Chapter 2 #3
While the rest of the house was a blank canvas for the show and its producers, Maggie and Jason’s bedroom felt lived in.
Sweatshirts lay jumbled on the divan, and a parade of pill bottles lined the bathroom counter.
Both nightstands held piles of books, though nothing I immediately recognized.
The suitcase I assumed I was seeking sat just inside the room, and despite Rahul and Adrian’s claims, I couldn’t bring myself to trespass any further.
The bag itself was well made and expensive to be sure, but not the ostentatious designer advertisement I’d expected. It was cream leather, which was relatively simple, and monogrammed with a swirling MMD. Maggie McKee Dean. I didn’t realize she had legally changed her name.
Or had she? This was before all the answers to the world lay just a finger tap away inside your purse or back pocket. Without perusing Us Weekly, I couldn’t have told you Maggie’s star sign or her favorite color, though that information was available to me for the low cost of $3.99.
I did know that Maggie McKee had begun her career in entertainment with tap and ballet lessons as a five-year-old in Youngstown, Ohio. Even when I’d known her as a kid, she’d had that charisma. Maggie was always a star.
By fourteen—long after she’d left Ohio behind—Maggie was more than pretty.
She’d sashayed past that awkward stage of braces and zits with a Lolita twinkle in her big brown eyes, which were by that point broadcast weekly on the songs and sketches of The Tiger Crew.
She’d made it to TV via her national anthem circuit—singing “O say can you see” for minor-league hockey teams and local rodeos and NASCAR.
You had to pay your dues, I guessed, and then pay them even more while you did choreography and sang harmonies in sparkly top hats for a billion-dollar network, and then by recording bubblegum pop in your underwear.
To me, the cost seemed high, but that was one of the many reasons why I was Cassidy “Get Me a Coffee” Baum, and she was Maggie McKee. I didn’t have monogrammed luggage.
What I did have was luggage you could actually wheel through an airport, or, in this instance, down a carpeted hallway.
I hefted Maggie’s suitcase down the wide spiral stairs, wondering how much it would have tarnished the artistic vision of its designer had they chosen to add wheels.
It seemed that if one was going to spend ungodly money on a cream leather suitcase, someone else would be the one to carry it.
I was both awkward and overdressed. Despite the instruction to wear comfortable clothes, I’d chosen that dress shirt and a kitten heel, my desire to appear competent in direct opposition to my actual competence.
Sliding the suitcase down the tiled entry floor, I felt a blister forming on my left big toe.
“We need those flowers in water.” Here was Lauren again, clipboard in hand, gesturing toward a giant bouquet in a cardboard box by the front door. I nodded.
The card, from a fancy florist in Beverly Hills, was pale-pink, scented card stock, with Maggie written in perfect felt-tipped calligraphy.
I found a pair of scissors in the mostly empty kitchen drawers and snipped the peony stems, then began to look through cupboards for a vase.
Paper plates, crystal tumblers, several packs of meal-replacement shakes in mocha and strawberry vanilla.
They’d amassed an impressive collection of the sort of kitchen items you could only have with ample space and which now sat collecting dust: a panini press, a pasta maker still in its cellophane.
I felt embarrassed to be searching their things.
This was a space they’d made available to the production crew, and surely they assumed we’d get to know it, but it was still Maggie and Jason’s home.
These were still their muscle relaxers, their joke coasters.
A birth announcement for someone named Taryn hung on the fridge next to a magnet for a dentist in Santa Clarita.
What it felt like, I realized, was my dad’s place in Virginia.
I’d only been there a few times, as a teenager, when he’d reached out wanting to connect.
Before he’d decided again that he wanted to disconnect.
It was that same sense of trespassing on other people’s space, even though I’d been invited.
My dad had told me to help myself to whatever was in the fridge, but I was scared to take anything, and eventually convinced myself that if I hadn’t finished his orange juice, maybe he would have kept me around.
If I hadn’t asked where I could find the towels.
As it was, at the end of my third visit, he dropped me back in Pennsylvania and said, See you in the summer, then called my mom a few hours after that to say that he was out.
It was too much for him: the parenting, maintaining the relationship.
He’d tried, but this still wasn’t going to work.
I reminded myself this was a television set. I belonged here. This wasn’t my dad’s house—this was my job, and I was going to make sure that I was good at it.
I found a vase in the small cabinet over the refrigerator and hoisted myself onto the counter to reach it. After arranging the flowers, I figured I’d earned the peek I stole at the card. Welcome home, it said, and where I’d expected to see love, Jason, it read Until next time . . .
In a different context, on a different day, I might have wondered more about this.
I might have asked at least Rahul, if not Lauren, who these flowers were from.
I might have considered the knowing looks between Lauren and Dan, the brief flashes of tension between Maggie and Jason.
I might have run, as they say, for the hills.
But there the hills were, dusty sage, outside my window.
The flowers were pretty. I’d set them up well.
Until next time, I thought. And I went about my day.
The episode we filmed that day is well known, mostly because Jason carried Maggie piggyback up the main stairs, the bedroom door closed, and then we were meant to assume that they had sex.
Production couldn’t afford to license any popular songs, so they ran something that sounded enough like Boyz II Men to suggest the reference but not so close as to cause problems with legal.
This doofy unknown track would become a cult favorite, the kind that you can never quite tell if people love to make fun of or unequivocally love.
The lyrics go something like “Tonight / I’m going to slip inside / Your body and soul.
” The episode credits roll when the instrumental break kicks in, and the camera remains on that door. We hear a giggle, a playful thump.
If you rewind a bit, you’ll see Maggie come in, dragging her suitcase.
She calls out for Jason, who stubs his toe on her bag.
They bicker. She pouts. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, then drops it, then pulls it back again.
He says something about how he’s also working—should he be expected to drop everything the second she walks in the door?
Maggie rolls her eyes at this. She goes into the kitchen to put her purse on the island.
“Are these for me?” Her nose is deep in the flowers, inhaling. “You got these for me?”
Jason neither confirms nor denies.
“I missed you, baby,” he says, coming up behind her. Her face is in the flowers, and his face is in her hair, and they sway a bit before he kisses her neck, and she laughs, and they agree to go upstairs.
It wasn’t until I left work that first evening that I remembered my car.
A more thorough examination determined it was dented but working; in no way worth the trouble it would take me to get it repaired, or the resulting increase in my premium.
I’d shoved the napkin with the other driver’s phone number into my pocket, and at home I ironed it out with my palm.
He’d been attractive. He wasn’t pissed about his car.
Maybe I should have let myself flirt with him a little. Maybe he’d want to meet for drinks.
I stopped myself. I was in LA for the right reasons.
I had my eyes on the prize. My focus was work.
This encounter would be an anecdote I used at conferences and dinners once I’d crested the summit of Reality television production and was asked about my early trails.
Oh yes, I’d say, on my first day as a PA, I played bumper cars with no actual consequence.
I’d hit this guy’s car and somehow gotten off scot-free. The power of the producer was already rubbing off on me. I taped the napkin to my mirror, a reminder that with the right frame of mind, I could turn all situations to my favor—a memento of the day I got my start.