Rich and Pretty(16)

Thanksgiving has always been at home, the place she still thinks of as home, though it hasn’t been that for years, her room transformed, anonymized, the perfect place for guests. She’s never been able to bring herself to spend a night there, sipping coffee after dinner, then proclaiming her own alertness, rushing out to catch the train. The pale purple carpet, which she’d chosen, had loved as a girl then loathed as a teen, had been ripped up, replaced by that wood flooring you buy at the hardware store then snap together like a child’s toy, her dad, who had always been handy, doing the work with her younger brother Adam over the course of one weekend. The twin bed had been replaced by a full, flanked now by matching nightstands with a box of tissues and a coaster: all the comforts. There was a framed poster, from when all those Monets came to the Met. She and her mom had played hooky, gone into the city to see them, a jaunt that seems out of character, now that she thinks about it.

Thanksgiving is a Brooks family specialty. Her mother cooks amiably and ably, checking measurements against handwritten notes decades old. Her dad was a chemistry teacher, once upon a time, so he does the baking. “Baking is science,” he says. He wears an apron, though he doesn’t need one: He works with a scientist’s precision and doesn’t spill. Thanksgiving, he does pies, both pumpkin and pecan, and bread, a beautiful, warm thing, perfectly shaped and very soft inside. The day’s rites haven’t changed much over the course of her life; there are no grandparents left, so there are no longer grandparents in attendance; instead there’s Alexis, Ben’s girlfriend, but otherwise, it’s the same as it ever was. Lauren finds Alexis uninteresting. A little too pushy, a little too proprietary inside the house—it might not be Lauren’s house anymore, but she doesn’t want to think of it as Alexis’s. And at the previous Thanksgiving, Alexis had made a fuss about Lauren’s bag.

“Ba-len-ci-ag-a.” The enunciation was meant to be indicate awe. “That must have cost a fortune.”

“It was on sale,” Lauren lied. It had most certainly not been on sale, but she didn’t want to defend having spent fourteen hundred dollars on a bag to Alexis, and discussing having spent fourteen hundred dollars on a bag at the holiday table was as unthinkable as discussing anal sex or Israeli settlements. The Lauren who goes home to South Orange is not the same Lauren who shops at Barneys. The Lauren who goes home to South Orange is her parents’ only daughter, the smart one, the one with drive, the one off in the city living the sort of grown-up life parents want for their children. Since Lauren’s never entirely been certain what her parents’ image of that life entails, she glosses over most of the details. She’s shaved a third off her rent, in the telling, and her parents still think it an astronomical sum. Still, they never appeal to her to move to Jersey City or Hoboken. That would be a concession of some sort, they realize. That would be losing at whatever game it is their daughter is playing, and at least she’s in the game—better than poor Adam, with his deep voice and an adolescent reluctance to make eye contact, despite the fact that he’s fast approaching thirty. Adam’s bedroom decor has changed, too, but unfortunately, he’s still occupying the place. Anyway, her mother hasn’t mentioned law school in at least three years, which is a relief.

Lauren pulls her chair closer to her desk, frowns at her computer, can’t remember what she was working on. She checks her e-mail. That’s what work is, that’s all work is, anymore, discussing the work to be done. She does the work, thinks about something else. She can do that: She’s been in this job long enough, unexpectedly long, if she’s being honest. She’d studied English with some vague idea that she’d work at a magazine, but began her career at a website, where a fellow alumna was a highly placed editor. After a year and a half of picking up her boss’s prescriptions and writing the occasional eighty-word movie review, she’d moved into book publishing, first as an assistant, later a junior editor, at one of the conglomerate’s more literary houses. Now: cookbooks. At least this imprint is profitable; a measure of job security.

She’s got a piece of paper stuck inside her book and takes it out. It’s her running list. She has to return the bedsheets that she bought online because she buys everything online, but they feel terrible, and so she stuffed them back into the box they’d come in, borrowed the tape gun from one of the guys at the messenger center, and sealed it up, and the box is sitting under her desk, a persistent reminder that she’s out eighty-nine dollars until she can stomach standing in line at the post office with the local sociopaths. That’s been on the list for a few days now. There was a problem with her taxes last year, damn the inexpensive Chinatown accountant she’d made the mistake of trusting, and there was a letter that she ignored, then another letter that seemed slightly more serious, then there was a bill for more than a thousand dollars, which just didn’t seem possible, seemed like a mistake, so she ignored that, then there was another, and another, and then there was something that said Warrant on it, which she knows is serious but still doesn’t want to deal with so there’s that, folded up carefully in its envelope back in her apartment waiting for her like a poltergeist. It’s her parents’ wedding anniversary next week, so there’s a reminder to buy a card! And she’s supposed to see Sarah; there’s a note to remind her to e-mail her to schedule a time, a drink—it’s been specified that this is a meeting that is to happen over a drink. Sarah wants to talk wedding strategy. For a crazy moment, Lauren considers taking the red pen from her black metal mesh cup of pens, the one with the red top that slides off so smoothly, a thick wet tip like a child’s marker. She’ll write Fuck Rob in tiny, neat print on her to-do list. She doesn’t do it, of course, but it’s returned, her initial sense that the man in their midst might be an enjoyable f*ck. There’s just something in his unhesitant eye contact that appeals to her.