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Authors: Frances Kuffel
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fake.
My body, at 150 pounds, felt equally fake—borrowed or stolen, unfamiliar and unexplored. Did both counterfeits have to shatter simultaneously?
In the months after being fired, I flopped around trying to invent a new me, doing anything not to think about how I should have hissed, mid-nose-twisting, Don’t you ever do that again, to Alix, and trying anything that might keep me from eating.
I drifted, the invisible witness of the changeover in my wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood, picking up coffee as the Yups went to work, going to the store as the nannies and housekeepers and landscapers arrived, reading at Starbucks as the courthouse bureaucrats thronged Montague Street for lunch, heading to a twelve-step meeting as young bankers morphed into parents and the nannies crowded into the Mac store.
What to do, who to be? In those long days around the summer solstice, I was bereft of what slender sense of identity I’d had, stricken by the confirmation that I was, first, last, always fireable.
“Hi, Frances, how are you?”
“Fireable, thank you, and you?”
“What color are your eyes?”
“Fireable.”
I was a marked woman. I might as well have been wearing a T-shirt with a scarlet F across my chest.
Alas, I am not as noble as Hester Prynne.
“The idea of you interviewing me is very sexy.”
I found his voice very sexy.
“Would you boss me around?”
“You start to sit down across from my desk. I tell you to remain standing.”
“Mmm,” he said, his voice smooth as ghee. “What are you wearing?”
“A suit. A long skirt with a slit to the back of my knees.”
“You have very sexy knees.”
“This is my interview. We’re here to find out if you have sexy knees.”
“Tell me what to do.”
I give great phone, my voice deep and a little rasty, as we say back in my native Montana, from smoking. It charmed authors and editors. Now I used it to charm boys with fantasies of older women knocking their thirtysomething egos around. If they wanted me, these younger men, then maybe fireable would recede. Maybe I’d have reason not to punish myself with food.
Slut Boys disappear quickly, back to being real—students or boyfriends or professors or potters. It was a double abandonment, of me and of my trial-sized identity as slut.
I looped-de-looped with food. “Why shouldn’t I have a blackberry pie?” I asked a friend one morning. “How often is blackberry pie available? I’ll get it out of my system, and it’ll be over.”
And so a blackberry pie and a pint of Häagen-Dazs would disappear in one sitting, and I’d take three Sominex to sleep through meals, fasting twenty-four hours, waking to something else I needed to eat or seduce out of my system.
One May weekend, when the wisteria was thick and the air sweet with roses, I slept with a man I wasn’t sure I liked. In the middle of fucking me, he asked, breathlessly, “Will you agent my next book?”
“Will you blurb mine?” I asked back. He smiled sweetly, but his eyes said no and silence hung between us, hot and overused as the air in my apartment. Over lunch I learned he was married, a boundary I’d sworn not to cross. The day went from bad to worse, ending with him staying overnight when he hadn’t intended to.
He fell heavily asleep as I lay awake, hating the invasion of my small space, debating who I disliked more, him or me. I listened to him snore, trapped under his arm and unable to turn over in bed. Finally, I got up, dressed, and went to an all-night deli on Clark Street. I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Limited Edition Oatmeal Cookie Dough Ice Cream—hey, limited edition, right? It would soon be unavailable, and anyway, I’d be abstinent in a day or two.
I sat down on a stoop to eat it, but it was frozen too hard for the flimsy spoon the clerk had thoughtfully provided. I went home, slid a real spoon from the kitchen cupboard, shut myself in the bathroom, and sat down on the laundry bag in the dark. It was
My body, at 150 pounds, felt equally fake—borrowed or stolen, unfamiliar and unexplored. Did both counterfeits have to shatter simultaneously?
In the months after being fired, I flopped around trying to invent a new me, doing anything not to think about how I should have hissed, mid-nose-twisting, Don’t you ever do that again, to Alix, and trying anything that might keep me from eating.
I drifted, the invisible witness of the changeover in my wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood, picking up coffee as the Yups went to work, going to the store as the nannies and housekeepers and landscapers arrived, reading at Starbucks as the courthouse bureaucrats thronged Montague Street for lunch, heading to a twelve-step meeting as young bankers morphed into parents and the nannies crowded into the Mac store.
What to do, who to be? In those long days around the summer solstice, I was bereft of what slender sense of identity I’d had, stricken by the confirmation that I was, first, last, always fireable.
“Hi, Frances, how are you?”
“Fireable, thank you, and you?”
“What color are your eyes?”
“Fireable.”
I was a marked woman. I might as well have been wearing a T-shirt with a scarlet F across my chest.
Alas, I am not as noble as Hester Prynne.
“The idea of you interviewing me is very sexy.”
I found his voice very sexy.
“Would you boss me around?”
“You start to sit down across from my desk. I tell you to remain standing.”
“Mmm,” he said, his voice smooth as ghee. “What are you wearing?”
“A suit. A long skirt with a slit to the back of my knees.”
“You have very sexy knees.”
“This is my interview. We’re here to find out if you have sexy knees.”
“Tell me what to do.”
I give great phone, my voice deep and a little rasty, as we say back in my native Montana, from smoking. It charmed authors and editors. Now I used it to charm boys with fantasies of older women knocking their thirtysomething egos around. If they wanted me, these younger men, then maybe fireable would recede. Maybe I’d have reason not to punish myself with food.
Slut Boys disappear quickly, back to being real—students or boyfriends or professors or potters. It was a double abandonment, of me and of my trial-sized identity as slut.
I looped-de-looped with food. “Why shouldn’t I have a blackberry pie?” I asked a friend one morning. “How often is blackberry pie available? I’ll get it out of my system, and it’ll be over.”
And so a blackberry pie and a pint of Häagen-Dazs would disappear in one sitting, and I’d take three Sominex to sleep through meals, fasting twenty-four hours, waking to something else I needed to eat or seduce out of my system.
One May weekend, when the wisteria was thick and the air sweet with roses, I slept with a man I wasn’t sure I liked. In the middle of fucking me, he asked, breathlessly, “Will you agent my next book?”
“Will you blurb mine?” I asked back. He smiled sweetly, but his eyes said no and silence hung between us, hot and overused as the air in my apartment. Over lunch I learned he was married, a boundary I’d sworn not to cross. The day went from bad to worse, ending with him staying overnight when he hadn’t intended to.
He fell heavily asleep as I lay awake, hating the invasion of my small space, debating who I disliked more, him or me. I listened to him snore, trapped under his arm and unable to turn over in bed. Finally, I got up, dressed, and went to an all-night deli on Clark Street. I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Limited Edition Oatmeal Cookie Dough Ice Cream—hey, limited edition, right? It would soon be unavailable, and anyway, I’d be abstinent in a day or two.
I sat down on a stoop to eat it, but it was frozen too hard for the flimsy spoon the clerk had thoughtfully provided. I went home, slid a real spoon from the kitchen cupboard, shut myself in the bathroom, and sat down on the laundry bag in the dark. It was
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