“I’m sorry, honey. Mommy has to blog.” On the couch, my laptop open, Ellie bribed into compliance with a bag of jelly beans and the remote control, I thought of what Lindsay McIntyre had seen when she stopped by. The kitchen, at least, had furniture. There was a cheerful jumble of family pictures on the refrigerator. One wall had been painted with blackboard paint and turned into a calendar, with “Clay Club” and “Daddy’s 10K” and “Stonefield Pajama Party” written in colorful chalk. There were apples in a yellow-and-blue ceramic bowl, the orchid that I hadn’t managed to kill in a clay pot on the windowsill. You would never see my kitchen and guess how many milligrams of narcotics I required to drag myself through the day. You would never look at my living room and know how much I’d cried reading comments on one of my blog posts, or looking at the online banking site and fretting about the increased frequency with which I was moving money to my secret account or the widening gap between what I put in each month and Dave’s contributions. You’d check out the big house with its princess suite, the princess herself, her brown hair for once neatly combed, and imagine that we had a happy life. Nothing to see here, you would think. Everything is fine.
NINE
In all my years of working at the Examiner and then for Ladiesroom, I’d never had anything come close to going viral. When I’d organized the slide show of nude cyclists that ran with the paper’s coverage of Philadelphia’s annual Naked Critical Mass ride, the pictures had gotten a tremendous number of hits, but that had all been local attention. Nothing I’d done, and certainly nothing I’d said, had ever gained national traction. Maybe it was a slow news week, or maybe it had to do with prudish, hypocritical America’s fascination with anything related to women and sex, but by Sunday night the “vibrator in every purse” sound bite was racking up hits on YouTube (I’d smartened up enough to know not to watch the clip or even glance at the comments). On Monday morning, a nationally syndicated conservative radio host spent ten minutes frothing into his microphone, incensed at the notion that the writers and editors of Ladiesroom—“a pack of p**n ography purveyors,” as he put it—wanted the government to equip innocent teenage girls with vibrators. Where he got the idea that we were asking for government money, I wasn’t sure, but I welcomed the attention. Every hyperbolic, spittle-flecked “THIS is what liberals WANT!” harangue got Ladiesroom.com another ten thousand hits. More hits meant more attention, and more money. Money: Our corporate masters offered a generous bonus for pieces that topped fifty thousand views. I stuck the cash directly into my Naughty Account, knowing I’d need drugs to get through the backlash, the inevitable dissection of my looks and politics and sex life, or lack of same. I was planning on cutting back . . . just not now. There was even a bit on The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart smirking as he repeated my line: “A chicken in every pot and a vibrator in every purse! Just make sure you don’t get them mixed up,” he said as the screen behind him showed a picture of a Hitachi Magic Wand in a Dutch oven. My inbox overflowed with e-mailed condemnations and praise, which I quickly gave up trying to answer. A “thank you for reading my work” would suffice, whether the reader was telling me that I was a genius and a hero and an inspiration to girls everywhere, or a fat ugly whore bent on making men obsolete.
I tried to distract myself by writing something new. “A Mother’s Guide to the Online World” was the idea I’d been playing with, a series of tips and how-tos for protecting girls on the Internet and in real life. Nothing scared me more than the idea of Ellie as a teenager, among peers who accepted as normal things like girls texting topless shots of themselves to boys they liked, or boys filming sexual activity and then making the video available to their buddies. She was too young for even the most preliminary conversation—only six months ago I’d stumbled through a speech about where babies came from—but I thought if I could come up with a list of what to do and what to say, maybe I’d be prepared for when she was eight or nine or ten or twelve and the conversation was no longer theoretical.
“Mommy, come visit with me!” Ellie would say, banging on my locked bedroom door in the days and weeks after my TV debut.
“Mommy’s working right now,” I would call back, telepathically begging her babysitter to come upstairs and whisk her away. Katrina, bless her heart, meant well, but she would usually come with some elaborate craft or cooking project that would take a while to arrange, leaving Ellie free to wander the house, or bang on my door, while her sitter laid out pages of origami paper or baked gingerbread for a gingerbread house.