Perfect Little World(93)
Izzy returned her gaze to the novel in her hands, a hardcover book with a light blue cover featuring a wooden dollhouse filled to overflowing with Fisher-Price Little People figurines from the ’70s. On the back of the novel, there was a picture of Julie, standing in front of one of the AstroTurf-covered buildings of the complex, looking more serious than Izzy had ever seen her in real life. The photographer had wanted to include all the members of the Infinite Family in the background, but several of the adults had balked at this idea, the weirdness of it, as if Julie had adopted them or ruled over them. The ad copy on the back cover began: A novel about a unique kind of family, from one of the members of The Infinite Family Project, which had given Julie fits at first, the way the publisher demanded that her status in the project be part of the promotional materials. “I was a writer before the project, you know,” she said, exasperated, at dinner one night.
The novel itself was about a woman in her forties who has inherited a fortune after her parents pass away in a plane crash. Without any family now of her own, no husband or wife, no children, no brothers or sisters, she decides to hire a group of actors to play her family. Soon, she hires more and more actors, until she has an extended family of thirty people, some of whom she only sees once a year. She eventually falls in love with one of the actors who plays her brother and they end up marrying and having children of their own.
To Izzy, who had read, like most of the Infinite Family, galleys before the book had been released, it was a weird kind of postmodern fairy tale. It was also, thank god, fairly removed from the actual Infinite Family, which had been a worry of many of the members of the project when they heard the title of the novel. “The publisher wanted that title,” Julie informed them immediately after showing them the cover, her face pink with embarrassment. “It’s pretty darn close to the Infinite Family, isn’t it?” Harris asked, his face smiling in a Silly Putty way, but no one else commented on the similarity. At least not at the table, not in front of Julie.
And yet, there were enough people in the family who felt ill at ease with Julie’s book, not only from outright jealousy but also from a feeling that Julie was using the Infinite Family as a promotional tool for her own career, no matter how often she said otherwise, the way she was, whether they wanted it or not, pulling them into the spotlight.
“When you get down to it,” Nikisha said to Susan and Izzy one night, “she and Link were the two people who needed the project the least. They weren’t poor, Eliza wasn’t an accident, they already had their own careers.” Nikisha ticked off each detail as if she were a lawyer in the midst of a closing argument. Nikisha was, to Izzy’s mind, one of the smartest people in the family, had an uncanny ability to recall perfectly anything that she had read, was unbelievably capable and seemingly impossible to unsteady, so Izzy could not help but fall into agreement with her, even if, hours later, alone, she realized that she actually didn’t think that way.
“It’s like the project is their own experiment,” Nikisha continued, “one that just Link and Julie are conducting, and we’re just lab rats.”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “They had just as many reasons as we did to join, and Julie’s always been one of the biggest cheerleaders for the project. Should she give up writing because it might make us uncomfortable?”
“I like Julie,” Izzy offered quietly.
“What if this project was just a long-term investment in her career? She becomes the most visible member of the Infinite Family; it becomes her brand. If someone is going to write a book about this place when it’s all over, who do you think is going to do it?”
“Are we allowed to write a book about it?” Susan asked. “Legally?”
“Even if it’s not a memoir. What about another novel? Don’t you think she’s been taking notes?” Nikisha offered, not bothering to answer Susan’s question. “Do you think we’ll turn out to be characters in her next book?”
After one of the bookstore employees introduced Julie, she stepped up to the podium to fairly boisterous applause. The book, only out for two weeks, was already at nine on the New York Times bestsellers list, well reviewed in numerous newspapers and magazines. There was talk, Julie admitted, of film rights being negotiated. Julie, wearing a plaid shirt and blue jeans, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail, read from the first chapter, where the main character, Anna, one year after her parents have died, puts an ad on craigslist for two actors to play her parents. Once she finished reading, she took questions from the audience. One woman in the front row asked if living at the complex and participating in the project had helped her writing. Julie frowned, thinking over the question, and then said, “Well, it gave me more time to write as a new mother than I would have had otherwise. But, on the other hand, there were times when I wanted to focus on the book and there were just so many people around, so many wonderful people, I might add, that it was hard to find time for myself. I don’t think of the project as something that helped me as a writer; I think of it as something that helped me as a person.”
A man then asked if she would be sad when the project ended. “Yes,” she said, looking at the group of people from the Infinite Family, smiling. “But I’ll also be happy to see what comes next. I think it will be a good thing, too.” She then shrugged, as if to apologize for her honesty, but Izzy completely understood what she meant, the appreciation for the larger family, but the feeling that there was an unknown future that would only open up after they left the complex for good. It seemed, now that they were more than halfway through the project, that it was harder and harder to avoid the understanding that the Infinite Family, despite its name, would eventually end. And it was even more difficult to properly analyze how they felt about this, if they should be guilty for wanting to move on to what was next or if they should be terrified to be leaving their family behind.