As Seen on TV (7 page)

“Sunny,” Liza points her pointy, pregnant head into my office. “Tomorrow, can you start writing up descriptions for everything you do?”

“What?”

“For the new MBA. It would help if she had To-Do lists. If you could write out everything you do and how you do it, that would be fabulous. Thanks.”

Great. Like I have nothing else to worry about. I’m going home.

That night I dream about sitting at the diner and Ronald picking hamburger meat with fat fingers out of the space between his two front teeth. He’s telling me that he’s decided to hire Liza’s unborn child instead of me.

I wake up hot and cold and sweaty, tangled in my clean cotton sheets. It’s 4:00 a.m. I can’t fall back asleep, so instead I shower and go to work.

I compose the list of things the MBA should do, and then at eight close my door and begin my morning ritual of calling Ronald.

“Ronald Newman speaking.”

My mouth is immediately zapped of all moisture. He’s alive! He’s alive!

Why didn’t he call me if he wasn’t dead?

“Hi, Ronald,” I say, wishing I had a glass of water nearby. What’s wrong with my mouth? “Sorry to bother you? It’s Sunny Langstein calling? How are you?” Must stop talking in question format.

Silence. Why is there silence?

“Sunny,” he says slowly. “I’ve been meaning to (ahem) call you—” Why the ahem? No one likes an ahem. “I have some bad news I’m afraid.”

Bad news? No one likes bad news.

“It’s very unfortunate, but we found a candidate with more New York experience.”

“More what?”

“More New York experience. Someone more familiar with the bars, the concert venues, the retail stores, the arenas. Television contacts. You don’t have any contacts here, Sunny. We need someone with a higher profile. What would you be bringing to the table?”

My new business experience in the soda industry? “I…um…didn’t you already offer me the job?”

“Like I said, the news is unfortunate. My secretary was supposed to call you and send you a fruit basket. Should I assume you never received it?”

What stupid fruit basket? “Why were you interviewing other candidates after you offered me the job?”

“You can never give up on finding the perfect candidate,” he says. I wish I’d received the fruit basket. I wish he was in the same room as me. Then I’d hurl an apple at him.

“I hope this hasn’t caused any inconveniences,” he says.

I have no job and no place to live, but what inconvenience? “Oh, oh, none at all,” I say in a singsong tone.

He doesn’t sense my sarcasm. “You never know, we could have another opening any day. Why don’t you give me a call once you’ve settled in the city?”

I am not going to cry. “Uh-huh,” I say, then add “’Bye.” I hang up. Rage and frustration and disappointment and what-a-fucking-asshole overwhelm me, and I sink into my fabulous swivel chair that now belongs to the fabulous MBA. I stand up and stand directly behind the closed door because it’s the blind spot, the one corner of personal space in the entire office where no one can see in. No job. No apartment. What am I going to do? I lean against my
in-case
umbrella and tears spill down my cheeks like rain.

T
his is the history of my parents: Father is in business school. Mother is a nurse. Father is Jewish. Mother is Catholic. Father meets Mother in Brooklyn. Father and Mother fall in love. Mother gets pregnant. Father proposes marriage but insists Mother convert, otherwise Father’s children will not be Jewish. Being Jewish is very important to Father because it’s important to Father’s parents. Father’s father, Daniel, died five years ago and Father promised he would marry Jewish woman. Mother cares more about Father than she does about religion so she agrees. Mother’s parents do not agree. Mother’s parents are horrified that daughter is pregnant and converting and tells Mother to never return home again. Mother converts. Process is far more strenuous than Mother imagined. Mother marries Father anyway. Father gets offered high-paying consultant job in Fort Lauderdale. Mother and Father move to Florida. Mother has baby girl, names her Dana, after Father’s father. Mother
wants to return to work but has difficulty finding new nursing job with baby at home. Father becomes increasingly distant. Father’s job requires much traveling. Mother tries to have another child. Gets pregnant. Miscarries. Gets pregnant again. Miscarries again. Gets depressed. Gets pregnant again. Carries to term. Mother sees baby as shining light in marriage and names baby Sunny. Sings “You Light Up My Life” to rock baby to sleep. Father leaves Mother for secretary. Mother’s older daughter doesn’t understand where Daddy is and sits on the porch stairs waiting for him to come home. Mother puts three-year-old back to bed and explains to ten-year-old again. Mother gets sick. Mother doesn’t tell children that she is sick, but instead calls her own parents who she hasn’t spoken to in ten years and begs them to come take care of them. Parents come. Grandmother and Grandfather move into Mother’s house until summer when Mother dies and children move into Father’s new house in Palm Beach.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Steve tells me.

My office door is still closed. “Whatever you say, Judy Blume.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” One at a time, I pull unused thumbtacks out of the corkboard walls, and then group them on my desk by color. Red, yellow, green, white.

“So you’ll look for a job here. It’ll be easy to find something once you’re in the city.”

I attempt to keep my voice at a consistent pitch, above the sinking level. “Everything is all screwed up. I didn’t want to move until I had a job. I don’t want to be the jobless girlfriend who has no life and sponges off her boyfriend, all right? How do you know I’m ever going to find a job?” I turn the thumbtacks around and stab them into the wooden desk.

“First of all, you’ll find a job. Second of all, you’re not sponging off me. I’m happy to cover the full rent until you find something. And second of all—”

“You already said second of all. You’re on third of all.”

“Third of all, you never thought you’d get the first job you applied for, anyway. And you only applied to jobs in the beverage industry. Can’t you apply for any new business job? And can’t you apply for manager positions, too? Not just assistant managers?”

“I wanted a job in an industry I’m familiar with. I don’t like not knowing what I’m doing. And I’m not ready to be a manager yet.”

“If you need to make some money, you can wait tables at the restaurant.”

I can’t get sucked up by his world. I need to have my own job, my own life. I can’t depend on him for everything. Is he not listening? “But I wasn’t planning on quitting until I had a job. You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?” He sighs into the phone. “Sunny, I know you’re afraid you’ll end up like your mother. But you’re not her, okay?”

My head hurts. I close my eyes. “How did you know that was bugging me?”

“What do you mean how do I know? I know.”

“Carrie? Hi, it’s Sunny.”

“Sunny?”

“Sunny, Adam’s daughter?”

“Sunny! Hey! How are you? I am so busy here today. We’re having a major crisis. Major. Can I call you back? Why are you calling?”

Why am I calling? I rub the palms of my hands against my temples. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you. The job that I thought I had fell through and I was wondering if you still had some temp work for me? You seem like you’re in a rush, though, so call me whenever you have a second.”

“Sure, Sunny, no problem. Let me ask around and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, okay? Gotta run! Crisis! ’Bye!” She hangs up.

She’s not calling back. Maybe my father has already
dumped her and she’s going to make me wait by the phone as payback.

The bulletin board walls in the room start to contract, like the trash compactor scene in
Star Wars.
My breathing feels shallower, faster, harder.

When we moved in with my father, this happened to me whenever my dad tried to take us on vacation. On a flight to the Florida Keys, I pretended to be asleep on Dana’s lap, imagining air leaking from my mouth as if from the rim of a balloon. Leaving me shriveled and empty.

When I was seven, on a trip to Epcot Center, on the Spaceship Earth ride, as Dana, my dad, his new girlfriend and her twelve-year-old son journeyed “to the dawn of recorded time…” I began to slowly hyperventilate. When our seats rotated to reveal a vast star-filled night sky, I felt as if I was being buried alive. Rambling, I told my father I had to find a bathroom, now, and Dana took my hand and led me through the blackness, toward the red exit sign. As soon as we entered the lit corridor, I started crying. She pulled me into her and smoothed my hair until I felt calm.

When Dana was seventeen, on the morning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, she knocked on my father’s door, still in her pajamas, and told my father she was not going to synagogue. She’d had enough. She didn’t believe in God, and what was the point in pretending she did? Moronic, she said. Religion was moronic, so why should she be a hypocrite?

Sitting in the kitchen, eating my cereal and milk, dressed in my new striped gray Rosh Hashanah suit and black pumps, I thought about how after my mother died, Dana used to tell me that she was watching us from above, making sure we were all right. But as I heard Dana stomp toward her room and slam her door, I realized that it had been something she had to say, because what else do you tell a six-year-old girl?

Headhunter. Why don’t I e-mail a headhunter? I’ll write up a polite cover letter, using Steve’s New York address.

By noon Liza has passed by my closed door, scowling, at least twenty times. I’m about to send off my cover letter to Great Jobs NY when my phone rings, annoying me.

“What?” Did I just say that?

“Sunny. It’s me. Omigod.”

Will Omigod one day make it into the
Oxford English Dictionary
as an expression of disbelief or amazement among generation Y women?

“Oh, hi, Carrie.” Maybe she found something? Be calm.

“Omigod. Guess what? You’re not going to believe this. Are you ready? Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down?”

No, I’m lined up vertically against the wall in a headstand. “Yes, I’m sitting.”

“Okay. Okay. One of the girls—not one of the two girls I found, but one of the girls my assistant Lauren discovered, my ex-assistant I should add—was arrested last night. Arrested! By the cops! I fired Lauren, of course. A bad judge of character has no future at Character. No future in this business at all. I can’t believe I hired her in the first place.”

“What girls?” I ask. What is she talking about? She’s sounding a bit pimpish. I change the screen of my computer to my To Do list in case Liza peeks in. No need to antagonize her for no reason.

“For
Party Girls.
The reality TV show. I told you about it, didn’t I? The camera follows four women on Saturday nights. And the unique part is that the show airs the next night because it’s ALR taping which is—”

“Right, Almost Live Reality. You told me.”

“Yes, Almost Live Reality and taping starts in eight days. Eight days! Eight days!”

Wow, I have good timing. I might be a timing goddess as well as deity of efficiency. Lauren got fired
today.
I need a job
today.
I am good. I can demean myself for a few months, while I make contacts and earn some cash. If it looks that bad on my resume, I don’t even have to put it on. I swivel my chair three hundred and sixty degrees, and smile. “I’ll take it,” I say.

Carrie squeals. “You will? You’re awesome! You’re going to be amazing. You’re going to be a TV star.”

What did she just say? Me? A what? “You mean a Character star, right?”

“Whatever you want to call it, honey. I’m going to make you famous.”

Famous? “Carrie, are you offering me a job at Character?”

She laughs a high-pitched, girly laugh. “I’m offering you a role on
Party Girls.
”

I drop the phone and then pick it up again. “Excuse me?”

“You’ll be great.”

“On TV. What do I know about TV?”

“You don’t need to know anything. That’s the point. It’s a reality show.”

I can’t be on TV. What would I do on television? “I don’t understand.”

Carrie is beginning to get impatient. “Sheena was arrested for shoplifting two thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise from Bloomingdale’s. She’ll be tied up in court for the next year. And we can’t have the show’s reputation tarnished before it even starts. And she was supposed to be the Miranda.”

“The what?”

“The responsible one. Remember my client Howard? At Eden’s? He had the Hawaiian shirt and the jealous wife. He called me at 3:00 a.m. last night and told me that Sheena was in jail and that I had to find a new girl, pronto. We need to have four girls. Four girls, Sunny, four girls. I’ve been frantically trying to find a replacement all morning. Howard nixed the runner-ups. All of them. He said, ‘If I didn’t hire them the first time I saw them, why should I hire them now?’ But isn’t that the point of runner-ups? Anyway, he said to find someone new. So I’ve been searching for a lawyer or an investment banker, someone sexy yet serious, but no one wants to take a sabbatical from work, and even if someone could, her management probably won’t allow her to moonlight in case the show’s material reflects negatively on the firm. But we need
someone capable. And then
you
called. Didn’t you always want to be on television? Be like Barbara Walters?”

How did she remember that? “I don’t know—”

“Do you believe in fate? I believe in fate. I called Howard, after remembering that he already met you. I told him you were a career woman, moving to the city and wouldn’t you be perfect and do you know what he said? Bring her in for a screen test.”

“Really? Me?” Well, I never. He must have been impressed with my life-saving show at the restaurant. “He saw me do the Heimlich and thinks my life-saving skills will make me a good character?”

“Um…no. He left before that happened. He decided he didn’t like their table and they went to Nobu instead. But he thought you were cute.”

I’m oddly flattered. I catch my smiling reflection in the computer screen and attempt to make my smile TV appropriate. Am I showing too much teeth? How much teeth is too much teeth?

“Are you in?”

“I…um…” This is a bit psychotic. How can I be on TV? Who am I? Everyone has his or her own show, and who are they? But on
Party Girls?
The bubble gum of television?

Why not? It’s a job in New York. “I do need a job. I could certainly use the money.”

“Exactly. Although, I should tell you the show doesn’t pay much. But—”

“What’s the salary?” Isn’t that the whole point in being a star? That you get to be rich?

“There’s no salary
per se.
But there is a stipend of a thousand dollars. And there are a million perks. You’ll get a complete makeover. We’ll fix up that hair and the uneven skin. And we’ll definitely do something about those eyebrows.”

Those eyebrows?

“Plus,” Carrie continues, “because
Party Girls
is on TRS and TRS is owned by Metro United, you get tons of free stuff from everything Metro United owns. Including a thousand
dollars a month clothing allowance at Stark’s, so twenty-five hundred in total for two and a half months. Isn’t that amazing? It’s amazing. And you’ll get fifty percent off any additional Stark’s purchases. They have everything there, Sunny. Everything. You can get a new couch. A sheepskin coat. Prada shoes. And since they pick up shipments around the country, I’m sure we can find a way for them to deliver your Florida furniture to your new Manhattan apartment. And Metro United, MU, also owns Gourmet Market. You haven’t tasted smoked turkey until you’ve bought some from their deli. You get a four-hundred-dollar expense account per month at any of their locations. And a free membership to Hardbody gym. There’s like one on every corner. They have spinning rooms, boxing rings and Pilates studios. They even have fantastic pools. Incredible, I know. Oh, and Metro United also owns Rooster Cosmetics. They make those fantastic facial-cleaning strips. And Purity tampons. You’ll get free Purity tampons. As many as you need. Sanitary products get expensive.”

My pubic region clenches at the very mention of a Purity tampon.

Free move? Clothing allowance? I could use that winter jacket. And Steve’s place could certainly use some new furniture. A lot of new furniture. A nice comfy bed, some lamps, blankets, candles…and a thousand dollars would pay for at least the first month of my rent…

What’s wrong with my eyebrows?

“It’s only ten weeks,” she continues. “Ten weeks. That’s it. Two and a half months of your time. And it only films once a week.”

That’s great. All that for only one night a week? I’ll have tons of time for a real job. “So I’m free the rest of the time?”

“Exactly. But Howard would prefer that his girls concentrate on the show and not work anywhere else. You’ll need to be free for press purposes. But you can certainly set up a job for after the show.”