Meternity Page 5

  Taken all in, I barely recognize myself in the mirror.

  Do I really have to do this today? I think, staring at my reflection.

  Yes, I tell myself firmly. I have to start showing or else the timing of my plan—the October date I’d given Cynthia and Jeffry—won’t work. And I figure if I don’t go through with it, I never will. Just a few more weeks. A month, tops. Enough time to get some freelance assignments. Little pangs of terror shoot through my spine as I look in the mirror at myself almost five months pregnant.

  Not bad, I think at first. I turn to each side, gazing at my profile to make sure no seams are showing. The cute minibump looks like a cross between those side view “before” shots of women in the diet pill ads intentionally sticking out their stomachs and the underweight pregnant models at five months we tend to use in Paddy Cakes—prenatal perfection.

  At first I feel good, great even. But then I turn around and face the mirror head-on. A mental deadline barrels to the front of my brain. “Have a baby by thirty.” I feel a small wave of sadness. How many chances have I let slip away because of the decision to prioritize work—or more accurately, allow work fear to overwhelm my life?

  I get my bearings as I climb down the stairs of my apartment to the street. Not too different, I decide, as I walk down Columbus Avenue toward the subway. I decide to test the waters by heading into my local café on the corner. Waiting in line behind five others, people brush against me to get to yogurt parfaits in the refrigerator case. Hey, watch it, I’m a pregnant woman! I think as I nervously giggle to myself. My favorite barista takes my order, as I try to make a show of my bump beneath the Pea in the Pod green dress Addison sent me from her shoot and hope he’ll notice. Although I practically rest my wallet on the top of my bump as I rifle through my change purse, he doesn’t seem to notice anything different about me. I pay, give him a friendly smile and grab my cold brew.

  A little deflated, I head out, sticking in my earbuds, and continue down the avenue toward the subway. For the first time I am one of the many pregnant women I see on the Upper West Side. It really is New York’s maternity row. A funny feeling stirs inside me. Jealousy. Not for the babies in their bassinets, exactly, but for their accessories. First it’s the strollers—I find myself wanting the blue one with the orange racing stripe—and then the clothes. I see a woman with a draped bohemian caftan over her bump, then another with a chic blue-and-white-striped Parisian-style top and leggings. They look so cute as they’re rushing their children off to school. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see my friend Elyse from college waiting for a cab. I cross over to the other side of the street like a madwoman, almost getting myself hit by traffic. At the other side, I look back. A cab has pulled over, but her eyes catch mine and she calls, “Liz!” I motion that I’ll call her later.

  Ugh. How am I going to avoid running into people?

  Finally, I arrive at work. As I type in the code to open the glass doors to our office, an electric charge zaps me, like a reminder of the cruel reality I’ve created for myself.

  Now or never.

  I spot Alix over in the corner, hands full of proofs.

  It’s go time.

  Life seems to pass in slow motion as I unfurl my gypsy scarf from my neck until my belly is fully revealed. I smooth down my jersey dress over it.

  She’s seen me.

  Noticing, she walks over calmly, holding the folders that have come back from Cynthia.

  “Hey, Alix, how’s it going?” I ask with as big a smile as I can muster as she reaches my cube. “Ooh, my back hurts.” I am rubbing my back and my belly simultaneously for full effect. Oh wait, shoot! That’s in the third trimester.

  “Uh, how are you feeling, Liz?” I can tell Alix has no idea what to say.

  “Great!” My tone is overeager. I try to cover my nerves and am surprised at my extreme guilt. Am I really doing this?

  “Good.” She hands me a folder without making eye contact. “Can you do more research on this story about alternative baby bassinets? I can’t find anything on Japanese wall-hanging cuddle caves. Have you seen the fall line yet?”

  “Not yet, but I’ll check with the PR contact.” As I meet her eyes, I feel the heavy weight of the lie for the first time. I push my anxiety away. I have no choice.

  “And can you pull some more quotes from celebs who’ve struggled with postpartum depression from LexisNexis, too? The ones we have aren’t working.” She continues to look me up and down until she seems satisfied with something.

  “Not a problem, Alix.” I’m glad for the distraction.

  “So, I’ve been meaning to ask...” She shifts her weight. “Is, there...a...father in the picture?” I begin to sweat, feeling the panic rising.

  “I’m not really ready to discuss that right now.”

  “As for your birth plan, you’re not thinking of doing any type of crazy natural home birth, are you?”

  “Uh, I’m really not sure yet,” I sputter.

  “Have you arranged a plan for child care going forward?”

  I take a second, then realize, for once, I don’t always have to jump for this woman. “Yes, I’ll be happy to fill you and Jeffry in later on,” I say coolly.

  “Well, we’re going to have to discuss it at some point soon since there will be two other women out when you’re gone, and once you’re back we’ll need to plan for coverage.” Oh. She only cares about whether I’ll still be able to clock late hours. Well, let her have fun sorting it out. It feels good to take charge of my own destiny for once. “Also, Cynthia was pretty underwhelmed with your October ‘First Steps’ lineup...it needs to be redone.”

  When she leaves the cube, I remember back to when Alix first started working here. Her role was to bring in more upmarket fashion designers to the feature articles in order to draw in more high-end advertisers like Chanel and Louis Vuitton.

  She did what they asked. But the air in the office shifted. Beyond making us change quotes, she was always yelling at assistants, making people do her work for her, and finding ways to assert her cool presence in all the meetings with our executive editor and Cynthia.

  Her life seems so easy with her Upper East Side town house and cottage on the bay in South Hampton, perfect banker husband and toddler Tyler, who’s been dressed in couture since birth. I get the sense that it wasn’t her talent or skill that got her to this position at Paddy Cakes, but her family connections. I hate to feel like I have a chip on my shoulder—my father’s daughter in that regard. But I see Alix throw her monogrammed Goyard tote over her shoulder and ease her way toward the doors to go down to the café, as she texts on her phone—probably giving the nanny instructions—I can’t help thinking some people are just born lucky.

  * * *

  By Thursday, I’ve pulled it off. Four full days of bumpage—no sign of being caught. Blousy tops thanks to a shipment of maternity gear from Addison’s shoots help hide my faux belly from the rest of the staff, who sadly, must think I’ve just put on the pounds.

  Before I even start working on a story, another email lands in my inbox.

  See me. It’s from Cynthia.

  Ugh...here it is. The big reveal.

  I’ll make an appointment for this afternoon, I respond.

  No, now, comes back instantly.

  I summon my courage and try to remember my spiel about my “pregnancy.”

  This is it. I walk over to her glass office and tap meekly on her door. She motions to come in. Before I even have a chance to sit down, she begins the inquisition.

  “Elizabeth, when I replaced Patricia last year, I knew it would be a rough transition for the staff as I raised the tone and direction of the magazine to higher standards.”

  I have no idea where this is going. I thought we were going to discuss my pregnancy, but maybe not.

  Cynt
hia stares me straight in the eye. “Some of the staff seemed to get it instantly, like Alix. Others have had a bit of a rocky start.”

  I just nod, trying to stay two steps ahead with a response to what she might say.

  “As you know, our newsstand sales have been on the decline for a few years now. It’s been my job to bring the numbers back up.”

  It was true. When Paddy Cakes, geared toward Brooklyn’s Park Slope–style mommies in 2000, launched at the beginning of the millennium, we’d had early success. With the dot-com boom, “bourgeois-bohemian” maternity items were the perfect place for people to spend their extra income.

  But when mommy websites launched, like The Bump and Babble, we saw the first slump in sales. Then about three years ago, we saw a huge drop, as more advertising dollars were leaving our pages to go to independent parenting websites like Angry Mommy and creative lifestyle bloggers with kids.

  Since I wasn’t responsible for that part of the business, I never really thought too much about it. But our editor, Patricia Holden, always did. She’d been asked to launch Paddy Cakes after making her mark as editor in chief at Women’s Health. Earlier in her career, she’d won awards for her investigative features at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. I really liked her a lot and felt as though she had an unusual realness and warmth. I learned a lot from her careful edits, which helped me to add more layers of emotion in my narratives. Even though the promotions weren’t huge ones, she was the one who decided to move me up from assistant editor to associate and then to articles editor. While the paychecks never really caught up, I held out hope something bigger and better would come.

  Then she got fired. It was a Monday, and we were having our typical production meeting, but instead of Patricia coming in, our publisher entered the room. He quickly informed us that the magazine would now be heading in a slightly different direction, and that Patricia had chosen to move on to pursue other opportunities.

  We learned that Cynthia Blackwell, who’d headed up British Glitter, would be replacing her. We all knew exactly who Blackwell was; the fifty-five-year-old ice queen had taken Glitter successfully from a regular to a rack-size magazine to a smaller handheld “subway-size” and subsequently doubled newsstand sales. She’d be making some changes at Paddy Cakes, he’d said. We all gasped at the thought, worrying about our job security, then lamenting that Patricia had been ousted because of factors in the marketplace out of her control.

  We’d all heard tales of Cynthia’s hard-line, take-no-prisoners approach to magazine editing. But we had no idea what to expect or whether or not our jobs would be saved. Initially, only a handful of changes had taken place.

  The magazine has gotten a lot more glossy and celebrity-driven. Cynthia became obsessed with finding younger, hotter, cooler celeb moms and airbrushing the crap out of them on the cover. She was always harping on us to get more sensational stories to generate more buzz instead of doing the advice-driven stories we had been known for. But aside from the constant fear that a story would be cut at the last minute, which left one having to research and write a replacement until all hours to make the shipping deadline, nothing much changed.

  When she’d hired Jeffry, his hard-nosed ways instilled more fear. But I just went along with the changes, too swamped with work to question things. Now, though, I was beginning to realize a focus on higher-end advertisers was probably just the tip of the iceberg.

  “You remember the most important rule here at Paddy Cakes?” asks Cynthia, ratcheting me back to the present.

  “Sell more copies?” I reply.

  “Exactly,” says Cynthia. “So you can imagine my surprise when I was reading your story ideas for October and saw that you’d pitched exactly the same kind of slush-driven muck that made this magazine tank 20 percent on the newsstand before I got here. I’m going to be blunt, Elizabeth. Your lineup was complete crap.”

  “I, uh...” I stammer, not knowing what to say, Okay, yes, I mean I had kind of called it in but still, I didn’t think it was terrible.

  “For example,” Cynthia continues. “‘This Sucks: Getting Your Baby to Learn to Latch’—this could go in any magazine. Kiddos even,” naming our more accessible mass-market competitor.

  “Right, but I downloaded the notes from this year’s American College of Pediatricians conference. It was about a groundbreaking study with new techniques. It’s a good chance to report on the news...” I say my case.

  “Sod reporting the news,” says Cynthia in total disgust, “I want to make news.”

  “I totally see what you’re saying.” I gulp in air. “I’ll submit a new lineup by tomorrow.” There is no way I’m going to win this one.

  “Make it good,” she says, turning away from me toward her computer. “I’m doing a bit of a rethink in terms of staffing over the next few months. Things may be changing. And while someone in your circumstances may have a little more...leeway...it’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  “Yes,” I say, quivering. “No problem.” I get up and walk quickly back to my cube. Jules is there, tapping away on her keyboard, but when she sees the look on my face, she immediately turns to talk me down off the ledge.

  I pick up my iced “decaf” and start sucking it furiously. “Cynthia finally brought it up.”

  “Seriously! What happened?” says Jules, turning her chair completely toward me as a sign of sympathy.

  “Yep. On top of that, she just told me my October lineup was crap, and hinted she may fire me anyway.”

  “Eek,” says Jules.

  “It’s so unfair. She comes in here, rips up all our stories, leaves us scrambling to write new ones in the time we’re supposed to use for researching new stories, then expects the lineups we pull together in a few minutes to be perfect.”

  “It sucks, Liz. I’m sorry. I know she’s come down way harder on features than health.”

  “No, not true. Your stories fly through with her. It’s like everyone here seems to get it but me. Write stupid listicles about how you’re lactating wrong and be done with it.”

  Jules puts her hand on my arm consolingly. “What are you going to do? Our paychecks have to come from somewhere.”

  “I guess I take it personally. I mean, moms out there don’t want to read about the stuff they can’t afford, right? They want real news about baby trends and advice to use in their own lives. That’s what would sell our magazine, right?”

  “Maybe, but people seem to like reading the stuff we’ve been doing lately. Like how celebs take off baby weight in two weeks or speed through African adoption agencies. It’s not all bad.”

  Jules has a point, but Cynthia’s comments have struck a nerve.

  “And she barely mentioned me being pregnant. It’s like she doesn’t even care at this point. Maybe she’s planning on firing me anyway and is just trying to work it out through HR!” I feel tears welling up out of pure frustration.

  “Well, you can either get a new job and quit, or, learn to stop taking it personally, just get it done and go home, which is what I do.”

  “Hrumph,” I spout, still wanting to sulk. “Okay, fine, if she wants stories like organic peanut butters that will get your kid into Princeton I will give it to her—founded or not,” I say. I type the idea into a fresh text file I have open on my screen, pounding the keys for dramatic effect.

  If my work doesn’t improve and Cynthia has a vendetta against me, my fake pregnancy might be the only thing keeping me from getting fired. My chest starts to tighten and a lump forms in my throat. Getting fired would leave me with no options whatsoever.

  Finally, the cover story comes back and thankfully, it has me so busy, I can barely register what happened, addressing emails with last-minute questions about the cover story and my other pages that are about to ship to the printer. Another email tings my inbox. From Mom, reads the subject line—she has never real
ized that people can see where it’s from without writing it in the message heading as if it were a telegraph.

  Hi, sweetie. Was thinking, you don’t have to come home for my birthday if you don’t want to. I know you’re always busy with work and your friends. I’d just like some flowers. And a Lancôme lotion—if you can find it with a free gift with purchase. Love you, Mom xoxo.

  Of course I’m coming home, Mom. Can’t wait to see you, I email back. I have a five days to get the gifts. I log on to 1-800-Flowers.com, pick out a nice tulips arrangement and use a 20-percent-off code from an email promotion I received. Now I’ll just have to get the Lancôme stuff and a few other things later. I am a good daughter, I tell myself, wringing my hands as I do. I remember the radiation days, when I had to pick and choose being there with her in the hospital over waiting around for copy to come back late on Fridays. Pressing Click, I add more to my credit card balance. She deserves it.

  Then, another call sounds from my phone. I know the caller ID number. It’s Ryan. I pick up and try to clear all the lingering hostility from my throat.

  “Hey, Deputy Editor Liz, sorry about being MIA—was crazy busy prepping for 100-pound-tumor man shoot. I wanted to tell you about it. Are we still on for our meeting tomorrow?”

  Shoot, that’s right. Tomorrow’s Friday. “Hey, Ryan, I’m so sorry, but something’s come up and I can’t make the office meeting tomorrow.” I’m secretly bummed, thinking how it would be nice to see him again. He takes it in with a pause.

  “Okay, how about next week?”

  I sigh, worried. There’s no way he can come to the office now. If he did, he’d see me in full expectant-mother glory. “Ryan, I’m so sorry, but things have unexpectedly gotten much, uh, busier here during the day.”