Sad Desk Salad (2 page)

Moira hasn’t sent me anything good. I keep refreshing my RSS feed, watching hundreds of new stories tumble down the screen. The same image flashes in my head when I am particularly stressed. It’s of that classic
I Love Lucy
episode in which Lucy and Ethel are working at a candy factory. The bonbons keep coming down the conveyor belt in an endless stream of confection. The ladies are so overwhelmed with chocolate that they end up shoving it in their mouths and in their hats in an effort to keep up. This is what I feel like most of the time, constantly behind the wave of nonessential information.

I am responsible for ten posts every day. Theoretically they can be about almost anything, as long as Moira approves, but lately they’re mostly about celebrity drama and civilian controversy. Some can be hundred-and-fifty-word shorties, but at least four have to be meatier, at least three hundred words long, preferably closer to five hundred. Sometimes I find the posts myself, and sometimes Moira assigns something to me. In some ways it’s a dream job—I get to make a living writing all day. In other ways, it’s not.

For example, around 9:15 nature calls, and I feel I must take my laptop with me into the bathroom. The last time I left my computer for more than ten minutes, a seventies TV star died, and Moira was livid that I wasn’t there to throw up a hot pants–filled slideshow.

At 9:37 I’m still sitting on the toilet. I’ve become so absorbed in trying to find something to post on that I haven’t moved. Finally, the jackpot, courtesy of the
Christian Science Monitor:
A trend piece about the small but growing number of women who are having water births.

Alex182 (9:37:42):
I’m going to grab this
CSM
piece about the ladies who give birth in bathtubs.

MoiraPoira (9:38:03):
Brilliant. I’ll let the other girls know you’ve got it.

The other girls are Ariel, Tina, and Molly. They all work from their respective apartments in Brooklyn and Queens. I’ve become tentative friends with Ariel, even though we see each other in person once a week, tops.

Ariel, who goes by Rel, is the most like me. We even went to the same YMCA summer camp (filled, absurdly, with Jews like us) in the Adirondacks, though our stays there didn’t overlap. We have the same heavy-lidded amber-colored eyes I’ve only ever seen on other Jewesses and the baseline familiarity of nice Jewish girls turned hipster. We might wear thrift-store sweaters, but we wear them with the Tiffany bean necklaces we got for our bat mitzvahs.

But the similarity is mostly superficial. Ariel has had a much more exciting and expensive life than I ever did. She went to a ritzy private school in Riverdale and wound up in rehab before her twenty-second birthday for that tiny heroin habit she developed at the New School. She spent most of her college years at bars on the Lower East Side and backstage at various secret rock concerts. That she looked like a Jewish Olsen twin (petite and waifish, brunette rather than fair) certainly helped her get behind the velvet rope. When I describe Ariel to other people, I make sure to include this bit of pivotal information: She once fucked a Stroke.

Now that she’s thirty, she lays off the junk (but not the booze). However she still has that cloak of coolness about her shoulders. She came to Chick Habit from
Spandex Magazine,
a notorious downtown rag that was founded in the midseventies by drag queens, where she was the culture editor. Her IM handle is a reference to Todd Solondz’s indie film classic about an unfortunate tween called
Welcome to the Dollhouse
. I spend most of our conversations wondering why she bothers to talk to me.

Wienerdog (10:03:14):
Moira is really up my ass today

Alex182 (10:03:29):
What’s her damage?

Wienerdog (10:04:11):
I told her I would have the clip of last night’s ANTM up at 11, but it turned out to be a double episode and now I can’t get it done until 12. Then she called me a “lazy article,” whatever the fuck that means.

Alex182 (10:04:38):
That is so annoying.

In fact, I think Moira’s demands are generally reasonable and that Ariel sleeps much later than she claims to. But chatting with Rel always turns me sycophantic.

Wienerdog (10:20:12):
Molly is sort of being an eager beaver.

Alex182 (10:20:39):
I know. Every afternoon she asks me for work because she’s already finished whatever Moira gave her for the day. Whenever I tell her I don’t have anything for her, she’s all, “Sorry I’m so persistent!”

Wienerdog (10:21:02):
“My real weakness is I just work
too
hard!”

None of us really knows Molly very well, and what we know we find irritating. Moira just hired her as our editorial assistant to pick up stray posts here and there and do research for the rest of us. She’s nearly fresh out of Yale, save for a brief interlude at
People
. I want to be empathetic—she’s just a go-getter!—but she makes it difficult, especially since the posts she wants to pick up always seem to be mine.

I let my conversation with Rel go idle for a while so I can finish up on water births. There is a photo accompanying the story, which depicts a woman in brownstone Brooklyn grimacing in an inflatable tub in the middle of her living room. Her family looks on in the background. A woman who is identified as her younger sister has the most horrified expression on her face: Her mouth is slightly agape, and her eyes are wide. I crop the sister’s face out and zoom in on it, and write 578 words about this completely grossed-out sibling, including a borderline-jerky joke about hippie placenta eaters.

These days it feels like I get paid to be a bitch. It makes me feel pretty terrible when I think about it, but the meaner I am, the better my posts do—and I can’t afford to miss my quota. In fact, my occasionally nasty sense of humor is what got me the job at Chick Habit. I had been working for the website of a moderately successful music magazine called
Rev
(not to be confused with
Rev: The Magazine for Reverends
). I was getting paid about the same rate as I did babysitting in high school, so to make rent, I took some DJ gigs on the side. At least the
Rev
name was good for something, even if it wasn’t good for a living wage.

I had a blog that a whopping three hundred people read regularly, and at least three of them read it from prison. I have the snail-mail letters they sent me from a minimum-security lockup in Georgia to prove it.

Moira noticed a very critical review of a Duncan Sheik album I had written. If memory serves, I suggested that he was “a eunuch” who should “stop cooing about yoga.” In return for my vitriol, a commenter called me a “mean cunt.”

That particular comment really affected me—for a few weeks afterward I’d go back and look at it every day. I’d have the same two dueling reactions whenever “cunt” flashed before my eyes: Part of me would feel hot-faced shame. Why did I have to be so bitchy? Why couldn’t I be more measured in my criticism? What if Duncan Sheik actually read it? The other, smaller part of me would think, Fuck that commenter guy. I’m allowed to have strong opinions and express them in whatever way I please. And besides, that review was funny.

At least Moira thought so. She called me in for an interview on the basis of that eunuch insult. I met her at a wine bar in the East Village, and she offered me the position as Chick Habit’s third full-time blogger before our second glasses of Pinot arrived. It would be much more money than I was making at
Rev
—a respectable $45,000 a year—but no health insurance (not like I had any at
Rev
in the first place). She was also offering me a much bigger audience: Chick Habit had been around for about six months at that point, and it was pulling in about three hundred thousand page views a day.

Both Peter and my mom were excited when I got the job offer at Chick Habit. “I read about that site in the
New York Times
last week!” my mom exclaimed over the phone. “You should definitely take it.”

Even though it didn’t have quite the gravitas that I had desired when I graduated from Wesleyan four years ago, I was pretty excited myself. A few years in New York had made me a realist, rather than an idealist. No one was going to pay me to write indulgent multi-thousand-word articles about the world’s woes. Chick Habit was, though, going to pay me to write occasional blog posts about those woes, along with the gossipy and cultural stuff that gets more pickup anyway. I knew even then that I would get noticed more if I wrote eight hundred words on the significance of the food poisoning scene in
Bridesmaids
than if I blogged about a climate-change bill.

Saying yes seemed like the easiest decision I ever made.

I file the bathtub birthers to Moira at 11:12; she gives it a once-over and schedules it to go live at one
P.M
., which is the blog equivalent of prime time. We get the most readers around lunchtime, when girls in offices all over the East Coast eat their sad desk salads and force down bites of desiccated chicken breasts while scrolling through our latest posts. We get another traffic bump around four, when our West Coast counterparts eat their greens with low-fat dressing.

Even though I no longer work at an office, I run out to get my own version of sad desk salad. There’s nothing in the fridge except a half-empty container of milk and some congealed Thai food from three nights before. I throw on the same black eyelet muumuu that I have worn every day this summer so far—I don’t bother to put on a bra—and scurry across the street. It’s a clear July morning. The sun is so bright I need to hold up a hand to shade my eyes.

At the bodega across the street I’m ordering the same mixed greens with my own limp chicken cutlet when I realize I don’t have my iPhone on me. “Shit! BRB,” I tell Manuel, who is making my salad. It’s come to this: I spend so little time talking aloud during the day, I’ve started speaking in Internet abbreviations to people in real life. He gives me a quizzical look right before I dart back outside and into my apartment for the smart phone. I’m back to the bodega in under two minutes; there are no angry e-mails or texts from Moira. Thankfully Cher has not died while I was in transit.

While Manuel is folding balsamic vinaigrette into my salad with half-clean tongs, the phone rings. I seize up a little, because I assume it’s Moira, but when I look down at the screen, my mom’s sweet, broad face is smiling up at me. I step toward a cooler filled with coconut water in a back corner to answer.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, puffin. Just calling to say hello on my break between second and third period.”

My mom is the only person besides Moira whose phone calls I will take during my workday. She is a high school teacher at Manning prep, which is in the small Connecticut town where I was raised. Since my dad died, my mom has started proctoring summer school in order to pad her nest egg and afford expenses on the house. Mom teaches freshman English and has read every word I’ve ever written; before Dad passed, he taught advanced chemistry, and hadn’t.

Almost exactly two years ago, my father was playing an evening game of squash against Mr. Hibbert, the head of the math department, when he keeled over. He died right there on the court, before he got to the hospital. When my mom called to tell me what had happened, her generally loud and chipper voice was so muffled and faraway it sounded like it was coming from another dimension. My best friend and then-roommate, Jane, was the one who picked me up off the floor of our apartment; I had crumpled down to the tiles in our kitchen and couldn’t move my legs.

Rev
let me work remotely for a while, and right after the funeral I went to Connecticut to help my mom regain some sense of everydayness. I was still numb. My dad was always this stoic, immovable figure in my mind, the voice of scientific reason in my head. Sure, he could be a hard-ass, but that was part of his charm. That he could be as ephemeral as anything else disrupted my sense of the world.

For my benefit, Mom tried to put on a happy face, but I would hear her crying at different times throughout the day. Voices carried in our old Victorian, and even though she tried to muffle the sound of her tears in her dressing room pillows, I could still make out nearly every sob and gasp.

About three weeks after Dad died I woke up to the sound of her crying long after midnight. The next morning I confronted her—tenderly—in the kitchen.

“You can cry in front of me, you know. I want to be here for you,” I told her.

She looked shocked, and like she might cry again. Then a deep sigh seemed to travel through her slender body—which was starting to look downright bony. Before the tears started flowing she sniffed and straightened her robe, a crisp blue pinstripe that she’d been wearing every morning since I was a child. “You’re the kid here,” she said. “I want to support you, not the other way around.”

After that, I stayed with my mom for just one more week. I sensed that my being there didn’t actually make it easier for her—she wanted to get back to her routine. My mom’s attitude toward profound disappointment and woe has always been to fill her days with productivity. The other teachers at Manning, close neighbors, and various friends that she had made through our temple were there to help, so I knew that I wasn’t leaving her to the wolves.

Before I left, I gave the house the best scrubbing I could (not really my forte) and sent my dad’s clothes to the Salvation Army at my mother’s request. “Are you sure you don’t want to save anything of his?” I asked her. “Not even his beaker cuff links?” Dad wore them on the first day of school every year, his own private sartorial chemistry teacher joke.