“We’re not dating. It was just a couple of dinners!” The absurdity of all this was starting to amuse Alison, as well as panic her. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone in her family had thought anything she did was cool.
“Do you tweet about it?”
“No, oh God, no—I haven’t figured tweeting out yet.”
“You’re dating a movie director, and he wants you in his movie, you need to tweet about it.” Megan was hardly paying attention, the toddlers had stumbled back into the kitchen and they were everywhere now. She kept scooping them up and feeding them Cheetos out of a small Tupperware container. They gobbled the Cheetos with such single-minded pleasure that Alison could not stop herself from reaching over and helping herself although she knew that if she was flying to the West Coast on Friday she had better start the starvation diet again, pronto.
“How come you know so much about tweeting?” Alison asked. “You’re a young mother with twin toddlers, everybody expects you to be brain-dead for another six years at least.”
“The only thing I have time to read is tweets, they’re nice and short, and they’re funny.”
“I don’t even know what a tweets is,” Rose announced.
“It’s stupid, Mom,” Alison reassured her. “It’s a lot of people with nothing better to do throwing their brains away.”
“Oh my God, you are such a snob!” Megan protested. “Mom, you know about tweeting, I showed it to you. People talk to each other on the internet. A lot of people all over the world are tweeting now and it’s a big tool for social justice.” Rose had, in recent years, become interested in the plight of the poor. She was apparently hanging out with a bunch of nuns who got together and prayed for the suffering of people all over the planet. It seemed harmless enough but it did call to mind stories her mother had told them, in childhood, about how she used to collect money for pagan babies. Another activity instigated by a bunch of nuns, just one that wafted even further into the past, ever further into her mother’s unwavering innocent heart.
“It’s not for helping the poor, Mom,” Alison contradicted. “Tweeting is just a lot of people saying absolutely inane things because they want to be famous.”
“That’s why you have to do it! You’re famous now,” Megan insisted.
“I’m a television actress, that doesn’t make you famous.”
Megan was having none of it. “Everyone in Cincinnati tweets about your TV episodes as soon as they come on,” she informed her. “My friend Suzanne tweets about you constantly. When she hears you are going to be in this movie, honestly she is going to flip.”
“Why does your friend Suzanne care about what I do?”
“It’s just fun, it’s a fun thing,” Megan said. “It’s something cool that we can talk about.” One of the twins was getting to the tail end of her Cheetos, and her orange face was starting to register exhausted bewilderment. Alison didn’t know much about kids in general, but she knew enough to recognize Megan’s precious seconds of adult conversation were coming to an end.
“Well, I haven’t been offered any movie, and you cannot tell your friend that I’m dating this movie director because it’s just not true,” she warned her sister. “I mean it, don’t go telling people that. I could get into a lot of trouble if something like that showed up on some dingdong’s Twitter feed.” Because she was afraid, this pronouncement came out more forcefully than she had intended. Megan picked up her orange-faced baby and tried not to look hurt, and Alison wilted inwardly. That’s not what I meant, she wanted to blurt, but too many years of being the black sheep kept her mouth shut and Megan turned away from her, fussing with the children, closing herself off from what had mere moments before seemed like pleasant, nonsensical banter.
Honestly, everyone in her world treated her like a complete idiot. Her agent, her publicist, every director she ever met, bloggers—with the exception of Schaeffer, that nutty guy who seemed to think she hung the moon. Now here she was in Cincinnati, and they all thought she was an idiot too. Only in a more Midwestern, you’re so ungrateful kind of way. And it wasn’t what she meant! She loved that Megan was tweeting with her friends about Alison and her slightly silly television show. She liked her fans, they were pretty nice people, when she bumped up against them. They were all so happy to have their pictures taken with her, and gossip about what was happening on the show.