any veteran of Weight Watchers (ages twelve and fifteen), I was no stranger to breadsticks. I sometimes wondered if there were any other people besides WW veterans who actually ate those things.
I smiled at her, sensing a kindred spirit.
She did not smile back. “I like to stay up on things.”
“Well, carry on,” Rita said. “We’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”
Two hours later, we ambled back to the office, full of Chinese food. I had expected to get the lowdown about what they expected from me in my job. Instead, I got gossip. Gossip about everyone. There were no affairs reported, no embezzling or money scandals, no shocking Candlelight secrets revealed, although you wouldn’t have guessed it from the urgent tone in Rita and Andrea’s voices.
“Did you know Ann takes her Maltese to doggy daycare every day?”
“It must cost her a fortune.”
“What else does she have to spend it on? The woman has no life. It’s pathetic.”
“Sad. She should try online dating.”
“First she should try to do something about that acne scarring.”
“Would insurance cover plastic surgery for that?”
“She could pay for it herself if she weren’t wasting all her money on her canine.”
They asked me a few polite questions about myself, which I evaded to the best of my ability. (If Ann and her doggy daycare were worth a conversational massacre, imagine the hay they could have made out of my living with my ex-boyfriend.) By the time the fortunes cookies rolled around, it felt like I had been working with them for months instead of hours.
When I got back, I continued to pile up accomplishments. I played a few rounds of solitaire and did very well. A few people, some of whom I had met that morning, came by to ask how I was settling in. Actually, I think they had afternoon restlessness and just wanted to get away from their desks for a while.
At one point, I had three other editors and Lindsay the editorial assistant all squeezed into my office, talking about famous person sightings they’d had in New York City. Ann—she of the pampered pooch—had stood in a deli line behind Leonardo DiCaprio, which was pretty damn impressive. The only famous person I’d come in that close contact with was Al Roker, who Fleishman and I had seen coming up the theater aisle the night we had gone to see Gypsy.
Lindsay had a good one. “Whoopi Goldberg goes to my dentist.”
This revelation brought gasps. “No way!” Madeline exclaimed. “Your dentist?”
Lindsay puffed up a little, sensing she had scored. “I saw her in the waiting room once, even. She was there for a cleaning, the hygienist told me.”
“Where? What dentist?”
“His name is Dr. Stein, and he’s on Eighty-fifth Street.”
Ann’s forehead wrinkled. “Does Whoopi Goldberg have good teeth?”
“Of course she has good teeth! She’s a movie star.”
“I’m sure they’re capped. All actors have caps.”
“Be crazy not to. In a movie close-up an incisor can look twenty feet tall.”
“Wait,” Andrea said. “Our insurance pays for Whoopi’s dentist?”
Lindsay nodded her head.
“That’s it. I’m switching.”
“Just like that? Because Whoopi goes somewhere else?”
“Why should I settle for substandard?” Andrea asked defensively. “You can bet with all that money she has, Whoopi’s checked out her dental care options.”
“Do you know she travels in her own bus?” someone asked. “Like a rock star.”
Just as the conversation was about to turn full tilt onto the subject of celebrity transport, someone rapped on my doorjamb. Standing behind Lindsay was a woman of medium height, with dishwater blond hair cut in an unflattering page boy, and wearing an olive green pantsuit of the most aggressively dumpy design imaginable. She surveyed the crowd through an owlish pair of glasses.
Suddenly, it was as if someone had shot off a bird gun at a duck pond. Coworkers flew out my door, leaving me floating all alone in the sights of…well, whoever this was. I still didn’t know, but a knot of foreboding formed in the pit of my stomach.
“Hi,” I said, attempting to keep the uneasiness out of my voice.
She smiled tightly. “I didn’t mean to break up your little party.”
I blushed self-consciously. “No—it’s just my first day. I’m Rebecca, by the way.”
“Hi, Rebecca, I’m Janice Wunch.”
I really had to keep my lips from twitching. If ever a person looked like a Janice Wunch, it was this woman. Poor thing. You would think she would have changed her name, or at least her glasses.
“I’m the production manager.”
I kept the polite smile frozen on my face. I had no idea what this meant.
“I have a little list here—well, actually, it’s quite long—of things of yours that are late to production.”
“Of mine?” I asked, confused. “But I just got here.”
“I’m sure many of these are projects that were originally Julie’s, but of course they’re your babies now.”
“Oh, I see…”
She handed a list to me, which filled up an entire page. It was staggering how late I could be on everything on my first day.
“In terms of priority, of course, the edit for The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard needs to get done first. It’s nearly a month late. I have told Rita about this repeatedly, and she said she was going to get Lindsay to do a preliminary edit, but then apparently she changed her mind when Lindsay left the manuscript on a crosstown bus and they had to ask the author’s agent for a duplicate.”
I nodded. As urgent as the situation was with The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard, there were two other late edits on the list, along with other stuff that I was completely clueless about. What was an art info sheet? I owed five of those. Where was cover copy supposed to come from? (Me? I wondered with growing hysteria.)
“No big deal,” Janice said. “Just get it to me ASAP—or by the end of the week, if you can.”
I gulped. The end of the week was sooner than what I had in mind. She had to be kidding. “If there’s a problem getting some of this stuff in…”
She blinked at me with what appeared to be sincere incomprehension. “Why should there be?”
Maybe because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing?
My
