Chapter Twelve Lauren #3
“Right? But one thing I’ve learned, Esmé—anything is possible in LA.”
“One hundred percent.”
One section of clothing was girls’ party and princess dresses.
“What are these doing here?” Esmé asked.
“Maybe Lauren wants to make sure his playmates are acceptably dressed in case they’re seen in public, but who knows? Let’s leave them for the time being.”
“That chicory coffee did not agree with me. I feel like I swallowed a tree,” Esmé said, clutching her stomach. “I need to find a bathroom.”
Right then, Lauren herself, in leggings and a sports bra, looking like she had just gotten off a Pilates reformer, appeared in the doorway, stopping Esmé in her tracks.
Lauren had on almost no makeup—the “no-makeup” makeup look—and perfect, pore-less skin.
Was there a new dermatological technology that eradicated pores?
Lauren glowed. No wonder the camera loved her.
Her faithful assistant Kirsten stood a few steps behind her, like a lady-in-waiting.
“Hey! So excited y’all are here.”
Lauren was (of course) a y’aller. It went with her folksy Southern-girl persona.
Y’all was one of those turns of phrase being deployed with alarmingly increasing frequency.
Memes had broken out like the measles on social media: “Burritos, y’all!
” “Oscars, y’all!” “Use it or lose it, y’all!
” Y’all collapsed everyone into an amorphous lump of humanity, and it was patronizing in the same way as erudite politicians using the word folks instead of people .
One truism Jane had learned from her time in the entertainment business was that many of these performers with reputations for being super nice were actually mean and vindictive.
When she was an assistant at the agency, clients would have snits about a trailer smaller than a costar’s, a late airport pick-up, a subpar hotel room, and she saw the same behavior when she worked for producers or studio executives.
Sometimes she’d be the one who would have to call the car service or hotel to try to remedy the situation.
Stars could turn everyone in their orbit into a kind of assistant.
Many of them attributed their success to merit rather than luck, which was a canard, because sometimes those with no discernible talents nonetheless achieved great success.
Talent, determination—sure, they could help.
But they weren’t all that was required. Also necessary was luck, and luck was capricious and chaotic.
This awareness sometimes made it hard for Jane to muster the enthusiasm to pursue anything ambitious. To chase any dreams.
For now, she would give Lauren the benefit of the doubt: she did like her inane movies, and Lauren did have that preternatural glow about her.
“Hi, Lauren, I’m Jane. So excited to meet you, your movies were everything in my teens.”
Jane felt an upswell of bile in her throat.
Had she really just used one of her other most hated linguistic tics, everything ?
As in, “this (fill in the blank) is everything.” “These jeans are everything.” “This TV show is everything.” “This donut is everything.” It was another fucking annoying meme. She might as well have said “y’all.”
“I’m Esmé, and same here—love those rom-coms!”
“That is so sweet! I wish we were still making movies like that now, but... it’s a whole new world.”
“Absolutely,” Jane replied. “The world is just too cynical now.”
Lauren took this in as if it were a profundity. Like all good actors, she was a good listener—or at least good at pretending she was listening.
“Tell me about it,” Lauren answered with the perfect note of wistfulness. “So, how’s it going?”
“Very well. We have a lot of questions,” Jane replied.
A flash of something—impatience?—crossed Lauren’s face.
“First thing is the sizes. What size is he now?” Esmé asked.
“Both the US and the European sizes would be helpful,” Jane added.
“Oh gosh, I have no idea, to be honest. In US clothes, he is mostly around a 6, but you know kids’ sizes are all so approximate and Scotty is in a little bit of a pudgy phase and I don’t want him in clothes that are too small and make him feel fat, you know...?”
“Oh, I know,” Jane said, possibly too emphatically.
Kirsten, holding a phone to her ear, stepped forward and discreetly whispered to Lauren, “Trevor’s calling to find out how the Peter Miller meeting went.”
Lauren rolled her eyes. “I’ll call back, but tell him that I met Peter, I did him a solid, but it was a total waste of time, he is so not my cup of joe.”
Overhearing this, Jane realized how far Peter Miller had fallen.
After she’d worked for him, he was fired and rolled into a producing deal that only yielded one movie, which was a big, expensive flop.
The deal was not renewed, and now he was groveling for a development position in the vanity production company of a movie star who rarely acted anymore—the misogynist was trying to get hired by a woman.
Was this poetic justice? No, Jane thought, nothing to do with Peter Miller could contain the word poetic .
Maybe she should tell Lauren she used to work for Peter, and that he was not her cup of joe either.
“Anyway,” Lauren said, picking up right where they’d left off, shaking Jane out of her reverie, “it’s complicated with Scotty and all these clothes in all these sizes.
People constantly send him stuff to wear, hoping for a placement, way more than he can ever use—so he hasn’t ever even worn a lot of it, and I have no idea what even fits. ...”
This kind of vagueness perturbed Jane and activated her to take control.
“Okay then. We’ll approximate and do our best with the European sizes. We’ll sort and shelve what we think you’ll want to keep. We’ll make a quick run to The Container Store for storage systems that children like—they have items specifically for children.”
“That sounds perfect.”
“When we’re done, we can go over the items we’re unsure about with you, or you can just do it at your leisure.”
“Leisure! Ha.” Lauren turned to Kirsten, who chuckled softly in assent.
“I realize you’re super busy.” Jane wondered if she was sounding defensive.
“But I recommend, at a bare minimum, going through the discard pile with him, to make sure we aren’t tossing anything he’s especially partial to.
Children can have fervent sentimental attachments to things sometimes, as I’m sure you know. ”
Lauren seemed to listen intently. Jane wondered if this sounded like a lecture, but it didn’t matter, she felt the need to be authoritative. If the little five-year-old could have agency, shouldn’t she?
“That sounds perfect,” Lauren said. “I’ll check in with y’all later, and let me know if you need anything!” “Let me know” clearly meant “ask Kirsten.”
“Oh, one other question,” Esmé interjected. “What should we do with the girls’ clothing?”
“Yeah, you know—we wanted Scotty to feel comfortable wearing whatever he wanted to, let him express himself, explore gender, but he actually seems to have no interest in dresses. He’s all boy, what can I do? Discard for sure!” Lauren proclaimed, then briskly strode off, Kirsten on her heels.
Esmé drove to The Container Store, and Jane was relieved not to be the one battling the surly narcissism of LA drivers.
Even the parking garage was a nightmare, warrens of color-coded concrete slabs and directionless ramps, crammed with hordes of cars, filled with viscous air thick with poisonous exhaust and impatience. Esmé seemed entirely unperturbed by it.
As they entered the store, Esmé put her hand on Jane’s arm.
“Jane, I need to tell you something.”
Jane tensed, wondering if another accusation of theft was in the offing. “Okay.”
“I’m going to be leaving this job.”
Jane, relieved, exhaled. If Esmé had any judgments about her predilection, she had set them aside, forgiven her.
“Oh, wow... I’m sorry to hear that. When?”
“This is my last week,” Esmé replied with a tinge of sadness in her voice. “I realized—especially when I work with someone like you, who’s so efficient, like a machine—this isn’t really my passion or something that I’m all that good at.”
“I think you’re great at it! I like working with you.”
“You’re sweet, Jane. But I feel like I’m deadweight. The only stuff I really like doing is the photographing and the Insta curation, and I found a gig at a place that manages people’s socials for them. They sort of like, soft-recruited me, because they loved my Insta feed.”
Jane, to her own surprise, leaned in to hug Esmé. “That’s so great, Esmé, congratulations! Sounds like a great move for you.”
“Yeah, I hope so,” Esmé said brightly. “I mean, it’s a whole new decade and I am ready for some change.”
“Me too.”
“Cool! What changes are you planning?”
Jane realized she didn’t have a concise answer for this.
“I’m trying to change everything, really.”
“That sounds ambitious. Good for you! Well, I’ll miss you Jane—you were one of my favorite people to work with and I always hoped we’d get paired more often.”
“Aw that’s sweet. Same here.”
As she said this, Jane realized that she actually would miss Esmé.
They had come to The Container Store with a list (drop-front storage boxes, clear plastic bins, woven storage bins), but Jane did a quick lap first to see if anything inspired her.