There She Is, Your Ideal                                  Lori Jakiela

 

Andi calls to say she’s set up a book signing for me at Sam’s Club.

“Don’t snark,” she says. “It’s a good opportunity.”

        Andi is my publicist, or more accurately, my publisher’s in-house publicist. Andi’s very good at her job.

        “Perky as an Alka Seltzer,” my mother would say.

        On the phone, Andi sounds like she’s mainlining Red Bull. She sounds like her teeth shoot sparks. I met her once in person. She is freckled and spring-haired and has breasts like a bounce house.

        Andi says, “It’s not just any Sam’s Club. It’s a Grand Opening.”

        She says, “Sam’s moves a lot of books.”

        She says, “You in or what?”

        I hate Sam’s Club. I hate Walmart. A few years ago, some kids from my alma mater started a website called “People of Walmart.” It’s supposed to be funny, and sometimes it is. It’s hard not to giggle at a guy in a red Speedo shopping for bananas or somebody’s pet goat munching a flammable nightie in the lingerie section. Mostly, though, the site, like all things Walmart, depresses me. It’s depressing to see so many people with the word Juicy across their butts. It’s depressing to think a website is popular because people, myself included, like to feel superior to other people. It’s depressing to think of all those florescent lights, all those security cameras, all those smiley cartoons rolling prices and fair-worker-wages all the way back to China. It’s depressing to think how often I end up shopping there.

        “Of course I’m in!” I tell Andi, and make my voice match hers bubble for bubble.

        I hate myself.

        Andi is my first-ever publicist. This is my first-ever book. If Sam’s Club seems sad and desperate, I am, too. I’ll do anything to get my book into the hands of readers. My publisher wants me to help sell books, but it’s more than that. It’s about ego and identity and insecurity and many other things graceful people don’t talk about.

I am not graceful. I give readings at dive bars and senior citizen centers, in strangers’ basement book clubs and at 4H fairs. I once gave a reading where people in the audience were armed with Nerf guns. They threatened to shoot if they didn’t like what they heard. “This makes it exciting,” the reading’s organizer said. He was a skinny man who dressed like a freak-show barker in a two-sizes-too-small velvet suit and top hat. He winked a lot. I was prouder than I should have been when the audience didn’t shoot.

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved,” the great Victorian novelist George Eliot explained once.

George Eliot’s real name was Mary Anne Evans. Because she didn’t want to be dismissed as a woman writer, which meant either a romance novelist or a hysteric, she took a man’s name. She wanted to be sure her work would be taken seriously.

“No pink covers, no lipstick marks, no bras, no martini glasses,” I told my agent when we first talked about this book. “Just promise me that.”

My book doesn’t have a pink cover or a kiss-stained martini glass with a bra draped over top. It does, however, have bubble print. There’s a picture of a smiling flight attendant on the cover. The top of her head’s cut off. The cover, a warm swirl of girl-friendly reds and blues, screams Chick Lit, and Chick Lit is popular. Chick Lit, like Sam’s Club, moves books. But what’s inside the cover, the actual book, often disappoints people who go in thinking this might be a book about shopping for Louboutins and not a book about my father, a mill worker in Trafford, PA.

The title of my book comes from an episode of the 1970s TV show “That Girl,” starring Marlo Thomas as Marie, an independent woman making her way in the big city. In the “Miss New York Has Everything” episode, Marie enters the Miss New York pageant. As part of the competition, she makes a cheesecake with all New York ingredients. Things go, expectedly, wrong.

I thought the title would come across as ironic, maybe. It didn’t. To say it out loud now in certain circles makes me wince.

“Men aren’t your audience, so why would you care if just women buy your book?” my agent said.

I do care. I know what George Eliot meant. I want to be loved. I want to be told I am loved, even if that love comes from readers armed with Nerf guns or shoppers at Sam’s Club. But I want my work to be taken seriously, too. I’m not sure how to balance that.

I wanted to be a writer as far back as I can remember, and this moment – my first book – always seemed beyond reach. I believed when it happened – if it ever happened – it would be life changing, though I don’t know now what that means. I expected, I think, something straight out of Disney – a chorus of critics singing like blue jays, deer and antelope stringing garlands of flowers and cash and movie deals around my door, a magical Mercedes to wheel me off into Legitimate Writer Land where a fiddle-playing grasshopper would vouch for me at The New Yorker.

“My life is going to change. I feel it,” Raymond Carver, a very legitimate writer, once had a character say. Meaning my life is going to change. Meaning of course it isn’t.

One of the things no one told me about getting my first book published is this: it’s wonderful and affirming and it makes you doubt everything.

“Nothing is so good as it seemed beforehand.” George Eliot said that, too.

George Eliot, really Mary Anne Evans, was smart, but not pretty. Her family made sure she was educated as backup. Not a good candidate for marriage, she became a writer instead.

***

A few days after the call from Andi, I dress in my Serious Writer Outfit. All black, of course – black dress, black tights, black kitten heels, black scarf. It’s a fancy get-up, but no matter what I try, I look tired. I am tired. My daughter Phelan is one and a half. She wakes off and on all night. My son Locklin is five and wakes early. I’m not sure how much sleep I get, but it’s not a lot. My husband trims my hair with his electric razor because I don’t have time for a haircut.

“Think of all the money we’re saving,” he says.

If I tilt my head, my hair looks almost even. I convince myself the ragged ends make me look edgy, urban. I pass my dark roots off as punk. I put on makeup. I squeeze into two pairs of Spanx and my stomach looks almost flat. I think I look o.k., passable, sort of author-ish. I check my dress for spots – milk, spit, toothpaste, a soggy Cheerio smear. I fill in a bleach stain with a black Sharpie.

In the living room, my husband Dave is on the floor playing Star Wars with Locklin.

“Be him,” Locklin says, and holds out a toy Yoda.

Dave takes Yoda and runs him up the hem of my dress. “Fuck you I would,” he says.

“He can hear you,” I say, and cock my head toward our son, who’s locked in a light-saber battle with a Lego Luke Skywalker. He doesn’t notice. My husband swears so much and so often, no one notices he swears. I bend down and kiss them both on the tops of their heads.

“Good luck,” Dave says, and I say, “Seriously, it’s Sam’s Club.”

“Get some bulk toilet paper,” Dave says. “We’re low.”

***

Outside Sam’s Club, there’s a bubble machine, like on Lawrence Welk. People walk by and swat the bubbles like they’re swatting flies. An angry clown with a button that says “Free Hugs” chokes balloons into swords and poodles. An older woman with a Marge Simpson updo hands out coupons for free hotdogs, and a teenager shows people where to get the free cake.

“I’m here for a reading and book signing,” I say to the teenager. “Do you know where I should go?”

The teenager wears a Sam’s Club vest, but his pants hang so low his boxers poof out the bottom of the vest like a life preserver. His hands are distracting. They’re very hairy. It probably doesn’t matter much for this job because when people ask about the cake he points with his chin.

“A book on signing?” he says. “Like sign language?”

He makes a peace sign with one fuzzy paw, then shrugs, says, “Free cake in the back,” and juts his chin like a knife.

Inside, everything – the signs, the cake, the carts and Grand Opening balloons – is red, white and blue, as if Sam’s Club is America itself and not just a place where Americans can get a bargain on 1000-count boxes of latex exam gloves.

Behind me, a woman in a motorized scooter with a red balloon tied to the back revs up. She says beep. She says it again. She waves her arms like propellers. “I’m just trying to get through here,” she says. “Christ.”

People are everywhere. A Grand Opening means specials beyond free cake. People roll by with their massive carts stuffed full of paper towels and dog-food bags big enough to stash bodies in. I make my way to the information desk and ask the woman there where I should go.

“Oh I don’t know nothing about that,” she says, and holds up a finger. Her regulation Sam’s vest is covered with smiley buttons and other buttons that say happy customer-service things like “Ask me! I can help!”

The woman reaches for a big red phone that looks like something from a comic book. She keeps her finger up as she waits for someone to answer. Off toward the snack bar, the huge free cake looks like it’s been mauled by squirrels. The line for free hot dogs stretches back to the entrance. Three-hundred-count bags of roasted pig-ear dog treats are buy-one-get-one, which explains why nearly every cart that rolls by is stocked with them.

This is what I’m thinking – how many roasted pig-ear dog treats an average American household goes through in a year – when I see a sign just behind a wall of stacked bulk toilet paper, a used-car-lot sign, the kind with yellow bulbs that form a giant flashing arrow. This arrow is pointing to a spot behind the toilet paper. On the sign there’s a message in bold black letters. It reads: COME MEET LORI JAKIELA. There’s more, but the toilet paper stacks block it out.

“That’s o.k.,” I say to the woman on the red phone. I point to the sign. “That’s me. I’m her.”

The woman looks doubtful. Then she says, “Whatever you say,” and keeps the phone to her ear.

I turn and walk toward the sign. My name is there, in lights, even if they are used-car-lot lights, even if these lights flash behind mounds of very reasonably priced toilet paper, even if the lights are smack in the center of a giant conglomerate where the air smells like old hot dog water. I feel pretty good.

Maybe Andi was right. Andi’s often right. I should lighten up and enjoy this. I should lay off the snark. I should act like what I am, a real writer. I look around at all these Sam’s Club shoppers, who may just be readers, too, and realize that I have been a ridiculous neurotic ungrateful malcontent.

My life is going to change. I feel it. 

As I get closer to the sign, I notice there’s a long line of mostly middle-aged men, waiting. “Men aren’t your audience,” my agent had said, but she is wrong.

Nearly all of the men wear Dockers and polo shirts, various blues and beiges. Some of them have cell phones and beepers latched to their belts. There’s a lot of cologne and hair gel. Some of the men look like they’ve been waiting a long time.

As I walk past, I smile and wave. I say, “Hey there.” I say, “Thanks for coming.”

The men, like the woman at the information desk, seem confused. Some of them check their watches, like they’re waiting for the real show to start.

When I get to the front, I see the full sign, which up close is so bright it’s blinding. The rest of its message, the part that had been hidden by the toilet-paper stacks, reads:

COME MEET LORI JAKIELA

MISS AMERICA

I stop in front of the sign. I step back. I look at it. I squint and look again.

I will it to say something else.

I think, there must be two of us here, me and Miss America.

Then I think, no.

Andi talks so fast. It’s an easy mix-up. Miss New York. Miss America. I stand in front of the sign for what feels like a long time. I look down at my dress, the spot I filled in with black marker, my un-shined, un-beautiful shoes. Six months ago, I would at least have had my post-preggo boobs, but now, nothing.

Off to my right, there’s a long table. Sam’s Club had ordered a lot of books. Stacks of them are lined up, ready for Miss America to sign, bubble hearts dotting all her i’s.

There’s a chair at the table. There’s a small placard in front of it that repeats my name, my alleged title, in case the flashing sign isn’t enough.

I walk over and sit down.

The questions start at once. The first guy in line, who may have been here an hour or more, bends down to look under the table, like I might be hiding someone else under there. His hair is fluffy, sprayed. It doesn’t move when he bobs down and up again, twice. He reaches in his back pocket and pulls out a picture of himself with, I guess, the most recent Miss America.

He says, “You are not her.”

He says, “I know her.”

“This,” he says, “is false advertising.”

His face is red. Above his upturned polo collar, a vein pops in his neck like a worm. “I’m getting the manager over here now,” he says.

He starts to walk away, then turns back, leans over and puts both hands on the table in front of me, like he’s a lawyer on TV. He says, “And when exactly were you Miss New York?”

It goes on like this. Some of the men wander out of line. Others want to vent. One asks me to stand up so he can see my legs. At first I don’t know why, then I realize he wants to compare them to the woman’s legs on the cover of my book.

“That’s not even you!” he says.

He’s right. The woman on the cover is not me. Those are not my legs. “It’s a stock photo,” I say and laugh a little. “She’s probably not even real.”

The man just glares at me, like I’ve tried to sell him swampland, like I’ve tried to deny him his free slice of cake.

“I’m not on the book,” I say, “but I wrote it.”

I think this should count for something.

Later I’ll remember George Eliot, author of Middlemarch whose great intellect trumped beauty, though she went on to have steamy love affairs and eventually married a man 20 years younger than her and in portraits she had lovely blue eyes.

But for now, at this table, it’s just this man and me. He picks up a copy of my book, the book that took me a lifetime to write, the book I thought would change everything. He turns it over like he’s checking nutritional value on a box of cereal. Then he tosses it back down.

“All lies, I bet,” he says.

“Miss New York,” he says. “Ha.”

When the manager comes over, he’s sweating. He says, “Well.” He says, “It’s nice to meet you, I guess.” As he’s talking, he turns the placard in front of me face down. The manager also wears Dockers and a polo shirt. His hair is smoothed into the beginning of a comb-over. He looks at the flashing sign. He says, “There’s not much we can do about that, other than unplug it,” which he does. He says, “You’re supposed to be here two hours, but I understand if you don’t stay that long.”

“Oh that’s o.k.,” I say, and try to come off as congenial, Miss Congeniality, a consolation prize.

“Sam’s moves a lot of books,” Andi had said.

I stay the whole time. I’m not sure why, other than there are all these books and I feel, maybe, like I should stay with them, the way a captain is supposed to stay with a sinking ship. I take out my notebook and start writing. I take a lot of notes. This makes me feel better.

A woman, who may or may not be the same one who beeped at me earlier, whizzes up in her electric cart, the red balloon bobbing behind her like a buoy.

“What is that, a catalogue?” she says. “What are you people selling now?” Then she revs off, rams a toilet paper tower and sends a massive pack flying.

Another woman in a matching leopard-print stretch top and pants stops by to say she was a Pennsylvania Junior Miss back in the 1970s.

“I was for real,” she says.

No one buys a book. I don’t sign a single copy. In the moments between visits from people who want to talk or shout at me, I look at the image of the woman on my book cover, her full red lips, wide smile, perfect legs. Under the table, I curl back my legs in their black tights. My legs are skinny, with all the cuts and bruises that come with having small children. “Fuck you I would,” my beautiful husband said to me on my way out the door. Still. I touch my hair. I wish I’d brought lipstick.

 

 

***

When my two hours is up, I grab my copy of my book. It’s ragged, dog-eared, marked up from the readings I’ve been doing.

“You can get a hot dog and some cake, if you’d like,” the manager says as he piles the rest of the books into a shopping cart.

He says, “I think we moved some inventory, so it wasn’t all for nothing.”

        “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” George Eliot said. It’s something I’ve seen on refrigerator magnets and t-shirts.

At the Sam’s Club exit, I get stopped by security. “I’m going to need to see your receipt,” the woman says.

“I didn’t buy anything,” I say. “I’m an author. I was here for a reading.”

        The woman points to my book. “I’m going to need to see your receipt for that,” she says.

        I point back over my shoulder to the sign. I point to the name on the book. “That’s me,” I say. “I’m a writer. This is my book.”

“I’m going to need to see some ID,” the woman says, and she doesn’t smile.

 

 

 

Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoirs Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette 2006) and The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious (C&R Press 2013), as well as a poetry collection, Spot the Terrorist! (Turning Point Press 2012) She teaches in the writing programs at Pitt-Greensburg and Chatham University. She is not and never has been Miss America, though she was once a finalist in the Pennsylvania Junior Miss Pageant. She did not win.