Ellipses, p.6
Ellipses, page 6
B knew something about career longevity and the sacrifices it required. Her last piece of encouragement had ended so well. Lily wouldn’t mind a second morsel from B’s banquet of knowledge.
Lily: I’m doing a story on a former ballerina who was forced to pivot to fitness because her career stalled.
Lily: Makes me wonder if I should do the same.
Lily: Not fitness, I mean. But pivoting. Since I’m kind of stalled, too.
Lily pressed send, and instantly, consternation seized her. None of her messages were technically questions, which could dissuade B from texting back. And further, Lily worried that she had been too forthcoming about her own career concerns. B had offered herself as a mentor, not a therapist. Lily had strayed too far into potentially needy territory.
To distract herself, Lily switched on Alison’s television and searched one of the streaming services for a show to watch.
“You should try that movie I texted you about last week, Maiden Voyage,” Alison called out from the kitchen. “I thought it wasn’t so bad.”
“Such high praise,” Lily replied as she clicked on Maiden Voyage nonetheless.
Lily and Alison were always on the lookout for films or shows about queer women couples. When possible, they tried to see these movies in a theater; this meant that in a good year, they spent fifty dollars each on a pair of films. Alison had a higher tolerance than Lily for the painful dialogue and borderline-offensive plot points that often characterized stories about queer women. This was the product of Alison’s optimistic nature and general desperation for something, anything, that depicted a romantic relationship between women. The films that did generally involved either incredibly graphic and anatomically unsatisfying sex scenes or near-Victorian expressions of ardor that relied on long, meaningful stares and fingers that accidentally-on-purpose brushed against each other beneath tablecloths.
One woman—or both—was always in a preexisting, extremely committed relationship with a man, whom she would have to forsake to fully embrace her new queer love. Bonus points if she had children whom she would also have to abandon to fulfill her selfish true nature as a woman-loving deviant. The films generally ended when one of the two women changed her mind, as one does; left the city, country, or continent in which the story was set, forever and with no plans to return; or better yet, dropped dead, thereby rendering the question of ethical decision-making a moot point. Lily couldn’t wait for the movie in which the two women were separated in the final moments not by conventional travel or pedestrian mortality, but by intergalactic realms: One woman would end up an extraterrestrial from a long-lost planet and would have to teleport back to her home before she disintegrated into dust.
According to the abstract blurb on the streaming service, Maiden Voyage was a queer twist on an iconic cruise ship love story, in which two women from different social classes, one wealthy and there with her fiancé, the other a stowaway, fall for each other on the high seas. Instead of a nude-model drawing scene, there was a musical instrument moment; the stowaway teaches the rich engaged woman how to play the flute. Lily’s hopes for Maiden Voyage were not particularly exuberant, but she clicked on the movie anyway. Three minutes into her viewing, her phone buzzed.
B: Interesting story. But not sure I agree with your premise.
B: If the ballerina couldn’t cut it anymore, that’s on her. No one forced her to do anything.
B: Careers stall because the people behind them aren’t pushing hard enough.
B was not a font of compassion, it seemed. Even she must have experienced a setback that was beyond the grip of her control.
Lily: Maybe it’s not that she couldn’t cut it, but that she was held to an unrealistic standard.
Lily: Or the demands of her medium changed.
Lily: If someone doesn’t feel valued in their office, is that entirely their fault?
It was the meet-cute moment for the two women in Maiden Voyage, which in this movie was code for the beginning of the end. The stowaway woman borrowed some fancier clothes and snuck into a black-tie dinner. There, she spied the rich woman across the ballroom; she spent the rest of the meal on a quest to meet her. Buzz buzz.
B: Change is the only constant.
B: The ballerina should have accepted that sooner.
B: The same applies to you.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” Alison said. “Could you grab some plates?”
“Of course.” Lily typed out a quick reply to B.
Lily: Maybe the company didn’t value any other skills she had to offer.
Lily: And as for me, the system is pretty stacked.
Lily: Women are set up to fail. If we’re too flexible and compliant, people take advantage. If we push back, we’re labeled bitches. Or worse.
Lily: At a certain point, why bother?
Plates and forks and knives in hand, Lily set the table for dinner. For the meantime, the fate of the Maiden Voyage characters remained on pause.
* * *
• • •
The daily commute had barely begun when Lily left Alison’s apartment the next morning to attend her dreaded ballet-not-ballet class. The studio was on the second floor of a town house on a side street in the upper sixties between Lexington and Park Avenues. Large windows welcomed in southern light, while the parquet floors shone with a recent application of polish. Julie had installed floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a ballet barre around the room’s perimeter. Various white women of indeterminate ages lay strewn across the floor on rubber mats. They contorted their bony hips and legs into a range of discomforting positions. Julie sat with her back to the windows dressed in a tomato-red leotard and pinkish-white tights. Her flaxen hair hung down to her waist in long wisps.
Lily chose a spot near the back of the room and planted her phone next to her mat so she could type any notes as the class proceeded. Julie led the group through a warm-up of various gyrations and a round of wide-legged pliés, then told them to lie on the mat for a series of excruciating and endless leg lifts. Buzz buzz.
Lily reached across the mat and behind her for her phone.
B: You need a serious attitude shift.
Lily: What are you talking about?
“Okay, now we’re moving on to clamshells. Everyone start by lying on their right hip, facing me, please,” said Julie.
Buzz buzz.
B: When it comes to your career.
Lily: Okay, how?
“Thirty-nine, forty, forty-one…keep your hips squared off, no opening up, you’ll feel it too much in the lower back.”
Buzz buzz.
B: Stop blaming the system.
Some advice B gave.
Lily: The system is the problem.
Buzz buzz.
B: Individuals have power. Free will.
“Seventy-one, seventy-two…just a few more. Looking great, ladies.”
Lily: Sure. That doesn’t mean there is no collective responsibility.
Buzz buzz.
B: Life isn’t fair. For women.
B: If you keep internalizing that unfairness, you’ll never get ahead.
Lily: It’s not just internal if other people are using it to minimize me.
B: You can’t control other people. The only thing you can control is yourself.
Lily: Where does that leave me?
“Okay, time for the other side. Everyone flip over to your left hip. You should be facing away from me, toward the back of the room now.”
Buzz buzz.
B: You’re clearly sleepwalking through life.
B: You need to fight for what you want. No one is going to hand it to you.
B: If your career isn’t where you want it to be, then that’s your fault.
“Could the lady in the black tank top please put down her phone? This is supposed to be you time!”
Sleepwalking through life. All Lily’s fault. The words jumped off her phone screen and slapped her in the face. She had no one to blame but herself. Her job, at which she churned out endless stories on bullshit deadlines dictated by those above her, that was on her. Not on a corporate office that sucked humans dry and then searched for more sustenance. Not on a magazine world that encouraged food-starved women to fight to the death to come out on top. Not on a larger culture that saw women without fertile eggs or children as devoid of purpose. No, Lily’s dissatisfaction was a product of her emotional weakness and her bad attitude, according to B. And the solution was for Lily to become a carbon copy of B, a woman devoid of compassion for a struggling ballerina, a woman who had no problem excising a younger competitor like a cancerous tumor. Some mentor B was. Lily should cut off ties this instant. She could seek salvation somewhere else.
Lily looked to Julie for diversion. Julie lay on her back at the front of the room, her flaxen hair fanned out behind her on her mat, as she demonstrated an abdominal exercise that made her resemble a metal protractor. The muscles in Julie’s arms and legs were rippling and alive. She performed these exercises with ease; the tilt of her mouth and the glaze in her eyes telegraphed her utter boredom. It was so evident that this woman’s body was capable of far more than her own class demanded—and of far more than the larger world would let her demonstrate. And yet, the very thing her body had been trained to do, the art that it had devoted its life to perfecting, was out of reach. Forever. A pang echoed in Lily’s stomach. It wasn’t from the abdominal exertion.
Julie had dreamed of the highest echelons of artistry; now she was a fitness instructor for pampered Upper East Side women and could barely stay present in her own class. She couldn’t have changed the inevitability of physical decline, but maybe her pivot could have been less disappointing. This was the eventuality from which B was trying to save Lily. Her words had been harsh, yes. B’s bedside manner could use some refinement, not that she concerned herself with other people’s feelings. The content, though, was there: Lily needed to decide her own fate before someone else did it for her. In delivering such a brutal, but otherwise warranted, message, B had expressed her care for Lily’s future.
The class came to a merciful end and Lily shrugged on her jacket and laced up her sneakers. She couldn’t approach Julie in her current state. They could meet over the phone and she would omit the fact that she had been the uncoordinated texting culprit who interrupted the class. Lily walked south down Lexington Avenue toward the closest subway station. A block away from the subway, she veered off onto a side street and leaned against an apartment building. Its rough brick façade provided hard reassurance. She pulled out her phone.
Lily: That is tough to hear.
Lily: But I get that your intentions are good.
She shoved her phone back in her bag and closed her eyes. Buzz buzz.
B: Change takes time.
B: Don’t give up just yet.
The PR person’s bullying hadn’t earned Lily’s defeat. She wouldn’t concede her career so easily, either. She required patience—and power. Neither of those traits manifested instantaneously. Whatever advancement Lily stood to gain from her connection with B required time. B deserved more time.
Lily: I won’t. I promise.
B: Good.
Lily: I don’t surrender that easily.
6
• • •
A decade out from graduation, Lily and her close friends Marissa and Jordan were as existentially intertwined as they had been during their school years at the small New England college they had all attended. On a Friday evening in June, the three friends gathered for dinner at a sleek Mexican restaurant in SoHo.
Marissa had been in Lily’s sophomore fall American literature class; they had bonded over their mutual love of coming-of-age stories and their shared disinterest in chauvinistic minimalism. Jordan had been a member of a Hot in New York viewing club that Lily had joined that same semester. The club had met once a month in the dowdy basement of a student dorm to screen and discuss episodes of Hot in New York as a stress-relief technique from the pressures of academics. Hot in New York was a show that followed four women protagonists navigating love, sex, and work. Jordan and Lily had watched the series on their own throughout middle school and high school. While they both took issue with various aspects of the show, its unrelenting whiteness and straightness, its insistence that grown women structure their lives around the romantic pursuit of men, for example, they also loved the glamour and genuine friendships at the heart of the storylines. And they refused to deny themselves these latter pleasures in protest of the show’s systemic disappointments. Their relationship with the series, as with all art that appeals to but ignores entire populations, was complicated. That joint complication became the basis for a budding friendship.
One night during the reading week preceding fall semester finals, Lily had invited Marissa to a viewing night with the club as a break from studying. Marissa had sat in between Lily and Jordan, and by the end of the episodes, the three of them were inseparable.
On this June evening, the trio of friends sat at a table along the restaurant’s glass-windowed façade. The cars and pedestrians of Lafayette Street whizzed along next to them. Sharp lime and sweet agave wafted by as servers carried dishes and clusters of margaritas to other tables. Plates of cauliflower tacos al pastor and freshly made guacamole lingered in front of them.
After college, they had all moved to New York—Lily back to New York—to pursue their careers. Marissa had worked for a couple of years, then moved away for law school. She was now permanently in New York, where she practiced corporate law, an ideal match for her reason-oriented brain—and her competitive streak, hidden beneath a placid exterior. For the past three years, Marissa had dated Luke, a fellow lawyer at another firm whom she had met in law school.
Jordan had jumped around from field to field through his early and mid-twenties before he settled on a job as a public relations coordinator at an art gallery in Chelsea. His work provided a dose of glamour via the gallery’s show openings and their accompanying downtown guest lists, though, like Lily’s profession, it came at the cost of financial and lifestyle security. Jordan was perennially single, mostly happily so, he claimed, but Lily suspected his declared contentment was at times a defense mechanism rather than a lived reality.
Marissa was in the middle of an anecdote about Luke’s latest fitness adventure, a grueling twenty-mile trail run in upstate New York, when Lily’s phone, facedown on the table, vibrated.
“Sorry,” she said, and picked it up to scan the notification. It was a text message.
B: Had a window to check in. Haven’t heard from you in a few weeks.
Lily flushed with the pleasure of being missed.
“Was that Alison?” asked Marissa. She sipped her tequila.
“No,” said Lily.
“Then who was it?” asked Marissa, who leaned forward in her seat. “You’re blushing.”
“It’s the mezcal,” said Lily. “You know, Asian flush.”
“Nice try,” said Jordan. His arm brushed against Lily’s as he reached for another tortilla chip.
“It’s a new industry friend I made,” said Lily. She shifted her position. The chair’s wooden seat was suddenly harder than when she had first sat down. “She’s been offering me professional advice. Over text.”
“Who is she?” asked Jordan.
Lily explained to them who B was and how they had met at the Alzheimer’s gala. How B had offered her a ride home. How B had asked Lily to send her a link to her story the next day and then had texted her feedback. And now she and B touched base every few weeks.
“That’s so Mr. Bold of her!” said Jordan of B’s town car maneuver, similar to one employed by a recurring and toxic male love interest in Hot in New York. “She even has the same first initial.”
“What do you talk about in your texts?” asked Marissa, ever the lawyer.
“Mainly my struggles at work.” Lily shrugged. “She gives me advice on what to do.”
“On a Friday night?” asked Marissa.
“She’s super busy. She can only text when she has a free window.”
On more than one occasion, Lily had wondered about B’s sustained interest. Lily’s incentive was clear: to absorb as much of B’s essence as possible, the better to manifest Lily’s own next step, whatever that might be. But B was not a person with considerable spare time. In an interview B had done with Women’s Wear Daily a few years back, she had described her daily meetings schedule as so intense, comprised of upwards of ten a day, that her assistant had to remind her to eat lunch by placing the meal in front of her midmeeting. It was curious that she would waste her meager leisure moments texting a random thirty-two-year-old woman.
B was also quoted in that same interview as declaring, “I still consider myself an outsider,” on the topic of her corporate stature. This kind of faux self-effacement from those at the top of their field always rang disingenuous to Lily’s ears, similar to when supermodels posted “awkward” photos of themselves from elementary school in which their alien-like beauty shone from every pore. Yes, B had forsaken family approval when she ventured into cosmetics after college. Yes, she was one of the few out queer women at the top of the corporate food chain, and in beauty, no less, an industry entrenched in conventionally straight feminine norms. But she was a leader now. She was power incarnate. Not to mention, a white beauty icon. That hardly constituted the marginalization that defined outsider status.
