In Sheep's Clothing

by Mary Monroe

  “If that’s the case, the whole world is guilty,” Pam snapped.

  I forced myself not to spend much time thinking about Pam’s last comment. It was too ominous. Especially since I’d gone so far overboard. With the frequency of my purchases, I didn’t even think that my ruse about using the wrong credit card by mistake was credible anymore. But because what I was doing was so easy, getting caught was the last thing on my mind.

  Exposing myself to Pam was one thing—which was out of the question—but Wendy was the last person I would ever share the knowledge of my larcenous activities with. I knew she could not be trusted to keep her mouth shut. Especially after she’d had a few drinks. Besides, I didn’t like a lot of the things she did and said. Her spitting in Ann’s coffee was one. I drew the line with behavior like that. That’s why I volunteered to do Ann’s coffee runs myself. In my mind this little act of kindness made up for the credit card abuse.

  Just like I had expected, Ann didn’t appreciate my gesture. She took full advantage of it. She got to the point where the coffee we made in the break room just wasn’t good enough for her anymore. Now every cup she drank had to come from Starbucks. And she didn’t think twice about sending me out in the rain to get it.

  “Freddie, let’s have dinner after work at the Cowboy’s Club,” I said, whispering into the telephone. It was the same day that I had helped Pam haul a box full of toner for her home printer to her car. It was also the same day that Ann had sent me to Starbucks four times.

  “Girl, that’s way across town. A cab would cost us an arm and a leg,” Freddie whispered back. “Even if I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t spend it on a cab to take to a restaurant.” She followed that up with a hollow laugh.

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re going as my guest, woman,” I hissed.

  “In a cab?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “That you’re paying for?”

  “Yep. They take credit cards,” I told her.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Trudy, when do you plan to do the laundry?”

  “Daddy, it’ll have to wait until the weekend. You know how tired I am when I get home in the evening.”

  “I know you done let that job go to your head. You ain’t got time for nothin’ no more these days. You’ll slow down when James start lookin’ at other women. . . .”

  I didn’t have to worry about James, so Daddy’s warning went in one ear and out the other. My man was always where he said he was going to be. Other than work, his mama’s house, and my house to sit in front of the television with Daddy and me, James didn’t go many places. He didn’t even go to bars or any other place where he’d be tempted by strange women. I didn’t worry about him fooling around behind my back. Especially as long as I showered him with nice gifts and kept him happy in bed. And I did that well.

  When James complained about the cost of putting a set of new tires on his Sentra, I surprised him with a gift certificate from Grand Auto. It not only covered the cost of the tires, he was able to get some new seat covers, too. I didn’t stop there. As a matter of fact, it was just the beginning of the many things I’d do for James to keep him attracted and distracted at the same time.

  “Baby, I don’t want you to be spending all your hard-earned money on me,” he said two days after the Grand Auto gift certificate. He grinned as I handed him a new leather jacket from Macy’s that he’d been admiring for weeks.

  “Don’t worry about it, honey. I like to do nice things for you.” I had just surprised him by showing up at his apartment in a cab with the jacket under my arm, gift wrapped. I also had a huge bag of take-out food, with all the trimmings, from one of the most expensive Italian restaurants in town.

  One thing I liked about James was that he appreciated a good meal as much as I did. But life was too short for anybody to settle for greens and cornbread most of the time like we had for so many years.

  “And feeding me like a king.” He grinned, wearing his new jacket to his kitchen where I had laid out our dinner on a table complete with candles. I could have screamed when I saw that the damn clerk at the mall had left the price tag on the jacket. James saw it before I could distract him long enough to snatch it off. “Six hundred dollars?” James was so taken aback he stumbled trying to sit down. “Baby, you can’t afford shit like this,” he hollered, waving the price tag at me.

  Without missing a beat, I continued to spoon lasagna onto his plate. “It didn’t cost me a dime,” I chirped. “I won a raffle at Macy’s.”

  “And the first prize was a leather jacket?” James gave me a confused and concerned look.

  “Uh-uh. First prize was a gift certificate.” I had never been a good liar. I had never had a reason to be. But since my new venture with Ann’s credit card, lying seemed like second nature now.

  James removed the jacket and draped it on the back of his chair, still looking confused and concerned. “Six hundred dollars is an odd amount for a gift certificate in a raffle.”

  I shook my head and sat down hard on the chair across from him, a fork poised between my nervous fingers. “Actually, it was just five hundred dollars. I paid the rest out of my pocket.”

  “A hundred dollars is a big chunk of change for you to be spending on leather jackets for me. I got a closet full of clothes.”

  “How long have you wanted this jacket?” I asked, chewing. I didn’t give James a chance to answer my question. “You haven’t bought anything for yourself in over a year.” I didn’t like the guarded look he gave me.

  He finally started to eat. “And how much did you spend on this food?”

  “Nothing,” I said, my mouth full of lasagna and garlic bread. I was sorry that I had forgotten to include a huge bottle of wine with the meal. A nice buzz would have come in handy. Instead, I stumbled to James’s noisy refrigerator and snatched out two cans of beer.

  “Nothing? Don’t tell me you won all this good food, too.”

  I drank half a can of beer before I responded. “Freddie gave me a coupon.”

  “Oh. Some greens would have been just as good,” he said, plowing into the huge pile of food on his plate.

  I reached under the table with my foot to massage James’s crotch. “We’d better hurry up and finish dinner if we want to have some fun before I go home. I like doing nice things for you, baby,” I said.

  I liked doing nice things period. And it was a real treat to do it at somebody else’s expense. Not a single penny of my money was being spent on the nice things I was doing for everybody. I wasn’t even putting a dent in the Bon Voyage account.

  “We need to be careful with our money, Trudy. I just don’t want things to get out of control.”

  “I got everything under control,” I insisted, starting to feel impatient. “Now eat your dinner and stop talking crazy,” I scolded.

  It didn’t take long for things to get out of control. Before I knew it, I had run up Ann’s credit card to its full limit. When I got the statement I almost fainted. I couldn’t believe that I had spent almost ten thousand dollars in less than a month! I couldn’t believe how easy it had been. However, I was too out of touch with reality to be too concerned. Not even when I had to use the other credit card that Wendy had given me to pay for our new copy machine.

  When the bills came, I paid them online like I was supposed to, and I started charging all over the following day. Expensive lunches, cab rides all the way from San Jose to South Bay City, there was no limit.

  There was a method to my madness and it went all the way back to my childhood. Mama’s reckless spending had brought me out of the doldrums more times than I could count. Since I’d been treating myself and my loved ones so well, I had almost forgotten what it felt like to have the blues.

  Things that happened at the office didn’t bother me as much anymore. And believe me, there was a lot going on at that place that got on my nerves. Like Mr. Rydell’s rambling, long-winded speeches during our weekly staff meetings, and Ann’s behavior. Since depr
ession had become a thing of the past for me, I relied on other motivations to keep me going. Every time Ann pissed me off I went on a shopping spree, grinning when the store clerks called me by Ann’s name. With my new wardrobe I finally experienced the kind of confidence that I’d wanted all my life. But it was more than that. It seemed like everybody looked at me in a different way. A way that made me feel as empowered and important as some of our biggest clients. Unlimited financial resources had such a strange effect on the human mind. Now I knew why rich people were so aloof and snooty.

  It was amazing how good my new Prada outfit made me feel. But like with drug addicts, being high was only temporary, so I just kept spending. Each time, I had to do it a little more than the last time.

  CHAPTER 20

  Like Wendy had already told me when I’d first come to Bon Voyage, the reps I worked with were lazy as hell. Those people did things so dumb it would make an eel roll its eyes. There was a list as long as my legs of office bullshit that drove me up and down the wall.

  The fax machine, the copy machine, and the break room were all on the second floor near the offices of Mr. Rydell and the reps. They would stumble into the elevator to come down one floor (they were too lazy to take the stairs the way Wendy, Pam, and I did) with a one-page document for one of us, usually me, to either copy, put in the outgoing mailbox, or to fax.

  What was so ridiculous about the whole procedure was the same rep would escort me to the copy machine, mailbox, or fax machine and stand right next to me until the deed was done. Naturally, Ann was at the top of this shit list. One day, and only that one day, Wendy, Pam, and I all called in sick. When we returned the next day the break room looked like a train wreck. Coffee beans, half and half, water, crumbs, and just about everything else you’d expect to see in a kitchen were all over the counters and floor. One sloppy person had even peeled a boiled egg and left the shells in the sink. The cleaning woman had already done her chores for that day so all this had been left behind for Wendy, Pam, and me to clean up the next day.

  Rolling up the sleeves of my new silk blouse, I headed for the refrigerator first. It was early and the office had not opened yet. Since we’d all called in sick the day before, by some strange coincidence, Wendy, Pam, and I had all come in a half hour earlier. That’s why we were all able to be away from the reception area at the same time. One strict rule was, during office hours, at least one of us had to be in the entrance area at all times in case a client or a delivery person needed to get in.

  Anyway, just as I reached for the milk container, Wendy cleared her throat. “I wouldn’t drink out of that thing if I were you. Never,” she said in a tone that had become quite familiar.

  “Did you spit in this, too?” I asked. It concerned me to know about some of the spiteful things Wendy Barker did to her coworkers. Since I was a fine one to talk, I never addressed the situation with her.

  “No, but Pam drinks straight out of the containers. There’s no telling where her mouth has been. Haven’t you noticed the scabs on her lips?”

  “Thanks for telling me,” I said, returning the milk carton to its place.

  “I like you, Trudy, so you know I’ll watch your back. And I expect you to do the same for me.”

  I had already made up my mind to keep my eye on Wendy Barker. She said and did too many unpleasant things for me not to. No matter how hard she tried to make it seem like we were on the same page, I didn’t trust her. I’d worked with people like her before. I knew how treacherous women could be in an office setting. One jealous woman whom I’d worked with during my temp job at the phone company, a woman I’d considered a friend, used to sneak around to other peoples’ computers and delete important files. She’d even done it to me once when I’d received a bonus. There were just some people who could not be trusted, no matter how friendly they acted to your face. Wendy was one of those people.

  Wendy and Pam had instructed me to open and date stamp all of the mail that came in each day. Anything that was marked “personal and confidential” I was not to open. But Wendy and Pam did it anyway as they huddled behind the file cabinet next to Wendy’s cubicle while I acted as the lookout. That’s how we found out that Dennis Klein, the Harry Potter look-alike, was having an affair with the wife of one of his best friends. It was also how we found out that the two weeks Lupe Gonzalez said that she’d spent in Mexico visiting her sick grandmother was a bold-faced lie. She’d spent that time in a clinic in San Francisco getting bags removed from under her eyes by the same surgeon who’d removed some fat from Geraldo Rivera’s butt and discussed it on Geraldo’s talk show.

  There were other situations going on at Bon Voyage that could best be described as “black humor.” Last Tuesday I snagged the knee of my panty hose on the corner of my desk. I always carried an extra pair with me in my purse in case of an emergency, so it was no big deal. But since I’d already been on my morning break, I wanted to make my sudden departure from my desk look like it was business related. I fished the new panty hose out of my purse, still in the package, and slid them into an interoffice envelope. When I delivered the office mail to the reps, I always slid it into interoffice envelopes. That was the way the reps wanted it delivered.

  On the corner of my desk was a half-a-foot-high stack of empty preaddressed envelopes, most of them for Ann Oliver, because being the diva she was, she received the most mail. A lot of it came from boyfriends all over the world, I might add.

  Anyway, the envelope that I had just slid the new panty hose into was addressed to Ann. Before I left my desk I directed all of my calls to go straight to voice mail, like I always did when I had to step away. The last thing I needed was for Pam or Wendy to take a call from somebody about a purchase I’d charged. Last week some clerk at a fancy boutique had called to tell me that I’d left my credit card behind after I’d made a purchase! Luckily, I’d taken that dangerous call myself. Direct voice mail was the solution to that knotty problem. It was a pain in the butt to remember to direct all the calls to voice mail every time I left my desk, but I did it.

  I took the stairs, entered the bathroom, and did what I had to do. With my fresh new designer panty hose hugging my legs and butt, I balled up the ripped old ones and slid them into the interoffice envelope. I returned to my desk and without giving it much thought, I dropped the envelope back onto my desk.

  It got pretty busy and before I could deliver the mail Ann took it upon herself to check on it. She buzzed me on the line that I shared with Pam and Wendy. “Trudy.” Ann often paused and sucked in a loud breath right after she said my name. As if she thought I was hard of hearing or dumb, or a combination of both, she repeated my name. “Trudy, do you know what time it is?”

  “Uh”—I glanced at my watch and the big round clock on the wall above Pam’s desk just to make sure—“it’s three-thirty P.M.,” I replied with a lilt in my voice.

  “And what time are you supposed to deliver the afternoon mail?”

  “Three P.M.,” I replied.

  “Thank you.” Ann hung up without another word. I grabbed the envelopes, all of them bulging with all kinds of correspondence, and took the stairs two at a time. A minute after I returned to my desk the telephone rang. It was Ann again.

  This time she didn’t pause. “Trudy, will you tell me why you delivered me a pair of ripped panty hose?”

  “Oh, my God! Oh, Ann, I am so so sorry. I snagged my panty hose and I had a spare pair so I could change them. I didn’t want to carry my purse into the ladies’ room, so I put my new panty hose into the envelope and then I—”

  She cut me off with a sharp laugh. “I see,” she said. “Well, is everything all right now?” Ann never ceased to amaze me. Sometimes she seemed genuinely concerned.

  “Uh-huh. I’m just glad I had that extra pair with me,” I added, thrown off even more by her interest in my wardrobe malfunction.

  “Well, if and when it happens again and you don’t have a fresh pair with you, I always keep a few extra pairs in the bottom lef
t drawer of my desk. We’re about the same size and color. Help yourself.” She hung up before I could thank her.

  I just didn’t know what to do with this woman.

  CHAPTER 21

  I would go for weeks without having to deal with James’s mother. I liked the woman and we got along fairly well, but the less I saw of Mavis, the better it was for me.

  Mavis Young was a widow who had been looking for another husband since her first husband died at the age of thirty-five. She was somewhere in her sixties or seventies depending on who was telling the story. James said she was in her seventies; she claimed to be sixty-five.

  In her long-range search for another man of her own, she decided she’d help James find a spouse as well. “God didn’t mean for nobody to be alone,” she told me during one of her visits to the liquor store, her roving eye looking from me to my daddy in his blue suit. “You and your daddy both deserve to be happy. You and my boy look good together, and while we on the subject, your daddy looks right dapper in his blue suit.” Mavis spoke loud enough for Daddy to hear her comments. He promptly disappeared into a back room and stayed there until she had left. Having Mavis for a mother-inlaw was one thing. Having her for a stepmother, too, was a hellish thought.

  My mother had been the last woman whom I’d known to get and keep Daddy’s attention. At least on any level to speak of. And certainly the last White woman. I’d overheard him once tell one of his friends that after the way Mama’s family had treated him, he’d never get involved with another one. He had remained true to his word. It made him mad now when White women got too friendly with him. He’d kept company with a few persistent old sisters over the years, and he’d found something wrong with each one. It pleased me to know that Daddy had made it clear from the get-go that Mavis Young didn’t have a chance in hell of landing him.