How to Be a Grown-up Read Online Free Page A

show that could pay our rent for months.
    Meanwhile, I risked being called the worst name in the business: unreliable. So I slowed down, figuring that when Wynn started school I could ramp back up. Which I did for three years.
    Then a particularly rigorous bout of makeup sex knocked my Mirena loose and—oops!—Maya.
    So I’ve done those post-drop-off coffees. I’ve heard the smug tut-tuts about what the harried office moms are missing, and why did they bother having kids? And I’ve dashed to the subway, overhearing the condescending dismissals of the moms with “nothing to do all day.”
    But I look at it this way: imagine there are no working moms. Suddenly we’re plunged back two hundred years. Now imagine there are no stay-at-home moms. Who the hell is keeping my kids’ school running? Who am I going to for advice? So the world needs all of us, and we should stop writing shit about each other on the bathroom wall that is UrbanBaby.
    That day, I was the harried one with twenty minutes to get back down to midtown. I nabbed a cab, stared at my phone, took a deep breath, and dialed.
    “Hello, gorgeous.”
    “Hello, Clive,” I said to my agent. He had been my booker for fifteen years and still liked me, despite the many times Blake’s schedule had interfered with my taking an assignment.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be at the shoot?”
    “First day of school, but don’t worry. I already prepped the site, and Zoe is there.” Zoe was my assistant. She’d been with me since she’d graduated Parsons because she Figures Shit Out. The story’s about wallpaper, and the apartment doesn’t have any? She would never sidle up to me and whine, “But they took down the wallpaper.” She’d buy some wrapping paper and invisible tape. She was a solution rolled in an answer stuffed inside a miracle—a turducken of efficacy.
    “What can I do for you?”
    “I need a job.” I’d been planning that I’d work more frequently now that Maya would be in school from nine until six, but freelance. “A full-time job. As soon as possible.” I felt like one of those grizzled farmers in disaster movies who stare at the cloudless sky and abruptly say, “Get in the basement.”
    “I don’t know of any staff positions coming up, but you know you’re front of mind for freelance.” I was hearing daily about editorial staffs being cut like snowflakes from copy paper, leaving teams most notable for their holes. And the more experienced (read: old) the employee, the more glaring her cost on the payroll. With women my age the first to go, competition in the freelancing sector was quadrupling while opportunities disappeared. Right as our confidence ripened—right as our children were finally loading the dishwasher—we were being reduced to low-hanging fruit.
    “Thank you, Clive.”
    “You okay, kid?”
    “The older I get, the more I love that you still call me that. Bye.”
    The cab pulled up outside the high rise and, one ear-popping elevator ride to the edge of our atmosphere later, I was greeted at the penthouse by the same sight as always: some pristine backdrop of sumptuous serenity being crisscrossed by manic twentysomethings wearing surgical booties over their shoes. These homes would never have so much—energy—in them again.
    Splash! “Shit.”
    Among this abode’s many thrilling attributes, the entrance gallery had been built over a water feature, like a lily pond, and you had to leapfrog across alabaster squares to get to the living room. According to the interview these photographs would accompany, the owners wanted guests to “slow down,” forcing them to “take in the view.” Because otherwise they might miss the three-story-high windows looking all the way out to the Atlantic.
    Splash. “Shit.”
    “Can you all please stop falling in the Zen gateway! You are all so fucking gormless.” That was Glen, our photographer from South London. He talked like a Guy Ritchie film and was permanently angry.
    Zoe