Page 2 of The Frog Prince
“I’m getting out,” I say, shifting uneasily, knowing that Olivia’s voice carries and not being particularly eager to have the rest of the staff hear my shortcomings. Again. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
It was supposed to be a joke, but she doesn’t laugh. “This iswork, Holly.”
“Exactly.”
Olivia rolls her eyes. She’s beautiful. Even when she rolls her eyes, she looks sleek. Sexy. With the ultimate in DNA—Olivia’s mother is a former model, the blonde, glossy type that graced the pages ofSports Illustrated, while her father dominated the Oakland Raiders’ offense, a star wide receiver still talked about in hushed voices twenty years later. Olivia is perfection. She modeled for two years in Paris buthatedit, apparently modeling wasn’tchallenging, as it did nothing for hermind.
“This is no social life,” she says, leaning against the edge of my desk, her long legs even longer in snug, low-waisted trousers, her black cashmere turtleneck sweater cropped short enough to reveal two inches of flat, toned midriff.
I feel like a slice of Wonder bread. “I don’t need one.”
Her gray-green eyes narrow, squint. She looks at me hard, the same up-and-down sweep she gives decorated ballrooms before handing responsibility over to an underling. “You need something bad, girl.”
Yes. I need my bed with my duvet pulled up over my head, but it’s only Wednesday, and I have two more days before I get to dive back between my covers and stay there for the rest of the weekend. “Am I not performing?” I ask, trying to shift the focus from personal back to professional. Olivia was the one who hired me three months ago. She’d be the one who’d fire me.
Another narrowed-gaze inspection. “You’ve lost your… edge.”
Edge? I don’t remember having an edge. I was desperate when I interviewed for the job, but there never really was an edge. I mentally add “Get edge” to my increasingly lengthy to-do list.
“You need attitude,” she continues. “Presence.”
I say nothing because, quite frankly, I do have an attitude, and I suspect it’s not the one she wants.
“What do you do when you go home, Holly?” Olivia’s fine arched brows beetle. “Sit down in front of the TV?”
“No…”
“Eat your way through a bag of chips? A carton of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey?”
“I don’t evenlikeChunky Monkey.”
Olivia is gaining momentum. Her purple-black polished nails tap-tap the laminate on my desk. Her stellar eyebrows flatten. “You’re getting fat.”
The word “fat” hangs there a moment between us, pointed, sharp.Ugly.This is a full-scale assault.
For a moment nothing comes to mind, and I inhale hard, topple forward in my chair, feet clattering to stop my fall.
I check to see if anyone else has heard. This is about as low as anyone could go. She knows it. I know it. “I’m not fat.”
Surreptitiously I glance down at my lap, homing in on my thighs. They do look rather big, but that’s because I’m wearing speckled wool pants, and the fuzzy spotted texture isn’t exactly slimming. “My clothes fit fine.”
Olivia shrugs. Says nothing.
I feel all hot on the inside, hot and prickly and a little bit queasy. I move my right thigh, check the shape. It does look rather spread out on the chair. “I need to work out,” I add awkwardly. “I haven’t joined a gym since moving here.”
She shrugs again, and I look down, see my lunch still sitting on my desk: a half-eaten burrito, guacamole and sour cream oozing, obscuring the chicken and black beans.
I can picture my leg naked. Or what it must look like naked if I ever looked at myself in a full-length mirror anymore, because I avoid mirrors, especially full-length mirrors. I haven’t taken a look at myself naked in, oh, three months—ever since I moved to San Francisco and realized I couldn’t bear to look me in the eye, couldn’t bear to see what I, once so pathetically hopeful, had become.
But beyond the burrito and the mirror, it’s not all bad. I still drink Diet Coke. I’ve always drunk Diet Coke. There are limits to indulgence, and I know mine.
“The point is,” Olivia says more delicately, “you go straight home after work. You sit on your couch. Veg in front of the TV. That’s no life, and you know it.”
For a moment I say nothing, because I’m not even thinking about my new apartment in San Francisco, but about the house I left in Fresno, where until recently I’d been a brand-spanking-new wife.
The house in Old Fig Garden was originally Jean-Marc’s, a 1950s ranch that looked cozy and cottage-y with a split-rail fence and hardy yellow summer roses. After we married, I couldn’t wait to make the house mine, too, and I loved personalizing it, adding festive, feminine touches like the new cherry-sprigged dish towels from my bridal shower, hanging on towel bars in the kitchen, or the sparkly crystal vase with zinnias and yellow roses displayed on Jean-Marc’s dining table. We had new 300-thread-count sheets on the king-size bed and fluffy white-and-blue towels in the bathroom, and it was like a dollhouse. Charming. Warm. Storybook.
Turns out I wasn’t the storybook wife.