Sellevision by Augusten Burroughs Page A

Jean loved the way he always called her girl .
    After brushing the color on Peggy Jean’s hair, he wrapped each section in a square of aluminum foil.
    “How’s your roommate? ” Peggy Jean asked, a modern, politically correct woman. Although she did lower her voice when saying the word “roommate.”
    “ Please . . . he’s driving me absolutely crazy. His latest delusional fantasy is that he’s going be a food stylist, you know, for photo shoots?”
    Peggy Jean nodded into the mirror.
    “I came home the other day and he was rubbing shoe polish all over the outside of a raw turkey to make it look already cooked.”
    Peggy Jean scrunched up her face. “Yuck.”
    “It’s been a nightmare. You try living with somebody who uses the blowdrier to melt cheese on top of nacho chips.”
    Peggy Jean couldn’t imagine .
    “You don’t know the half of it. I caught him adding grill marks to a steak with my best curling iron,” he said, all faux exasperation and rolling eyes.
    For the next twenty minutes, Peggy Jean sat under a blowdrier, thumbing through Elle and wishing she had longer legs. Then, scolding herself for such a vain wish, she silently thanked God for her three beautiful, handsome boys and her loving husband.
    After Claude checked her hair and decided she was done, he sent her over to the shampoo sink where Sonja rinsed, then shampooed and conditioned.
    Back in Claude’s chair, Peggy Jean’s newly reverse-highlighted hair was blowdried and styled with a circular vent brush. Standing back to admire his work, Claude said, “That was a marvelous idea. I love what it does for your features. It gives you angles.”
    Then Claude caught a glimpse of something in the mirror and leaned around Peggy Jean to look at her face. “Honey, we should really bleach those little hairs on your upper lip. You just sit right there and I’ll be back with something in a flash.”
    But I did bleach them , Peggy Jean thought. Had she grown more of them? In the space of only a couple of days? She could do nothing except sit there, stricken, and stare at her reflection in the mirror, wondering, What’s happening to me?
    Then Peggy Jean reached into her purse and retrieved a Valium, which she swallowed dry.

    “N
    o, Max, I promise, he did not think you were a flake,” Laurie was saying to her agitated client. As Max paced back and forth in his living room, Laurie attempted to offer him hope. “Next steps: First I’ll contact Discovery Channel. And we’ll go ahead and fax your résumé and bio over to Lifetime. I’ll put out my feelers and see what’s going on.”
    “Don’t bother, nobody is going to ever hire me again. My career is over.” Max knew he blew the interview with E-Z Shop the instant he mentioned the game show.
    “Maxwell, you can’t take this personally. They had to go with an Asian , they just didn’t have a choice. They don’t want to get involved in some hundred-million-dollar discrimination case like the Buy-a-thon Network.”
    As much as he hated to admit it, he could understand. Rebecca Chow’s recent lawsuit against Buy-a-thon sent shock waves throughout the industry. She claimed that the network discriminated against her because she was relegated to the overnight position, while only the white hosts were allowed on during the daylight hours.
    Even Sellevision had sent out a memo asking all their hosts if any of them had any “Hispanic, Asian, African American, or American Indian ancestry.” It turned out Irish-Catholic Adele Oswald Crawley’s great-great-grandmother on her father’s side had some Navaho blood. So within a month, Adele was dressed in a little suede dress with fringe and given her own turquoise jewelry showcase called Indian Expressions, complete with potted cactus trees and a tepee. An old black-and-white photograph of Adele as a little girl wearing an Indian headdress at a birthday party was enlarged and hung behind her. Prop stylists added Navaho throw rugs around the living