by Jane Porter
“Not if Monica’s willing to buy the house furnished.”
It’s not until later, when I slide between my covers, replay Patti’s call, and think about Monica, that I realize I haven’t talked to Kate since book club. I would have thought she’d call. Kate and I have been friends for years. We’ve gone on girls’ trips together and skied together and spent endless hours by the club pool together, too.
Maybe Kate’s hurt. Maybe she’s uncomfortable. Maybe she just doesn’t know what to say. I make a mental note to give Kate a call tomorrow.
After I get my hair color fixed.
Monday morning, I dress carefully, as I’m determined to find an outfit that won’t clash with my color, which means orange, red, pink, and coral are all out. Gray, possibly. Black, too much of a contrast. Brown, no. I settle on a tweedy olive green jacket and cuffed tan slacks. By pinning my hair up in a knot, I hope there’s less hair to see.
Monica calls on my cell while I’m driving Tori to preschool. Just seeing her number on my phone makes my hands sweat and my heart race, and I let her call go into voice mail. I know she’s calling about the furniture, and it’s a call I should take, but I still feel so betrayed.
How could she make an offer on my house without telling me? How could she and Doug do such a thing without being up front?
I check my voice mail as soon as the message appears. Monica’s leaving the check under my front door mat now. I’ve got the money for the rental house, but it comes at a great price.
I walk Tori to her class, kiss her good-bye, and head to work. Everyone’s in the office by the time I arrive. I’m flustered to see Marta and her team already working when I walk in. I hate being late, finding it awkward being the last one to arrive.
“Good morning,” I say nervously as I close the door behind me.
After hanging up my coat, I slide my purse in my desk drawer just the way Susan did with hers. I sit at my desk. My computer’s already on. I check my e-mail first, as that’s what Susan said she always did, and there are fifty e-mails waiting for me, at least thirty as forwards from Marta.
For a moment, I feel pure panic.
I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know anything about advertising, and I’ve been out of work so long—
“If you have any questions, Taylor, just ask. We know you’re going to need some time to get the hang of things.” Marta’s behind me, en route to the little kitchen to refill her coffee.
I nod. I should be reassured, but I’m not.
This is hard. And scary.
The morning passes with time dragging at points and then passing in a blur at others. I’m acutely aware of being new and not knowing basic things. I’m aware that I don’t type as fast as Susan did and that I don’t know any of the names that the team mentions when they’re asking for a phone number or a file or a meeting that’s being scheduled.
I can see why I’ve felt so powerful at home. In the world I’ve created at home, I’m the queen. Here I’m the bottom of the totem pole.
At lunch, I dash into downtown Bellevue for my hair appointment at the Salon. My stylist is horrified as I am seated at his station.
What was I thinking? Didn’t I realize my color wasn’t single processing? I have highlights and lowlights and overall color, and I’ve ruined it. Ruined it.
I didn’t cry when I messed up my hair at home. I did my best to keep my sense of humor intact. But right now, my humor’s sadly lacking. I’m just angry. I’ve got enough to cope with. I don’t need Mr. Marco’s attitude.
“What do you expect from me?” he continues, returning with the bowl of color. “You had beautiful hair. Gorgeous hair. And it’s ruined.”
“You’re not helping things, Marco,” I answer flatly.
He stirs the color in quick, angry jabs. “I’m not a miracle worker. I don’t know why you think you can ruin your hair and then come in and expect me to make everything okay.”
“I am paying you to fix it. You’re not doing it for free.”
He rolls his eyes. “Everybody thinks they can color their own hair. Everybody thinks they’re a professional now.”
That’s it. I’m done. Suddenly I’m on my feet and ripping the cape off from around my neck. “Forget it. My hair’s not that bad after all.”
I know I’m emotional. I know I need my hair color. But my God, enough is enough. Can’t I make a mistake? Can’t I screw up without everyone climbing all over my back?
Marco shouts after me as I walk to the door. He has the color ready. He’s got a busy day. I can’t waste his time like this.
I don’t turn around. I don’t stop walking. I just head straight out the door and into the weak November sunshine. I’ve had it with the lectures. I’ve had it with the sly, snide comments. I’m doing my best. I’m trying my hardest. That has to count for something.
I’m practically running as I reach the parking garage and nearly trip over Suze, who is heading for the elevator.
“Taylor!” She does a double take and then gives me a tight, perplexed smile as she stares at my hair. “What, uh . . . what uh, how are you?”
Of course she’d be freaked by my hair. It’s hanging like gold and orange streamers down my back. “Just left the Salon,” I say, giving my head a jaunty toss. “Change is fun!”
“Yes, well . . .”
I smile at her, smile as hard as I can, even as I tug on my coat, pulling the lapels up against the biting breeze. “See you soon.”
She’s still staring at me in shock. “See you soon.”
My bravado is all very well and good until I return to Z Design and the first person I meet is Marta on her way back from a lunch appointment.
“Taylor, so what’s the story with your hair?”
I should be offended. But at least Marta’s open and honest. My shoulders lift and fall. “I tried to color my hair at home. It didn’t work. I tried just now to have my usual stylist fix it, but he gave me a lot of attitude, so I walked out.”
Marta nods approvingly. “That’s right. Don’t take shit from anybody. That’s my mantra, and it’s served me pretty well.”
“Yeah. Until you’re Ms. Pumpkinhead.”
She flashes a wry smile and reaches into her bag and retrieves her cell phone. Skimming through her contacts, she chooses a number. “Monique, it’s Marta Zinsser. What’s Michelle’s schedule like today? Is she just crazy?”
Marta waits while Monique checks Michelle’s schedule. “She does sound busy. Is there any way I can talk to her, though? Tell her it’s Marta and I’m desperate.”
Marta looks at me, covers the phone. “Michelle’s brilliant. The only person I let touch my hair. She’s the main colorist at Paule Attar. She’ll be able to fix your hair without drama, I promise.”
Again Marta waits, and then Michelle gets on the line.
“Michelle, sorry to interrupt you, but I’ve a huge favor to ask. A friend needs an emergency fix job on her hair. She tried coloring her own hair, and her usual stylist had a fit, and my friend doesn’t know where to go. I know you’d know what to do. Is there any way you could see her today? Just for a consult?”
Marta’s listening again and nodding. “Great. That’s fantastic, Michelle. You’re the best. Thanks.” Marta hangs up and grins. “You’ve a three o’clock appointment. You’re in.”
“That’s wonderful. But shouldn’t I be working?”
“Yeah, you should. But, Taylor, I have to be honest. I won’t be able to get anything done, not with you looking like Carrot Top.”
Michelle might be a genius with hair color, but she’s also intimidating as hell. She’s tall and glamorous, with gorgeous dark hair, high cheekbones, and perfectly shaped lips. I slink into her chair, and she fastens a dark cape around my neck.
“So what did you do?” she asks, standing behind my chair and studying my reflection in the mirror.
“Ruined my hair?”
She cracks a small smile. “I guess what I should say is, what do yo
u want to do? I can take out the blond and tone down the orange, but that doesn’t solve anything long-term. Four weeks from now you’ll have to touch up your roots. What do you want to do with your hair?”
I look at my hair, which hangs past my shoulders in vivid color streaks. “I’d like to be dark blond again without the orange. I had highlights, but they were a lot of maintenance. I used to go to the Salon every four weeks for touch-ups and every six to eight weeks for highlights. But I need easier upkeep. I’m in a different place financially.”
“There’s no rule that says you have to spend a lot of money to look great,” she answers, adjusting my cape. “I have a lot of clients on tight budgets, and a lot of those clients are blondes with great hair.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Michelle pats me on the shoulders. “It’s going to be all right.”
“So what will you do?”
“Take out the color you have on your hair right now, change your base color, going darker blond, which will help stretch out your root touch-ups. Then we’ll add highlights, but do them underneath, instead of at the crown to hide grow-out. That way, you’ll only need to do highlights twice a year instead of every six to eight weeks.”
She does what she said she’d do, but it’s not a speedy process. First we strip the color and then put in new color as well as the highlights.
By the time I walk out, I’ve been in the chair for hours. Fortunately my hair is dark blond again, but the highlights are more subtle and less “sun kissed,” which is fine considering it’s mid-November and Thanksgiving is just around the corner.
I call Z Design on my way out and get the answering machine. The office is closed for the day. I’m not surprised, since it’s almost five-thirty and completely dark out, but driving home, I keep feeling this funny little tug inside my chest.
Marta isn’t so bad, I think, swinging by the house to get Monica’s check and head to the bank. Marta might even be nice.
Monday night after dropping a check by the landlord’s, I flex my fingers against the steering wheel and grin. Our rent’s covered now until June, and we should have enough for my car payment, too. My job will pay for groceries, child care, and incidentals.
I should call Nathan. He’d be proud of me.
I reach for my phone, call him on speed dial. To my delight, he picks up right away. “Nathan, great news,” I blurt out breathlessly, “I’ve just sold all our furniture for twenty-five thousand dollars!”
I’m met by dead silence.
“Did you hear what I said?” I say, a hint of hurt creeping into my voice. “I sold our furniture to Monica and Doug. Twenty-five thousand dollars, Nathan—”
“Taylor, the dining room set alone cost twenty-five thousand dollars.”
His voice is chilly and remote. I pull over to the side of the road, lean on the steering wheel. “Are you mad?” I ask incredulously.
He exhales. “You’re so impulsive, Taylor. You just don’t think.”
“That’s not fair!”
“It’d cost us a hundred thousand dollars to replace all that furniture. The couch in the living room was more than twelve grand. The two armchairs were five thousand each. How are we going to be able to replace that?”
I press the tip of my tongue to my teeth, press hard, pressing to silence my protest. I can’t win with him anymore. Nothing I do is right.
“But we don’t have a house it’ll fit in,” I answer after a moment when I’m sure I’m calm. “None of the pieces will fit in the rental house, and we can’t afford to store it all. Nathan, we have furniture to fill a six-thousand-seven-hundred-square-foot house. The rental house isn’t even two thousand square feet. It’s itty-bitty. Trust me.”
“So why pick that house?”
“Because it’s available, it’s cheap, and it’s near the girls’ school.”
He’s silent so long that I think he’s hung up, but then I hear a low, heavy sigh. “You don’t even need me anymore,” he says quietly.
Something in my chest wrenches. “That’s not true.”
“It’s what it feels like to me.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Yeah. That’s what I keep hearing.”
Our conversation weighs on me the rest of the night, and I phone him back the next day on my way home from work but then don’t know what to say.
Come home, let me support you? Quit your job and live in the ugly rental house with us?
I swallow hard as I drive. Nathan was raised with money, by a stay-at-home mom and a father who made millions in the seventies and early eighties in Silicon Valley. Nathan was expected to make millions and millions, too. Instead we’ve lost everything, and my handsome quarterback husband is slogging away in Omaha.
There’s times I think I have it hard, but looking at the big picture, Nathan has it worse. He’s a man. He’s supposed to be the provider. He’s supposed to be in control. Knowing Nathan, knowing his family, I’m sure he feels like a failure.
Wednesday is a short day at Points Elementary, which means Eva appears in the Z Design doorway at two-thirty in the afternoon.
Robert and Allie are presenting to a client, Mel’s on a plane to New York, and Marta’s in the house searching for something her mother either wants or needs. Eva in the meantime is in the studio office, spinning in the chair at the corner workstation. It’s the extra computer for when Marta has part-time employees, but there aren’t any part-time employees right now, just Eva making me crazy.
“I talked to my mom,” she says, pausing in her spinning to look at me. “She says you’re not her secretary. You’re the office manager. Apparently there’s a big difference.”
I look up from the letter I’m typing. “Thank you, Eva. That’s good to know.”
She spins once and stops herself by grabbing the edge of the desk. “Did you want to be her secretary?”
Does anyone like to be tortured? “Not particularly, no.”
She’s hugging her knees to her chest now, her red sweater bright against her blue jeans. “Why are you working here?”
“I needed a job.”
“Why?”
It feels as though she has a nail and she’s tap-tapping it into my forehead. “Why does your mom work?”
“Because she’s smart and she likes it.” Eva makes a face. “And because she’s a single mom. My dad’s a sperm donor.”
I’d just reached for my coffee, and I nearly spit the mouthful all over the computer screen. Wiping coffee dribbles from my chin, I turn to look at her.
She nods matter-of-factly. “Apparently he donated a lot of times, too. He wasn’t supposed to, but he went to different clinics and somebody in New York just figured it out. They called my mom and said I probably have ten or twenty brothers and sisters out there.” Eva reaches up to rub her cheek. “That’s a lot of brothers and sisters.”
“Uh-huh.” It’s a terrible answer, but I don’t know what else to say. Eva’s not like most little girls around here.
“The thing is,” she continues, studying her nails, “I have to be careful I don’t marry my brother. It could cause defects.” She pauses, frowns. “Besides, it’s gross.”
The office door opens and Marta appears. She’s tugging off her jacket and dropping it on the back of her chair. “You’re not supposed to be bugging my staff,” she says, crossing to her daughter’s side and dropping a kiss on the top of her head.
“I’m not,” Eva answers blithely, sliding from her chair to head to the office door. “I’m just telling Mrs. Young about my dad.”
She leaves and Marta stands there a moment, hands on her hips, before shaking her head. “That has to be her father’s genes. Can’t be mine.”
“Can’t be you,” I agree, uncertain if I should be impressed by Eva’s nonchalance or horrified. “You’re not a rebel.”
Marta laughs and drops into her chair, stretching her long legs out in front of her. She’s wearing old jeans, a white men’s shirt with the tails hanging out,
and her hideous combat boots. “God, I’m tired.” She tips her head back and rubs her neck before turning to look at me. “I’m not paying you enough for you to work this many hours, Taylor. Susan never worked past three on Wednesdays and twelve on Fridays.”
I gesture to the stack of paperwork on my desk. “There’s too much to do for me to leave.”
Marta lifts an eyebrow. “There will always be too much to do. You’ll never get to the bottom of the pile because new stuff will come in. Just do what you can do and when everyone else dashes out, you should, too.”
“Well, let me at least finish this letter I was working on. Once it’s printed I’ll take off.”
Ten minutes later, I’m going through the document one last time doing spell check when I feel Marta’s gaze. It’s incredibly unsettling. I look over my shoulder at her.
“Have you always been such a perfectionist?” she asks quietly.
I frown. “Why do you think I’m a perfectionist?”
“I’ve been watching you. You’ve read the letter through at least four times, maybe five. Move on. Be done with it.”
“I just don’t want a letter going out from Z Design with mistakes in it. It’d look bad—” I break off as Marta laughs. “Why are you laughing? I’d think you’d care about appearances—”
“I do.” She’s no longer laughing, but she’s still smiling a little. “I do, but I also know what it’s like to juggle home and work. Go home, Taylor. Your girls had a short day, too, and I’m sure they’re dying to see you.”
The girls are screaming at the top of their lungs as I open the front door. “It’s all your fault!”
That’s Jemma, I think, closing the door between the garage and mudroom.
“It’s yours!”
And that’s Brooke. Sagging with fatigue, I hang up my coat on a mudroom wall hook, set my purse on a bench, and head toward the kitchen.
“If you weren’t such a spoiled brat, we wouldn’t have to move and sell all our things!” Jemma again.
“If you weren’t such a jerk, Dad wouldn’t be in Omaha!” And that’s dear Brooke.
