Pretty in Plaid: A Life, A Witch, and a Wardrobe

by Jen Lancaster

  “That’s the guy.” I motion to the waiter as he passes by and order another cosmo.188 I hand my salad plate over to Fletch. “Wanna finish this? I don’t have much of an appetite.”

  “Thanks.” He neatly slices the salad so he gets an equal ratio of cheese, tomato, and basil in every bite. He chews carefully and deliberately. “Are you still considering quitting?”

  “Pfft. Only every second of every minute of every day. What would I do, though? I’ve had a Monster search with a political science keyword for six months and it hasn’t turned up one listing.”

  He guffaws. “Bet your philosophy minor keywords aren’t helping either.” I glower and Fletch lays his fork down. “Listen, I don’t know how many times I have to say this. The tech industry is exploding right now. Go do sales for a dot com. Everyone’s hiring. I’ve been slammed with all the business I’m getting from these start-ups because they’ve got a ton of VC. You’ve got the tenacity and you know how to negotiate—you’d make a shitload of money.”

  I mull over his suggestion. There may be something to this dot-com business. I’ve been noticing subtle changes in the general population every time I go to my office in the Loop. The cars have gotten a lot nicer lately. I was so proud of myself when I earned the privilege of driving a company car and I got to upgrade from my Tercel to a brand-new Dodge Stratus. The car only had thirteen miles on it when I got it! Now it seems like everyone’s in a Beemer or a Land Rover and suddenly my gleaming gold Stratus feels gaudy and cheap.

  I see people wearing a lot more designer sunglasses when they stroll past me, too. They no longer carry briefcases—instead they’ve got weathered computer bags with whatever-dot-com logos on them. And they aren’t stuck in suits anymore—they’re clad in jeans and cargo pants and dirty khakis. An occasional tattoo peeks out of a sleeve or a wrinkled collar. When I started my job three years ago, no professionals ever showed their ink, let alone went to work unshowered or unshaved. I still have to stick a Band-Aid over my tiny sorority ankle tattoo any time I’m wearing pantyhose.

  I bet if I were friends with Charlotte, she’d agree with my disapproval of casual business wear.189 Regardless, something big is going on out there, but I’m not quite sure what.

  The vibe on the streets is almost euphoric, like everyone’s so damn excited about their jobs and their companies. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed what I do for a living. I can’t imagine what it would be like to leave work on a Friday and not spend the entire weekend dreading Monday. Or what it’d be like to have a spittle-free client conversation.

  Yet I’m not quite ready to make a change. “I don’t want to stay, but I can’t leave because then I’d be admitting defeat.” I spin my ring so much that Fletch finally places his hand over mine to stop me.

  “That’s your problem right there. You won’t concede the game, yet you can’t justify why you’re playing it in the first place.”

  “Touché.” I exhale loudly and drain my cosmo. He’s not wrong. “At the moment, the path of least resistance is just giving this job some more time.”

  “That’s nothing but a short-term solution.”

  “Well, maybe Mexico will be just what I need to improve my attitude.” I’m leaving for a vacation in Cancun with my folks at the end of the month. You know what I just realized? You never hear the SATC girls talk about their families. That’s odd.

  “Yes,” he quickly agrees, “I’m sure that after a week with your parents, your work problems will seem insignificant.”

  I nod and dunk a piece of bread in some homemade marinara sauce before glancing over at him. Why’s he’s smirking?

  I get through the next few weeks of work somehow and I’m super-excited as Fletch drives me to the airport. Unfortunately, he’s still kind of new at his job and doesn’t have enough vacation time to come with us. Or at least that’s what he says. There’s an outside shot this was an elaborate ruse not to spend a week listening to my mother grilling him on why we aren’t married yet, in which case I don’t blame him.

  “Dad says to meet him at the international terminal.” I navigate while Fletch drives.

  Fletch shakes his head. “Your ticket says terminal three.”

  “But Dad said this is an international flight so I have to go to the international terminal. I’m supposed to meet them there.”

  “Your father is wrong. Your ticket is right,” Fletch argues.

  “But he said—”

  “Jen, do you want to go to the correct terminal or do you want to listen to the same man who once led a convoy of sixteen hundred marines to the wrong country because he refused to ask for directions?”

  “Terminal three, please.” We have to take another lap around the periphery of O’Hare to get to the right terminal.

  Fletch helps me with my bags, hugs and kisses me good-bye, and then I’m off. I cruise through security and grab a coffee and scone before proceeding to my gate. My parents are already there. My mother lunges to hug me and kisses me on the neck, which I hate.

  “Please never do that again,” I say, wiping off her kiss. I should be kissed on the neck by my boyfriend, not my mother.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she replies.

  “Jennifer, you’re late. We were going to leave for Mexico without you,” my father tells me.

  “You said to meet you in the international terminal. This is not the international terminal. This is terminal three. Had I listened to you, I could have missed the flight.”

  Refusing to admit he was wrong, he merely shrugs. “This isn’t the international one? Oh, well, you figured it out. Hey”—he gestures toward my coffee—“why don’t you go get me one of those? Two sugars and four Sweet’N Lows.” My father prides himself on never having retrieved his own coffee in his entire professional career. He’s retired now, but old habits die hard.

  “Let me see your hand first,” my mother singsongs. She grabs me by the wrist and inspects what would be my wedding ring finger. “This? What is this?” She taps the thick silver band. She raises her voice with rabid excitement. “Is this what I think it is?”

  I grit my teeth. “Mom, if you think this is the Tiffany ring I bought myself, which I already showed you at Thanksgiving, then yes. Yes it is.”

  “Jennifer?”

  “Yeah, Dad?” Thank God for my dad. He’ll run interference between me and my mother’s ever-growing wedding obsession.

  “I’m ready for my coffee now. Run, run, run, we have a plane to catch.”

  As I walk back to Starbucks, I realize why Fletch was smirking.

  We arrive at our hotel in Cancun and my mother and I sit in the lobby while my father checks us in. As we wait, I’m growing skeptical of our accommodations. We’re staying at the very beginning of Cancun’s main drag. According to the cabdriver, this is the least nice section of the beach and all the good stuff is a couple of miles away. As I take in the scene, I notice the paint is peeling and the couches in here are threadbare. And the bar? Yeah, Studio 54 called and they want their chrome and mirrors back.

  Aarrggh, again.

  You know what? I have to stop all this unconstructive thinking—it’s not getting me anything except a smooth spot on my finger from all the spinning. I need to channel my inner SATC girl. Samantha’s a testament to the power of positive thinking. Carrie doesn’t dwell on the negative. Charlotte’s so upbeat she practically has bluebirds flying out of her ass. So . . . screw it. I’m here in Mexico, a whole country away from my hateful job. No one’s going to call me a parasite because of the industry I work in. Nobody’s going to tell me I’m the incompetent one when they refuse/forget to hand in paperwork. Best of all, I can’t receive a phone call from an angry physician demanding I swing by their office on a weekend because my cell phone is two thousand miles away. Suck on that, Dr. I-Don’t-Care-If-It’s-Saturday Dickweed.

  I’m going to sit here and have a good attitude. I’m sure the shoddy lobby is no reflection of the accommodations and that the rooms will be great.
After all, I wrote my dad a huge check to pay for my third of this trip back in October. For that price, my room can’t not be luxurious, right?

  I spent my whole bonus from last quarter on this trip, but it’s worth it because I’m finally independent enough to pay my own way . . . although I’d have had plenty of money left over if the company hadn’t just revised our bonus structure. However, I’m not thinking about that because I’m trying to have a good attitude. I’m thinking about bluebirds. Happy, chirpy bluebirds. Bluebirds who know how to fucking compensate you for your fifteen-hour days.

  The one positive thing I should focus on right now is that we aren’t going to be parents and child on this trip; we’re going to be three grown adults sharing a pleasant vacation in separate rooms. We’re going to each pay for our own meals and activities and I’m delighted at the prospect. Our old family vacations where we kids had zero say in any matter190 are now a thing of the past. Going forward, we are equals!

  My dad strolls back from registration carrying keys and one margarita. For himself. “We’re all set. Jennifer?” He points to his carry-on. “My bag.”

  I throw it over my shoulder, schlepping it along with my own stuff. I guess the equality will begin after I get to my own room, then.

  We arrive at a room on the seventeenth floor and open the door. This room is . . . big. It’s not nice, or pretty, or for that matter all that clean, but it’s big.191 There’s a kitchen, a table with a couple of spindly chairs, a sitting area with a ratty old couch, and a bedroom with a small attached bath. The literature in the lobby said the hotel was undergoing renovations and the suites weren’t yet done. But that doesn’t matter—all the single rooms are complete so mine should be better. Bluebirds! Bluebirds!

  “We’re here!” My mother claps her hands as she enters the room. “This is great; I love it!”

  “Okay, I would like to go to the beach,” I say. “Please give me my keys so I can go to my room and put on my suit. See you down on the sand in ten minutes?”

  Suddenly, no one else in my party can meet my eye. “Um, hello? Keys?” Still nothing. “You guys, I need my keys to get into my room.” I look at each of my parents’ guilty expressions and I get the overwhelming feeling that there are no keys.

  Dad says, “Your mother has something to tell you,” and then he runs off to the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

  “Mom?”

  “Isn’t this beautiful? Look at that view!”

  “Mom?”

  “There’s a whole kitchen! We can cook if we want to!”192

  “Mom.”

  She will not even glance in my direction. Instead, she focuses on inspecting every leaf on the plastic, dust-covered palm tree by the rickety sliding glass door.

  My dad peeks his head out and in one giant breath blurts, “Your mother thought you’d be afraid to stay in a room by yourself so we got the only hotel with an available suite and you’re sleeping out here on the couch and that’s why we’re staying in a lousy hotel instead of a nicer one down the beach and I told her you wouldn’t want this but she didn’t listen.” Then he closes the door again and I can hear him shut and lock the bathroom door, too.

  I am dumbfounded. Surely this can’t be true, because I’m thirty years old and I have my own apartment in the middle of the third largest city in the country. And why do I suddenly feel like we just drove two hours for a lobster?

  After a few frantic calls to the front desk (and to neighboring properties), where I try to compensate for only speaking English by talking louder, I find there’s no room at any other inn. I am stuck.

  My mother’s response to the whole situation? “This will be fun!”

  Sure, if sleeping in the living room with no privacy and a hide-a-bed bar digging into your back and finding your parents’ partial dentures soaking in every cup in the entire suite and learning the meaning of one Spanish word—el Niño—is what you consider fun, then yes, it’s a goddamn blast.

  On the bright side, I’ve stopped obsessing about work.

  And I’ve figured out why Carrie never talks about her parents.

  “I wouldn’t hire you.”

  “Thanks, Dad. What a tremendous vote of confidence that is.”

  My parents and I are having lunch in a thatched hut by the water in Xcaret, a Cancun nature conservatory. When we arrived this morning, we saw ten thousand signs begging guests not to wear any kind of mass-produced sunscreen. The conservators are emphatic about this because patrons can swim in all the hidden ponds and lagoons on the property and there are ingredients in commercial sunscreen that could mess up the delicate ecosystem here. Naturally my mother refuses to part with the pesos necessary to purchase the environmentally sound stuff sold in the gift shop and she’s slathering herself liberally with something sure to kill every tree frog within a two-mile radius. (And correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure a thatched roof has an SPF of at least 100.)

  “You should listen to your father, he’s usually right,” she agrees.

  Of course he is, Slathery McFrogkiller.193

  “Dad, can’t you agree that it’s possible the business world may have changed since you were in your prime?” I ask. He retired a few years ago, yet still takes a tremendous amount of pride in having never once sent an e-mail. This reminds me of when I was a kid and it looked like the metric system was going to catch on—Dad pledged he’d paint over every thermometer because he refused to accept the concept of Celsius.

  Lasciviously, my mother waggles her eyebrows and suggests, “He’s still in his prime.” I do not acknowledge this statement, yet I find myself unconsciously scrubbing at my hands with my napkin.

  “I’m just saying that quitting a job without having one lined up is not necessarily the kiss of death in this economy,” I argue. “The dot-com market is exploding and it sounds like tons of places are hiring.”

  My father simply sips his cerveza before replying, “Pfft. Not relevant. The business world is a constant.”

  I consider this for a moment. “Wait a minute . . . you’ve told me stories about having so many martinis in the middle of the day that Mom had to pick you up from the restaurant and drive you home.”

  “Jennifer, that only happened a few times,” my mom chides.

  “If that happened even once in the professional world right now, you wouldn’t be sent home to sleep it off; you’d be sent to rehab. At the very least, you’d get a huge HR write-up.”

  “Our HR guy used to come with us. If I recall, Bob didn’t drink martinis,” my dad muses. “He preferred red wine.”

  I may as well be having this conversation with the dead tree frogs right now for all the headway I’m making.

  Resigned, I defer to my father’s flawed logic. “Okay, Dad, you win. I won’t quit.”

  “Good girl.”

  And then I wrench my ring so hard I practically break my knuckle.

  The End of the Beginning

  (Crocodile-Skin Pumps)

  Jim, David, and I are lunching at the food court in the Citibank building. They’re both chowing down on some kind of tuna-based sushi, while I have my usual chicken teriyaki bowl.

  Can I be honest here? I kind of don’t understand sushi. Like, what’s the draw of raw fish? Especially raw fish wrapped in seaweed? And, really? Seaweed? Who came up with the idea to eat this? Was someone all, “Hey, you know that disgusting green algae? I’m talking about the crap that gets stuck to our oars when we row the boat and ruins our nets and makes our hair all slimy when we dive in? And that washes up on the sand and reeks like an ocean full of dead fish? Yeah, we should totally have that with dinner.”

  In my opinion, sushi is less a meal and more a game of truth or dare gone horribly wrong. Yes, I appreciate the aesthetics of a big plate of sushi, but I also dig how pretty my couture crocodile shoes are and you don’t see me dipping them in soy sauce. (Shoot, I practically encase them in Lucite.)

  I shudder as Tim and David shovel the glistening pink bits into their m
ouths. I try not to gag imagining the raw texture on my tongue.

  “I can’t believe they picked you,” Tim says. “Why would they pick you? You hate everything about this company.”

  I’ve been selected to represent my department as part of a company-wide quality-improvement task force. Because of this, I’m one of the people set to meet with the president of the company later today. My work friends are astounded I was asked because they think I complain all the time.

  “No,” I correct him, “I don’t hate the company; I hate its lack of innovation. I hate that the applications to join the network are thirty pieces of repetitive paperwork when a Web-based tool would be ten billion times more efficient. I hate that we merged almost three years ago to capitalize on another company’s technology and yet we never integrated their systems. I hate that there’s no centralized database that stores all the relevant information.”

  “So . . . what you’re saying is you hate everything about the way they do business, not to be confused with your actually hating them,” Tim says. Sometimes these boys are too blunt, even if they are right. I bet SATC Charlotte would occasionally if not sugarcoat reality, then at least wrap it up in a pretty plaid bow.

  I frown and gesture toward his plate. “Finish your sushi.”

  “Are you nervous?” David asks.

  “No . . . I’m more excited than anything. I usually feel like I’m pissing in the wind every time I broach a problem with management. So I’m psyched that someone with the power to actually make changes wants to hear what I have to say.”

  The day we went to Xcaret, I stood on the balcony after my parents went to bed and spun my ring and promised myself this is the year I’m going to make it happen. I started my career being bold and outspoken but lately I’ve done nothing but go along with the status quo. Going along to get along has been safe but it’s made me miserable. I’ve allowed these physicians to bully me. And I don’t like bullies.