Chapter Eight The Shopping Trip
Chapter Eight
The Shopping Trip
I got to work.
Over the next week, I met with Eliza four times, with the producers three times, and with Toby twice—one of those was the meeting where we broke the news to Miles that Julie and I would both be gone soon. As I expected, nothing was more important to Miles than his uncrackable confidence that I did nothing but push a couple of buttons, so although he complained and grumped, he ultimately maintained that it was fine, he’d be fine, whoever Toby brought in would be fine. When it came time to let us go, his lack of respect for us worked to our advantage.
I got tape of every time Eliza and I met. I was a little relieved that Toby was too cheap to send a producer to follow me around everywhere I went at this stage, so I did the recording myself. We would chat in her little studio, or she would take me on a field trip. Despite her repeated reassurances that in no way was I getting a makeover as if I were a recently hatched ugly person or a prom-bound teenager in a movie, she did tell me she wanted me to “explore how I see myself.” And to make that happen, we went shopping.
My budget was limited. I’d told Toby that whatever I bought was coming out of his pocket, so we ended up in one of the nicer department stores not far from the office. She’d told me that I should ask for more so we could hit up City Center, but given that the one-ply toilet paper felt harsher by the day, I didn’t think the Kate Spade bag she wanted me to carry “for confidence” was in the cards.
“So,” Eliza said as we started to wander through the racks, “what’s your favorite thing about your looks?”
“Oh, yuck,” I said. “Don’t ask me that.”
“Terrible answer,” she said, skipping her fingers through a series of thin sweaters. “You have to know that’s a terrible answer.” She pointed at a mannequin wearing leather pants and a sequined top. “What are your thoughts about that?”
“I think the pants are still a couple of steps away on my particular journey.”
She shrugged and went back to her rack. “Okay, try again. Favorite thing about your looks. Don’t think about it. Don’t qualify it. Just tell me.”
“Well,” I said, glad the recorder wasn’t on, “I guess it’s my eyes.”
“Okay.” She sighed. “But everybody says eyes. Everybody says eyes because it’s just so neutral, you know? It’s an eyeball. An eyeball is an eyeball. What’s your second-favorite thing? Or wait—favorite thing from the neck down? Spit it out.”
I looked down at myself. I lay one hand against my hip. “Hips,” I said. “I like my hips.”
“There you go,” she said, looking over at me like I’d just won the school spelling bee. “That’s a good answer. And I agree with you. You have a great shape. Very good proportion between your waist and your hips.” I moved my hand over my belly, not realizing I was doing it until I’d already done it. “Tiny waists are overrated,” she said. “You have a regular waist, but you have great hips. I want to show all that off.” She plucked a deep green top and came over to me, holding it against my torso. “Good color for you,” she said. “But it’s too conservative.”
“I would usually just wear maybe dark jeans and a nice sweater on a first date,” I said.
She rolled her eyes until they almost disappeared into her skull. “I know.”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed.
She rejected a couple of things I chose, and since the real dates were going to take place in the last week of October and the first three weeks of November, I nixed everything without sleeves. But we finally agreed on a loose top that fell off one of my shoulders and a pair of pants that had just enough stretch to accommodate my newly emphasized hips without making me look and feel like a vacuum-sealed pork shoulder ready for a sous vide bath. Eliza looked great in precisely this kind of get-up, relaxed but sexy, giving an impression of perhaps having sung a tune while having her clothes maneuvered onto her body by a group of especially muscular cartoon bluebirds. I was less confident that I could pull it off.
We bought a pair of modest heels and a thick cuff bracelet, and that used up all the money I had. I was now bewitched, bothered, and bedazzled, and she pronounced me ready to start with the “dummy date,” which she had arranged for early the next week.
We headed back to her house in her black SUV, and she took me upstairs, told me to wash my face, and sat me at the makeup table in the content studio. “So,” she said, “I’m going to show you a basic look, and I want you to try to replicate it on your date. All these products are new, so I’m going to give them to you when we’re done, so you’ll have everything you need.”
I hesitated. “This is really sneaking right up on makeover territory, you know. When I am the ‘she,’ I fear she will never actually be ‘all that.’?”
Eliza just sighed dreamily. “Ohhhh, I love that movie. My older sister was obsessed with it. She must have made me watch it a hundred times.”
“Mm, this is all starting to make sense.”
“Is there anything you want to talk about before this date next week?” she asked.
“Dummy date,” I said. “Before this dummy date.”
“Well, don’t say that to him,” she said. “To him, I said it was a practice date. Maybe you’ll like him. Maybe he’ll like you. It’s fine if you hit it off. I just want you to think of it as practice, because it’s going to take the pressure off. He’s just the first pancake.”
I frowned. “Clarify.”
“You always have to throw out the first pancake. Right into the trash.”
“Who throws out pancakes?”
“I’m making a point. You deserve the best,” she said. “Don’t settle. Throw out the pancake. The next one will be better.”
“How bad do you think first pancakes are? Wait, do you even eat pancakes? Not paleo pancakes or whatever, but real actual pancakes made of food?”
“Okay, fortunately I need you to close your mouth, because I’m going to work on your face.” She smoothed things over my cheeks. She puffed me with powders. I had to close my eyes, open them, look down, look up. When she was finally done, she put one finger under my chin. “You look gorgeous,” she said. And then she clapped her hands. “Oh my God, come with me.” And she got up and ran out of the room. I had no idea what could be urgent at all, let alone this kind of urgent, but I followed her out of the studio, downstairs, and through a door into the kitchen that led into the garage. She’d left it standing open, and when I found her, she was standing in front of ceiling-high shelving that was packed with cardboard boxes. She’d flipped on an overhead light and was scanning them, looking for something.
“Where are we?” I said, looking around.
“Swag room,” she said. “Companies send me stuff.”
“Stuff” was beyond an understatement. I walked over toward the shelves and saw package after package she’d gotten from makeup brands, clothing brands, booze bottlers, TV networks, movie studios, and even a sports-car manufacturer, who’d sent her a squishy plastic envelope with a red convertible printed on the outside. “There’s not a car in there, is there?” I asked, pointing.
She looked over and shook her head. “No, that’s their athleisure stuff. They did a collab with whatever that company is that does the shirts with the holes and the…anyway, it’s clothes.” Eliza seemed to find what she was looking for, and she pulled out a box, tore off the packing tape, and swung the flaps open. Inside was a luscious black leather bag from a brand I had never expected to own in my life. I was pretty sure this bag alone, sitting in its packaging, was worth something like two months of my rent. She pushed it toward me. “Here, this is perfect.”
“Oh, I can’t,” I said. “I’ll worry the whole time about returning it with hummus on it or something.”
“Well, you’re not returning it,” she said. “It’s yours, enjoy.”
I stared down at it. “You can’t give me this, Eliza, it’s way too much.”
“Sure I can,” she said. “They just sent it to me. I have one almost exactly like it, so I don’t need it. I’ll take your picture, and when the episode comes out, I’ll post it on my Insta and talk all about how I knew this bag was perfect for your big night. Which is true. They’ll be thrilled, believe me.”
I touched the soft sides of the bag. Opened and closed the zipper by its not-subtle branded pull. “Thank you,” I said. “This is really nice of you.”
“You are so welcome,” she said. “Thank you for taking it off my hands.”
I knew she probably could have sold it secondhand or something, but for reasons of her own, she wanted me to take it, carry it, maybe see what it felt like to be the woman who belonged to this bag.
I put it on my shoulder, felt the weight of it, nodded. “Any final advice?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Just be open. And don’t blow it.”