by Rita Ciresi
I sneaked into the kitchen, threw on the light, and pulled open the kitchen cabinet. There was a flash of wild eyes, and bare teeth, and black claws, and then the rat dropped the Brillo pad, and I screamed and closed the cabinet. Back in the living room, I took all three volumes of Proust off the floor beside my mattress and then stacked them against the cabinet door.
A month later I landed up in Ossining, away from the scene of my crime, away from the rat and the half-finished second-generation survivor manuscript. I wished I could have left myself—the rotten side of myself—behind too.
Instead, I took her along for the ride to Boorman, and my evil twin threatened to break out right when Karen’s uterus slipped and she had to take to bed to save her baby.
Chapter Four
There’s a Man in the Picture
As if she were the grammar-school nurse about to deliver the infamous “little talk” about the facts of life, Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger herded the editorial staff into the break room, where she announced that Karen would be out of commission for the next four weeks, and perhaps indefinitely. The tight-lipped way Peggy eked out the words placenta previa made it sound as if Karen had contracted crabs or cooties. Her stern look seemed the prelude to her hosing down the rest of us in Editorial with a can of pesticide that would render us all infertile and thus ineligible to take any future maternity leaves.
“This situation is very regrettable,” Peggy said. “I’m sure we all feel for Karen. However, we have deadlines. Important deadlines. Deadlines that Karen also wants you to meet.”
I was sure deadlines were the furthest thing from Karen’s mind. But as if to demonstrate that she and Karen spoke with one voice, Peggy held up her legal pad, where she had recorded careful notes of her conversation with the unfortunate mother-to-be. “Karen wants to remind you that the newsletter is due at the printer next week. The employee-benefits manual needs to be turned around by the end of the month. And there’s the new spinal block.”
Since coming on board, it seemed as if I had heard of nothing but this fabulous injection, which had just cleared the final FDA hurdle and was about to be released onto the market with as much fanfare as a cure for cancer.
“Karen has taken tremendous responsibility for the spinal-block project. Who will volunteer to take her place?”
Summer was up and running. July and August reservations had been made at the Jersey shore. I was the only one in Editorial—other than Karen—who didn’t bolt the moment her digital clock slid onto 5:00. It was no surprise my hand was the first—and the only—one in the air.
Peggy’s curt nod showed she admired any young woman—such as me (or was that I?)—who had nothing better to do with her free time than give her all to Boorman. “Very fine, Ms. Diodetto. Mr. Strauss said if you didn’t volunteer for the spinal block, to go ahead and give it to you anyway.”
I shifted the position of my rump—which suddenly felt sore and uncomfortable—in my chair. I noticed that several of my coworkers smirked at the very idea of Mr. Strauss—or, rather, the good Doctor herself—administering an anesthetic into my gluteus maximus.
Peggy cleared her throat. “Mr. Strauss really should be here having this conversation with you—”
More smiles, as we all thought of Mr. Strauss giving us a frank talk about placental abruption.
“—but he’s out of town and will call you with the details. You can work out the overtime with Human Resources.”
Dr. Schoenbarger then gave us a speech about the need to keep up standards in Karen’s absence. She said she was a busy woman and so was Mr. Strauss (here she provoked an audible snicker). “Neither one of us has much time to keep our eyes on you,” she said. “We trust you to run a tight ship here and conduct yourselves like professionals.”
We gave her our solemn word we would do just that. Then the moment she left the break room, we sent the secretary out to Dunkin’ Donuts and fired up Mr. Coffee.
A half hour later (our eyes on the glass door to make sure Peggy didn’t swing back to deliver a few more words on the dangers of employing women of childbearing age), we reconvened over mocha java and two dozen glazed and frosted crullers. We did a lot of tut—tutting over Karen and her baby before the married women predictably began to swap stories of failed pregnancies and gruesome labors and deliveries. Another single woman thankfully cut them off by asking, “Are you nuts, Lisa?”
“How so?” I asked, washing down a mouthful of cream puff with black coffee.
“Doctor Peggy is such an I-don’t-know-what. You need to have your head examined, volunteering to work closer with her.”
“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “Karen gets along with her all right.”
“She’s a roaring bitch.”
“And Mr. Strauss is no dream boss either,” someone else added.
“He seems nice enough,” I ventured.
“Compared to the Doctor.”
“He’s worse than she is.”
“So fussy.”
“A perfectionist.”
“Totally uptight.”
“You don’t do something once for him, you do it five times.”
“At least he says please.”
“The Doctor never says please.”
Giddy on sugar and caffeine, I let down my guard. “That’s true,” I said. “When I first met her, the Doctor said, Greetings.”
They burst into laughter. “Do it again, Lisa.”
“Greetings,” I repeated in Peggy’s low voice, and with that single word I established myself as one of the girls.
Their advice then flew fast and thick:
“Listen, Lisa, we didn’t want to tell you since you were in so good with Karen, but the further you stay away from the big guys, the better.”
“That’s not true. When you’re putting together the newsletter, interview the CEO at every chance you get.”
“Watch out for those guys in the ad room.”
“Wear short skirts when you go in there.”
“And definitely wear a pantsuit when you have a meeting with Peggy—”
“—Mr. Strauss might like that too—”
“Go on. You think he’s—”
“He isn’t married.”
“So what?”
“Well, it’s just a feeling; don’t you sometimes have that feeling?”
Opinion seemed divided on the subject, but I wasn’t able to hear the full extent of the debate, because my office phone was ringing. It was Karen.
“I just stepped away from my desk,” I said, carefully enunciating my words to disguise the sound of the last bite of doughnut going down my throat. “How are you?”
Karen was upset from her encounter with Peggy and anxious about her ability to still supervise us from her bed. She asked me to take out a pencil so she could give me a long list of tasks to accomplish. If I felt uncomfortable about using her misfortune to muscle in, prematurely, on her position—and I did—she took my guilt away by saying, “Thank God you’re there, Lisa—otherwise the work wouldn’t get done half as well and Dr. Schoenbarger would get even more bent out of shape.”
“What did she say to you?” I asked.
“It was more what she didn’t say. She only once said she was sorry. Mr. Strauss sent me flowers—I mean, and he’s even out of town—but she did nothing but grill me about my medical condition for half an hour.”
“Maybe she has a scientific interest in your condition.”
“Maybe she’s got a grudge against me because I’m pregnant.” Karen paused. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—I don’t want to spread rumors, but …”
I rolled my eyes and waited.
Karen lowered her voice as if she were in the office right next to me instead of five miles away on the phone. “Well. Lisa. Dr. Schoenbarger lives with another woman—”
No! I felt like answering. I’m shocked beyond belief.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, holding the phone away from my ear and sticking
my tongue out at Karen through the receiver.
“—and I happen to know—from a friend who volunteers at Catholic Charities—that she and this woman friend of hers have been trying to adopt a child from Central America.” Karen raised her voice back up again. “I’m sorry. I just can’t imagine Dr. Schoenbarger a mother. She doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body.”
“I wouldn’t totally agree with that,” I said. “Sometimes she treats me—and even Mr. Strauss—like a kid.”
Peggy Schoenbarger’s motherly instincts first came to my attention when she silently conveyed her disapproval of my wardrobe and were further confirmed when she took me up on my offer of help with her correspondence. As we sat at her conference table hashing out the wording of some form letters, I decided she was less interested in chastising me than in gently converting me—if not over to true feminism (whatever that was) then at least over to below-knee-length skirts. Her inordinate interest in how I was getting along at Boorman seemed to signal that she was ready to take me under her wing—a position that Mr. Strauss also curiously seemed to hold, as was illustrated when he strode right into her office and got stopped (by one of her forbidding looks) halfway across the carpet.
“I thought you were out. Excuse me for interrupting.” He pointed to her desk. “May I pick up something here—”
“Yes, you may,” Peggy told him. He went over to the desk, ignoring me completely. I wasn’t wearing the recommended pantsuit for my meeting with Peggy, and the way I sat—sideways at the table—probably displayed too much of my legs for his prudish taste.
“He does know how to knock,” Dr. Schoenbarger told me.
“You have me well trained, Peg,” he said.
“Now I’ll have to get to work on some others. Who shall remain nameless.” She shuffled the papers in front of her and made a few vague comments about the need to promote more women within the ranks of Boorman. “What were your grades in science, Ms. Diodetto?” she asked, perhaps hoping she could send me back to night school to produce the next Madame Curie.
“Must I admit to them?” I asked, trying hard not to look at a certain section of Eben Strauss’s anatomy—i.e., his admirable butt—as he leaned slightly over a pile of file folders.
“Very well. Grammar is a science too. Now, about this letter: Isn’t there any more enlightened way to open than Dear Sir or Madam?”
“It’s antiquated,” I said, “but that’s still the accepted way.”
“Does a woman—of your generation—like being called Madam?”
“Well. No. It makes me feel like I’m in a brothel.”
Some of the gray hair on her forehead stiffened, and I rushed in to say, “But I guess most men don’t mind that opening. The Sir part, at least.”
“Do they, Eben?” Peggy asked.
“Pardon me?” he said, although I was quite sure he’d been listening—and even smiled when I said brothel
“Mind Dear Sir as the opening of a letter?”
“Why don’t you try To Whom It May Concern?”
“That’s very cold—”
“It’s not a love letter, I take it?”
“—to the point of being rude.”
“But it’s gender nonspecific, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“What are you looking for?” she asked him impatiently—because he was taking an awfully long time to find what he needed on her remarkably clean desk.
He held up a red file folder and smiled. “Did you ask Ms. Diodetto if golf is her game?”
“All in due time.”
Then they both turned and gave me the once-over, as if trying to assess how fine a figure I would cut on the golf course—and I sat there like a living specimen of the kind of woman who infinitely preferred heels to cleats.
After I related an (edited) version of that scene to Karen, she admitted, “Dr. Schoenbarger and Mr. Strauss do have a tight relationship. Personally, I think it’s a very odd relationship.”
I waited for her to breathlessly confide in me, I don’t want to spread rumors, but … Dr. Schoenbarger gave birth to Mr. Strauss through artificial insemination long before the process was even invented!
“Maybe she always wanted to have a son,” Karen said. “And I am sorry she couldn’t get that girl to adopt from Central America. But I didn’t ask for this to happen to me. I fully expected to work up to the ninth month—” Karen started to cry. “Oh, Lisa! Can you bring me my Rolodex on your way home from work?”
“Give me your address,” I said, “and I’ll even bring you some leftover doughnuts.”
“Doughnuts?” Karen asked, her voice fraught with dismay.
I got off the phone in a hurry.
Right after this I got a call from the printer. Then yet a third call came, from Cleveland: Mr. Eben Strauss, his voice half drowned out by the bustle of a crowd and airline gates being announced.
“Your line has been busy,” he said. “I’m in a hurry, but I want you to call Karen—”
“I just spoke to Karen.”
“Oh. How is she? This is unfortunate. She really wanted this baby.”
“She hasn’t lost it.”
“But to be confined to bed—like an invalid—” He cleared his throat. “I hope you won’t mind calling her back and asking her, please, where she is with the spec sheets and the brochures on the spinal block.”
“I’m already on the spec sheets—”
“Could you speak up? I can hardly—”
My voice always sounded rude when I raised it. “I’m already doing them,” I loudly said, and added, “sir.”
“And the ads? We’ll need the ads. I’m concerned about the ads—”
“Relax,” I said. “Trust me.”
My comment—clearly inappropriate from his point of view—was greeted with a silence so long I heard this complete announcement in the background: Final call for Flight 4298 to Peoria. All ticketed passengers should now be on board. I wished I were on that plane, with a big stiff drink in my hand. I wished I didn’t have such problems, all the time, with authority.
I charged back in to set the situation right. “What I meant to say was, I hope you’ll trust me to take care of it.”
After he coolly assured me that was his plan, I hung up the phone, unable to determine whether I was more pissed at myself for calling him sir or for telling him to chill out and relax.
Two days later Karen’s ob/gyn ordered her onto complete bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy, and although I didn’t get her title or her office, I got all her responsibilities—plus a substantial raise, which took some of the sting out of picking up her work load and helping to cover for the women on vacation. During the two weeks that followed, I stayed late to take care of the spec sheets and the physician-information brochures and the ads for that spinal-block project and sometimes didn’t get to the gym until 8:00 P.M.—mainly because I didn’t have a computer at home, and I was determined to type up the few scribbled notes I’d made on Stop It Some More. When I returned to my apartment, I flopped my sweaty body onto the couch and cracked open a bag of popcorn and my latest library book—that is, until my extracurricular activities took on a more interesting light. Then my whole life seemed to revolve around not letting anyone suspect my social scene had changed for the better.
Although I dropped a few coy hints to Dodie (who also had taken up with a mysterious partner), I couldn’t talk about my new romantic interest to anyone, beyond casually alluding to his existence in the Bloomingdale’s dressing room when a helpful saleswoman wanted to know if I was updating my wardrobe because of a career change. I nodded. “There’s also a man in the picture,” I said, looking over my shoulder into the three-way mirror to check out the panty-line situation on the skirt.
She congratulated me on achieving success at both work and play, little suspecting that if I didn’t handle myself just right, I’d lose at both of them. I knew the rules. Karen had forewarned me of the rules: that those in my lowly position should not
mix with management, except through occasional phone calls to the higher-ups to confirm some tidbit of news that was going to run in our internal house organ, a sickeningly upbeat monthly newsletter I edited called The Grapevine, in which we reported births, weddings, new policies on smoking and trash collection, who won the local quilting contest, which VP got another wood and brass plaque from the Rotary Club, and the standing of our corporate baseball, basketball, and bowling leagues.
On my computer I had written a hilarious (at least to my mind) send-up of the text of this newsletter, which I had the bad judgment to share with a few other girls in the office. Instead of The Grapevine, my banner read Face Crime! My articles reported that the CEO was parked in a drying-out facility, the staff social worker was arrested for pedophilia, the head of the chemical plant was a confirmed dope addict, and our trustworthy custodians made up for their lousy salaries by filching number-two pencils and ludes from the lab. My headlines proclaimed: DRUG ABUSE RAMPANT IN THE INNER CIRCLE and SECRETARIES QUERY TOP EXECS: WHY DO OUR DRINKING FOUNTAINS TASTE LIKE BONG WATER?
Needless to say, I did not share this choice document with Karen, whom I visited at her home from time to time and with whom I kept up the most professional of demeanors—knowing, of course, that her good recommendation was crucial to my moving my stapler and paper-clip holder into her office for good. After it became clear that this move was in the cards, I rued ever having composed Face Crime!, because I was afraid my coworkers, jealous of my power, would use this lapse of judgment to sabotage me.
But I had a way of handing the enemy more than enough ammunition to blast me out of the water. Why else did I become Boorman’s equivalent of a high-school hussy, who could have been framed by one of the very second—coming headlines I had so delighted in composing on my computer: EDITOR SEDUCES RELUCTANT VEEP!
I fell in love—the only way to do it, madly—with a man I was careful to describe to Karen as a stuffed shirt.
His name was Eben Strauss.
Strauss and I got off to a rocky start. He was out of town when I first began work on the spinal-block material, and we communicated mostly through pink while-you-were-out messages: 3:00 P.M. Mr. Strauss. Wants to know where you’re at with the JAMA ad, leave message with his secretary. 11:15. Mr. Strauss. Call printer and up number of brochures by 3,000. When he came back to the office, he visited Editorial—unannounced—to inspect our project log. More than once I had to leap up from my chair and plant myself in front of my noisy dot-matrix printer, where the latest draft of Stop It Some More was pounding hot off the press. Plenty of Boorman’s literature referred—in frank detail—to male and female body parts, but I was sure he’d think something was amiss if his eyes fixed upon a manuscript containing the words luscious tush and stiff, saluting prick.
