She titled her essay “
Fahrenheit 88:
A Sunburn on Their Souls.” She carefully didn’t mention Bart by name, since her problem was not precisely with him anyway, and why rock that boat if it didn’t need to be rocked? But she didn’t refrain from calling the show “soft-core porn for the lowest common denominator” and “a sign of the final demise of intelligent discourse in America” and “one dangerous step toward herding women back into their cages.”
The day the issue was shipped to subscribers, she left a copy of
Snatch
—open to the article—on the kitchen table for Bart to read when he got home from the set. She woke up in the middle of the night and heard him rattling around the kitchen, the liquid burp of alcohol being poured into a glass. Wrapping her robe around herself, she stumbled toward the clatter and found him standing over the kitchen table, staring down at her magazine with a tumbler of tequila dangling from his thumb and forefinger. His face was a mottled shade of purple. Suddenly, she saw what a terrible error she’d made: What did she think, that he’d be thrilled that his girlfriend was eviscerating his career in public? That he’d recognize her superior morals and bow down to her, quit the part, disavow his employers? That he would be
enlightened
?
She stood there in silence, watching Bart finish the article. When he was done, he gazed accusingly at her, his eyes bloodshot. “They wrote me off the show,” he said. He fumbled in his jeans pocket for a cigarette. “They’re killing off my character.”
“Why? Everyone loved you!” Margaret’s first horrified thought was that Bart had been fired because of her controversial editorial, and, despite her guilt, she snagged on a tiny frisson of excitement that she might have had such an immediate impact. Perhaps, despite her niggling paranoia that she should have started a blog instead, despite her fears that she was hanging on to Stuart Gelkind like a drowning man to a life vest, perhaps
Snatch
did have a vast cultural cachet belied by its modest readership. Like the
Paris Review.
Or the
Believer.
Bart shook his head. “Ratings were slipping. They thought killing off a character would keep everyone talking.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Margaret. Bart’s breath was rasping, and she realized that he was fighting off tears. She reached out and hugged him, tucked her head into his neck, smelled the sour liquor and sickly-sweet pancake makeup caught at his hairline. She reached for something, anything, that would make him feel better. “But in a way, this is good, right? It frees you up to do something more challenging. Something more, say, Coppola…?”
Bart shrugged himself away from her with a cruel twist. “Guess what, Margaret?” he said, lighting his cigarette. “You really need to get over yourself.”
“I’m just thinking of you,” she said, realizing she’d made a mistake. “I want you to be happy, being the best you can be.”
Bart stabbed his finger at the article on the table. “You know,” he said. “I used to think it was cool that you were so smart. But what’s not cool,
darling,
is the fact that you think you’re so much smarter than everyone else. It’s really getting tiresome. You aren’t right all the time, you know. And your magazine is just shrill and joyless.”
Margaret could sense that she had made some grave miscalculation and her boyfriend was slipping away from her as a result, but his words triggered her indignance. She had thrown everything else away for him, and for
Snatch
—how dare he dismiss that? “At least I have principles,” she snapped before marching back to the bedroom and slamming the door closed.
He didn’t break up with her immediately. Instead, he found an acting job—an action film called
Thruster
that costarred the rising starlet Ysabelle van Lumis—which required him to go to Monaco for three months. With Josephine and Alexis off hobnobbing with agents at Sundance, where their no-budget indie film had won the festival’s top honors, and Claire away doing an art installation in London, Margaret had even more time to pour into her struggling magazine. But something about Bart’s tirade had poisoned her enthusiasm for
Snatch,
and she found herself pounding away at it more out of habit than genuine passion. Yet Stuart Gelkind was still promising a lucrative sale, and with her mounting debts she needed that money more than ever. Besides, what else did she have going for her? It was her shot—her Sundance, her
Fahrenheit 88
—and she wasn’t about to walk away.
Secretly, though, she mostly yearned for Bart to come home so they could reconcile. Instead, when he returned, tanned and boasting a very Italian haircut, he told Margaret that she needed to move out of their bungalow immediately and pay him back the more than $12,000 he had managed to lend her.
That was four months ago. Each day, she seems to miss him more. In occasional moments of searing honesty, she knows that he was right. She wasn’t better than him, her morals weren’t superior, and her career lust no less craven than his own. And, if anything, the failure of her magazine is now proof that he was on to something from the very beginning: Intellectual authenticity was overrated. Fame trumped everything. If he came back, she might even be willing to admit this out loud.
at two-thirty, margaret washes her face, runs a comb through her hair, and scrabbles together a presentable interview outfit of black slacks and a Prada blouse that once belonged to Claire. Her mother is doing something in the attic—it sounds like a power drill is running?—when Margaret creeps down the stairs, filches a five-dollar bill from her mother’s purse, and drives to Le Chat Blanc.
The main drag of Santa Rita is an oak-lined arcade of conspicuous consumption. There’s the boutique that sells children’s clothes hand-sewn by Belgian nuns and a store selling fresh-baked croissants the size of watermelons and another shop that specializes in hand-dipped candles. Where did the old five-and-dime go, the one where she used to buy black rubber bracelets and gold-foil-wrapped chocolates? (Demolished to make way for Starbucks.) What happened to the coffee shop with worn leather booths that she used to hang out in? (Replaced by a faux-retro diner called the Fountain.) It’s like an advertisement for gentrification, and Margaret, thinking of the mom-and-pop businesses that were driven out to make way for $5 chai lattes, feels angry on their behalf (even if she does have a weakness for chai lattes).
Le Chat Blanc is halfway down Centerview Avenue, in a space that was once a musty thrift store where Margaret bought the vintage housedresses her mother hated. It’s a chilly café—more of a bistro, really, the kind of restaurant with parquet floors and framed fin de siècle Parisian liqueur posters and wrought-iron chairs that look like torture devices for the back. According to the menu posted by the front door, it serves up a $16 cheese sandwich and oysters for $3 a pop.
Margaret buys a cup of coffee at the bar and turns to survey the room, looking for a woman sitting by herself. But the only person in the room is a teenage girl with a round face, her hair yanked back into a wispy ponytail. She is wearing a black pencil skirt and button-front white blouse with a high round collar and—could it be? Yes. Pearls. She has a folder in front of her, squared neatly to the edge of the marble-topped table. The folder says, in block letters, “Happy Tails.” Margaret’s heart sinks.
She goes to stand in front of the girl. The girl looks up at her, confused.
“Are you Carly?” Margaret asks.
“Yes? Are you…Margaret?” She smiles, revealing braces.
Margaret nods, reluctantly. She looks around to see if anyone is staring at them.
“Wow,” Carly says, taking her in. “I don’t usually get people applying who aren’t, you know, my age or something.”
“How old are you?” asks Margaret.
“Fifteen,” says Carly.
“You’re very professional for a fifteen-year-old,” says Margaret, trying to swallow her humiliation, trying to ignore the fact that her presence here at all is a sign of how dismal her own professional life has become. Silently, she reminds herself:
Quick cash!
Carly smiles. “Thanks! I’m an entrepreneur,” she says. “I’ve been building this business for three years. I’ve got twenty-two different clients and enough money to buy myself a car when I turn sixteen. I figure I’m getting a jump start on my MBA.”
Margaret manages a smile. Carly reminds her just a little bit of herself at this age. Not that Margaret was such a budding capitalist, but she recognizes the intensity and purpose and total self-righteousness that comes with youthful agenda. Her father would love this girl, Margaret thinks. He’d always hoped she’d be an MBA. She sighs, sits down across from Carly, and takes a slug of coffee. “So what is the job?”
Carly sits up straight and shuffles her papers in an official manner. “You would be a dog walker.”
“Dog walker?” Margaret’s hand jolts involuntarily, splashing coffee.
“It’s a very lucrative, high-growth industry.”
“Well, Carly, that’s very nice, but…” She starts to stand up. She thinks of Bart in
Us Weekly,
of Josephine and Alexis being feted at Sundance and Claire putting on a solo show at the Gagosian in London.
“It’s twenty-five dollars per hour per dog,” continues Carly. “All cash. Plus tips. I’m leaving town for summer camp and need someone to cover my route for the next six weeks. The clients pay thirty dollars per dog, and I take a five-dollar fee off the top.”
Margaret hesitates. She does some mental math. If she walks, say, ten dogs a day—which doesn’t seem unreasonable—that would be $250 a day, or $1,250 a week, or $5,000 a month.
Quick cash!
It’s not quick enough—she would have to walk, what, four thousand dogs to pay off her credit card bills entirely? Still, in one week she could have enough to pay down the balance on a card or two. It will be a fairly easy job to hide from her family; she’ll just say that she’s going for a walk and no one will be the wiser. And does she really have any better options at this point? (Internally, she answers her own rhetorical question:
Yes, you could just ask your parents for the money
and then
No, this way you will at least retain a little bit of your pride, even if you lose your dignity.
)
She sits back down. “Okay,” says Margaret. “I’ll do it.”
“Well, I actually have three applicants so I can’t give you the job just like that,” says Carly. She pulls a sheet of paper from her folder and pushes it across the table to Margaret. “Why don’t you fill this out, and we’ll have you do a trial run tomorrow to see if you’re a fit.”
Margaret looks down at the paper. It is a universal application. “You need to know my Social Security number and college major?”
Carly reaches across the table and crosses the education section out with a black marker. “Most of my applicants leave the college part blank.”
Margaret picks up the application and begins filling it out with a ballpoint pen. Name. Address. Relevant experience. She pushes it back at Carly, who studies it carefully.
“You went to Millard Fillmore High too? Wow, you graduated, like, ten years ago. Okay, and you live on Hyacinth…. Wait a second—are you Lizzie Miller’s sister?” Carly looks up in astonishment at Margaret, who nods reluctantly. “Wow. That’s so…weird.”
“And don’t I know it,” says Margaret. “Why don’t you just tell me what I’m going to do for this test run.”
Carly smiles vaguely and hands Margaret a sheaf of papers—profiles of four dogs and a map of Santa Rita drawn over in pink highlighter. “So, here’s your route. And here are profiles of your dogs. You’ll pick up the dogs in the order which I have listed. Mostly you’ll just open the gate and grab the dog and go. Everyone leaves their gates unlocked. And then you just walk the dogs—I’ve marked the route on the map—and drop them off. I assume you know how to handle dogs?”
“Yes,” says Margaret, remembering the shih tzu her family had owned when she was very young. She doesn’t remember ever taking Bitsy for walks—the dog mostly puttered around the garden, systematically eating her mother’s flower beds, until it died of stomach cancer from ingesting too much fertilizer. “I’m very good with animals,” she lies.
Carly stands up and puts the completed application in her folder, closing it with a snap. She proffers a hand. “It was a pleasure meeting you,” she says. “I’ll call you tomorrow to check in after your walk. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” says Margaret, and she can’t quite stop the wry note that creeps into her voice.
“Oh, you’re
welcome,
” says Carly, clasping her hands before her chest in an offering of true sincerity.
on the way home, margaret drives past her old high school, Millard Fillmore High, a sprawling brick monolith with all the charm of a maximum-security prison, despite the multicultural mural of smiling Afro-Asian-Hispanic-Caucasian kids that has been daubed on the side of the gymnasium. Discarded Big Mac wrappers and abandoned term papers have blown up against the chain-link fence and flap idly in the breeze. The fields where she used to wheeze her way through gym laps are being replanted for the fall, and yellow tape marks off the fledgling turf like a crime site.
A group of cheerleaders are practicing on a grass patch on the edge of the parking lot, and she pulls over for a moment to watch them. The girls are working on some kind of elaborate routine in which, with the assistance of a pair of besweatered male yell leaders, they launch each other high in the air and turn a quick somersault before landing safely in their teammates’ arms. It takes Margaret’s breath away. She wonders what it feels like to jump that high, to trust that someone below will catch you as you come back down.
In high school, her own aptitude had mostly been for cerebral activities: the academic triathlon, Future Democrats of America, the Viola Society, the
Fillmore High Bugle
—she’d been an executive officer of all those clubs at one point or another. She’d had to tack on a whole extra page to her college applications. It was no wonder the yearbook had elected her “Most Likely to Change the World” she had always thought she would, even if she was a shoo-in for the title because of her position as the yearbook editor. At high school graduation, it was Margaret who had given the class commencement speech, entitled “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything” after a Bauhaus song that, at the time, seemed to encapsulate perfectly the vast scope of the opportunity before them. Now it just sounds dreadfully naïve.