by Rita Ciresi
“Are you married?” asked a woman whose chunky engagement and wedding rings glinted beneath the fluorescent lights as she dug into her baked potato covered with chili.
I held out my bare left hand next to her diamonds—or what on closer inspection proved to be cubic zirconium.
“Oh,” she said, and went on to complain about her own husband.
“You’re lucky you’ve never been married,” said the obvious divorcée to my left, who then took up her knife and fork and lit into a crouton with a fury that sent her Caesar dressing flying in all directions, including right onto the sleeve of my new cream-color silk blouse. Some of the other women at the table—who had heard and reheard the divorcée’s bitter tales of complaint—cut her off by filling me in on the rules for taking coffee breaks and the benefits of the new dental-insurance package. I nodded and smiled and wondered if I was the only person at the table who liked reading Dostoyevsky. Then I remembered that I didn’t like reading Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment made me feel suicidal, and The Brothers Karamazov brought out the pugilist in me. One more pious word out of Alyosha, I thought as I plowed my way through that novel, and I’m going to sock this Christian wimp right in the nose.
I ate my salad and thought, Like it or not, these are Boorman’s women, so learn to live with it, Lisa—at least they’ll laugh at your large stock of dumb-guy jokes. I forked a big piece of spinach and surreptitiously scoped out the men in the cafeteria. The guys in R&D—with their white lab coats and dorky rubber-soled shoes—seemed smart but distant (a feature I would come to value after I discovered three-quarters of them smelled of eau de formaldehyde). After someone finally asked me if I had a boyfriend—to which I replied, “Not at the moment”—I was informed that most of the lab scientists were unavailable. “They all get married in graduate school,” I was told, “and their wives stay home and take care of their kids.” I also was told that the sales reps and account executives—married and single—were a bunch of on-the-make pigs, and the management—well, nobody even dreamed of management. From what little I had seen on my two interviews, I already had the top dogs pegged: these were men who drove German and Italian cars, who dressed in subtle shirts and suits from Barney’s, and who had photographs on their desks of toddlers and wives whose youthful skin and thin hips and bleached-blond hair made it clear that every executive in the company was on his second or third marriage, and that their spouses regularly visited plastic surgeons, manicurists, hair salons, and tanning beds.
The field did not look promising. It looked even worse in the afternoon when my new boss, Karen, who was four months pregnant but already looked close to eight, marched me around Boorman’s corporate headquarters and laboratory, introducing me to what seemed like hundreds of people.
Among the more memorable persons I encountered were the superiors who oversaw the Editorial division. The senior vice-president for Research and Development, Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger, was a great steel-haired Teutonic wonder of a woman, who looked just as suited to wearing a Wagnerian helmet with horns as she did to directing the production of more-effective over-the-counter enemas. The diplomas on her wall announced she had a doctorate in biochemistry from Rutgers and a master’s in management from Penn State. Her smarts frightened me. As we were introduced, I wished I wore glasses.
“Greetings,” Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger said, giving me a firm handshake, and I was so taken aback I merely repeated, “Yes, greetings.”
“Lisa’s been hired to make sure we put all our commas in the right place,” Karen explained.
“Very fine,” Peggy said. “We can all use help with that.”
“Please feel free to call me if you should have a question about grammar usage,” I said, immediately questioning whether my use of the subjunctive in that sentence had been correct.
“I’ll do that,” she said, and I inwardly cringed, knowing I would spend the weekend curled up with nothing more romantic than The Chicago Manual of Style just to bone up on usage of the verb to be. I also knew I would get paranoid the moment she called and I answered the phone with a normal hello, because she’d say, “Is this Ms. Diodetto?” and I’d be hard-pressed to give her a grammatically correct answer, because I didn’t know which one was kosher: “This is her” or “This is she” or “This is I,” and I’d do something dumb like blurt out, “It’s me, yes, it’s me!”
Karen actually congratulated me on that fiasco. “You played that just right, Lisa,” she whispered. “Dr. Schoenbarger writes a lot of important correspondence, and now she’s sure to call you for advice. She’ll like you even more if you’re a golfer—”
“A golfer!”
“Her dream is to play at Saint Andrews in Scotland. Once she gets to know you—but she has to be really fond of you to do it—she might even invite you out on the green. I heard she once thought of turning pro and going on tour.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said, and added to my homework looking up the definition of birdie and the origin of the term links.
After that, Karen led me to the door of yet another spacious, plush-carpeted corner office. This deluxe model also had a wonderful view of the cascading fountain on the front lawn, which rolled on lusher than the eighteenth green before it reached, beyond a windbreak of poplars, the main road. Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger’s immediate underling, the vice-president for new-product development, was a much younger—and shorter—man with black hair, who wore the kind of intellectual wire-rimmed glasses I had just wished I wore to impress Dr. Peg. He sat at a conference table beneath a Thomas Eakins print of a rower, obviously about to confer with a group of other white-shirted, red-tied corporate clones. Karen suggested we return later, but his secretary said the meeting hadn’t gotten started yet.
She buzzed the VP on the intercom—although one good hoot through the door would have sufficed to catch his attention—and we were sent in. As Karen introduced us, I felt a brief second of kinship with Mr. Eben Strauss, perhaps because we both clearly were the only two folks in the room who had to spell our names—slowly and distinctly—every time we used the phone to book a restaurant reservation or make a doctor’s appointment. For half a second he gave me the impression that he, too, acknowledged this kinship, for when he rose from the table to greet me, his dark eyes—darker than anyone else’s I had met so far at Boorman—blinked as if in recognition.
“Welcome on board,” he said as he shook my hand, and my warm feelings toward him went down faster than the Titanic. What is this, I felt like asking, the Good Ship Lollipop? If so, he had just made it clear that he was the captain and I was the third mate, or even just the lowly hand who got tossed a mop without even a verbal command to swab down the poop deck.
This hearty, one-of-the-boys corporate lingo—get on board, be a team player, take the initiative, prioritize, and that most loathsome of phrases, let’s touch base in the morning—made me seasick. I smiled queasily, told him I was very pleased to make his acquaintance, and tried hard not to stare at his diamond-patterned tie, which could only be described by one word: ugly.
“Where are you from originally?” he asked.
“New Haven.”
“I’ve heard of that,” he said, and that’s when I saw—over his shoulder—that the framed degrees on his wall were from Cornell and Harvard. I wondered how well his ivy aura sat with public-school Peggy.
He gestured to the other men at the table and apologized for not having a chance to talk more. Later, he certainly hoped we would have that opportunity. But for now he had this meeting. If we would excuse him—
“Certainly,” Karen said crisply, and took me by the arm where that blasted Caesar dressing had spotted the silk. I saw Mr. Eben Strauss look, too long, at my sleeve.
After we left his office, Karen told me that Eben Strauss was a decent man. I tried hard not to yawn. “If you have to work under a man,” Karen told me, “he’s the man to do it under.” She also told me that Eben Strauss was the only guy in the corporation willing—or even capable—of
working for a woman senior vice-president. From this I surmised either that Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger was a bitch on wheels or that the rest of the male crew at Boorman were a bunch of chauvinists.
As Karen and I continued down the hall to meet yet another man in a navy suit, she was quick to point out that she alone was my supervisor, and even though the chain of command eventually led back to the big guns, she would act just like those poplars outside their windows: as a buffer or windbreak. Besides, Karen told me, Dr. Schoenbarger and Mr. Strauss were the perfect bosses—she was so busy overseeing research for new drugs and he was always jetting around the country supervising the production and marketing end of it. “They trust us to get the jobs done,” Karen said, “and we do it.”
“But why is Editorial under Research and Development?” I asked Karen, kicking myself for not examining the organizational chart before I accepted the position. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to be under Communications?”
“We were there for a while,” Karen said. “But it didn’t work out.”
“Why not?”
She looked up and down the hall. Lowering her voice—people always seemed to be lowering their voice at Boorman, as if the walls were bugged—she told me with pride that while Communications was the brawn of Boorman, Research and Development was the brains. “Communications just didn’t understand the scientific end of our work,” she said. “A lot of our editing jobs are highly technical and require the utmost discipline and accuracy.” Lowering her voice still further, she said, “A single mistake can result in tremendous loss of life.”
I gave her a grave nod and thought, My, someone does need to feel self-important this afternoon.
“Dr. Schoenbarger and Mr. Strauss hold us to very high standards,” she said, adding in a whisper that Communications could be considered very loosey-goosey. Once I had the chance to interact with some of those characters in advertising, I would see exactly what she meant.
Little did she know how desperately I wanted to find out—not only because Communications probably held the key to any romantic interest I would find at Boorman, but also because the really good jobs came out of that department. As a newcomer, I was assigned the dullest stuff: proofreading patient-information manuals, revising label copy, drafting routine correspondence, and once even editing the CEO’s barf-inducing Rotary Club speech. As senior editor, Karen took care of Boorman’s glitzier promotional material, which came out under the aegis of Communications: the advertisements destined to appear on the glossy pages of RN and Lancet and JAMA, and the four-color corporate brochures that showed, on the cover, grains of wheat and multicolored pills and white-coated scientists in face masks contemplating beakers full of urine-color liquid.
Yet Karen was bound, sooner or later, for a maternity leave. Knowing I did not want to spend the rest of my days at Boorman proofreading again and again the phrase CARCINOGENESIS, MUTAGENESIS, AND IMPAIRMENT OF FERTILITY, I made sure I was nice to her—which in the end didn’t prove hard. Although she seemed a little too proud of her degree in French literature from Bryn Mawr—and too eager to introduce me to others as a “Sarah Lawrence graduate”—she gave me a lot of responsibility and tons of praise for catching a couple of my coworkers on some proofreading mistakes. She was the only one in Editorial who stopped to examine the old photo of me and Carol and Mama and Daddy posing in front of church after Easter mass (1968), which I had felt compelled to put on my desk after realizing it was practically de rigueur at Boorman to demonstrate warm feelings toward your family. “Isn’t this sweet,” she said. “But why aren’t your parents smiling?”
I didn’t bother to explain. Instead, the next time I went into her office, I reciprocated by admiring the canned studio portrait Karen displayed of her own engineer husband, who looked handsome enough even though he was posed in front of a navy blue velvet backdrop and the photographer clearly had touched up his teeth.
The artwork Karen had up in her office (representations of snowy New England villages and covered bridges) appalled me, and I hated the way her briefcase and number-two pencils and even one of her Shetland sweaters were monogrammed (as if she were some Alzheimer’s patient in danger of forgetting her name). She also prefaced all of her gossip—and she had a lot of it—with the statement “I don’t want to spread rumors, but …” Yet I had to make friends with someone, and I knew it was more prudent to find that friend further up a notch on the organizational chart than to pal around with the secretary. Of all the women I worked with, Karen had the most in common with me. She alone did not regard her cuticles as an interesting source of conversation. She alone was known to read a good nineteenth-century novel while she ate a too-wholesome bagged lunch at her desk during break. She liked Jane Austen and Henry James and Balzac, and we shared a penchant for the Brontës, although I liked Emily best and she preferred Charlotte (to my mind, for all the wrong reasons). Karen seemed taken aback when I described Jane Eyre as “hot” and very grave indeed when I said I always rooted for Jane to run off with Mr. Rochester to France and become his mistress.
“But if she ran off with him, then we would lose the great moral dilemma of the heroine,” she said.
“We also would lose the proselytizing of her cousin,” I said, because the passages full of Saint John Rivers’s moralizing thrilled me about as much as the chapters on agriculture in Anna Karenina: that is to say, not one bit.
“Saint John does get a bit tedious, doesn’t he,” Karen admitted. “But he’s a necessary part of the plot. Jane has to reconsider her relationship to God and come into financial independence. And Mr. Rochester’s pride has to be taken down a peg before they can have an equal union in the end.”
I shrugged. “Of course, I’m not married,” I said, “and of course, Brontë’s not a true realist, but I don’t think an equal union is possible in this life.”
“Well,” said Karen, “maybe not.” She sighed. “I’ll wait to see how many diapers my husband changes.”
“Let me know,” I said, and we both laughed. The next day she hinted a few times she might like to introduce me to one of her husband’s cousins, and after I kept declining, she finally said, “Just as well. He’s almost forty.”
“Balding?” I asked.
“No, but he does have thick glasses and I know you’re Catholic. I mean: He’s been married before.”
“I don’t do divorced men,” I said.
Karen gave me a tense smile and lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “You know, Lisa, I probably shouldn’t say this, but the word do sometimes has sexual connotations.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks for telling me. I was completely unaware of that.” I glanced at the clock. “So, you think I should skip doing my scheduled lunch with Dr. Schoenbarger?”
“You have another appointment with Dr. Schoenbarger?” Karen’s forehead furrowed. “She’s really taken a shine to you, Lisa.”
Karen looked worried. But she had no reason to be. The stuffy corporate culture of Boorman clearly didn’t hold much promise in the way of any kind of romance—lesbian (should I be so inclined) or straight. To widen my chances of meeting men, I joined a health club and found out, to my dismay, that Friday nights the gym would be populated by me and (as Dodie would put it) every single gee-gee (short for gay guy) who missed the ferry to Fire Island. I sat down at the rowing machine, grabbed the bar that was supposed to simulate an oar, and got to work on my muscles, which already were starting to firm up. The free weights tempted me, but I avoided them with the same kind of care I passed by the Milky Ways and M&M’s. I had inherited my mother’s shorter legs and worse, my father’s upper-body build, which made me look so masculine in a turtleneck I could have supplied the inspiration for a new men’s cologne called Sturdy Sicilian Shoulders. Ringing in my ears was the echo of Dodie’s comment—all butched out with no place to go. I was determined not to bulk up my upper body beyond giving my tits—a satisfying 36C—a little lift.
With a whistle and slow, monotonous chug, t
he train pulled into the station. As I stood up from the bench I spotted Dodie’s essential weekend outfit—black jeans and a deep blue denim shirt—through the grimy window by the door. When he came down the steps, his black leather tote bag (which I hoped contained at least one joint) slung over his shoulder, I thought again about how lucky Dodie was. In the great lottery of looks, he had pulled a winning ticket, at least among the Sicilian subset. Dodie and I both had a smooth, fair complexion, and by some odd genetic fluke we also got brown hair that became slightly brassy in the summertime, not the black hair that thickly covered our parents’ heads. Yet unlike me, Dodie got what we all thought of as a more Northern face: a clean chin and chiseled cheekbones. And so he was better-looking than I was. What’s worse, he was prettier, and that pissed me off.
I greeted him with a kiss. “God, I’ve missed you.”
Dodie hugged me. “Hey, the train really does go beneath Sing Sing.”
“Forget the train,” I said. “Come on, check out my new car.”
“Japanese, I hope.”
“Sayonara, Galaxy Five Hundred,” I said, dismissing with one swoop the car model that both Dodie’s parents and mine had sworn by, even though it had lived up to Ford’s nickname of Fix Or Repair Daily. As we walked along the platform I realized my pride in my Corolla made me too akin for comfort to my father, who often fondly reported the glow he felt when he purchased his first—used—Model T.
The parking lot wasn’t crowded. When we got over to my Toyota, Dodie gave me an appreciative smile. After a moment I saw he had eyes not for my new wheels, but for the inflatable man in the passenger seat.
