Kelsey looks confused. “Aren’t we going for a walk?”
“Oh, I assumed since we had breakfast…” Nina trails off, then smiles to compensate. Of course Kelsey doesn’t really have a call.
“Do you have something else planned?” Kelsey still sounds confused but also a little pointed now.
“No!” Nina says and sits. “Are you finished eating? I just wasn’t sure if you were finished.” In her pocket, her phone buzzes yet again.
“I want more coffee,” Kelsey says and raises a hand in the direction of the waitress, who comes over quickly.
Nina had paused her recorder before going to the bathroom. She starts it again and says, “So where do you see yourself in five years?”
“Professionally or personally?” Kelsey asks.
“Either,” Nina says. “Both.” While Kelsey is speaking, Nina pulls her phone from her pocket—it’s 2014, people do this, fuck Kelsey’s fame—and the text reads, In my 22 years as a care provider this is the most a baby has ever cried
“I know it’s such a cliché, but I’d love to try directing,” Kelsey is saying. “One of my role models—”
“You know what?” Nina interrupts. “I do have to go. I really apologize, but I—I—” She pauses, and Kelsey looks at her. “I have a baby, and I need to go nurse her.”
Kelsey seems bewildered. “You have a baby?”
“In my hotel room,” Nina says. “She’s six months old. I never got her to take a bottle—I messed up, I have no idea what I was thinking. But she won’t take one, and she’s really finicky about jar food, and she needs to eat now.”
This is when, as if to offer proof—as if proof is necessary, as if anyone would lie about such a failure—Nina’s milk lets down. There’s that hardening in her nipples, then the release, the liquid spilling in two warm, fast lines, immediately soaking through her bra and shirt. Kelsey looks as if she has detected a bad smell. But when Kelsey speaks, her voice is dispassionate, almost clinically curious. She says, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Nina tries to sound respectful, not defensive, when she says, “You didn’t ask if I’d had a baby.”
Because it would have been self-centered and insensitive to tell you, Nina thinks. And because I didn’t realize Zoe’s existence would become relevant. And because you don’t care. Aloud, she says, “My daughter isn’t really used to people besides me. I’m sorry that I didn’t plan this better, but I’ll order a taxi back to my hotel.”
“Just Uber.”
“I don’t have Uber on my phone.”
“Where are you staying?”
“North Hollywood.”
“I’ll drive you,” Kelsey says. “If you’re trying to get there as fast as possible.” Even if there isn’t apparent sympathy in her tone, Kelsey is offering a favor, and Nina is not in a position to decline it. As she sets cash on the table and they walk out of the restaurant, she knows that without the check, she won’t be reimbursed by Gloss & Glitter.
I’m coming back to hotel now, Nina texts the babysitter from the passenger seat of Kelsey’s SUV. About 15 min.
Then Nina turns on her recorder and says, “So your dream kiss, on-screen or off—who would it be?”
Kelsey turns to look at her with an expression that is unmistakably appalled. Which Nina understands, but at the same time, it’s Gloss & Glitter’s signature question; the magazine’s writers ask this of all the subjects of cover profiles, even the occasional athlete. And getting a follow-up answer from a famous subject, after the interview, is a hundred times harder than getting it in the moment.
Coldly, Kelsey says, “Hmm. I’d have to think about that.” For several minutes, they listen to a pop channel on satellite radio, not speaking.
Kelsey has just turned off Santa Monica Boulevard when she says, “That stuff I told you about Scott and our breakup and the miscarriage—obviously, I didn’t mean for it to be in the article.” She sounds calm and certain, not nervous.
Fuck, Nina thinks. She says, “Oh, I promise I’ll handle it in a very respectful way.”
“After I specially requested you to write this piece, it would be a bummer to find out that I shouldn’t have trusted you,” Kelsey says, and there is in her tone a new steeliness, possibly a menacing quality—a bummer for you is the implication. Even so, if there were not two still-widening lines of breast milk running down the front of Nina’s shirt, if Kelsey were not chauffeuring her, surely she would say delicate and suasive things. At least she’d try.
As it is, Nina says, “I hear you.”
The hotel where Nina is staying has a circular driveway in front, with a fountain in the center. When Kelsey pulls into the driveway, Nina sees that the sitter and Zoe are standing outside. The sitter has Zoe propped on her right hip, and Zoe is big-cheeked and little-nosed, mostly bald, her plump arms emerging from a sleeveless pink shirt with a fish on it, her squat little legs bent in yellow pants, her feet bare.
Nina is surprised that they’re outside and more surprised that Zoe is not crying. To be sure, her expression is one of annoyance. But it’s also one of scrutiny and discernment. Even spending all day in a house with her, Nina is often caught off guard by the intelligence in her daughter’s eyes, and as they approach the hotel, from thirty feet away—that is, before it’s really possible—Nina feels that this intelligence is trained on her.
While still sitting next to Kelsey in the front seat, Nina understands that she will never see Kelsey again. They aren’t friends, they never were friends, they never will be. Nina will never again interview a celebrity. In fact, she will never again write for Gloss & Glitter or any other magazine. This part she doesn’t know, but six weeks from now—which, not coincidentally, will be ten days before her COBRA insurance expires—she will accept a grant-writing job at a nonprofit; she will enroll Zoe in daycare; Zoe will cry nonstop for the first six days and then, abruptly, be fine.
Kelsey will indeed be nominated for an Oscar; she won’t win, but four months from now, at the ceremony, she will present the award for Best Documentary Feature, and people who pay attention to such things will agree that her dress, a sheer ice-blue gown by Dior Haute Couture, is one of the night’s best. In the weeks prior to and following the Oscars, she will be everywhere in the media, her wardrobe and hairstyles, her upcoming projects, her girlish midwestern charm. And in a taped interview that airs just before the Oscars and is conducted by a legendary octogenarian television personality, an interview Nina will watch lying in bed while Zoe sits next to her eating oyster crackers from a purple plastic cup, Kelsey will tearfully describe the miscarriage she suffered in September 2014.
“I hadn’t gotten pregnant on purpose, but we were both really excited,” Kelsey will say. “And Scott isn’t a super-emotional person, but his proposal was incredibly sweet. He said how he was so happy he’d found someone else who was grounded and had good values and he wanted us to be a team and support each other in the crazy world of L.A. Then five weeks later I miscarried, and literally the next day he moved out. And then those paparazzi pictures show up of him with—” This time, Kelsey will roll her eyes but not say Amanda St. Clair’s name. Also, she won’t describe all the blood, and Nina will wonder if one of her handlers advised against it, or if these are edits Kelsey made on her own. For the part when Kelsey said to Nina that she swore she wouldn’t cry but she felt like she was hanging out with one of her girlfriends from high school, Kelsey will amend it to “But I feel like I’m hanging out with my favorite auntie in Michigan.” Which is tactful, given that the interviewer is probably the age of Kelsey’s grandmother.
How astonished Nina will be to realize not only that Kelsey has fucked her over but that in complying with Kelsey’s request, Nina herself was showing stupidity rather than compassion. How astonishing Kelsey’s shrewdness will be—it will elicit from Nina genuine respect, along with a predictable antip
athy. Given that Nina’s career as a journalist is finished, however, does it really make a difference? Defying Kelsey could have prolonged Nina’s career, but probably not by much.
As Kelsey turns her SUV into the hotel driveway, she says, still coldly, “Did you think I’d be jealous?” Nina is about to say no, which is the truth, when Kelsey adds, “Of you?”
But cranky, suspicious, eczema-ridden Zoe—Nina loves her so much! She’s so happy to see her! Outside the hotel, perched on the sitter’s hip, wearing her undignified clothes, Zoe is very familiar and dear, and it occurs to Nina that today is the first time she’s ever had the chance to miss her daughter.
The Prairie Wife
The understanding is that, after Casey’s iPhone alarm goes off at 6:15 A.M., Kirsten wakes the boys, nudges them to get dressed, and herds them downstairs, all while Casey is showering. The four of them eat breakfast as a family, deal with teeth brushing and backpacks, and Casey, who is the principal of the middle school in the same district as the elementary school Jack and Ian attend, drives the boys to drop-off. Kirsten then takes her shower in the newly quiet house before leaving for work.
The reality is that, at 6:17, as soon as Casey shuts the bathroom door, Kirsten grabs her own iPhone from her nightstand and looks at Lucy Headrick’s Twitter feed. Clearly, Kirsten is not alone: Lucy has 3.1 million followers. (She follows a mere 533 accounts, many of which belong to fellow celebrities.) Almost all of Lucy’s vast social-media empire, which, of course, is an extension of her lifestyle-brand empire (whatever the fuck a lifestyle brand is), drives Kirsten crazy. Its content is fake and pandering and boring and repetitive—how many times will Lucy post variations on the same recipe for buttermilk biscuits?—and Kirsten devours all of it, every day: Facebook and Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, the blog, the vlog, the TV show. Every night, Kirsten swears that she won’t devote another minute to Lucy, and every day she squanders hours.
The reason things go wrong so early in the morning, she has realized, is this: She’s pretty sure Twitter is the only place where real, actual Lucy is posting, Lucy whom Kirsten once knew. Lucy has insomnia, and while all the other posts on all the other sites might be written by Lucy’s minions, Kirsten is certain that it was Lucy herself who, at 1:22 A.M., wrote, “Watching Splash on cable, oops I forgot to name one of my daughters Madison!” Or, at 3:14 A.M., accompanied by a photo of an organic candy bar: “Hmm could habit of eating chocolate in middle of night be part of reason I can’t sleep LOL!”
Morning, therefore, is when there’s new, genuine Lucy sustenance. So how can Kirsten resist? And then the day is Lucy-contaminated already, and there’s little incentive for Kirsten not to keep polluting it for the sixteen hours until she goes to bed with the bullshitty folksiness in Lucy’s life: the acquisition of an Alpine goat, the canning of green beans, the baby shower that Lucy is planning for her young friend Jocelyn, who lives on a neighboring farm.
As it happens, Lucy has written (or “written,” right? There’s no way) a memoir, with recipes—Dishin’ with the Prairie Wife—that is being published today, so Kirsten’s latest vow is that she’ll buy the book (she tried to reserve it from the library and learned that she was 305th in line), read it, and then be done with Lucy. Completely. Forever.
The memoir has been “embargoed”—as if Lucy is, like, Henry Kissinger—and, to promote it, Lucy traveled yesterday from her farm in Missouri to Los Angeles. (As she told Twitter, “BUMMM-PEE flyin over the mountains!!”) Today she will appear on a hugely popular TV talk show on which she has been a guest more than once. Among last night’s tweets, posted while Kirsten was sleeping, was the following: “Omigosh you guys I’m so nervous + excited for Mariana!!! Wonder what she will ask…” The pseudo-nervousness, along with the “Omigosh”—never “Omigod” or even “OMG”—galls Kirsten. Twenty years ago, Lucy swore like a normal person, but the Lucy of now, Kirsten thinks, resembles Casey, who, when their sons were younger, respectfully asked Kirsten to stop cursing in front of them. Indeed, the Lucy of now—beloved by evangelicals, homeschooler of her three daughters, wife of a man she refers to as the Stud in Overalls, who is a deacon in their church—uses such substitutes as “Jiminy Crickets!” and “Fudge nuggets!” Once, while making a custard on the air, Lucy dropped a bit of eggshell into the mix and exclaimed, “Shnookerdookies!” Kirsten assumed that it was staged, or maybe not originally staged but definitely not edited out when it could have been. This made Kirsten feel such rage at Lucy that it was almost like lust.
Kirsten sees that last night, Lucy, as she usually does, replied to a few dozen tweets sent to her by nobodies, including Nicole in Seattle, who has thirty-one followers, and Tara in Jacksonville, who’s the mom of two awesome boys. (Aren’t we all? Kirsten thinks.) Most of the fans’ tweets say some variation of “You’re so great!” or “It’s my birthday pretty please wish me a happy birthday?!” Most of Lucy’s responses say some variation of “Thank you for the kind words!” or “Happy Birthday!” Kirsten has never tweeted at Lucy; in fact, Kirsten has never tweeted. Her Twitter handle is not her name but “Minneap” plus the last three digits of her zip code, and instead of uploading a photo of herself, she’s kept the generic egg avatar. She has three followers, all of whom appear to be bots.
Through the bathroom door, Kirsten can hear the shower running, and the minute Casey turns it off—by this point, Kirsten is, as she also does daily, reading an article about how smartphones are destroying people’s ability to concentrate—she springs from bed, flicking on light switches in the master bedroom, the hall, and the boys’ rooms. When Casey appears, wet hair combed, completely dressed, and finds Ian still under the covers and Kirsten standing by his bureau, Kirsten frowns and says that both boys seem really tired this morning. Casey nods somberly, even though it’s what Kirsten says every morning. Is Casey clueless, inordinately patient, or both?
At breakfast, Jack, who is six, asks, “Do doctors ever get sick?”
“Of course,” Casey says. “Everyone gets sick.”
While packing the boys’ lunches, Kirsten says to Ian, who is nine, “I’m giving you Oreos again today, but you need to eat your cucumber slices, and if they’re still in your lunch box when you come home, you don’t get Oreos tomorrow.”
She kisses the three of them goodbye, and as soon as the door closes, even before she climbs the stairs, Kirsten knows that she’s going to get herself off using the handheld showerhead. She doesn’t consider getting herself off using the handheld showerhead morally problematic, but it presents two logistical complications, the first of which is that, the more often she does it, the more difficult it is for Casey to bring her to orgasm on the occasions when they’re feeling ambitious enough to have sex. The second complication is that it makes her late for work. If Kirsten leaves the house at 7:45, she has a fifteen-minute drive; if she leaves at or after 7:55, the drive is twice as long. But, seriously, what else is she supposed to do with her Lucy rage?
* * *
—
Kirsten’s commute is when she really focuses on whether she has the power to destroy Lucy Headrick’s life. Yes, the question hums in the background at other moments, like when Kirsten is at the grocery store and sees a cooking magazine with Lucy on the cover—it’s just so fucking weird how famous Lucy is—but it’s in the car that Kirsten thinks through, in a realistic way, which steps she’d take. She’s figured out where she could leak the news and has narrowed it down to two gossip websites, both based in Manhattan; she’s even found the “Got tips?” link on one. If she met somebody who worked for such a site, and if the person promised she could remain anonymous, it would be tempting. But, living in Minneapolis, Kirsten will never meet anyone who works for a Manhattan gossip website.
Kirsten’s co-worker Frank has volunteered to leak the news for her; indeed, he’s so eager that she fears he might do it without her blessing, except that he knows she knows he pads his expense reports when h
e travels. And it’s Frank’s joyous loathing of Lucy that reins in Kirsten’s own antipathy. Frank has never met the woman, so what reason does he have to hate her? Because she’s successful? This, in Kirsten’s opinion, isn’t sufficient. Kirsten hates Lucy Headrick because she’s a hypocrite.
In 1994, the summer after their freshman year in college, Kirsten and Lucy were counselors at a camp in northern Minnesota. It was coed, and Kirsten was assigned to the Redbirds cabin, girls age nine, while Lucy was with the Bluejays, age eleven. Back then, Lucy weighed probably twenty-five pounds more than she does now, had very short light brown hair, and had affixed a triangle-shaped rainbow pin to her backpack. The first night, at the counselors’ orientation before the campers arrived, she said, “As a lesbian, one of my goals this summer is to make sure all the kids feel comfortable being who they are.” Kirsten knew a few gay students at her Jesuit college, but not well, and Lucy was the first peer she’d heard use the word lesbian other than as a slur. Although Kirsten took a mild prurient interest in Lucy’s disclosure, she was mostly preoccupied with the hotness of a counselor named Sean, who was very tall and could play “Welcome to the Jungle” on the guitar. Sean never reciprocated Kirsten’s interest; instead, and this felt extra insulting, he soon took up with the other counselor in the Redbirds cabin.
Kirsten became conscious of Lucy’s crush on her without paying much attention to it. Having given the subject a great deal of thought since, Kirsten now believes that she was inattentive partly because of her vague discomfort and partly because she was busy wondering if Sean and Renee would break up and, if they did, how she, Kirsten, would make her move.
Lucy often approached Kirsten, chattily, at all-camp events or when the counselors drank and played cards at night in the mess hall, and, more than once, she tried to initiate deep conversations Kirsten had no interest in. (“Do you believe in soul mates?” or “Do you usually have more regrets about things you’ve done or things you haven’t done?”) When Kirsten and Lucy ran into each other on the fourth-to-last night of camp, on the path behind the arts-and-crafts shed, when they were both drunk, it was maybe not as random or spontaneous as it seemed, at least on Lucy’s part. Kirsten had never kissed a girl, though she’d had sex with one boy in high school and another in college, and she’s wondered if she’d have kissed just about anyone she ran into behind the shed. She was nineteen, it was August, she was drunk, and she felt like taking off her clothes. That it all seemed especially hot with Lucy didn’t strike her then as that meaningful. They hooked up in the dark, on a ratty red couch, in a room that smelled like the kiln and tempera paint. Kirsten was definitely aware of the variables of there being more than one set of boobs smashed together and the peculiarly untroubling absence of an erection, but there were things she heard later about two girls—about how soft the female body was and how good another girl smelled—that seemed to her like nonsense. She and Lucy rolled around a lot, and jammed their fingers up inside each other, and, though both of them had probably swum in the lake that day, neither was freshly showered. There really wasn’t much in the way of softness or fragrant scents about the encounter. What she liked was how close they could be, almost fused, with nothing between them.