“I don’t know when it is, anyway,” I say, lying, again.
“But when you do, you’ll let us know,” Hannah says. “We’re all so proud of you. Tell us about the movie.”
“Um,” I stammer. “It’s been really good…working on such a large shoot.” I search for something, anything to say, and land on the last change I made for the movie, an insignificant detail the safest response. “I made some dancing skeletons.”
“Tell us about that,” Hannah says, nodding, a big smile on her face.
“As if any of us could understand the mechanics of all of it,” my mom says, leaning back in her chair. “Joni’ssogood at her job. Can you imagine her doing anything else? Her dream!”
I let out a weak laugh. She’s not wrong. It was the dream. All through preproduction,all through the shoots, straight through editing, everything was going well. And then, Ramona Brinkley, founder and CEO of Novo and the person I used to envision myself growing up to be, called me into her office.
I knew what was about to happen, had known it for the past month, since we learned that the project I had fought for as my first film as a lead in the fabrication department three years ago wouldn’t be premiering. Ever. The studio heads had taken one look at it—at threeyearsof painstaking work on the puppets and sets, figuring out how to make eight sleepaway campers move, how to bring the ghost stories they all told to life with things like cellophane and natural fibers and wire, and, more than once, items from my own home—and said it wouldn’t read well with audiences. We wouldn’t make up our budget, and so we shouldn’t add on to it now.
It happens all the time, they’d said, like that was supposed to be any consolation.There are movies in our vaults the public never even knew existed. Count yourself lucky critics didn’t get their hands on this.
It doesn’t happen all the time tous, though, I’d wanted to say. I had been with Novo, albeit as an intern, when it was struggling to make ends meet in its Portland offices: tiny studios, unreliable plumbing, spotty electricity and all. There, no project got off the ground unless it was a sure thing. Sinking millions of dollars and thousands of hours of manpower into a film that would never see the light of day might be a drop in the bucket to the major studio that we were now a part of, but to those of us at Novo, it was a catastrophe.
“Joni,” Ramona had said when I walked into her office. “I want you to know that this has nothing to do with how talented I think you are, but—”
“I’m fired,” I cut in. I wanted to rip open the wound myself, be in control of my own heartbreak. I had given up everything for this project, had made it my entire personality for years of my life. I might as well see it through to its bitter end.
The rest of the conversation hadn’t mattered all that much, in the end. Being fired by someone I’d looked up to for the last decade of my life was about as bad as it could get.
I hadn’t had a panic attack in years. Had even, for a while, naively thought they might be gone for good. But after crying so hard on the train home that a woman who had to be pushing a hundred had offered me her seat, all the familiar warning bells went off, and I didn’t do anything to stop it.
I received a text shortly after I got home that three other members of the team had been fired as well. A slew of texts came in after that:
Happens all the time, my ass. I bet they’re firing us to make up for the money we cost them.
Is this legal? I mean, can they get rid of us at this stage of the game?
Who wants to get drunk and look at job boards?
I felt trapped, untethered. I couldn’t fathom discussing it with anyone, that this thing I had given everything to was just over, like that, couldn’t even pull it together to commiserate with people because they had full, vibrant lives outside of work to turn to. The only thing that sounded okay was getting out of New York, so I used my miles and dipped into my savings to pay the exorbitant fee to move my flight two days earlier.
“It’s the dream,” I tell the room now, my eyes stuck on the movement of Ren pouring water into the back of the coffeepot, as I try to let the natural rhythm of it soothe me. “They’re in postproduction, so my role is mostly over.” A half lie. I’d had some hand in it the whole way through, if only because I couldn’t seem to let it go after preproduction.
Hannah, thankfully, changes the subject. I quickly wish she hadn’t. “Are you seeing anyone back in New York?” she asks me.
“No,” I say, eyes wrenching away from Ren’s hands to where his mom is scooping the last of the batter into the muffin tin. “Not right now.”
“All you young people, not wanting to settle down.” She bends to slide the tray into the oven, bumps it closed with her hip. She walks over to where Ren is closing the lid to the coffeepot, squeezes his shoulders as he flips the on switch. “This one won’t marry the perfect girl when she’s right in front of him.”
The fact that Ren had considered marrying Amanda shouldn’t shut me down. In fact, it was what I’d thought he was about to tell me at the winery, that they were next. But her words are like a rail bridge in front of me that suddenly goes missing, and my train of thought hurtles off.Marry, perfect girl.
“And we all know how you feel about that, Mom,” Ren says, reaching up to put the grinder back in the cupboard, store the bag of coffee next to it.
Hannah holds up her hands, her attention on her baking paraphernalia. “I’m just saying, I thoughtmaybeseeing Stevie and Leo so happy this week might make you reconsider the idea of marrying Amanda.”
The pinprick to my spine at the sound of her name, at the reminder of anything even tangentially related to that New Year’s Eve night is quick, familiar, so I don’t even flinch at it anymore.
“I would like to point out that I am marrying Leo only because I’d like to hang out with him forever,” Stevie says, taking a bite of her muffin. “I don’t want this week to make anyone feel like theyhaveto get married.”
The coffeepot sputters.
“It doesn’t, sweetie,” Hannah says. “It’s just that, Ren and Joni are the only ones who won’t be married now. Joni, doesn’t seeing your little sister preparing for her wedding make you think about it at all?”
I can’t get more than a croak out of my throat when she looks at me.I’m thrilled for Stevie, but marriage has always been a vague concept to me, buried under work and working toward a future that no longer exists. I figured it would just sort of happen one day, and so I haven’t put the same effort into dating that some of my friends have. And now, with everything in my life so out of control, it’s the last thing on my mind.
