I knew I’d have to distract Dawn from the details of the pitch because she’s one of those people who always says “Yes!” when canvassers in New York stop us and ask if we care about starving children or if we get our hair cut. Even that time it made us twenty minutes late to see her favorite musical, which obviously is Rent.
To preoccupy her, I started whispering stories about the employees as they showed us around: “Milania and Alex commiserated about what a waste college was last week at TGI Fridays and wound up sleeping together even though he has a girlfriend.
“Devin who just offered us Diet Cokes obviously wanted to be an actor, and every time some retiree stops his pitch mid-sentence to ask a question, he hopes that they’ll request the ‘ABC’ monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross, but of course it never happens.”
She stared at me.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” she said.
“Remember what?”
“Your dad used to do that.”
I’d forgotten, but it came back to me in bits and pieces as soon as she said it. He’d tell us voyeuristic tales of the people in front of us at the DMV and make up backstories about the waitresses to keep us entertained while we waited to be seated at Perkins. At least, he’d do that in the rare instances he wasn’t locked in his bedroom working on his novel.
A lot of my memories from when I was little revolve around that closed door and Dawn taking me to get Dairy Queen or putting on a really inappropriate movie like Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction to distract me. We had even less money than we have now, so it made no sense to me when Dawn would say, “Daddy’s working.” I get it now that I’m older, but sometimes I worry, like a big old Lifetime movie child-of-divorce cliché, how much I had to do with him leaving. If I’m part of what he wanted to upgrade from.
Dawn was waiting for me to say if I remembered or not. But it’s not a time I like thinking about.
“Look.” I pointed to a pretty girl at the wheel of a Lexus, text-ing frantically. “Alex’s girlfriend just found out she’s pregnant.”
I check my phone. It’s eight twenty. We’d be well into the episode by now. I feel like I’m in detox. I decide to call my stepmom, Kira, who is an excellent person to answer what I want to ask because she’s written about pop culture for basically every highbrow magazine and blog on the planet.
“Hello, Scarlett!” Her lilting English accent is like aural Vicodin.
“Hey. Why do people like Jennifer Lawrence so much?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t think I like her, but if I tell any other American, I’m worried my citizenship will be revoked.”
Kira laughs, and I hear my baby half sister, Matilda, giggle, probably from Kira’s lap.
“Well, what don’t you like about her?”
I twist my mouth into a frown at the wall, struggling to find the words. I always want to be especially articulate for Kira.
“It’s like . . . she has such a good PR team that she knows she should pretend to have no PR team. Or she’s so overly calculated that she knows she should pretend to be uncalculated.”
“First of all, Scarlett,” says Kira, with a smile in her voice, “if you put this much thought into school, you’d be the valedictorian.”
“But seriously . . . why do people respond to that?”
There was a thoughtful pause on the other end. Then she finally said, “I’d wager people like looking at how little effort she puts into, say, late-night shows. They identify with it. It makes them feel like they can be lazy, and it’ll come off like effortless charm. Does that help at all?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“What’s this for?”
“No reason,” I mumble.
She has to go shortly after, profusely apologizing because she and my dad are late for a dinner party.
Dawn’s acted even more psycho since Dad married Kira, a gorgeous black Englishwoman who looks immaculate in Google image search, even as far back as page fifteen of the search results. She’s thirty, smart, and pedigreed as hell—she got six figures for her debut novel, which came out last year. She is one of those women who doesn’t eat any bread at restaurants but would never judge you for eating it. Whereas Dawn’s and my motto is basically “Can we get some more bread for the table?” in Latin. It makes way more sense for Dad to be married to Kira. I asked him once why he married my mom. He thought about it for a minute, then finally said, “She was fun.”