Friendship (2 page)

Three years in, she still half imagined her no-longer-new job as temporary: she had no desk ornaments, had resisted even the temptation to claim a dedicated coffee mug. But on some level she realized that she wasn’t going anywhere, not in this economy. She sometimes looked for other jobs, halfheartedly. Partly she was insulted that other jobs hadn’t sought her out. But there was also something comfortable and comforting about Yidster; its cheery, clean office with big windows overlooking the Manhattan Bridge made her feel, each morning, that something might be accomplished there. It didn’t matter, in those morning moments, exactly what that something might be. Yidster’s DUMBO location was perfect, too. Of course the third-most-popular online destination for cultural coverage with a modern Jewish angle was located not quite in Manhattan, but
almost.

Yidster provided health coverage, a decent salary, and free coffee, in addition to the perk—well, it was sort of a perk—of frequent lunch meetings at nice restaurants with their founder-benefactors, Jonathan and Shoshanna Geltfarb. The brother and sister team were heirs to a hosiery fortune (faded lettering on the side of a Hester Street tenement still proclaimed “A lady who knows / wears Geltfarb hose”) that had been compounded many times over by the savvy non-hosiery investments of Jonathan and Shoshanna’s father, Mr. Geltfarb. Now, though, the Geltfarb gelt was being steadily depleted by Yidster, but Amy wasn’t too worried about that. Or maybe that was the chief source of her worry—that the Geltfarbs would
never
run out of money and she would be stuck at Yidster forever.

The founders had many evolving and contradictory ideas about the website’s mission. They would meet with the Yidster editorial staff—which consisted entirely of Amy, two other staff bloggers named Lizzie and Jackie, and their managing editor, a combative Israeli expat named Avi—at Vinegar Hill House or the River Café and discuss ideas over very expensive food. Then the staff would go back to the office and tentatively begin to implement the ideas, stalling on the important stuff as they waited for the inevitable email from Jonathan and Shoshanna saying they’d changed their minds, that more concepting was necessary, more reimagining, more going back to the drawing board.

All the strategizing and pivoting meant that Amy sat down at her desk every day and did, basically, nothing. She responded to several dozen all-caps urgent emails about MAKE HEDS MORE SEO and TEASE JUMPS HARDER and various other meaninglessnesses from Avi, who sat five feet to her left when he wasn’t taking one of a million daily smoke breaks, and she assigned Lizzie and Jackie to write a series of filler blog posts about the issues of the day, “with a modern Jewish angle.” This meant skimming her RSS feeds and picking a few posts from other blogs for Lizzie and Jackie to, er, reimagine. Then the rest of the day was hers to waste.

This day, she’d unlocked the Yidster office door at 9:30, about an hour before anyone else typically rolled in. She’d nearly sprinted past the security desk, as usual, rushing toward the moment when she’d log in to the Yidster CMS with a sense of great urgency—not because she was eager to get to work, but because she was eager to get through her fifteen minutes of work and then get on with her life. Who knew where the day would take her? Maybe a caffeinated morning of recreational rage spent in comments sections, vicariously enjoying controversies about music and art and politics and feminism, putting in her two cents on Twitter where appropriate, then checking back to see whether anyone had responded to her responses. Then lunch, then an afternoon of online window-shopping and Wikipedia rabbit holes and listening to productivity-enhancing playlists on her headphones and Gchatting with Bev. In theory, this was the time she had for her supposed
real
work—the time for her to open one of the files with names like bookproposal8.docx and specpilotREAL.pdf that littered her desktop like so many five-inch knitting projects. But there was something about the office—something in the air, maybe (wi-fi, for one thing). By 6:30 she would feel sleepy and dazed as she stood up to leave—worn-out, as though she’d been working hard.

But not today, she realized as soon as the office door swung open. There, at the conference table to the right of the foosball table, were Jonathan and Shoshanna and Avi, peering intently into a laptop. Getting closer, she saw that the screen was open to StatCounter. Jonathan and Shoshanna looked very grave. They were dressed impeccably, as usual, and Shoshanna smelled amazing—her glossy ringlets and creamy skin radiating something somehow simultaneously ripe and chilled, like an expensive melon on display at a gourmet grocery store. Shoshanna waved her hand, and Amy went and sat down next to them.

“We’ve been brainstorming about what to do about these stats,” Avi said eventually, as Jonathan and Shoshanna continued to frown at the screen.

“Oh. Of course, the stats.” Amy wondered when she’d last logged in to StatCounter (several months prior), and whether they could tell at a glance that this was the case. Probably not; she suspected that the idea of “stats” had just been explained to Jonathan and Shoshanna, maybe by a segment on the
Today
show or by some nail-salon magazine.

“We were thinking, what do people love on the Internet—like, what are our most popular posts? And we realized—duh! Video!” Shoshanna’s beauty disappeared the minute she opened her mouth; all that glowing skin and shimmering hair couldn’t compensate for the kind of voice you immediately associate with someone calling from the temple sisterhood to remind you it’s your turn to plate the
oneg
after Shabbat service.

“We, um, we’ve never posted original videos, though,” Amy said. “The popular video posts are all just embedded YouTube videos of, like, Amy Winehouse.”

“Let’s not get bogged down in technicalities, Amy,” said Jonathan. He was often opposed to “technicalities.”

“We think we should start shooting video, like, today! And editing it and posting it. Today. Little video segments about pop culture, or maybe comedy. You know, a comic take on the issues of the day.”

Amy had skimmed the front page of the
Times
during her commute. “Like … a little video of me talking about the latest Hezbollah bombing?”

Jonathan scowled. “Nothing about Israel, Amy, you know that. Dad would freak.”

Avi fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a Marlboro Red, and shoved it behind his ear, maybe unaware that he already had a cigarette shoved behind his other ear. He drummed his fingers on the table. “Have you two thought about a budget for these videos?” he asked. “We can figure out what we need to do, but no one on staff is an expert video editor. And I don’t know about Amy as an on-screen presence. No offense, Amy.”

“None taken.”
Douchebag.

“No, Amy is
perfect
,” said Shoshanna. “She’s got that realness. She’s authentic. I don’t want someone super media trained. We can just go in the conference room and do one right now. What do we need, a camera? Just, like, send an intern to B&H and get a camera. Or you can even just use a phone, right?”

“I don’t … uh. What am I going to talk about?” Amy asked.

Jonathan and Shoshanna glanced at each other. Clearly they hadn’t considered this. When Jonathan responded, he spoke slowly, as if he were deciding what to say as he said each word (which he was). “How about … we pick a topic … and you can just kind of ad-lib about it … and then we’ll edit it to be really funny and cool. We’ll call it … the Daily Yid Vid!”

“Yideo!” shrieked Shoshanna.

“Vyideo,” murmured Amy.

“The Daily Vyid.” Jonathan’s pronouncements had an air of finality; it was a talent that probably came with always having been rich enough that no one ever disagreed with you.

“Okay, done! Settled! We will absolutely get right on that!” announced Avi, twitching and scrabbling behind his ear. “I’ll walk you guys downstairs and we can hash out the rest of the details.” He stared meaningfully at Amy. “Amy, you’ll get busy working out logistics. Drop everything and focus on this.”

“What about Morning Yidbits? What about, um, the rest of the site?”

“We’ll get around to it,” he said, almost running toward the door, Jonathan and Shoshanna following close behind him. As soon as they were out of earshot, Amy said
“Ughhh”
and stomped over to her desk.

She had finally sucked her way to the icky cordial at the center of her candy-sweet job. Writing the occasional bylined post was one thing—there was enough of her on the Internet already that a few YidRants weren’t going to affect her future in serious journalism if she ever got her act together and decided to have one. But was she really now going to humiliate herself in a way that might go viral, leaving her stupid facial expressions gif’d and reblogged across the Internet for days?

It could never be as bad as her last job, she thought, then hurried to tap her knuckles superstitiously against the wooden frame of the foosball table behind her. Still, why couldn’t Lizzie or Jackie do it instead, or even twitchy Avi? Being pretty, or whatever Amy was from the right angle, had always struck her as overrated: an invitation to a lame party you never wanted to go to in the first place but somehow didn’t quite want to leave once you got there.

Alone in the empty office, she wandered over to the window. Midmorning haze obscured the details of the skyline and the bridge. It was so overcast that she could see her reflection in the window, and experimentally, she began to speak, holding her own gaze as she did so, as though the window were a camera lens.

“Hello, this is Amy Schein,” she said slowly, admiring the way her lips parted to reveal her orthodontured teeth. The front two were bigger in a way that had always struck her as sexy. Her mouth was her best feature; for years she’d had a little photo of her own lips as her AIM avatar. Higher up, though, were some problem areas: her nose, slightly too long and broad, and her eyebrows, straight across, like one stroke of a paintbrush, no matter how expensively she had them groomed. Worse, though, was the way they
moved.
“And you’re watching Jew Vids,” she said to the imaginary camera. “I mean, Yid Vids. Vyideos.” The brows waggled upward uncontrollably, and her eyes darted from side to side even as she willed them to focus on one spot. Her eyes were another problem area, giant and deep set in their sockets in a way that precluded the wearing of any eye makeup; even the merest mascara smear made her look ten years older at best, domestically abused at worst. She turned away from the window, disgusted, then snuck a last look back as the office door opened to admit little frizzle-haired Jackie, who gave her a were-you-just-talking-to-yourself look before she slipped on her headphones and began her own day of faffing around online.

Amy sat down at her desk too, but instead of researching how quickly a camera could be messengered over from B&H (they had no interns; Avi tended to repel interns in ways Amy didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about), Amy got out her phone and texted Bev.

“YT?” It was their shorthand for “you there?” and the answer was nearly always yes. Amy and Bev tended to stay in constant text or Gchat communication through the day; if a “YT” went unanswered for more than a few minutes, the person on the other end was presumed to be asleep, on the subway, in a movie, or being held captive.

“At temp agency, just finished Excel competence test. have achieved rank of Excel ‘Int-Expert.’”

“Congratulations! Let’s pick out medals.”

“Well, it automatically prints out a certificate for you on the dot matrix printer, so depressing.”

Amy looked out past the foosball table and took a deep breath to calm herself, then realized she could still smell Shoshanna’s perfume, and she breathed more shallowly again. She wished Bev would hurry up and get a temp job so she could be bored at a desk somewhere else in the city, able to Gchat with Amy all day again the way they’d done when they first met. She missed those days, at the dawn of their friendship, when they’d worked as assistants at the same staid corporate publishing house and chat was still new enough that their bosses thought they were busily typing something related to their jobs. Amy decided to dig through her Gmail and find funny tidbits from conversations they’d had in 2005 and send them to Bev to cheer her up and encourage her. That would be a good activity for the rest of the morning.

*   *   *

AMY LEFT THE
office at midday and walked to her favorite lunch spot in the neighborhood, a sushi bar whose exterior was so inauspicious almost no one ever joined her at its counter. Though she never took a chance on the plastic-wrapped, distressingly static contents of Sushi Zen’s raw fish display case, she was partial to its footbath-size bowls of soba noodles. She put in her order and was happily anticipating the comfort of slurping down all those carbs when her phone vibrated with news of an incoming call. It was her mother.

She hit “silence” because if she hit “ignore,” her mother would know she was screening. Then she watched the silent screen light up a second time. On the outside chance that her mother’s persistence indicated that something terrible had happened, Amy picked up the phone, already suspecting that she had once more been outmaneuvered.

“Hi, sweetie. Are you busy? Is this a good time?”

Amy inhaled.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
“Sure.”

“Okay. I just wanted to go over the plans for Rosh Hashanah. Did you already make travel arrangements? Because if you didn’t, I just wanted you to know that your father and I discussed it, and we’d be willing to pay for half of your train ticket, or all of the nicer bus. I know tickets are expensive, especially when you wait until the last minute to book your trip.”

“Wow, thank you … that’s really generous of you guys,” Amy said, permitting herself to make an exaggerated eye-rolling facial expression as a reward for keeping any hint of sarcasm out of her voice.

“I just wanted you to think about it. I happened to glance at your bank balance recently, and it seems like you might not be able to afford the trip on your own, the way things are going for you.”