“I need to write something. Can you keep Ellie amused for an hour?”

“I actually need to get to the office. I’ve had her all morning,” he said.

While I was goofing off, I thought. Instead, I walked wordlessly into the kitchen, where Ellie was wrapping up her finale.

“I should get going,” L. said, after Ellie, who’d moved on to The Sound of Music, hit the last notes of “So Long, Farewell.” She got to her feet, straightening her shirt and giving her hair a pat. It was astonishing, really. A few subtle changes in features and hair color and she could have been me, ten years ago.

“Can we go to the zoo?” Ellie wheedled after L. and Dave had departed.

“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 pornography 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.

Dave, meanwhile, had gone back to being tight-lipped and silent, his face unreadable and his body rigid as he passed me in the kitchen or the halls. I was afraid to try to grill him about L. McIntyre. I wanted to know the truth . . . but I suspected that the truth would burst my opiated bubble, revealing the unhappy realities that even four or five Oxys couldn’t mask—that my marriage was a sham, that my happiness was an illusion, that even though the pieces were in place and everything seemed okay, underneath the veneer of good looks and good manners, the three of us were falling apart.

Or, at least, I was.

Two weekends after my television triumph, the guilt got to me. I woke up early, chewed up sixty milligrams of OxyContin, took a shower, and announced, over a breakfast I’d cooked myself, that I was putting everything on hold and taking Ellie on a girls’ day outing.

“Great,” Dave said. He even managed to smile. Ten minutes after I’d made my announcement, he had his running shoes in his hand, his high-tech lap-and-pace-counting watch on his wrist, and his body covered in various wicking and cooling fabrics made from recycled bamboo. “Bye,” he called, closing the door behind him. Ellie gave me a syrup-sticky smile. “Can we go to my museum? And the Shake Shack? And the zoo? And to sing-along Sound of Music?”

“Sing-along Sound of Music was a special treat. How about you pick two of the other things?” I said pleasantly. Meanwhile, I was performing a mental inventory of how many little blue Oxys I had left, and how I’d space them out to get me through until noon the next day, when my next batch would come in the mail. You’re taking too many, a voice in my head scolded. I stacked dishes in the sink, then rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher, and told the voice to shut up. How much money did you spend last month? the voice persisted. Four thousand dollars? Five? I can afford it, I thought uneasily, shoving aside the memory of the petty cash I’d borrowed, or how worried I was that Dave would take a hard look at our joint checking account. As long as I stay on top of things, as long as I’m careful, I’ll be fine.

After lengthy deliberations, Ellie decided on the zoo, and burgers for lunch. For two hours, we admired the elephants, held our noses in the monkey house, screamed “Ew!” at the naked mole rats, and sat on a bench eating soft-serve pretzels in the sunshine. I let her have everything she wanted—a pedal through the pond on the swan boats, a pony ride, and a trip on the miniature train that circled the zoo. She got her face painted to look like a leopard (a pink-and-white-spotted leopard) and bought friendship bracelets and a souvenir keychain and widened her eyes in disbelief when, at the Shake Shack, I said she could have both cheese fries and a milkshake, when usually I made her choose one or the other.

The cashier gave Ellie a buzzer—by far, one of the highlights of the Shack. “It’ll go off when your food’s ready.”

“I KNOW it! I KNOW it will!” Using two hands, Ellie carried the buzzer to our table and set it reverently in the center after cleaning the surface with an antibacterial wipe from my purse. “Now, don’t freak out,” she instructed the buzzer.

“Okay. I won’t. I won’t freak out,” I answered, in character as Wa, which is what we’d named the Shake Shack’s buzzers, for the wah-wah-wah sound they made.

“Just be CALM, Wa,” she said, giggling.

“I’m gonna. I-I’m gonna be calm,” I stammered, in Wa’s trembling, not-at-all-calm voice.

“Just say, ‘Your food is ready,’ in a NORMAL voice. Don’t LOSE YOUR BUSINESS,” Ellie said, her eyes sparkling with mirth.

“I got it. I got it. No freaking out. No losing my business. No . . .” Ellie was already starting to giggle as the buzzer lit up and started to hum. “WA! WA! WA! Yourfoodisready!” I said. “Wa! Wa! WAWAWAI’MFREAKINGOUTHEREWA!”

“Wa, calm down! It’s just a burger!” Ellie gave the buzzer an affectionate pat as I continued to narrate its breakdown. An older woman sitting at the counter watched the proceedings. On our way back with our tray, she tapped my shoulder.