Dating Big Bird Read Free Page B

away. As one of the many behind-the-scenes industry slaves, I had a million things to do; most of which—or all of which—had to do with making sure nothing went wrong.
    Please.
    Like it mattered now.
    The day before, a three-year-old had, in so many words, pointed out that I had nothing.
    No Barney.
    No Elmo.
    No Teletubbies.
    Just a relationship with an older Big Bird (by almosttwenty years), who was complicated (divorced, depressed, despondent), difficult to explain (we slept together but didn’t
sleep
together), and whom I’ll get to later.
    And a big job working for a big designer.
    The job: Director of marketing, Karen Lipps New York.
    The designer: Five foot five. One hundred and seventy-two pounds. Easily a size sixteen if she weren’t a clothing designer and couldn’t sew her own size-six labels into whatever she wore.
    Karen Lipps was only ten years older than I, but she had a multigazillion-dollar company that had just gone public; four homes and another under contract; a husband; and a little girl, Marissa, two years old.
    The latter of which was why she wasn’t as thin as she used to be.
    “She’s not as thin as she used to be, ever since she had
 … the child
,” her fawning but slightly evil British Uriah Heep–like assistant, Simon Marder, once whispered to me upon exiting a meeting. Karen had been particularly harsh about a pant sample that made the model look like she’d actually eaten in the past three weeks, and she had thrown a peeled banana at Annette, who oversaw the sample seamstresses. Whenever Karen threw food or anything else at someone, Simon felt it was his responsibility—and perhaps his one opportunity to get a word in edgewise all day—to deconstruct her pathology to anyone who would listen.
    “It drives her absolutely mad when the clothes don’t lie completely flat against the body or if there’s even the slightest bit of puckering,” he continued in his hushed tone. “She considers it an injustice:
the illusion of fat where there really isn’t any.”
He paused then and tucked his straight chin-length hair neatly behind his ears. “She hates fat, you see. Because she hates
being
fat. Not that she’d ever admit to it, poor thing. In her mind she’s still a size four.”
    “Try telling her pants that,” I suggested.
    “Believe me, I’ve tried,” he said, sucking the life out of a Dunhill. “But Lycra will only stretch so far.”
    I knew Karen back when her name wasn’t plastered on billboards and buses and full-page newspaper ads and sneakers and baseball caps and perfume bottles and underwear. Back when her name was still Karen Lipsky and she was indeed a size four. But I have to say, I liked her better now that she was heavy. What Karen had gained and never lost after her pregnancy made her more human, more vulnerable than she’d been when I first met her.
    I wish I could say it was her incredible talent that had attracted me to go and work for her—her exquisite taste, her ability to design clothes that were sleek and sophisticated and understated, and her legendary loyalty to those who worked for her (not to mention the free and steeply discounted clothes you got if you worked there). But it wasn’t really. I hated my job at the time I met her (then as now; some things never change), and the marketing position she was offering me sounded like I might just hate it a little less.
    Right after college (University of Michigan), I moved to New York and got a job in advertising (Young & Rubicam) and then another job in advertising (J. Walter Thompson). I was a copy writer at the latter when Karen hired us to position her new company in the market. She had just gone out on her own, having worked her way up, and through, more than a few design houses in the city in the 1970s and 1980s—Halston, Perry Ellis, Gloria Vanderbilt—where she had become known for her bald ambition and raw talent. Especially during the last five years in her position as head in-house