I should be used to it. In the past twenty years, I’ve suddenly found myself older than my doctors, my editors, my therapists, my mortgage broker, and most of my friends. But this is different. I’ll be coming to this office three days a week every week, until I’m too old to shuffle in here anymore. What was I thinking, moving to a city famous for worshiping wealth and beauty and youth?
I follow Heather to my office. It’s a spacious, light-flooded room with curved glass-brick walls, midcentury-modern bookshelves, a gray flannel easy chair, and two gray melamine desks. “That’s you,” Heather says, pointing at one of them. She points to the other. “Our social media person, Charlotte, sits there.”
So I’ll be sharing a room with a stranger all day, then sharing a house with a stranger all night. At least there’s the car. I’ll have two hours a day alone, three days a week, getting to work and back.
“Take your time settling in,” Heather says. “I’ll circle back to you in a bit.”
I sink into my lumbar-supported Aeron chair and start opening drawers to see what my twenty-six-year-old predecessor left behind. There’s only one file drawer in my desk, and that drawer contains no files, just a beat-up copy of the employee handbook and a dented box of Kleenex. Looks like the paperless office, a Jetsons’ fantasy when I last had a job, has become a Flintstones reality.
“You must be Meredith.” A stunning blonde walks into the room, drops her beige cashmere poncho and silver leather tote onto the gray flannel chair, and smiles, really smiles, at me. Her streaked golden hair, hazel eyes, and olive skin remind me of the heroine of my beloved childhood chapter books, Honey Bunch and Norman.
“I’m Charlotte,” she says. “How’s your first day going so far?”
I feel an instant connection with Charlotte. For one thing, she’s obviously older than the other Bellas, maybe close to forty. And the frame on her desk holds a black-and-white photograph of two little blond boys who look just like her.
Ah. Charlotte’s a mom. So she knows love, the deepest love, and she knows worry and vulnerability and pain. Despite our obvious differences, we’re members of the same club.
“You okay?” Charlotte asks, squinting at me, sounding as if she actually wants to know.
Horrifyingly, a sob escapes my mouth. Without hesitation Charlotte gets up, walks over to me, and puts her arm around my shoulders. She smells faintly of good parfum. She smells like my wife.
“Sorry,” I croak. “I’m not usually like this. I mean, lately I am like this, but not . . . I’m going through a divorce.”
Charlotte gives my shoulders a quick squeeze, then returns to her chair. She folds her hands in her lap, her eyes and her attention trained on me. I can’t believe this is happening on my first day on the job. I can’t believe how compassionately Charlotte is dealing with it.
“I signed my divorce papers three months ago,” she says quietly. “I’m the one who ended it, but still . . .” She sighs. “Still. There’s so much pain.”
“There is,” I say. “So much pain.”
“My boys are with their dad this weekend,” Charlotte says. “Maybe you and I can have a glass of wine on Friday night.”
“I’d love that,” I say.
At the same moment Charlotte adds, “Unless you have other plans.”
She smiles. I smile.
My aching heart sprouts angel wings. I feel God right next to me, a beaming, loving face inside a brilliant yellow sun.
Thank you, I pray.
FOUR
I’m writing hang-tag copy, second day on the job, when Heather appears in the office I share with Charlotte.
“Did anyone tell you to wear your Lulus tomorrow?” my boss asks me. It’s 4:30 p.m., and Heather, who arrived at ten this morning, is on her way out the door. Heather is one of several Bellissima employees who live on the Westside, a sixty-to-ninety-minute commute in the morning and a ninety-minute commute in the afternoon.
“Got it,” I lie. Heather gives me the thumbs-up and disappears.
“Lulus?” I ask Charlotte.
“Lululemons,” Charlotte says. “Tomorrow’s Workout Wednesday.”
“Which means . . . ?”
“Every Wednesday and Friday morning at nine-thirty, Isabel’s personal trainer comes into the office to train us for an hour. It’s too much hassle to change, so we all wear Lulus on those days.”
My jaw drops. “The whole company comes to work in spandex twice a week? And everyone stops working for an hour to work out?”
Charlotte laughs. She must be a recent immigrant, too. I’ve noticed that the La-La things that seem weird to me also seem weird to her. “Exactly,” she says. “It’s optional, but most everyone does it.”
“Why?” I say. “Who in this company needs to get any thinner? Besides me, I mean?”
“You look great,” Charlotte says reflexively, the way a hot young thing with a kind heart speaks to a slightly overweight old thing with a bit of a potbelly. “But if you do lose weight, you have a chance to win the fat contest.”
“Excuse me?”
“Every three months Joanne weighs and measures us. Whoever loses the most body fat gets a day off with pay.”
Charlotte leans across the space between our desks. “Isabel’s really into fitness, so . . .” she says.
“Isabel weighs eighty-five pounds.” I realize I’ve spoken a bit louder, perhaps, than I needed to. My voice echoes off the glass-brick wall.
Charlotte laughs again, uncomfortably this time. I realize she probably weighs eighty-eight.
“Do we really have to wear Lululemon?” I ask, hoping I can get away with baggy sweats.
“Of course not,” Charlotte says.
My relief fades quickly as I imagine myself working out in my pilly Target sweatpants next to my skinny, fit Lululemon-clad coworkers.
“I have extra Lulus if you want to borrow some,” Charlotte says.
“Thanks anyway, but I’ve been meaning to get a pair,” I lie. At $98, Lulu yoga pants weren’t at the top of my list. But they are now.
—
AT NINE-THIRTY THE NEXT MORNING, Joanne bounces into the office. “I’m heeere!” she hollers, the duffel bag she’s lugging and her voice outsizing her five-foot frame. Like children in a Pied Piper trance, my coworkers, fitted out in Lulu running bras and skintight shorts and sparkling clean Nikes in matching hallucinatory hues, follow Joanne into the Bellissima warehouse. My butt, in please-make-me-invisible basic black, brings up the rear.
Joanne points her Apple remote at a bank of electronics on a rickety table. Music of a genre I cannot even name blasts into the cavernous room. “Give me twenty push-ups,” Joanne barks over the din. Everyone drops to the concrete floor.
I tell myself I can do it. I have to do it, even though this is not the kind of workout I did at my Berkeley gym, where the first drop of sweat was my signal to stop, sit down, and have a cold drink. I’m used to “an hour of exercise” that starts with a fifteen-minute warm-up and ends with a fifteen-minute cooldown, interrupted by a brief period of moderate effort.
There is no warm-up today, and I suspect the cooldown will take place at my desk. This is a Los Angeles workout, designed to build the kind of movie-billboard bodies that tower over Sunset Boulevard. This is a solid hour of burpees and crunches and rock climbers interspersed with runs around the block, followed by pull-ups using TRX straps hooked to the front of the building—which happens to be located on Hollywood Boulevard. This makes it extra-convenient for truckers driving by to blast their air horns while leering at my coworkers’ perfect bodies.
I make it through the hour, barely, by walking while the others are running, and collapsing onto my stomach, panting, when they’re doing push-ups, and “kicking” an inch into the air when they shoot their delicate ankles Rockette-high.
Even worse than my red-hot, sweat-drenched
face and shaking legs is the comparing and contrasting I’m doing in my head. I can’t seem to keep my eyes from darting back and forth between my crepey cleavage and my female coworkers’ perky breasts; between my waggling arms and their chiseled pecs. Even the few men in the group are younger, tighter, and prettier than I am.
After a “run” around the block, I stumble back into the warehouse minutes behind the others. “Good job, Meredith!” Joanne shouts. I duck my head, pleased and embarrassed until I realize that the only other person Joanne compliments is the lone overweight woman in the room.
“I do one-on-one training at the Silverado gym, you know,” Joanne says as I pass her on my way to the shower line. “You could get a lot out of it. You’re naturally athletic, but you could be a lot more toned.”
“Great to know,” I say, my humiliation complete.
—
THE NEXT MORNING, sore and shaky, I limp into my first big Bellissima meeting, a planning session for New York Fashion Week. Members of the Finance, Marketing, Product Development, Design, and Creative “teams” are sitting around an enormous walnut burl table, swiveling lazily on cushy chairs. I’m here because I’ll be writing the press releases, the copy for the booth displays, and Isabel’s speech for the show.
The vibe is mellow, a group of friends hanging out, snacking on wasabi seaweed, drinking grass-green juices from the fresh-pressed juicery down the street and water from mason jars, dissecting last night’s Game of Thrones. “It’s a perfect second-date show,” Charlotte’s boss, Jade, says. “I watched it with this guy I met on Tinder. I learned a lot about him, fast.”
“Hey, guys. What’s up?” Isabel’s image comes to us nearly life-sized from the huge flat-screen on the wall.
Isabel is gorgeous beyond all reason, with a face the screen loves and long, flowing, beach-wavy streaked blond hair. Like her employees, Isabel radiates charm and positivity, but with a fierce gleam in her eyes.
The people around the table greet their boss casually, affectionately. “What are you wearing, Is?” the design director asks, squinting at the screen. “Is that dress ours?”
Isabel grins. “It will be. As soon as Jim figures out how to get it made for a margin we can love.”
“Or as soon as Isabel figures out how to get it made in a less politically correct fabric that we can actually afford,” says Jim, the Finance VP.
I perk up. Making products that are good for the bottom line and good for the world might be a new challenge for Bellissima, but it’s a time-honored one for me. Isabel sought me out because I consulted with Ben & Jerry’s and other progressive companies during the 1980s, the heyday of “doing well by doing good.” Maybe there’s something I can contribute here.
“Hey, Meredith.” Isabel flashes me a brilliant smile from the screen. “So happy you’re here.” She directs her gaze at the group. “Meredith did that awesome direct-mail campaign I told you about. We’re lucky to have her.”
“I remember reading about that campaign in Ad Week,” Heather says. “How long ago was that again?”
Was that a dig? “Nineteen ninety-three,” I say. “But I’ve done a few other campaigns since then.” I hope I don’t sound as lame as I feel.
“You know we’re going after the Eileen Fisher market,” Isabel says. “I’m hoping Meredith will help us with that. Let’s give our new Bella an awesome welcome.”
Despite Isabel’s casual categorization based solely on my age—my style runs about four decades behind my years, more Forever 21 than Eileen Fisher—I like this woman. She’s warm and sparkly. I can see us working together well. “Happy to be here,” I say, over a limp smattering of applause.
“So, Heather,” Isabel says, “what’s on your list?”
“Fabrics for the fall line,” says Marguerite, the design director, a thirtysomething brunette. “At the last retreat we set a goal of becoming the ‘eco-chic innovator.’ So I asked the reps to find me something super green and new.” She passes her iPad around the table, showing us the swatches on the screen. “They came up with organic bamboo. It’s sustainably harvested and produced. It feels like silk, and it’s washable. The colorways aren’t quite as strong as I’d like, but if our order’s big enough, they’ll do custom colors for us.”
“What’s the bad news?” Jim asks.
“You mean, what’s the growthful challenge?” Isabel teases him.
“The usual,” Marguerite says. “Bamboo’s twice as expensive as organic cotton. Which of course is twice the price of conventional cotton. Using the bamboo, even for just a few styles, might kick our price points higher than I feel comfortable with.”
“But it’s awesome fabric!” Isabel says.
“With a great backstory!” Jade chimes in.
“Is anyone else using it?” Heather asks.
“Not that we know of,” Marguerite says. “But . . .”
To the young people in this room, the challenge of branding a conscious, caring business in an unconscious, uncaring marketplace is something shiny and new, a puzzle they’re being paid well to solve. To me, it’s one of many legacies of the sixties movements that changed the world, however incompletely, and made me and their parents—and their grandparents?—who we are.
I want to ask if they’re aware of the progenitor of their eight-dollar-a-bottle fresh-pressed juices. That would be the back-to-the-land hippies, including me. Do they know who was “reducing, recycling, reusing” decades before they were gleams in their stoned parents’ (or grandparents’) eyes?
Uh-oh. I feel the stirrings of bitterness in my belly. The familiar metallic taste of judgment in my mouth.
Since I agreed to take this job I’ve been warning myself not to make the mistakes that have made me pretty much unemployable for most of my adult life. I know I need to listen more than I talk. Collaborate, not control. Stay open to my coworkers’ points of view. In other words, show a little respect for my fellow beings—an attitude at odds with the defensive, self-protective disdain I learned at my Jewish forebears’ knees.
“So,” Isabel is saying, “we’ll use the hemp fabric for five SKUs and organic cotton for the others. And we’ll go with the good caterer, but we’ll set up a buffet instead of shelling out for servers. Everyone cool with that?”
There’s something about Isabel’s smile, her humility, her humor that seems to work like kryptonite on my dark side. For an instant I catch a glimpse of her, and my coworkers, and even myself, in a softer light.
Maybe being young and attractive doesn’t make the Bellas’ sense of mission and discovery one bit less earnest or innocent or sincere than my own and my colleagues’ was forty years ago.
Maybe there’s more than one spot in history for a generation to be pioneering in its time. Maybe it was our turn in the sixties, and it’s the millennials’ turn now. Maybe every generation gets to have the same thoughts, invent the same ideas, for the first time.
Contemplating this, I’m surprised to feel my anger dissipating and my heart lifting.
Going around the table, each Bella gives her or his assent.
When they get to me, I say, “I’m in.”
—
ON FRIDAY, I’m lying on the couch on Jules’s deck, Googling “moving on from grief.”
Of the 92,100,000 results, most seem to revolve around Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages, which I memorized thirty-five years ago in the terrible months following the sudden death of my fifty-eight-year-old mother-in-law. Attempting to situate myself, now, on the continuum of denial/anger/bargaining/depression/acceptance, I realize that I’ve been pinballing through four of the five stages each day.
Denial helps until I realize that I’m in it, and that realization plunges me into depression—deep sadness, really; I’ve been depressed, so I know the difference. Bargaining is on a loop in my head. “If I pray every night, if I stay late at work, if I brake instead of
accelerate at the next yellow light . . .” Bargaining sometimes ends in anger at myself for being such an idiot. Acceptance seems light (dark) years away.
As usual, I find wisdom in poetry—in this case, Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods.” She says that to live in this world, you must be able to love what is mortal; and, when the time comes, to let it go.
Much as I deny it, rage against it, bargain with God about it, or get depressed about it, I know that the time has come to let it go. Unfortunately, knowing that it’s time to let go of my mortal love doesn’t make it one bit easier to do.
—
CHARLOTTE TEXTS ME A LINK to a West Hollywood bistro that meets her criteria—outdoor seating, within a couple of miles of the Bellissima office—and mine, happy-hour discounts on drinks and food. Instantly, I’m lifted, looking forward to my first L.A. friendship date. My friends from “back home” are doing a great job of buoying me up by phone, but I’m desperate for a face-to-face connection.
I offer to pick Charlotte up, since the office is on my way from Jules’s house to the bar. Charlotte texts back: In LA everyone drives own car. Always. Everywhere. #carpool #rookiemove. See u @5.
At five we’re texting each other again because we’re separately stuck in epic traffic, even by L.A. standards. At five forty-five we’re texting each other again because we’re prowling the same five-block radius, looking for a place to park. At six-fifteen, we’re ordering martinis (me), Pinot Grigio (Charlotte), and five-dollar ahi sliders and truffle fries, bonding over the tandem traffic battle we just fought.
Looking around the densely packed sidewalk café, I notice a preponderance of rainbows. Two men, otherwise naked, are wearing matching rainbow bikinis and matching rainbow flip-flops. The woman at the next table has rainbow-painted fingernails and toes. The elderly gentleman at the edge of the patio is holding a rainbow-dyed teacup poodle.
“Special occasion?” I ask our tall, handsome waiter. He laughs as if we’re all in on the joke, and whirls off to get our drinks.
The New Old Me Page 4
