Mercury in Retrograde (13 page)

“So! It's couture!” Lulu gasped. “I thought I knew all the couturiers in Paris. Who is she?”

“I…I can't say, sorry,” Lipstick stammered. “I have to go, I'm expected at a dinner downtown in ten minutes.”

“Why rush off? Bitsy will be here in a second,” Lulu sniped. “She'll know who you're wearing. She knows everyone.”

“Sorry, dinner plans, you know…” Lipstick gasped.

“Well, will you be wearing her to the Met next month?” Fernela asked, slyly. “Because as you know, you
have
to register the designer who is sitting at your table. And as I'm on the committee, I noticed you purchased your table months ago but never listed a designer.”

“You'll see,” Lipstick said, grabbing her coat and heading toward the door. “I don't have to register until two weeks before. So I guess you'll just have to wait.”

Lipstick rushed outside into the freezing wind.

 

Ten minutes later Lipstick tried to navigate the whole “subway thing” at the East Ninety-sixth Street and Lexington station, but was having a hell of a time with her MetroCard. She swiped her card at the turnstile. It beeped and flashed, “Swipe Again at This Turnstile.” After eight swipes, Lipstick got frustrated and went to another turnstile. When she swiped her card there it read, “JUST BEEN USED.” She could hear the train rumbling its approach.

She ran up to the ticket booth. The station clerk ignored her.

“Excuse me, sir,” Lipstick said, tapping on the glass. “Um, I swiped and swiped and it kept saying swipe again, but then I tried at another one and now it won't let me in! Help?”

The clerk, an ancient man of indeterminate age, didn't lift his eyes from the
New York Post
he was reading. “Should've kept swiping at the first turnstile, like it told ya.”

“But I did and nothing was happening and now the train is here and I have to get home.”

“Nothin' I can do. If it's a monthly or weekly card, you'll have to wait twenty minutes till you can go in again. I just can't bend the rules for everyone who wants to swipe their friends in.”

“But I didn't swipe anyone in,” Lipstick cried, frustrated, as she saw the train pull into the station. “Oh, darn. Forget it!” And, as the clerk kept reading, Lipstick did what she thought she would never do (besides riding the subway): something illegal. She jumped the turnstile and ran onto the train just as the doors were closing.

Trembling with excitement, Lipstick sat on the 4 express train to Union Square, where she transferred to the local and got out at Bleecker Street, wearing a huge grin on her face the whole way.

 

Later that night at yoga, Lipstick was still excited.

“You guys—you should have seen it!” she gushed to Penel
ope, Dana, and Sally during their sun salutations. “It was so cool, I was a
criminal
!”

“Okay, Jesse James,” Penelope said, rolling her eyes and attempting to stand on one leg without falling. She liked Lipstick but thought that sometimes her “look at me having fun being poor” tales were annoying. “Take it easy there. I can't afford bail if you get caught, and I don't even want to think about what that damned society website that you're so obsessed with would say if there was a police report.”

Over the past month or so, Penelope had had to face her snap judgments head on. Dana, whom she'd always thought was an aloof workaholic,
was
a workaholic, but was also very sweet. She'd let Penelope and Lipstick join her yoga class free of charge and was always there to offer advice if they needed it. Which they did. A lot.

But Penelope didn't understand Dana's depression. It had been, after all, a full year since her divorce. It was almost as if Dana were still trying to fit the image her jackass ex-husband had tried to stuff her into. The marriage was the one thing Dana, the ultimate type-A personality, had ever done that failed and, therefore, she couldn't get past it.

As for Lipstick, Penelope had expected Neal's friend to be an airheaded, cocaine-addicted snob—which, up until then, she'd assumed all socialites were. But she was fun and generous and didn't touch the Colombian marching powder. However, sometimes her tendency to treat being “poor” like a trip to Epcot Center was grating. After all, Lipstick wasn't really poor. Penelope and Lipstick were, according to national statistics, actually middle-class, although in New York, that placed them firmly in the lower middle-class section of society.

At that moment Lipstick leaned down to hug her head to her knees and came face-to-face with her burgeoning belly.

“Uch,” she moaned, disgusted. “I hate Rachael Ray.”

“Hello, non sequitur,” Penelope said. “I'll admit—Rachael Ray's annoying but why you gotta hate?”

Lipstick sighed, standing up straight, while Sally began to meditate in the corner and Dana lay flat on her back.

“I've been trying to live on like twenty-five dollars a day. I took your advice, Penelope. I got a monthly MetroCard, stole toilet paper from my office, and I've been making my own breakfasts and meals on the weekends. So I started watching the Food Network while I sew, and Rachael Ray is always like, ‘I do it cheap for the everyday family, blahblahblah…. Watch me travel on forty-five dollars a day, blahblahblah….' And she lies! Lies! You just
can't
do New York on forty-five dollars a day. I think the Food Network producers must've slipped her some cash. And then I watched her cooking show and I gained ten pounds off of those damn ‘sammies' and ‘stoups.' That's it. I'm switching to Lean Cuisine and Martha Stewart.”

“Well, you could always go to Weight Watchers,” Dana said. “I…um. I went to a Weight Watchers meeting last night.”

“Is that where you're always going on Tuesday nights?” Lipstick asked.

“Huh?” Penelope asked. “What do you need to go to Weight Watchers for? You're not that…heavy.”

Well,” Dana said, “I am a bit. And I was really fat once. I gained a lot of weight during my marriage and my husband used to make me go.”

“And you were
sad
when you two divorced?” Penelope quipped.

“Hey, I lost the weight—and kept most of it off. Kind of.”

“So why do you go back now?” Lipstick said.

“It's hard to explain,” Dana said, lunging into a fantastic warrior pose.

“We're waiting,” Penelope said.

“You guys are going to think I'm nuts,” Dana said, holding her pose and staring straight ahead.

“News flash, we already do,” Penelope said, trying to match Dana's pose, but wobbling. “But we're all nuts, so go on…”

“I can't stop going. It's like an addiction. For one hour every week I go to this church basement and I'm the skinny, pretty girl.”

“That's sick,” Penelope said.

“Yeah,” Lipstick agreed, walking over to her purse and peeling open a low-calorie snack bar.

“Don't judge,” Dana snapped, stepping back from her lunging pose. “You two aren't exactly role models for having your life together—Penelope is working as a gofer-slash-sex bunny after she got fired, threw up on her boss, and almost burned down the
Telegraph.
”

“Hey,” Penelope interjected, “It was just the one room.”

“And you,” Dana said, turning to Lipstick, “are consumed with worry that a bunch of idiots will find out that you're broke and even worse, can't afford a ten-thousand-dollar dress anymore. And you don't even know how to ride the subway, for chrissake. You've lived here your whole life.”

“Well, some people just don't need the subway…” Lipstick said, looking down at her bare feet and dropping her snack bar.

“The point is, I'm trying to deal with my shit the best I can,” Dana said. “And if Weight Watchers makes me feel better and helps me get up in the morning and get out the door, why judge? It's bad enough my ex is having a baby with that fucking Victoria's Secret model—the baby I should be having—without feeling like a loser from two people I barely even know except that we do yoga a few times a week.”

Sally finally snapped out of her meditational state to murmur, “Amen.”

“Sorry,” Penelope mumbled.

“Yeah, me too,” Lipstick said. “But I can't believe you want to get pregnant so badly. It freaks me out. My friend Elly Portman got pregnant last year and it did
not
go well.”

“Oh, I know Elly,” Sally said, doing a full backbend. “She used to do private sessions until she started Pilates.”

“Wasn't she the socialite who ran over all those people in the Hamptons?” Penelope asked.

“
Accidentally.
” Lipstick exhaled, starting another sun salutation.

Elly Portman, a model-turned-PR powerhouse, was well known to almost everyone in New York as six years ago she'd “accidentally” backed her SUV into a crowd of people lining up outside Aero nightclub in Southampton at three in the morning. Elly had immediately been whisked away by friends, preventing the police from getting a Breathalyzer test, but not from charging her with leaving the scene of a crime. The story had made the front page of the
Telegraph,
the
Post,
and the
Daily News
—for six weeks.

Two months in prison, a year of community service, and more than three million dollars' worth of payouts to the victims later, Elly met the love of her life at a work function and, a little more than a year later, married him. Soon after she'd gotten pregnant and subsequently found out that during pregnancy, one couldn't use any recreational/prescription drugs, cigarettes, or other appetite suppressants. And oddly enough, people actually encouraged her to stuff her mouth full of food. For the first time in her tiny, anorexic life, Elly Portman could eat whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted—and not be judged.

Sadly, for Elly, she went a little overboard.

“You guys, it was terrifying,” Lipstick said, breathing into a downward dog. “She gained over ninety pounds.”

“That
is
a lot.” Dana sighed, matching Lipstick's pose.

“She was only eighty-five pounds to start with,” Lipstick said.

“Oh, I remember that,” Penelope said, trying in vain to stand on one foot. “The
Telegraph
ran a picture of her eight months pregnant and called her ‘Jabba the Portman.'”

“She got so fat she broke her foot—just by walking on it!” Lipstick cried.

“Oh, come on,” Dana said, “that's ridiculous. Nobody gets that fat.”

“Elly did,” Lipstick said. “Now everyone gets a gestational carrier, which is the hot new thing. Muffie at work had one and raves about her. She got the biological baby without the fat, stretch marks, or morning sickness. And don't even get me started on the actual birth. Ew.”

“Well, I'm not going to get that fat!” Dana shot back. Fat and babies were clearly her particular sore spots. During Dana's divorce last year, which scandalized the Lubovitch section of her Miami family (thankfully, it was a small section from her Aunt Nedda's side and everyone knew Aunt Nedda was nuts), someone had anonymously sent her a copy of a new book,
It's Too Late: The Myth of Female Fertility and the Lies of Fertility Treatments.
Even worse, the package was postmarked from the saner climes of Cleveland (as opposed to the Lubovitch Miami).

The book, which caused a national outrage, was about how women need to “focus on finding a man like you find a job because your eggs are dying every day—and after thirty-five it's just not viable to have children naturally!”—at least according to the author, Dr. Julia Jacobson, MD, PhD. “Women need to tell their bosses in their twenties, ‘Hey, I need to leave early and date. It's important to me! I want to have a family!' Because if you don't, you'll be forty with no children. People think they can just get in vitro at any age, like going to McDonald's. Well,
in vitro is expensive and doesn't always work.” What Dr. Julia didn't say was that at the ripe old age of fifty-two she conceived through fertility treatments with her fourth husband, a steel magnate from Dallas.

“Now that's called going out of your way to seal the deal,” Penelope mused.

During the year that Dana tried to conceive with Noah, it hadn't happened as easily as she thought it would and Dr. Julia infuriated—and terrified—her. She felt as if her inability to have kids had contributed to the downfall of marriage and that when she couldn't conceive he'd found a younger, hotter someone who could. An embittered and frightened Dana now wondered if she was going to be “Aunt Dana” for the rest of her life.

“Take time off to date? I'm a lawyer! What would I tell the client?” Dana fumed. “‘Sorry—can't go to court for you today because I have to go on a date with this guy I don't know because he may be the one and my eggs are dying as I speak?' I'd be fired!”

“Isn't the point moot anyway?” Sally asked. “Dana, you aren't actively doing anything to find a live sperm donor and won't leave the house once you come home from work except apparently for a Weight Watchers meeting. Unless you're planning on going it alone and getting in vitro, the outlook is grim, babe.”

“I'm working on it!” Dana said. “I'm going to go out…soon.”

“Actually, I may need you to come out next month,” Lipstick said from the lotus position. “I need a date to the Met gala. I'm wearing my biggest creation and need some moral support. It's
the
event of the season and everyone is photographed and judged according to what they're wearing. And I can't go with any of the socials or someone from work because they'll just ask about my dress. The fifth degree I got at Portia's today almost
broke me.”

“I'll think about it,” Dana said.