“Jesus God,” Jen mutters. However long it’s been since Jen has had sex, it’s in dog years.
The waiter picks up the bottle to refill my glass and realizes it’s empty. “Did we want to stick to this bottle?” Lauren circles her finger in the air, pantomiming a mini tornado: another round. Jen pokes me under the table. Now, before she gets too drunk to remember.
I reach for another piece of bread. “So, Laur, I’m not trying to blow your fuse here but there’s more.”
“Don’t tell me,” she says, pushing her plate away. “Brett is skinnier than me now.”
Jen endorses the bon mot with a guffaw. She’s always bristled at being grouped into the “wellness industry” with a woman who considers baked goods one of the major food groups. Likewise, Brett has taken Jen to task for her narrow and elitist definition of health, which contains but a single word—“thin.” There is nothing healthy about a woman weighing the same as she did in the fifth grade, about a woman who rarely eats solid foods and who is so malnourished she cannot grow her hair past her ears. These are Brett’s words, not mine, though I do wonder what she would say if she could see Jen now, with her shiny new lob and lusher-looking figure. There is nothing healthy about a woman who changes her appearance to please a man, probably.
“It’s about the trip,” I say to Lauren.
The Trip. Every season, the producers carve out a benchmark week to bring all the women together, no matter where we are in our cycle of loving and loathing each other. First season was quiet and cost effective: Jen’s Hamptons house, to celebrate the opening of her pop-up juice truck in the parking lot of Ditch Plains. Second season, we were a bona fide sleeper hit thanks to the network’s incessant Sunday afternoon marathons, and we could afford to go bigger: Paris, for the launch of the third book in my fiction series. (The Parisians have never called my books smut.) Last season, it was Los Angeles for the GLAAD awards. The show was up for Outstanding Reality Program—which we all understood to be Brett’s nomination—and there was also a nomination in the Outstanding Talk Show category, for the episode of 60 Minutes featuring Brett and all she was doing to help pave the way for other young, gay entrepreneurs.
As it’s gone, the Digger who is at the heart of the trip is the Digger who gets the most flattering pass by the editor’s hand and the most screen time for her product. And as it’s gone, every woman gets her turn. Lauren isn’t an original like Jen, Brett, and me, she doesn’t wear the signet ring inscribed SS, but she’s been with us since season two. This season we all assumed it would be her turn.
With as much compassion as I can muster, I say, “Lisa told me they want to calendar Morocco for some time in June.”
“Morocco?” Lauren whispers in quiet defeat.
“Apparently SPOKE is releasing a line of electric bikes,” Jen says. Her elfin face pinches in disgust. “Because what women like Brett need is a piece of exercise equipment to reduce the amount of movement in their day.”
In all fairness, the e-bikes aren’t for women like Brett. They’re for women who have too much movement in their day to attend school and to earn a living. I hate that even a silent part of me is still sticking up for Brett, after what happened between us. “The good news is that they haven’t booked the travel yet,” I say, putting the devastating memory out of my mind. “If we make our concerns known, we can sway them. But we have to move fast and we have to show a united front. Lisa said Jesse feels very strongly that in the first season since the election we present women as magnanimously as possible.”
“I see,” Lauren sniffs, “and reversing sexist dating roles isn’t magnanimous?”
“Not as magnanimous as keeping twelve-year-old African girls from getting raped,” Jen replies.
“Who are these twelve-year-old African girls Brett is keeping from getting raped?” Lauren wants to know. “Honestly, does she have any hard data to prove this? Have we even talked to a single one of them? How do we even know it’s true?”
I nod, animatedly. I want her riled up before I get to the point.
“So the show is now The Brett Show,” Lauren says, her aggrieved voice crowd-surfing the din of the restaurant. “Or the SPOKE show or whatever it is. It’s her whole fucking family and her business and she gets the trip two years in a row.”
“It pays to play on the same team as your boss,” Jen says, which was a claim I used to defend Brett against before I realized that Brett has absolutely benefited from being the same kind of different as Jesse. In our ecosystem, Brett is undoubtedly the most privileged of the bunch, and her advantages extend beyond the good edit. Jesse has made it abundantly clear that the show functions as a by-product of our already existing success. It is wonderful if it can enhance what we have already built for ourselves, but it is not there to lay the groundwork. In other words, we attract the show; the show does not attract us. For that reason, Diggers take home the same paltry salary of five thousand dollars a year for roughly one hundred twenty days of labor—and that’s before taxes. We are not meant to need the money, and most of us don’t, but ever since Jesse banished me to the end of the couch, I can no longer stomach the hypocrisy of my boss lambasting the wage gap in the New York Times while paying her own less than minimum wage. Jesse moves up the corporate ladder at the network as the show grows in popularity, getting richer off our backs while we are expected to just be grateful for the continued exposure. Hayley finally had enough of it, especially once one of the production coordinators suggested that Brett took Jesse’s advice, asked for more money, and got it. I admired Hayley for going to bat for herself, but I also knew it was a suicide mission. Jesse would only see the attempt at a salary negotiation as ungrateful, and it would only end in her dismissal, which, of course, it did. Unless you are Brett Courtney, the show does not reward difficult women.
Brett is the teacher’s pet, and funnily enough, one of her top complaints about Jen was that she received preferential treatment because of her mother. Introducing two people who are so much alike that they ultimately repel one another. Both are exhaustively preachy when it comes to their brand of health. Both are smug know-it-alls, believing their approach is the right one and if you don’t do it their way then you are a moron who will probably get cancer soon. Something else they have in common, something I didn’t discover until recently, is that they are both totally different people off camera than they are when we are rolling, though this could be said of all of us. It’s not easy to maintain the dividing line between who we are on the show and who we actually are, to do the dirty, daily work of pulling up the weeds and clipping the undergrowth. But not all of us go around insisting Who I am in real life is who I am on camera, which Brett has said so often it should be her next hideous tattoo. The truth is that who Brett is on camera is who she has become in real life. TV-Brett metastasized. Brett-Brett is in there, somewhere—I’ve had a brush with her—but she is like the last, smallest Russian nesting doll of the set.
Lauren groans. “What are we going to do about her?”
I glance at Jen again. She nods: Go for it. “I sent Lisa my schedule for the next few months,” I say. “I have my book tour and Vince’s birthday and a few other things on the calendar, and I just made it clear I would invite you two, and perhaps whoever the new cast member is—not if it’s Kelly, obviously—but that was it.”