9
Leah Brenner, Executive Editor
W
hen Laura schedules a remote meeting for Mimi and me, she usually cites a reason. So when she calls my home office and asks if I’m free to Skype at three, vaguely adding, “Mimi wants to chat,” I assume this will be my finale. We’ve just shipped the final pages of the September issue, and Mimi is likely thinking she’s kept me around long enough to glean all of my
Hers
wisdom.
As always, it feels like an invasion when Mimi’s wide, white face appears on the screen of my home computer. “Hi there,” she says, not quite looking at me, although it’s admittedly difficult to make eye contact through a Web cam. “I’m doing some reshuffling, so let’s talk change.” I brace myself. Although I’ve imagined this moment many times, I still don’t have a clue if I’ll respond with the poise of a princess or the dumb hysterics of certain toddlers I know. Mimi continues: “I’ll need you to take over all of the top-editing for October.”
“The entire issue?” I ask, shocked. Victoria and I have been splitting this task half and half, and it’s a massive one: It means constructing and deconstructing and reconstructing every story all the way from its initial big, messy concept to its final perfectly placed punctuation; it means acting as liaison between dueling personalities in edit and art as the text and photos come together on-page; it means being the first and the last pair of eyes on a piece, and sticking around until the wee hours of the night during shipping to usher each layout, error-free, out the door to the printer. Even in Louisa’s time, this was never a one-woman job.
“Yessiree, the whole enchilada,” says Mimi. A feeling of flattery is worming its way into my brain—could Mimi possibly have decided I’m a smart, competent editor, after all?—but a part of me knows to remain skeptical. There is, in fact, a catch: “Victoria is moving on to focus on the November relaunch,” Mimi says, “and since you have such a fan-friggin-tastic handle on the old content, I thought it would serve us all best to pass the baton over to you for the last month of it.” Wow. She does get points for bluntness.
The screen flickers to black—it must be the Web connection; even Mimi wouldn’t end a conversation quite so harshly. As I wait for her smug mug to reappear, I hum in order to avoid any thoughts of my overwhelming new responsibilities. I peer up at my wall calendar, a reproduction of Seurat’s
Grande Jatte,
and soon lose myself in the picture. Oh, to break free of my windowless office and become one of the fashionable women in the painting, promenading along the shore on a balmy summer day. I settle into the fantasy, imagining the delicate lace pattern of my parasol, the thin breeze against my face, the gorgeous French accent I’ve acquired by magic or divine intervention. It doesn’t take long for the nearby squall of one of my babies to snap me out of my reverie and remind me how absurd it is to pine away for an alternate life while also feeling utterly terrified of losing the one I have. I narrow my eyes, and the calendar image turns into what it is: a bunch of dots.
An instant message from Laura pings up on my screen: “Mimi’s having technical difficulties. Do u need 2 ask her anything else?”
Unbelievable. “Nope, message loud and clear,” I type back.
I do the math: The October issue ships in the first week of August, which means I have at least—or more likely, exactly—three more weeks of employment.
The fact that my workload has suddenly doubled does not stop me from dimming my office lights and collapsing on the couch for a catnap. In Louisa’s day, I would have felt guilty even extending a midday coffee break from five minutes to ten. But now, for whatever reason, I’m not the least bit ashamed to call a time-out on my workday. I suppose it’s a response to my helplessness. Still, I hardly recognize this version of myself. I wonder,
How the hell did I get here? How has it come to this?
My mind meanders back in time several months, back to when I felt confident about and certain of my exact role and purpose at work, back to when the name Mimi Walsh meant nothing to me.
Louisa and I were like yin and yang and, if you added the managing editor, Abby, I suppose you could say she was the yung, or something. Louisa was our strong, fearless leader, a bit removed, but always decisive, and I ran the day-to-day operations, managing the team and lending emotional support and gently nudging Louisa away from her more outrageous, out-of-touch ideas. Although I don’t exactly blame myself for Louisa’s demise, I suppose the beginning of the end was when I started telecommuting part-time. I was always available by phone or e-mail or Skype, but I wasn’t always around physically, and that made a difference. Our delicate balance began to teeter.
Remotely, I couldn’t manage to stop Louisa from running a lifestyle story about decorating a vacation home, full of two-hundred-dollar throw pillows and design ideas for gazebos and fountains; Abby did protest in her meek way, but Louisa wouldn’t listen. The experience was like when you trip and everything slurs to slow motion, but you still can’t prevent the inevitable fall—I saw it all coming: the deluge of angry reader mail, the flagging sales, the Corporate freak-out upstairs.
And the staff got edgy, too. Without being on-site day in and day out to moderate disputes and smooth out tensions, I’d return to the office and discover festering grudges and built-up resentments. Louisa would retreat, impatient with her restless underlings and, left sequestered in her closed-door office, she’d cook up even more esoteric ideas: how to get your child into a top private school, what to look for in a personal trainer, and (God forbid) an editorial about how it was time our president followed through on his promise to reform the tax code to bridge the economic gap between rich and poor. She dismissed my concerns that our readers’ median income was $64,000 and that half of them hailed from red states. Mark, though I love the guy, only made things worse; he egged Louisa on, fawning over her “ingenious” ideas and designing layouts more fitting for an Ayn Rand pamphlet than a middle-America parenting magazine.
We did try. On one of my days in the office, Abby and I teamed up to deliver a convincing presentation to Louisa about how
Hers
was on a fast course to disaster. Louisa heard us out, and then the three of us powered through a full day of brainstorming for a redesign with friendlier layouts, more welcoming language, and stories that would acknowledge our readers’ realities—their finances and home lives and political views. Louisa delivered a brilliant speech to the staff about the changes, and then everyone pulled together and worked long hours to make over the next issue. I felt so proud of our team.
But it wasn’t enough—that redesign, or the next one. Part of the problem was that Corporate had lost its faith in us, and kept slashing our budgets when what we needed was the opposite: an extra influx of cash, our own stimulus plan. It got so Louisa banned Abby from her office because she always came bearing bad financial news.
I tried to help Louisa get into the heads of our readers—I sent her on a road trip to a slew of megamalls across the Midwest to meet them—but her heart wasn’t in it. For all her effort, she said she couldn’t connect with the chubby women with bad hair and ill-fitting clothes, women who described their ambitions as just getting through the workweek and who said their dream vacations were Disney World or a cruise to Cancún, women who shook her hand heartily and declared her outfit “real neat.” Louisa returned to the office cranky and despondent. Listlessly, she parroted back the concerns and interests of the women who had lined up by the food courts to get their copies of
Hers
autographed, but she couldn’t abandon her highbrow sensibilities or ignore her natural instincts.
As a result, we couldn’t deliver for her. By the time we rounded up the staff in the conference room to discuss a third redesign in a year, it was clear they were exhausted—and that some had lost their confidence in Louisa, too. Our once invincible leader had become vulnerable and anxious. And I, as second-in-command, had failed to prevent her meltdown. When the call came from the thirtieth floor, Louisa and I were both ready for it.
I lie supine on the couch, peering up at my basement’s ceiling tiles, possibly for the first time ever. I notice they’re overlaid with a pattern of tiny, concentric circles. As I stare, the circles seem to animate into trippy swirls. I start drifting off into that hazy median between wakefulness and sleep. At some point my eyes float shut.
From somewhere I hear a phone ringing. The Human Resources number flashes up on the phone screen. So this is it, I think, inhaling what feels like a hot air balloon’s worth of breath.
“Hello?” I say, but it’s a distorted version of my voice, like the one that plays back from a recording and makes me wince.
“Come to the thirtieth floor.” A deep, booming voice, like a deity’s.
I ascend as if by magic. The carpeting in the corporate suite feels plush between my toes, and I wonder why I’m barefoot. Someone who resembles Suzanne, the H.R. woman, is standing at the end of a very long hall, beckoning to me. I feel as if I’ll never make it to her, wading through the thick carpeting that’s like mud.
I’m seated across from this simulacrum of Suzanne in an office where I swear I’ve been before. “Where’s Mimi?” I ask, that same strange voice filtering through my mouth.
“An appointment.”
“Oh.” I get the sense my boss is hundreds of miles away.
“Well,” says the Suzanne-ish woman, shuffling her papers and avoiding my gaze. My heart is thumping. I feel bad for her. It wasn’t her decision to call me up here, and it’s not her fault that the speech she’s about to deliver is carefully constructed with euphemisms and corporate-speak. I suddenly suspect someone has a gun to her back. I search frantically for an exit. Wasn’t there a door around here? How did I get in?
When sort-of Suzanne looks up at me with a smile, I can tell she feels bad for me, too. How totally wretched, this mutual pity party. I squirm in my seat. “Your position has been eliminated,” she says, and then—poof!—I’m eliminated from her office and off far, far away, settling in on a blanket by the Seine, spreading Brie on a baguette, and basking in the mild light of late afternoon. It’s all
jolie
and
gentile
and
merveilleuse,
until suddenly my snack disappears and I’m clutching at a packet labeled “Moving on and moving up”; the Seine dries up, the pretty women with parasols vanish, and I’m back in an office with Suzanne’s clone, clasping her clammy hand with my own.
“Get yourself a lawyer,” the Suzanne impersonator whispers, a tickle in my ear. I should ask her, “Who?” and “Why?” and “How?” but I’m utterly exhausted, desperate for a bed.
“Good-bye, Leah,” I hear, or maybe just imagine.
I jolt awake, disoriented. Strands of my hair are matted with sweat to my cheek, and my left arm is imprinted with the nubby diamond pattern of my couch. Oh, right, I’m in my home office. I have no sense of how long I was out. The phone is ringing.
“Hello,” I say into the receiver, my voice hoarse with sleep.
“Phew, you’re still there.” My mother’s voice is like espresso; I clear my throat and snap to full attention. “I’m never sure when I’ll call and your replacement will answer and pretend like she’s never heard of you.”
“Gee, thanks, Mom. You know you’re calling me at home.”
“Well, still,” she says. I only let her get away with such talk because she’s been through this kind of staff turnover herself, and in her case, she was the displaced editor in chief. My mother—the famous and brilliant Betsy Brenner—was one of the first women to head up a Schmidt & Delancey publication, back in the era when women’s magazines were usually run by men.
“So, what’s up?” I ask, now fully awake.
“I wanted to see if you’re coming in for a visit this Sunday. Or do you have to work?” Of course my mother believes work is the only reason I might choose to not spend my weekend with her. I think she honestly sometimes forgets I’m a mother of three.
“I’m not sure, Mom. Why don’t you come out to our place and we can inflate the pool in the backyard for the girls?”
“Oh, I’m not up for all that suburban revelry.” I roll my eyes. She and my father have resided in the same Upper West Side floor-through since my sister and I were infants. She believes it’s a tragedy I shipped out to New Jersey, and when I recently told her that Rob and I were mulling over a move farther from Manhattan, she simulated a stroke. “I thought we could work on the program for your sister’s little play,” she says.
What my mother calls Cara’s “little play” is an off-Broadway revival of Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
; the production’s previews inspired the
Village Voice
to declare it the most hotly anticipated show of the year. “You’re writing the programs?” I ask, incredulous.
“Sure I am. It should come as no surprise that they don’t know the first thing about producing a publication—”
“You mean a program, not a publication. It’s more like a pamphlet, right?”
My mother ignores me. “When I mentioned my decades of experience as one of the most preeminent editors in the history of the publishing industry, the producers practically fell at my feet and begged me to do it.”
“So did you already set the deadlines for first drafts, revises, fact-checking? How’s the copy flow coming?” My mother doesn’t acknowledge my sarcasm. Maybe she’s actually gone bonkers and believes she is back at the helm of a real publication, running the show.
“You may be interested to hear,” she says, her voice turning sneaky, “that they’re letting me include a crossword on the back page. We could theme it, like The Sounds of Sondheim, or Comedies, Tragedies, and Tonys.” I’d prefer not to admit that this intrigues me; my mom knows how much I adore a word puzzle.