Jenny Fran Davis
Style Guide
In Boston, you can earn a living wage copy editing articles called “What Kind of Denim Girl Are You?” and “The Haircut You Need to Try Based on Your
Zodiac Sign.” You can sit in an adjustable chair for eight hours a day, ratcheting yourself half an inch lower or higher, and there will be a check deposited into your bank account every two weeks. For a while, the appearance of the check felt like magic. Then I remembered the hours in the chair.
My boss was Belle, a pinched, timid Minnesotan who could barely meet my eyes. On my first day, she presented me with a mountain of paper and told me it was all I needed to succeed at the job. Long lines of words, properly stylized, snaked down the page. Aww (only two w’s). Bare-legged. Bi-coastal. Bralette. Breton stripe (capitalize). A woman from HR gave me a bag containing mints, a journal, a water bottle, a beanie, and a tube of foundation, all featuring the company’s logo. I kept the bag on my desk with the products’ seals unbreached.
The woman from HR used a cheerful PowerPoint to explain the life insurance plan and the complimentary dry-cleaning service. She gave me a tour of the massive refrigerators stocked with soft drinks and the shelves lined with bags of chips and packages of Junior Mints. It was Valentine’s Day. Boxes of sugar cookies topped with pink and red frosting were stacked in neat piles around the office.
My first few days, I ate as much free food as I could manage, surreptitiously filling my backpack with bags of chips and cans of seltzer before leaving at the end of the day. I had never had a job with perks before. As I crammed the seltzers into my fridge at home, I told myself that this job would be good for me: steady, reliable, hydrating. A friend had sent me the online listing as a joke, and I’d applied half out of desperation—my café gig had ended when I realized I could no longer spend my evenings prying open frozen compost bins—and half out of curiosity, just to see what would happen.
My cohort of new employees included a copywriter with a flippy haircut and a can-do attitude, and a stylist who wore red velvet boots, had tattoos up and down her arms, and showed up late to orientation. Across from me sat a woman who had the angular jaw of someone named Meredith (I could never remember her real name), and next to her was Petra, a spray-tanned bleached blonde who was a self-proclaimed ditz. I just want to be a famous blog wife. Petra had soggy green eyes and an incredulous expression that contorted half her face into a twisted grimace. She managed the company’s social media accounts and piped up loudly to run her wordplays by the rest of us. Burberry? Check Yeah.
I quickly picked up on my coworkers’ style of speech. Syllables lasted an extra ten to twenty seconds. Hiiiiii. Thaaank youuuu. A decently nice person was a sweetheart. This was the best job ever. A colossal bitch was having a hard day. The presentation of treats—a cookie truck perched at the curb, a sundae bar to celebrate the company’s tenth anniversary, a Mediterranean spread at a creative department meeting—incited a specific ritual: exclaim, refuse, gorge, and repent. Nobody ate anything at her desk, so I stopped going to the snack wall for pretzels and Kit Kats. When I got hungry, I cracked open the mints bearing the company’s logo and ate them one by one until my tongue burned.
It was mid-winter, but we looked resolutely to spring. I edited articles called “Neon: The Warmer-Weather Craze” and “Sexy Easter Dresses for Every Age.” In March, the head of the creative department danced around the office dispensing pastel Cadbury eggs and jelly beans. When Mitch came around, everyone protested that they’d already had their fill of sugar for the day, but most begrudgingly accepted a single egg. I too engaged in the excessive politesse: You shouldn’t have! If you insist! Mitch winked and gave me two eggs, probably because he could see that I needed them. Starving, I sucked ferally on my eggs and then tucked the shiny wrappers into my trash can before anyone could see.
Everywhere I had gone before, my alienness was key to my belonging. I knew how to weld myself into a viable alternative. Around bohemians, I was uptight. With academics, I became ditzier, always a version of myself different enough to be of interest to the people around me. To counteract my coworkers’ muted tones and pearls, I showed up to work in an ’80s jumpsuit with shoulder pads, a floor-length fuchsia windbreaker, and rubber clogs printed with chickens. But at the fashion job, nobody was interested. Note that it’s an Hermès scarf, not a Hermès scarf. Boat neck. Bocce ball.
I ate lunch alone, or else with the friendliest woman on my floor, Monica. Monica was a copywriter who wore brightly colored peplum tops and chunky statement necklaces. She spoke in a high-pitched garble, impeded by the extra set of teeth that was apparently stored in her mouth. She asked me if I was on any dating sites. I told her about my girlfriend. Oh, Monica gasped. It’s a woman!
Monica’s lunch was always anxious and meager: two hard-boiled eggs on a pile of wilted lettuce, half an avocado stuffed with dry chicken salad, a smattering of cottage cheese curds, a pile of grapes as hard and dark as pebbles. She measured out her salad dressing with a ring of spoons she brought from home. I felt piggish with my leftover pad Thai and the bags of pretzels I ripped down from the wall of snacks like fruit from a tree.
One day at lunch, Monica showed me Petra’s Instagram account, zeroing in on Petra’s synthetic-looking legs, which were speckled and jagged as though they’d been hacked at. You could see where she’d photo-shopped away the slight bulges of fat around her upper thighs. Monica shook her head, like it was such a shame to see a woman trying to shrink herself. Monica had a sloppy command of style and grammar, capitalizing words at random in the copy I edited and often neglecting to supply correct verb forms. But she fired off clever headlines quickly and didn’t seem to mind when I returned them to her with slashes of red pen.
The other two copy editors, Belle—my boss—and Melanie, didn’t eat regular meals at all. At lunchtime, Belle smuggled a Big Texas cinnamon roll from the snack hallway back to her desk. She tried to unwrap it stealthily, producing no noise, like it was contraband. She pulled tiny pieces of dough until she was left with a knot of cinnamon sugar at the center. Melanie ate nothing, but drank three bottles of lemonade-flavored Vitamin Water Zero every day. She also downed can after can of seltzer, cracking them open in a series of crisp clicks and fizzes and tilting her head all the way back to consume the last few drops, staring at the ceiling with dead eyes. On days I didn’t eat with Monica, I went to the small park adjacent to the office building and ate in the cold.
At the end of March, Belle announced without eye contact to Melanie and me that she was pregnant, due at the end of August. Melanie screamed and hugged her, which from the look on Belle’s face was not entirely consensual. I asked Belle about what names she liked, and she blushed. I wondered if I’d inadvertently pried. But when the royal baby Louis was born, Belle wrote meekly on the creative department instant messaging channel, They stole my baby name!
Haha. Nobody responded.
The style guide featured a list of forbidden words. Don’t use “tribal” to describe an African print. Don’t use “tops” or “bottoms” for men’s clothing. Use “pants” and “shirts” instead. My coworkers were experimenting with intermittent fasting and spent hours discussing the practice. Petra ate between the hours of twelve and six only. Lila took her meals between three and nine. Monica ate, impressively, between two and five. These women seemed fake, like they didn’t exist outside of work, or were actresses on my private television show. Still I felt stilted and awkward around them. I didn’t tell anybody but Monica that I was gay. Noun + in-training: If you are referring to someone who is in training, hyphenate the entire phrase. E.g.: Doctor-in-training. Fashionista-in-training.
I spent half of each workday applying to other jobs: The Southern Poverty Law Center, the MIT Press, anything with a touch of gravitas. I edited articles called “How to Mattify Your Skin,” “Push-Up Bras for Your Eyelashes,” and “I Transformed into Miley Cyrus for a Day.” Belle was training Melanie and me to take over her responsibilities for when she went on maternity leave over the summer. Melanie was good at her job, efficient and eagle-eyed. I was less so, prompting Belle to send me emails replete with passive-aggressive smiley faces: Just a reminder that we use “sleep sets,” not “pajamas.” :) P. 64 in the style guide. :) Belle seemed too fragile to be a good mother, too awkward. Still there was something tender and well-meaning about her. When I caught a mistake in an article about pairing California wines with Steve Madden slippers—the writer had confused flare with flair—she came over to my desk and gave me a stiff congratulatory speech.
I projected my own depression onto her, becoming pained at the sight of her greasy bun or her nubby, gnawed fingers. Belle’s face was big and guileless, her nose and ears angled loosely, as though they’d been dashed off quickly by a lazy potter. For people who showed such limited ranges of emotion, my coworkers made me feel so much—so much sadness, desperation, confusion, even boredom. On the weekends I binge-watched the Bravo reality TV show Vanderpump Rules, which follows the dramatic couplings and de-couplings of the wait staff at an elite Los Angeles restaurant. My favorite character was Stassi, the hot blonde bitch who always tells it like it is. Stassi reminded me of Petra, who once sneered at a coworker, You wore theory to a wedding? Ew. Stassi, like Petra, made me at turns both inexplicably sad and absolutely riveted: her chin implant, her cheating boyfriend, the narrow contours of her life.
I was biding my time. I was also regimenting it. Lunch was at 12:33 p.m. I left the building at 5:07 p.m. Then I went and sat at the bar of a neighboring restaurant and drank coffee so hot that it made the skin on the roof of my mouth come off in sheets. I took the shortcut that snaked by the frozen river and bisected a popular bar called Lolita’s. The Red Line stuttered over the frozen Charles River. By the time I got to work in the morning, the wind off the water had sent my hair into wild tangles, and my fingers were so cold that I could barely pull my ID out to open the doors. Offices, condos, and trendy restaurants were slowly replacing empty lots and broken-down warehouses in the Seaport. My girlfriend had sent me a Globe article about the gentrification of South Boston when I got the job. The city had a rare opportunity to build a new neighborhood for all Bostonians. Instead, it built the Seaport.
The office was trying hard to look like a start-up, like one you’d find in San Francisco or Hoboken, but because it was only Boston the space seemed slightly sad, like something a child might have attempted. There were gumball machines at every turn (each gumball printed with the company’s swirling logo), machines that spit out a dozen gumballs no matter how gingerly you twisted the knob; pictures of grinning employees holding signs with the company’s six core values—the maddeningly un-parallel innovative, passion, collaborative, tenacity, decisiveness, and kind—in big pink letters on the walls; and fashion magazines piled on every surface, thick back issues of Vogue and Vanity Fair like tombstones lining the halls and scattered on the floor. I sensed that my coworkers liked to imagine that they were in New York or Los Angeles, young women working in fashion in the big city. Instead, they were here.
Belle liked old-fashioned names, she told Melanie and me. Annabel, Wallace, Henry, and Millicent were her favorites. Her husband worked for a travel company and they lived out in Somerville, farther than I did, where the Red Line didn’t reach. She had to take the 87 bus and the Silver Line airport shuttle to get to work. As her pregnancy crept along, she brought it up more and more frequently. At meetings, she’d take an extra half of a brownie and proclaim, I’m eating for two! or mention offhand that she’d be using the Moncler sale to pick up a few half-priced items for the baby. Her parents would be driving from Minnesota to help her care for the infant because they were afraid of flying. She quietly described the creamy color she’d chosen for the nursery wall. She ate her cinnamon roll at her desk as though she were under surveillance.
Sally, the voice director, everyone’s boss, was a trim blonde with a baby voice and a Jimmy Choo addiction. She once wore a lavender suit with white sneakers and, throughout that winter, a pink coat so succulent that I yearned to bury my face in it. Sally stopped by each bank of desks in the morning and dispensed compliments to the employees there. She sang the praises of topknots, maxi dresses, and platform sneakers. A compliment from Sally made me feel good, but at the same time the praise felt like unwrapping a gift meant for someone else. She drank massive cups of iced coffee and brought a plaid lunchbox with carrots, a dollop of hummus, and a sandwich with its crusts cut off. She had a toddler and two babies and a husband called Mason, and I overheard her telling Belle that she’d walked in stilettos throughout all of her pregnancies.
Sally led frequent meetings to discuss Ta-da!, the company’s new box business. Customers would be assigned personal stylists, who would send them seven mystery items of clothing according to their personal specifications. The items could be kept or returned. The copywriters were hard at work coming up with a tagline for the business. Your fashion fairy godmother. Just like magic. The Tada! business had its own color scheme meant to convey its sophistication: peach, salmon, cream, pewter, and eggplant.
The idea was commercially appealing and struck me as somewhat ingenious: an entire wardrobe at your doorstep, a wardrobe that conformed to your specific dimensions. There was an entire task force devoted to Ta-da! and we sat in endless meetings to plan its every detail. Lila suggested that the company include small items like pins or hairclips in Ta-da! boxes. She said we could call them just because items. Just because we’re thinking of you. Sally loved the idea. She asked us to go around and suggest tagline ideas. My suggestion was Your fashion I.V.
Nobody got it, but Sally gave me a warm, pitiful smile.
One afternoon, I returned from my lunch break to find my coworkers gathered around Petra’s computer, arguing and Googling loudly. Belle was smiling nervously at her desk, head cocked to stay abreast of the conversation. There was a piece of paper with calculations scribbled in thick pencil on Petra’s desk. See, I told you, Petra announced. Each walnut does have sixteen calories. Pleased, she settled back into her seat with her four walnuts. I could have told them how many calories were in walnuts. I’d known since I was sixteen. But it was repulsive to affiliate with them, to identify as a nut counter myself, so I went to my own desk and breathlessly relayed the nut-counting anecdote to my friends.
Later that day, Sally presented all of us with a teeming array of macarons: pistachio, matcha, caramel. Because it was 3 p.m., inside everyone’s eating hours, we all scarfed them down. I managed to eat three and a half pistachio macarons before abandoning my napkin on a side table. I’m having lettuce for dinner, Monica sighed, a hand at her round abdomen.
I guess it’ll be a trough of water for dinner, was how I mocked Monica to my roommates later, but I felt disgusting, like crying. Like the joke could not have been let’s all laugh at my anorexic coworkers. Like when you smelled someone with foul body odor on the train and slowly, over the course of the ride, realized it was you who stank.
At a Passover Seder in April, a group of leftist Jews and I played a game called, What would you be if you sold out? Bachelorette producer, said Miriam. P.R. exec, said Liora. Married, said Rachel. Then they looked at me.
OUR VOICE IS WITTY: We have a sense of humor in a way that’s smart and universal. It’s not above addressing life’s funny truths, like your fear of a unibrow or your dependence on SPANX®. At work I took as long as I could to do anything: refill my water mug, make copies, pee. I walked up and down the spiraling staircases for exercise, willing the time to move faster. On a pink legal pad from the supply room, I chronicled my boredom and sorrow, amplifying both my boredom and my sorrow.
I have a friend, also queer, who wants to dilute herself by seventy percent. She says her intelligence, her acute understanding of the world, her all-around toomuch-ness, fuels her despair. She feels Byronic, publicly hysterical, like the crazy girl of her graduate program. When I told her about the nut counters, we agreed that it would be nice to be more like the women at my fashion job. There is something pure and precious about being a nut counter, she said.
I thought about nut-counting, the thing I used to do when I was bored and lonely as a teenager, but now the strategy, unmasked, seemed only sad. I thought of my mother, forced to face the fear that had always been her fear: a child who would not eat. How I’d spend the days watching reality TV shows, telling myself that with enough will power, I could look just like the thin and ditzy caricatures on the screen, characters I loved and feared and rooted for and despised.
My own eating issues had always seemed original to me, and quaint, like I was the protagonist of a ’70s made-for-TV movie. But at the fashion company, they sounded tinny, like a song I’d heard too many times before. A line from a popular website I’d read back then, at the height of my illness, stuck with me: Confessing to having had an eating disorder as a teenager is like admitting you went to high school. The line embarrassed me, made me feel almost guilty.
On the train ride home from the fashion company on the day of the macarons, a mother scolded her young son for not giving up his seat to an elder. When I was in your belly—I mean, when you were in my belly—I always appreciated it when people gave up their seats for me. Her flub resonated: my mother had always been in my belly. The winter I was sick, my special eating-disorder doctor had called my mother in after an appointment to speak with her privately. It was only when we got home that she told me I’d been diagnosed with classic anorexia.
But it’s embarrassing to be classic—to have what other people have, to want what other people want. I told her that what I had was different, actually. Well then what is it? she asked, tired. The clinic was sleek and perfectly manicured, an Upper East Side building just like the ones my private-school classmates—mostly angular and rich—lived in. Waiting my turn to be weighed, I both envied and pitied the painfully thin girls who checked in, pale and anxious, at the receptionist’s desk, felt sick with desire to look like them.
Years later, in our college apartment, I had confessed to my girlfriend that I had been anorexic as a teenager in an attempt to be closer to her—to elaborate myself, to be something to her, something she hadn’t seen before. And then again, when things fell apart for the first time, I asked her why she never asked me about it, why she’d never followed up. It was an accusation. And then, in a minimizing and self-protective move when she did not respond as I wanted her to, I told her that everyone had overreacted: I hadn’t been that sick. I wanted her to feel bad for me, and to be, if only for a second, transparent to her, but she immediately took up the opposing side. Your life belongs to the people who love you.
After a Ta-da! meeting, I pulled Belle aside to tell her I was leaving the company in two weeks. She teared up and immediately asked me what she’d done wrong. But I’m pregnant! she said, as though without meaning to. The next morning, Sally marched past my desk without giving me a compliment. Short-lived, she muttered under her breath as she walked by. Short-lived. The woman from HR conducted a brief and condescending exit interview. I guess you’re just not a fashion person, huh? Belle didn’t look in my direction for two weeks. I thought about the human growing inside of her and wondered if she would one day be inside that baby’s belly.
The copywriters decided on Your fashion fairy godmother for the Ta-da! business. Sally showed everyone a sample box: a blouse, a blazer, flats, a necklace, jeans, gloves, a scarf. The ensemble, heaped on the table in the approximate shape of a human body, looked just like what everybody else in the room was wearing. Just like magic. My coworkers reluctantly threw me a surprise birthday party with vegan cupcakes that Belle had procured from Seaport Boulevard. We all stood awkwardly around a counter. Each of the cupcakes was cut into seven precise pieces, of which three remained when it was time to go back to our desks.
It was my last day. Before leaving, I scribbled a note for Belle that she would be a great mother and presented her with an L.L.Bean bib I’d bought for her using the company discount. She didn’t hug me goodbye. I cried in the bathroom and wiped my face with the sleeves of my blouse. The free foundation stained the fabric bright orange.