Chapter One Kelsey #3
The hardest part of Jane’s job was being patient. She never bought into the whole “patience is a virtue” canard. She believed patience was actually the manifestation of sluggish mentation.
“Aargh, do I have to get rid of it?” Kelsey groaned theatri cally, not that she’d done any theater. Jane tried to picture Kelsey performing Shakespeare and chuckled to herself.
“What’s funny? I could use a laugh.”
“Oh, nothing, just something my boyfriend said last night.” Jane was adept at thinking on her feet and casual subterfuge.
“Sweet! You have a boyfriend. Do you have kids?”
“Not yet.”
It was a bit surprising that someone as self-absorbed as Kelsey would ask Jane about her life. Maybe she was lonely. A lot of these people were.
“Is your boyfriend super neat like you?”
“He does the best he can. But not really.”
“Well he’s got you to keep him in line, am I right?”
“He sure does.”
While he wasn’t the tidiest person, Teddy wasn’t a slob, either.
He was impulsive, which could be disorienting for Jane, a consummate planner.
When Teddy was diverted by some sudden enthusiasm, pants could be left on the floor, dishes in the sink, a skateboard in the driveway.
That morning, Teddy woke up craving pancakes, and despite Jane’s protestations that she didn’t have time for breakfast, he proceeded to whip up a batch, imploring her to take a few minutes to sit down and enjoy them, which she reluctantly did.
The steam wafting off them carried an intoxicating sweet and yeasty scent, and they were delicious—tender and milky, laden with blackberries and maple syrup.
Jane pivoted back to the work at hand. “So, the green shirt?”
“I look at all of this and they’re not just clothes. It’s like a museum of my career and my life and...”
Jane tried a new tack: a spoonful of sympathy.
“It’s hard to let go of things, Kelsey. But I promise, letting go opens you up to new things.”
“New things! Yay! You are so right, Jane.”
Kelsey picked up a vermilion dress.
“Like this—I wore it on a date with Charley and got a little wasted and vomited while we were having sex, so now it’s sort of triggering.”
What a charming anecdote—even if not true.
Kelsey was one of those fantasists prone to hyperbole.
And the word triggering had become as irritatingly ubiquitous as the words space and brand .
The notion that triggers were harmful and to be avoided was absurd.
Jane believed they were inevitable and useful.
Learning to deal with microaggressions would inure you to macroagressions.
So essentially, triggers were a vaccine.
As Jane wondered if the strain of letting stuff go would make Kelsey spontaneously combust, an adolescent girl appeared at the threshold of the closet.
“Prudence, sweetie, I didn’t hear you come in.”
Prudence shrugged, impudent yet shy. Kelsey’s ex may have been a philandering cokehead, something Jane knew from her guilty-pleasure reading, but he was a hottie and had passed along those genes to Prudence.
Jane made a mental note to get People , TMZ , Us Weekly , InStyle , Jezebel , BuzzFeed , and all rags of that ilk off her news feed.
What if Kelsey factoids filled an entire storage bin in her brain and supplanted knowledge that was actually useful?
“Prudence, this is Jane. She’s getting me organized.”
Prudence chortled. “Good luck with that.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Prudence.” Jane spoke to children the same way she spoke to adults. She hadn’t liked being patronized when she was a child, and she was all about doing unto others.
Prudence eyed the various piles and picked up a pink camisole. “Are you getting rid of this?”
“I don’t know yet, sweetie. Mommy’s got a lot of decisions to make. Do you want it?”
“Oh god, no. It’s hideous,” Prudence said, her mouth curling in disgust.
If Jane ever did have children, she would not tolerate any petulant snark.
“Prudence has such a great eye for fashion. She’s like my mini-me!”
To a narcissist, a child was a mirror; all they saw was their own reflection. But if they didn’t like what they saw in their child-mirror, that meant trouble.
“No, I’m not, Mom. I hate it when you say that.”
“Sorry, sweetie, it’s only because I’m so proud of you. Did you have a good day at school? Want me to make you a snack?”
Jane cringed. The words “snack” and “nap” grated on her; they reeked of preschool, of infantilization and helplessness.
“No, I don’t. I feel fat.”
Talk about triggering! Jane had once made the mistake of bemoaning her feeling of being fat to her mother, who replied, “You’re not that fat.” Jane never forgot it.
She still had the habit of weighing herself daily, a self-flagellating ritual instilled by her mother.
Her digital, Bluetooth-enabled scale synced with an app on her phone, storing each day’s verdict.
It was a compulsion she both hated and treasured, a way to quantify things.
Even if the number of pounds displeased her, the certainty soothed.
It was an entirely objective measurement. But of what, exactly?
Kelsey ran her fingers through Prudence’s hair. “Don’t say that, honey. You’re beautiful.”
“Are you, like, silencing me? Because that’s not okay.”
“I’m so sorry, go do whatever you want, I have Jane for only a couple more hours and she’s worth her weight in gold.” Jane flinched at the word weight , and wasn’t thrilled with have , either, as it suggested she was Kelsey’s possession.
But Prudence lingered over another pile and gingerly picked up a puce dress. “This is, like, the ugliest thing ever.”
Kelsey considered for a second and turned to Jane. “That is definitely a discard!”
For all her disdain, Prudence seemed in no hurry to leave. “Mom, you know Madison?”
“Of course, I know who all your friends are.”
“Well, she posted photos of her with, like, every girl in our class except me.”
“On Insta?”
“Yes! There was one I was in, but she cropped me out of it. And then they all went to a movie, and I didn’t even know about it, but they posted about it!”
Prudence was trying to hold back tears but lost the battle and then Kelsey’s eyes grew moist. While Jane hadn’t cried in years, she sometimes felt an unsettling longing to shed tears.
Prudence allowed Kelsey to wrap her arms around her. Over her daughter’s shoulder, Kelsey made an exaggerated pouty face at Jane. So commedia dell’arte.
“Sweetie, let’s go talk, okay?”
Kelsey put her arm around Prudence, and they went off into the sprawling primary bedroom where Jane discretely observed them in a hushed conversation.
Jane was ambivalent about having kids. Her only sibling, a younger brother, was severely disabled.
He had a progressive disease, and his needs became central to her household; that is, as much as her parents could factor the needs of others into their lives.
As her brother’s care became more demanding, her father went from being a specter to disappearing completely.
Jane was scared of what all of this would portend for baby-making, which was a kind of genetic Russian roulette.
Now Prudence had her head in Kelsey’s lap while Kelsey gently traced the whorls of her ear, a soothing ritual.
Jane watched them. Her own adolescent heart had been similarly broken by fickle friends; she remembered being overcome by a bone-deep fragility that made her feel as if she would literally crumble.
Her mother had shrugged. “Girls can be really mean,” she said.
“Don’t let it bother you.” This felt like a slap.
“Jane, really,” her mother had said. “You can’t worry about these things. Just get some new friends. You need to understand: there will always be girls prettier than you and smarter than you. But you can be the nicest. So, try to be nice.”
Jane had stormed off, a lesson learned about the consequences of vulnerability.
It was September, the dog days of summer, and even in the cocoon of her car, the dry heat felt oppressive as Jane ruminated some more on the drive home. When did she transition from hopeful dreamer to sardonic realist? What was the inflection point?
When she was a junior development executive, her boss Peter Miller invited her to a general meeting with a woman who was a very in-demand director (i.e.
, in demand for movies that male executives deemed appropriate for female directors, which meant romantic comedies, weepy dramas, and movies for children).
“General meetings” were meet-and-greets, opportunities for executives to feel out creatives and suck up to them if they were “hot.”
This director was smart and passionate, and Jane’s boss was entirely out of his depth, asking banal questions like what sort of material appealed to her.
“Bildungsroman,” the director replied. Peter Miller’s idea of literature was Superman, Spiderman, and Batman; he clearly had no idea what the word meant. Jane, however, was delighted, and effused about her love of the genre and in particular her favorite novel, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.
When it was assigned in college, she approached it indifferently, but the book ended up leaving an indelible impression.
The stultifying world these nineteenth-century women lived in—Bronte as well as her fictional alter ego Lucy Snowe—was suffocating and rigid yet also paradoxically cozy and reassuring.
If those women could find dignity and passion within those constraints, surely there was hope for Jane Brown.
Because Villette was relatively obscure, overshadowed by the much more popular Jane Eyre , Jane was astonished when the director said it was one of her favorite novels as well. What were the odds?