34. What We Pretend to Be

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” —Kurt Vonnegut

Master Park was there immediately, his eyes narrow and angry behind the squares of his eyeglasses. He grabbed Jen by the shoulders—the first time she could remember him touching her directly—and shook her.

“Are you crazy?” he yelled. “What are you doing?”

Jen didn’t know what to say. The men from the advanced class had swarmed around the reporter on the ground, offering to help her up, asking her if she was okay. Jen wanted to punch her again, to kick her in the face. It took all of her energy to restrain herself.

“Go sit over there,” said Master Park, pointing at the chair behind the front desk. “Don’t move.”

She sat in the swiveling office chair, feeling like a bad child forced to sit in the corner, and watched Master Park help Olivia up and lead her outside. Through the glass of the front door, she could see them talking. Her male classmates were leaving one by one, most of them avoiding eye contact as they passed her, although a few of them smiled grimly at her, their expressions conveying that they knew she must have had a good reason. One slightly-built green belt, a college student Jen had trained with a few times since he was close to her size, stopped in front of the desk. “What did she do to you?” he asked under his breath.

Even though Master Park was facing the other direction, Jen didn’t want to risk him turning around and seeing her talking to someone. “Nothing,” she said quietly. He didn’t seem offended by her reticence. He just flashed her a sympathetic smile and left.

That’s nice about taekwondo students, Jen thought; they don’t pry.

Master Park and Olivia stood outside talking for almost fifteen minutes, according to the clock on the wall, which Jen couldn’t help but stare at as she sat in the empty room, waiting. Master Park stood with his weight balanced evenly, his arms crossed. Olivia was gesturing with her hands as though trying to negotiate some kind of deal.

Finally they came back inside and walked over to the desk. Master Park had a rigid look about him that suggested some formal business. I hope they aren’t going to ask for an apology, Jen thought; she didn’t know if she would be able to offer one.

But instead, Master Park nodded his head towards Olivia.

“She wants you to go have a drink with her,” he said.

Jen was surprised for a moment, but quickly regained her composure. Of course she does, Jen thought. She’s been chasing me all over North Middleton.

“I don’t drink” said Jen.

“It’ll be juice,” said Olivia.

Jen looked up at Master Park. He was impassive, his arms still folded across the front of his crisp white jacket. “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s up to you.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Jen.

“Give me one hour,” Olivia said. “After that, I’ll never come back here again if you don’t want me to. You’ll never have to see me again.”

Jen looked at the clock. It was nine forty-five. “Okay,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“The juice bar,” said Olivia. “You can follow me in your car.”

In the parking lot a few minutes later, Olivia pulled her car up in front of Jen’s. Jen was expecting one of the large, black SUVs that had waited in ambush for her outside the co-op. Instead, Olivia was driving a squat little Volkswagen, painted a faded red color except for the driver’s side door, which was black.

Jen drove behind her into the center of town. Just before they reached the university, Olivia flashed her right-side turn signal. It occurred to Jen that she had never turned this direction off of Main Street; the food co-op and the tea house were both on the other side.

Jen followed Olivia down a side street whose sidewalks were flooded with students, even though it was almost ten o’clock on a Tuesday, toting heavy backpacks as they poured in and out of the bars and coffee shops. Olivia parked in front of a run-down storefront whose sign read “North Middleton Juice Collective.”

The small space inside was crowded with young women whose style of dress reminded her of Paula’s comfortable, earth-tone wardrobe, except in place of her dreadlocks, most of these women had short, boyish haircuts that contrasted their flowing garments. They had filled up every visible seat, their backpacks occupying every chair that they were not sitting on. Several of them looked up from their work and smiled when Olivia walked in. “Hey, Olivia, want me to move this?” asked a woman in an oversized oatmeal-colored turtleneck, pointing at the stack of books, sweatshirts, jackets and scarves overflowing from the chair next to her.

“No, that’s okay,” said Olivia. “There’s a back room,” she said to Jen, leading her into a tiny area behind a wall that housed four more tables, all of them occupied except one. Olivia threw her jacket over the top of the empty table and walked back to the front to order.

The counter was staffed by two young, shorn-headed women who appeared indistinguishable from their clientele. Jen raised her eyes to the expansive menu posted on a chalkboard above their heads. It was printed in colored chalk, with writing that grew increasingly smaller as it approached the bottom.

Olivia turned to Jen. “What do you want to drink?”

Jen glanced again at the dizzying menu, squinting her eyes to sharpen the tiny letters. The words that popped out at her from the swirl of hand-printed writing normally would have appealed to her: carrot, melon, flaxseed, cucumber. But there was a heavy smell in the air, like bleach and steam and mushrooms, that killed Jen’s appetite; or perhaps it was just the effect of standing so close behind Olivia, her nemesis.

She was tempted not to order anything, but she didn’t want to seem passive aggressive. She had promised Olivia an hour; she resolved to be pleasant until her time was up.

“Whatever you’re having is fine,” Jen said.

“Okay,” said Olivia, turning to the girl at the counter. “Two Greenpeaces.”

Jen scanned the board for the translation: kale, grapefruit, celery, garlic. Not the combination she would have chosen. At least it’ll be healthy, she thought.

She cringed at the price, six dollars for a small. Pulling her wallet from the pocket of her jacket, she asked, “Can I give you some money?”

“Don’t worry, it’s free,” said Olivia, turning from the counter. Jen looked at the girl who took their order; she had already started helping the next customer, despite the fact that Olivia hadn’t paid for their expensive drinks. She really must be a regular here, Jen thought.

Jen sat down while Olivia waited for their drinks to be freshly squeezed. When she finally appeared around the corner, she placed two tall glasses filled with frothy brownish-green drinks on the table and sat down across from Jen.

Jen looked at the clock on the wall. It was five minutes past ten. “You’ve got forty minutes,” she said. She expected Olivia to protest that her hour shouldn’t include driving and ordering time, but she accepted the warning somberly.

“Okay, then, let me just think where to start.”

She paused, her hand wrapped around the bottom of her face. She really does look a lot better, Jen thought, remembering how the fluorescent lights of the co-op had caught in the dull ends of her bleached blonde hair and sickly, creased skin. The face of the woman sitting across from Jen now glowed with health, framed by her glossy, dark hair, looking at least ten years younger than the woman who had sat ringside, watching Jen get knocked unconscious.

“I’m going to have to start at the beginning,” Olivia said. “Sorry, but it’s important.”

Jen nodded and took a tentative sip of her drink. The first flavors were pleasant, celery and grapefruit. Then the bitterness of the kale struck her, and then, finally, a shocking flash of garlic. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, just bracing. She took another sip and swished it around in her mouth. At least it will keep me from getting sleepy, she thought.

“I don’t know how I ended up writing for a crappy magazine,” said Olivia. “Or, I suppose I know, but the whole thing was a mistake. Growing up, I always planned to be a ballerina. I was really serious. My parents used to drive me an hour to Milwaukee every day after school. And I would go to study in New York every summer, and I was thinking of moving there when I was sixteen, because you could board at the ballet school there.”

“Why did you stop?” Jen asked.

“Oh, you know,” said Olivia, the healthy glow of her cheeks intensifying by a few shades to a burning crimson. “The same reason everybody does.”

Jen thought of all of her friends who had given up on their dreams of becoming actors. “Because it’s impossible to make a living as a dancer?”

“Oh, no,” said Olivia. “Because I got addicted to diet pills. So, you know, I had to go through treatment and that whole thing, which wasn’t so bad because a bunch of my dancer friends were doing it, too. But I lost half a year of study, and I never really got back to it in the same way.”

Jen was appalled by the image of a Midwestern rehab center flooded with adolescent ballet dancers. “If you were all doing it, somebody should have told the ballet school,” Jen said.

“Oh, they knew,” said Olivia. “They encouraged it.”

“Really?” Jen asked, scandalized.

“Well, they would say things like, ‘You will just need to figure out how to manage your weight in some way, whatever that might be.’ What do they expect in an art form where they want you to be really skinny and really energetic at the same time?”

She looked up at Jen, embarrassed, and added, “Well, you know.”

Truthfully, Jen didn’t know. Of course there was a lot of pressure to be skinny in Hollywood, but she had always dealt with it by just eating very little, as had most of the other actresses she had talked to. The truth was, it didn’t take that much energy to shoot a movie or television show. In fact, she had found it helpful to be a little lightheaded from hunger; it heightened her emotions and made her feel more creative. She tried to imagine what it would be like to eat that way while trying to maintain a rigorous athletic schedule; there was no way she could fast three times a week while training at taekwondo.

“But you’re right,” said Olivia. “It is impossible to make a living. So instead I stayed in Wisconsin for college and got a degree in mass communications and started writing for a newspaper.”

“I was writing for the arts section, reviewing concerts and art exhibits and even the ballet; I liked that job a lot. But the paper got bought out by a bigger company that owned newspapers all across the state. And then they got bought out by an even bigger company that owns a bunch of newspapers all over the country.

“That company cut the arts section from my paper, so I was going to be out of a job. But they said I could do contract work for a couple of magazines they had just bought. They wanted people in the Midwest who could specialize in what they called ‘recluses,’ which basically just meant celebrities who weren’t in New York or L.A.

“And that’s how I ended up writing for Celebrity Gape. I’ve been doing it ever since, for almost ten years. It’s really depressing work, really boring, a lot of waiting around. I was so excited when I got the assignment to cover you in Michigan, because no one knew what you were doing out here. Most of the celebrities in the Midwest just wanted to get out of the spotlight and raise their families, so there’s not really much to say about them. So you just wait and keep an eye on them and hope they get a divorce or have an affair or something.”

“That’s horrible,” said Jen.

“It sounds bad, doesn’t it,” Olivia agreed. “But it hardly ever happens. The recluses are usually really stable. If they get divorced, it’s just like a regular divorce, after the kids are grown and it’s a mutual thing, no drama.”

So you have to invent it, thought Jen, thinking of some of the wilder claims Olivia had made about her.

Olivia looked up at the clock anxiously; ten minutes had already passed. She picked up her untouched drink and took a large gulp. When she spoke again, her eyes were large and earnest with excitement. “But really, the thing I want to talk to you about is your fight. Because that’s the day my whole life changed.”

Your life changed, Jen thought, surprised. She scanned Olivia’s face, looking for some hint of ironic distance, a sign of a trap. But she looked as earnest and absorbed as she had been when Jen showed her the opening of the first taekwondo form and how to do a roundhouse kick. A woman at an adjacent table rose and gave Olivia a friendly pat on the shoulder on her way to the front room, but Olivia was too engrossed with telling Jen the story of her own fight to notice.

“I drove down to Lansing with a photographer. The drive seemed so long, and I was so nervous for you. I kept thinking, I can’t believe Jen is really going to do this. I’d been tracking you for months and months, and I just felt so invested in your progress. When you first got to Michigan, you seemed so fragile. I couldn’t believe how far you’d come since you moved here.

“Like when you first started sparring, I was sure you were going to get your rib broken again, or your nose or your arm. You didn’t know it, but we had a photographer in the parking lot every Sunday just waiting for you to be carried out in a stretcher.”

Jen felt anger begin to rise in her chest; she wasn’t sure whether it angered her more that the reporters had been stalking her without her knowledge or that they had been hoping to see her get injured. But she had decided not to pass any outward judgment until Olivia’s hour was up. Jen looked at the clock. There were twenty-seven minutes left. She took another swallow of her drink and looked down into the cup. Now that it was almost gone, she decided it was actually quite tasty. She wondered how she would distract herself from making horrible grimacing faces at Olivia’s story once she had nothing left to hide her face with.

“When we got to the gymnasium, I found a seat in the back, where no one would notice me,” said Olivia. “I sat there for the first set of fights. I was watching those two little skinny guys who went before you in on the same mats. And they were flying in the air, kicking each other. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen. You know how that one guy kept jumping up so high?”

Jen nodded, though she hadn’t seen any of the three fights that had occurred simultaneously in the period before hers.

“I thought that was so amazing,” said Olivia. She was speaking very quickly now, either from excitement about her story or nervousness about running out of time.

“Your fight was next, and I was so excited and nervous. I’d been keeping a low profile since that day I saw you at the co-op. But I wanted to sit closer. And I decided, screw it, I’m moving to the front. I figured there was no way you were going to be looking at the crowd, much less recognize me.”

“I saw you,” said Jen, unable to contain this small comment.

Olivia rushed on as though Jen’s statement made her nervous. “Watching you fight up there, I thought, this is amazing. This is more impressive than anything I’ve ever done—than everything I’ve ever done, put together. Here I am, following this woman around, and she is spending her life in such a better way than I am spending mine. Why am I here, sneaking around the corners of this event, when I should be right in the middle of it? Why couldn’t I be the one doing it?”

Jen remembered the awful, queasy sickness of waiting for the fight, waiting in the dressing room with Shane, reading the article that this woman, Lorna Olivia Lee, had written about her. And then the fight itself, the pressure, the public humiliation. It’s not as fun as it seems, she thought, taking one final, silencing sip of her drink.

“When you got knocked out, I screamed. I don’t know if you heard me.”

Jen didn’t bother responding, although she didn’t remember hearing a scream, didn’t remember hearing anything other than the rushing in her own head.

“My photographer was all excited, taking all these pictures. But I was so worried. I thought, if she gets up, I’m going to change my whole life.”

She paused and took a long, melodramatic sip of her drink, licking her lips clean of the green froth.

“And of course you did, and that was it. I stayed and watched all the fights. I had been planning to leave right after yours, but I just sat there, close enough to touch the fighters, and watched until the very end of the tournament. The photographer was complaining that he wanted to leave, but I had the car keys and I wouldn’t move. I saw all the people from your school fight, and your friend Brittany.”

“Shane,” said Jen.

“And when it was over, I walked out, and I felt exhilarated, like I was high or something. I called my job and quit that afternoon. And I decided my goal was to become a fighter like you.”

Olivia looked at her expectantly, as though wanting her to respond. But Jen didn’t want to show her surprise at this unanticipated declaration. She returned Olivia’s gaze blankly.

“How long do I have?” Olivia asked.

“Fourteen minutes,” said Jen.

“Okay,” said Olivia, taking a deep breath and a large gulp of her drink. “I spent the next few days looking for a new place to live. I always stayed at this one hotel in North Middleton, but I took all my stuff out of there and moved into a big house with a bunch of college kids, and one of them got me a job at the juice collective.”

“You work here?” Jen asked. That would explain why everyone here knew her, not to mention the free drinks.

“Yup, since one week after your fight,” said Olivia. “It doesn’t pay much, but I have savings, plus my rent is really cheap. And I get most of my meals here for free.” As though to emphasize this point, she took another large sip of her drink.

“The only problem was that I was in no shape to start taekwondo. I had no stamina at all. I hadn’t exercised at all for years, since I stopped dancing. So I started running every day, and I joined the yoga studio.”

“Right,” said Jen, remembering their conversation during class. “What’s it called again?”

“Pomegranate Yoga Studio,” said Olivia.

“Where is it?” Jen asked.

Olivia looked anxiously at the clock.

“I’ll count this as a time-out,” said Jen.

“Okay, thanks,” said Olivia, sighing in relief. She had been speaking so quickly that she seemed a little out of breath.

More slowly, she said, “It’s just a little further down the street.” She turned to look around the cramped room at the handful of college women hunched over their textbooks, drinking juice and eating vegetable sandwiches. “A lot of the people in here go to Pomegranate. Actually almost all of them.”

“Do you like it?” Jen asked. She couldn’t help but be curious about this potential alternate life; if she hadn’t met Rob, she realized, she likely would have been one of the women attending the yoga school and drinking juice in this collective.

“I love it,” said Olivia, smiling. “It’s a woman-centered practice, so we do more moon salutations instead of sun salutations, and all the teachers are women.”

Jen couldn’t help but note the contrast to the taekwondo school and its attendant tea house, both populated heavily, and at times exclusively, by men. I’ve been hanging out on the wrong side of Main Street, Jen thought.

“So that’s why you look so different?” Jen asked, finally understanding why the woman sitting across from her seemed to have lost ten years off her age during the last three months.

“Yeah, I suppose,” said Olivia, looking down at the table in embarrassment. “I also stopped smoking and eating fast food and bleaching my hair. And I’ve been eating a mostly raw diet, lots of vegetables and nuts and juice of course.”

Olivia took another large swallow of her juice and looked at the clock. “I can finish my story now if you want.”

“You have six minutes,” said Jen.

“Okay,” said Olivia, speeding her pace again. “Now that I’ve spent a few months getting in shape, I felt like it was finally time for me to start studying taekwondo, that I was finally ready. So that brings me to why I need to talk to you now.”

“You want to study with Master Park,” said Jen. She didn’t care anymore. “It’s fine. Go ahead.” If Olivia was really trying to change her whole life, Jen certainly wasn’t spiteful enough to try to stop her. And if this was all some kind of elaborate trap to get into Jen’s school, well, Jen had decided months ago, back at the co-op, that she wasn’t going to bother protesting whatever the reporters did. Jen could ignore Olivia like she usually ignored all the other beginning students. Hell, Rob could teach her; they would be a perfect match.

“No,” said Olivia. “I want to study with you.”

“With me?” said Jen, startled. “I’m not a teacher.” This evening had in fact been her first experience teaching, and clearly it had not ended up well.

“Sure you are. You taught me all that stuff tonight. I thought you were a great teacher.”

“I don’t think Master Park would agree to it,” said Jen, hoping this white lie would distract Olivia long enough for Jen to come up with a more credible excuse.

“I told him tonight outside, after you hit me,” Olivia replied. “He said it’s fine, if you agree.”

Jen couldn’t manage to be polite in her dismissals any longer.

“You wrote those lies about me,” she said, spitefulness darkening her voice as she tried to control her temper. Jen saw several of the women in the room look up from their textbooks in alarm.

“I never wrote any lies,” said Olivia. She did not appear insulted or ruffled by Jen’s attack. “I would never write lies. Everything I wrote was technically true.”

“You said I was obsessed with fighting and I was sleeping with my training partner,” said Jen.

“So you weren’t sleeping with her?” Olivia asked.

“No!” Jen yelled. She expected the students to come to Olivia’s defense, but as soon as she had shown herself to be calm and untroubled, they had resumed their studying.

“Oh, well, I wasn’t sure,” said Olivia. “You sure spent a lot of time at her house.”

“That’s none of your business,” Jen said, trying to lower her volume. She could hear her voice shaking; she looked down and saw that her hands were shaking as well. “Didn’t you just say you only reported facts, not just things you made up?

“I never said you were sleeping with her,” said Olivia, her calm voice suggesting that, unlike Jen, she was accustomed to this sort of confrontation. “I said that there were rumors you were sleeping with her.”

“But there weren’t any rumors like that,” said Jen.

“Sure there were. Me and the reporters had the rumors,” Olivia replied. “We had all kinds of rumors.”

“That’s really crappy journalism,” said Jen. She was tired of yelling; her voice was worn and sullen now.

“I know. And I shouldn’t defend it,” said Olivia, her voice softening. “I have no real way to defend myself, other than to say that I’ve stopped. I’ve stopped for good, and I’m going to do something better with my life, and I’m asking you to help me.”

Jen sighed. She hated rejecting people, even people who had done horrible things to her in the past. And it did seem like Olivia had changed everything about her life in an effort to reject her disgusting, parasitic career. She cursed herself briefly for being so quick to forgive.

“I’ll think about it, said Jen. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“That’s great,” said Olivia, smiling broadly. She stood up and pointed at the clock. “Time’s up; you’re free,” she said, pointing at the clock. She pulled her jacket on and pushed in her chair.

“You might think I’m a bad person,” said Olivia, “and maybe I am. But I never lie, and I always keep a promise.” And before Jen could say anything in response, Olivia had disappeared out the front door, leaving her half-finished drink on the table.

Chapter 35