to hold oneself to account, to say, “I am at fault, I have
done you wrong,” while looking into the eyes of the person who was wronged—and what’s more, to mean it.

  Which is why, after the show gained some momentum, I called up Simone. She didn’t answer, but I left a long voicemail apologizing for whaling on her so hard during sumo wrestling and, in general, treating her as my mortal enemy. She didn’t call back, ostensibly too busy rolling around in piles of Nanü money. Undeterred by this initial failure, I also called the writers I’d recruited to Nanü and told them how sorry I was for roping them into the business and asked what I could do to make their lives easier, how I could set things right. The ones whom I got ahold of—Izzy, Betty, Geoffrey, Tracy, and of course, Mary—somewhat surprisingly said no. They didn’t mind the work, they said, and with the exception of Tracy, who remained sweetly oblivious to earthly matters, they clearly enjoyed the jump in pay. To assuage my conscience more than theirs, which appeared, collectively, to be unconcerned, I not only had them all as guests on the show, I also worked with the three Wendys, with whom I had a fruitful partnership, to ensure at least these authors’ books were always facing outward on the shelves.

  Indeed, over the summer, the Wendys had allowed me a table, right by the checkout, with a sign that read A LADY’S GUIDE: SIZZLING PICKS! All the Nanü writers got a place there, too, including Johnny Hard, who’d disappeared off the face of the planet after getting paid for his White Castle commercial treatment, and whom I thought about frequently and with a great deal of regret. And Mort, who had died that spring (after a courageous battle with Parkinson’s) at the age of eighty-eight, got his own table. Mort and I had emailed back and forth a few times—he’d been so encouraging when the show had initially floundered, told me it was a success even if I only had a single viewer, because the point was not to be successful but rather to make something of “real moral value”—and I cried when I read the news of his passing. Lady’s Guide was planning on going on the road that spring, when the new wings of the Milwaukee Jewish museum were scheduled to open. I hoped to dedicate the entire week to Mort’s books and his legacy.