Accidental It Girl

by Libby Street

  Brooke continues, “There’s just so much backstabbing and conniving in New York real estate, you know?”

  “And Hollywood’s such a picnic.”

  Brooke shakes her head, her sleek brown hair flopping from side to side. “You just don’t get it.”

  No, I don’t. To tell you the truth, it reminds me of my mother and the dentist, and it makes me a little sad for Brooke. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re a gold digger?” I pose, as gingerly as the phrase gold digger can be posed.

  “No!” she defends. “No, it’s not like that!” She goes all quiet and contemplative, obviously trying to form some further explanation of her position. She comes back to earth and adds, “I want the compatibility and love, too. I just don’t see why it’s so totally out of the realm of possibility that my perfect match happen to be a celebrity. You know, when Katie Holmes was a teenager she said that her dream was to marry Tom Cruise. And I read somewhere that Kelly Preston had a Grease poster on her wall in high school. Why am I any different?”

  “It sounds a little…far-fetched.” And pretty damn corny, I might add.

  Brooke rolls her eyes. “Oh, whatever. I don’t know why I’m surprised that you don’t get it. You’re just not a romantic.”

  “Am too!” I defend reflexively.

  “Sadie, just days ago you dumped a man because he offered you a toothbrush.”

  “It was more than the toothbrush. It was what the toothbrush symbolized,” I reply.

  “Oh, really? What did it symbolize? Tartar control? Plaque? Gingivitis?”

  “Fine. I have…problems with men.”

  “Correction,” Brooke warbles, “you have a problem with men. You.”

  “You’re the devil!” I say, desperately trying to keep a chuckle from escaping my lips.

  “Uh-huh, I see that smile on your face. You know it’s true,” Brooke says gleefully.

  “Okay fine, I’m not good at commitment.”

  She waves her one shopping-bag-free arm around dramatically. “You go out of your way to hook up with guys you think won’t want to commit, because you’re terrified of lousing up the status quo. I, on the other hand, have no problem with change or giving up a teensy bit of my independence in return for being blissfully happy.” Yeah, ’cause that’s guaranteed. “Someday, Sadie, you’ll meet a guy that you’ll be willing to louse things up for—”

  “Like Duncan Stoke?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Uh, Brooke, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you’ve never met him.”

  “Ah, but when I do, sparks will fly. I know it.”

  “Oh, God. You’re not planning on strapping yourself down with explosives or something, are you?”

  “Very funny,” she replies.

  “Covering your body in sparklers to catch his eye?”

  Brooke’s expression suddenly transitions to one of concern. “I’m serious about this, Sadie. You guard yourself so closely against all these things that you perceive to be so dangerous. So what if you can’t take pictures anymore? So what if you fall for a guy and you can’t maintain the status quo? Sometimes you have to give something to get something better in return.”

  “Like your career?” I ask earnestly.

  A look of dreamy exuberance softens her angular features. She replies, “Maybe…”

  “Hey, I have a funny idea….” I say, with just a hint of sarcasm eking into my voice. “If you hate real estate so much, why don’t you just get a new job?”

  A touch of pink rises in Brooke’s cheeks. “Why aren’t you shooting your portraits anymore?”

  My mouth falls open. Her question sucks all the air out of my lungs—all the fight out of my voice. That completely came out of nowhere. We don’t talk about that. She doesn’t ask me about that. My portraits are in a dark little corner of my closet, and carefully concealed by dust bunnies under my bed.

  I suddenly feel a bit naked and raw.

  “Where did that come from?” I ask, shocked by her leap into conversational no-man’s-land.

  “Answer,” she replies curtly.

  “The website is still up! I just paid the bill on Tuesday,” I say, for lack of anything better.

  “Why aren’t you shooting the portraits, Sadie?” she replies, not giving an inch.

  “What does this have to do with real estate and Duncan Stoke?” I jab back.

  “Why. No. Portraits?” She’s being just a little too blunt for her own good. I would tell her so if she didn’t have a devastatingly hard-boiled, determined look in her eye. She’s not going to let this go. She’ll bite and claw her way to an answer if she has to.

  The phrases “Yes, it’s for the money” and “I’m still a real photographer” dance precariously close to the tip of my tongue. “I don’t know,” I say lamely.

  “Ha!” she squawks. “You don’t take your portraits anymore because by the time you’d finished college and paid off your father’s debts, you’d been struggling your whole life and you were fed up with struggling. Not to mention that if you were a starving artist, you couldn’t afford the five pairs of Jimmy Choo’s you own and wouldn’t be buying hundred-dollar panties.”

  “They were ninety-eight dollars!” Before tax.

  She ignores me, and continues, “Well, I’m tired of struggling, too. Okay? If I had even the faintest notion how to focus that damn camera of yours, I’d be shooting Ethan Wyatt, too. But, I can’t. Instead I have a rather all-consuming—but not uncommon—fantasy that someone with a few films to his credit and whose lap happens to be ever so slightly on this side of luxury will fold me into his fabulous life…and arms. Is that a crime?”

  “I wasn’t accusing you of anything, Brooke.”

  “Please, I know how you feel about all this,” she says, pointing to her stash of magazines. “You think I’m loony.”

  “They’re real people. Real photographs get taken of them. Fantasy is one thing, but the reality is…different. And, believe it or not, I think you have a good chance at succeeding. You’re gorgeous and funny and smart. You have the instincts of a shark and the scrappy tenacity of a prisoner trying to escape from Alcatraz. You could do it. I’m just wondering if maybe there were some easier solution to your problem, or a solution that didn’t involve being plastered all over the papers.”

  She smiles, and then gives way to some other emotion. Her big green eyes squint down to nothing. “Wait, you want to protect me from the likes of you?”

  I…well. I hadn’t really thought about it like that. “No, not me. Them,” I say, pointing to Celeb.

  “Sadie, that is you.”

  Oh, right.

  Chapter 10

  Waking up to an ominous six-foot-long box is not the best way to start the day. Unless, of course, you’re a vampire.

  I have tried stuffing it under my bed, cramming it into my bedroom closet, and shoving it behind the living room bookshelves—whence it spawned. The only solution with even a tiny hope of success was the hall closet. Unfortunately, Brooke complained that it was creasing her many jackets and coats. The fact that the coats in question won’t be in use for five months was not enough to sway her. So, I just have to live with it. Sitting here. Taunting me. It’s a monolith. A big brown monument to my cowardice—and Paige. Pretty soon schoolchildren will be made to file past it and ponder its significance. Luke will set up a gift shop in the kitchen and sell little Brown Box magnets and key chains. Brooke will host telethons and direct-mail campaigns to fund Brown Box maintenance projects.

  I should probably just open it and get it over with.

  Reaching over the edge of the bed, I tug at the bit of paper that Brooke loosened days ago. Pressing my eye to the tiny slash of an opening, I try to catch a glimpse of the contents.

  No use. It’s a black hole.

  The thing is, I know that if I open this box, it’ll be a monument of another kind—a gigantic memorial to a vapid mother-daughter relationship.

  Our gifts to each other are, and a
lways have been, completely hollow. They never mean anything. They’re just things. Sometimes they’re nice things, but there’s never any feeling or thought behind them. They’re tchotchkes picked up out of obligation, like company-mandated Secret Santa presents or those generalized charity gift-giving programs. Gifts from my mother always look like they were prompted by a three-by-five card that said, “Needed. Gift for: female. Age: 28 years. Likes: piña coladas, getting caught in the rain.”

  I’m no better, I guess. I rely on this fascinating category of Hallmark cards called Simply Stated. These cards bypass all the mushy, heartfelt stuff and get right to the point. A Mother’s Day card, for example, will have a very tasteful nondescript flower arrangement on the front and an inside greeting that reads “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom” and nothing more. The vast expanse of empty white space that surrounds the greeting speaks volumes of its own—something like, “You’re technically my mother. It’s Mother’s Day. As a self-respecting American consumer, I am contractually obligated to participate in this holiday. Here’s a card.” My mother’s fiftieth birthday was a few months ago. That’s a major milestone, the kind of occasion that in a normal mother-daughter relationship would elicit some sort of deeply meaningful gift. I swear to you, I tried. I stayed up nights window shopping on the Internet. I dug through every major department store in Manhattan, scoured countless little boutiques. You know what I came up with? A doormat. I bought my mother a doormat for her fiftieth birthday. I was completely incapable of finding a gift that meant something.

  I’m sure this box has something expensive and age appropriate inside. Just one more reminder of how little Paige knows me. No, I’m not going to open it. I’m going to do something much more productive—I’m just going to lie back down on the bed and stare at it.

  Or, maybe I should just peek at the card.

  I lie down flat on my stomach and stretch toward the box. Very gently, I peel the small plastic pouch away from the paper—careful not to tear it and reveal too much.

  It’s my mother’s signature paper, expensive correspondence cards from Smythson of Bond. They’re monogrammed with her first name only, as though anyone receiving the note should already know who the one and only Paige is, in the same way they know which Madonna, Cher, or Elton.

  “Dearest Sadie,” it reads. “A gift for you. Sometimes the things we run away from should be given a chance to catch up. A reminder of things past—and perhaps future. Your loving mother, Paige.”

  Things we run away from? A reminder of things past? And future? Who am I, Ebenezer Scrooge? It’s just like her to give me a riddle. It’s like she knew I wouldn’t want to open it. Damn.

  You know what bothers me most about this box—besides the fact that it exists? It’s got me all twisted up about Brooke’s little rant. I know, for a fact, that Dr. Hank was my mom’s Duncan Stoke. I know it. She wanted him; she went after him; she landed him. Like a fisherman after a marlin. He swallowed her bait—hook, line, and sinker.

  The thing that keeps swirling around and around in my brain is that whatever Paige got from being Mrs. Price-Farmer was worth more to her than me. Just like the money and fame are worth more to Brooke than her independence, for my mother the fur coats were worth more than me. The five-thousand-square-foot house was worth more than me. The stupid nattering, ankle-biting Oodles and Donks were worth more than me. Meanwhile, my dad worked his ass off—always with the caveat of it being “for us.” “I’m not doing it for me, Sadie,” he’d say. “I’m doing it for you. For us.” The only problem was, his dream of owning his own restaurant was the very thing that destroyed the “us” he was trying to provide for. First, “us” lost my mother to the dentist, then me to college and a life that didn’t involve worrying whether or not the electricity would be cut off because we couldn’t pay the bill. Or, trading my lunch money for gas money so that I could actually get to school in the first place. So, finally, the only bit of “us” that my father had left was himself. And he even managed to lose that. He had a heart attack three days before the grand opening. The result of all his sweat, struggle, and loss? My father’s dream is now the cosmetics and feminine hygiene section of a Super Wal-Mart.

  I don’t think Brooke understands the kind of Pandora’s box she’s opening. I really don’t. She’s not thinking about the big picture.

  Fighting the urge to delve back under the covers, I slip on the La Perla undies I so lovingly hand-washed the other night and throw on the cleanest clothes I can find.

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” says Luke, as he groggily straightens out the couch cushions.

  “Hey. Breakfast?” One of the best things about long friendships—you don’t have to bother with all the tiring connective tissue of normal conversation.

  “You making?” he responds.

  “Cereal,” I say, while padding into the kitchen.

  “Sure.”

  I return from the kitchen bearing two enormous bowls. Snuggling into the sofa with my breakfast companion, His Royal Highness the Count of Chocula, I switch on the television.

  “Hey, Luke?” I ask, then turn to him.

  “Oh, no!” he says, backing further into his corner of the couch.

  “What?”

  “I know that look in your eyes. You’re going to make me talk about girl things.”

  “I am not!” Well, only a little. “I just wanted your opinion.”

  “My opinion on, like, underwear? Hair color? Anything with wax, gloss, or…”—his nose scrunches up and his shoulders tense as he wrestles with some insanely objectionable word—“lubrication?”

  “No, I want your opinion on Brooke.” I laugh. “But you just said lubrication.”

  “Yes, thank you for reminding me. Did you say you had a question?”

  “Fine. Do you ever worry about Brooke hating her job so much and this crazy celebrity fantasy she’s got going on?”

  He takes a deep breath. “She’s a little obsessed, yeah. But here’s my take on it: even though she has all those damn boxes in her room, and seems all practical and adult or whatever, she pretty much just follows her heart. Her heart said “real estate” first. Now it says “Marry a famous guy.” Whatever makes her happy is my basic position. You know?”

  Why is it that people think of the heart as this infallible GPS device? Isn’t it just as possible that your heart gives bad directions? I mean, if it were really that accurate, wouldn’t we all be consulting our hearts instead of MapQuest? Like, “Hmmm, we need to get downtown. Hold on, let me consult my heart for the most direct route.”

  I guess Luke doesn’t know my mother well enough to share my understandable concern for Brooke’s welfare. Granted, Brooke doesn’t have any kids to be swallowed up in the wake of her fantasy, but I worry that she could be slowly giving up little parts of herself for some ideal image that she’s concocted in her head.

  “You’re really not worried about her at all?” I ask again. I can tell by the look on his face and the cereal milk dribbling down his chin that he thought this conversation was over.

  “No, I’m not,” he says, wiping his chin with his shirtsleeve.

  “Okay,” I reply weakly.

  “Hey, I’ve got to get going. Have to see a man about a horse.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a little indie film, A Man About a Horse. Dakota Fanning is supposed to be there. I think she can sign her own name now. Very exciting.” Luke gets up and deposits his cereal bowl noisily in the sink before strapping on his enormous Teva sandals.

  “Hey, Luke? One more thing.”

  “Hit me,” he says over the thwacking of Velcro.

  “Are you in the market for a six-foot-long unopened box?”

  “Sorry, Killer,” he says with a smile as he makes his way out the front door, “I’m not in the albatross business anymore.”

  Damn.

  Brooke has received her weekly shipment of glossy tabloids; they cover nearly every square inch of our tiny coffee table. I attempt to gently p
ush them out of the way, and they react by slipping and sliding scattershot over the table and onto the floor. Wily little suckers.

  I pick up the two that I can reach and make a mental note to organize them properly before Brooke gets home—I’d like to avoid a lecture.

  The Ethan Wyatt Scandal, as it’s universally described, still dominates the headlines. In a matter of days, the story has exploded. It’s huge. Not O.J. huge (no Bronco chase), but definitely approaching Ben and J. Lo huge (lacks the collaborative music video angle). I’d say it’s about on a par with a Britney Spears wedding. Which, as I’m sure you know, is just slightly smaller than a Britney Spears divorce or, say, Gwyneth Paltrow giving birth. In any event, it’s big. And though the Maya Dunn/Lori Dunn/Ethan Wyatt love triangle has squashed the “Ethan Wyatt as victim of paparazzi car crash” story, it hasn’t solved the actual car crash problem.

  The estimates are in. A very hairy Hungarian gentleman (I use the term loosely) who happens to be the only Camaro restoration expert in the Triborough area said, and I quote, “Two month.”

  “Two months?” I asked incredulously.

  His response to that was, “Three month?” Which was followed quickly by, “It cost you ten.”

  Begging and praying that our little language barrier was the reason this number sounded so scary, I asked, “Ten…hundred?”

  He laughed a deep, guttural, manly laugh. “Tow-zand.”

  It is going to cost ten thousand dollars to restore the car to original condition. Ten large. Ten grand. Ten. That’s twenty-five pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes, or eleven Marc Jacobs handbags. It’s five Zac Posen party dresses. It’s two weeks at a spa in Maui, or ten nights at the Waldorf-Astoria. It’s one first-class, round-trip ticket to Paris. Paris!