Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

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 fuck. There’s just something in his unhesitant eye contact that appeals to her.

It’s a week before Lauren deals with the packageunder the desk and the anniversary card for her parents. Writing these things down sometimes makes her feel that she’s done them, the downside of the to-do list. Finally, she lugs the cardboard box home and leaves it at a little office supply place down the street where you can ship boxes, make copies, send faxes on those rare occasions faxes must be sent, and where she also finds an acceptable greeting card (the Brooklyn Bridge, rendered in ink) and leaves with the satisfaction of having patronized a mom-and-pop joint, when so many of the local ones have been supplanted by pet boutiques and fussy grocery stores and the sort of charmless, middle-of-the-road chain retailers (ugly handbags, cellular telephones) that can afford the newly astronomical rent.

Stepping back on the street she hears someone calling, and her instinct is to ignore it. Hey lady, miss, excuse me— no good ever comes of all this: scams, pleas for directions, hassles about caring for our animals or ensuring our rights to abort our fetuses.

“Lauren. Lauren Brooks.”

“Oh.” She says it, too, like it’s a word, not a sound; like it’s a greeting. She’s staring. The neurons are firing but nothing is happening, it’s a terrible moment. She went to high school in the city and a college upstate that excels at producing the next generation of publishing and art world talent, so of course, she’s run into old classmates from time to time. She finds it baffling. Melissa Reid had frozen for her at seventeen; to see her, as she had a year or so ago, in her mannish blazer, stabbing away at a phone, looking a little thick around the waist — it was hard to make sense of. It isn’t that Lauren has a bad recall, it’s just that she can only recall what she knows. She had been able to recall the Melissa Reid with the hot older brother, the Melissa Reid whose parents divorced in such spectacular fashion that she ended up with two cars on her sixteenth birthday, the Melissa Reid who was alleged to have sucked Dylan Berk’s dick in the backseat of a bus en route to a field trip at Fallingwater. Melissa Reid, securities trader — she was someone Lauren never knew.

“God, how are you?” the girl says, unhelpfully. She has high cheekbones and short hair, like a fashion model from the nineties, like a girlish lesbian, like a little French boy. She leans forward, toward Lauren, doing this thing with her neck that is so unflattering Lauren almost wants to tell her to stop before remembering that she’s trying to figure out who she is; the tips on comportment can come later.