On the subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I retraced the word DIETLAND on my palm, using my fingertip. What did it mean? I had thought the girl was ridiculing me, but she didn’t seem cruel. What I knew for certain was that she was weird. If she bothered me again, I would have to go to the police, but I feared that in a city full of murderers and terrorists they weren’t likely to care that a girl in colorful tights was trailing me.
I exited the subway station in Times Square, stopping at the top of the stairs to catch my breath in the heat. With my employee badge I entered the Austen Tower, a glistening silver tree trunk. Austen Media was an empire, publishing magazines and books, running a range of websites, and broadcasting two lifestyle channels. If someone had flown a 747 into the Austen Tower and it crumbled to the ground, American women would have had far fewer entertainment options.
Before my job with Kitty I had worked for a small, not-very-prestigious publishing imprint that was owned by Austen but located in a drab building twenty blocks south. We produced novels about young career women looking for love. The covers of the novels were in springtime shades, like the walls of a baby’s nursery. I didn’t have anything to do with the content, but worked in production, tracking manuscripts, liaising with editors, helping to usher the books into the world. After college, I had wanted to write essays and feature stories for magazines, but I couldn’t find a job doing that, so I settled at the publisher. I loved words and the publisher offered me a chance to work with words all day long, even if they were someone else’s. It was a place to start. A foot wedged in the door of the word industry.
My coworkers at the publisher were middle-aged women who wore tennis shoes to work with their skirts and nylons. I soon became comfortable in their world of Tupperware lunches and trips to the discount shoe mart after work, so I made no effort to move on and find the writing job I had dreamed about. One day, after I’d spent more than four years at the publisher, my boss called me into her office to tell me the bad news. We were going out of business.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything sooner, but you probably heard the rumors.” A vase of hydrangeas sat on her desk, blue pompoms in brown water, dropping their shriveled petals onto her Filofax.
“Well,” I said. The rumors hadn’t reached me.
“It’s not just us. They’re cleaning house. It’s the whole building.” The whole building was a mail-order book club and a few small magazines, one about cats, another about doll collecting. We had gone unnoticed for years, the dregs of the Austen empire, hidden in an annex on Twenty-Fourth Street. At long last, Stanley Austen had looked down from his perch in the silver tower and noticed us in a tiny corner of his kingdom. Then came banishment.
After the publisher closed, I was unemployed except for random shifts at Carmen’s café, but eventually a woman named Helen Rosenblatt from Austen’s Human Resources department called to schedule a meeting with me. I went to the Austen Tower as directed, and rode the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor. Helen was a middle-aged woman with a tumbleweed hairdo and a gummy smile. I followed her to her office, noticing that her linen skirt was wedged between her buttocks.
Helen said that my boss from the publisher had told her all about me. “We’re old friends,” Helen explained, and I wondered what had been said. Helen wanted to talk about Daisy Chain, the magazine for teens. I had read Daisy Chain when I was in high school. Even my mother and her friends had read it when they were that age. It had been published since the 1950s and was such a part of Americana that the first issue was displayed in the Smithsonian, alongside Seventeen and Mademoiselle. I guessed that the old issues of Daisy Chain on display at the museum weren’t like the current issue on Helen’s desk, with a cover that read POPPING YOUR CHERRY—IT’S NOT THAT SCARY!