Next to Ashley I felt positively matronly in my khaki skirt, white T-shirt, and black cotton blazer. I used to wear conservative suits before I made partner, or dresses with jackets or sweaters, but after I felt secure I relaxed a little and experimented with different looks. I still remembered the liberating day in August a few years before when I decided to stop wearing stockings altogether. The firm didn’t have a dress code, but there were unwritten rules that everyone was expected to follow. The men wore dark suits, both in summer and winter, but they took off their jackets and loosened their ties as the day wore on. Nonattorney men dressed more casually, in pants, button-down shirts, and ties. As for the women, there was a marked difference in how the attorneys and support staff dressed. The lawyers were expected to wear suits or dresses with jackets, stockings, and heels. The staff had a lot more latitude. In the years that I’d been with the firm, no female attorney had ever showed up for work in pants, or simply a skirt and blouse, but the staff could do so. The rules were bent out of shape for Ashley, of course. She could wear whatever she wanted, as long as she wasn’t naked.
I was the only female partner at Weber, Miranda, and I set the precedent for what was sartorially acceptable—although I knew enough to tread lightly about making any major alterations in what was conventionally acceptable. I tested the waters by chucking my stockings, and experienced no major repercussions. I was biding my time before the next step—going without a jacket on the days when I wasn’t meeting with a client. I didn’t want to show up in a sweat suit, but I liked to be comfortable.
No matter what anyone said about sexual equality, the playing field wasn’t level in the legal community, and I had to watch my step carefully in everything I did. I always worried about my actions backfiring, and doors closing without explanation. I was a full partner in my firm, but I was a woman who practiced immigration law. I was a low-priority player, and not in a position of real power. I wasn’t a high-visibility rainmaker. My position might have seemed secure, but I was always aware of its limits.
Weber, Miranda still adhered to the principles of the old boys’ network—all it took was one look at the office layout to know that was true. Our offices occupied the top three floors of the First Dade Corporation building, with the twelve partners and their personal secretaries on the penthouse floor. The offices of the other attorneys and their secretaries—which they shared—were on the floor beneath. Support staff, clerks, bookkeepers, and paralegals were on the lowest floor. All three stories were connected by spiral staircases, but no one visited the other floors much unless they had specific business. No one went up to the penthouse floor unless specifically invited by one of the partners. Until I was made partner, my office was on the middle floor. I had been a lot more at home there, and felt a lot more camaraderie than I did with the partners. But there was no choice—when you’re made partner, you come upstairs.
I moved past the cloud of Ashley’s perfume in the reception area with a smile and a wave. My worries about my professional life were a welcome distraction from thinking about Luther every waking moment. Even the feel of my shoes on the padded carpet transported me to a major part of my life that I had recently forgotten. Now that I was back, I needed to think about whether I was going to stay there. Working part time wasn’t an option. My choice was plain: quit, or resume working the same grueling hours as everyone else at the firm. Weber, Miranda didn’t believe in of counsel positions, or any halfhearted solutions. In the life of the firm, five partners had either died or retired; as soon as they did, their names were removed from the letterhead. Sentiment didn’t carry much weight at a powerful law firm. If you didn’t heap up billable hours, then you weren’t a player. Death was no excuse for failing to generate revenue. It was a tough philosophy, but one that I knew about and accepted before I joined the firm as an associate after law school.
I knew that I was living under a microscope. Once there were other female partners in the firm—whenever that happened—the old male partners would get used to them, and the climate would change. But for now, I was the only one. I had to be purer than Caesar’s wife. And, although partners were ostensibly permitted a year’s leave of absence from the firm, no one had ever used the time before for personal reasons—those who had taken leave had gone into some government post, or taught at a university somewhere for a year. I was the first to take leave to be with my family, and I had held out as long as I possibly could before filling out the paperwork for the year off.
Now, after about ten months, I saw that I was no longer as much a force in the firm as I had once been. Everyone knew that I was a mother and, partner or not, they suspected that at some point I would be derailed from becoming managing partner. I was on the mommy track, the road to powerlessness and oblivion. Taking leave had done nothing but solidify this impression.
If I left the firm, I knew, the chances of another woman being made partner would be set back for years. The firm had been around for sixty years, and no male partner had ever left his job for personal reasons. The excuse sounded wimpy even to me—it was as though I couldn’t deal with my life outside the office, and needed to drop my responsibilities in order to cope. It was called real time, and everyone knew what it meant: billable hours, the bottom-line reality that affected everyone in the firm.
I really did feel a sense of responsibility about the sort of legacy I would leave at the firm if I did, in fact, resign. I knew that my partners viewed me as a living example of their keeping up with the times, and ostensibly abolishing the glass ceiling that had traditionally kept women from climbing to the top in law firms and other high-powered businesses. If I quit, they would feel less pressure to make another woman partner. They would be off the hook, able to point to me as an example of how they had tried to cultivate a female partner only to see her resign to stay home with her kids.
The phone rang, and Ashley scampered back to her desk. I knew I had unnerved her a little bit by trying to walk across the reception area without saying a word. I had a lot on my mind, but Ashley wasn’t used to being ignored; she gave me a little wave as she pressed the speaker-phone button with a pencil, her usual means of answering calls. I heard the pencil clacking on the phone and hoped she was successful in patching the call through—her usual success rate was about fifty percent.
The reception area was truly beautiful, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls and a view of Biscayne Bay and Key Biscayne to the east, and Coconut Grove and Coral Gables to the south. The only furniture were two dark brown leather couches separated by a simple square-cut glass table bearing an always-fresh arrangement of tropical flowers. The lighting came from hidden, strategically placed high hats in the ceiling. It had taken a lot of billable hours to make such a room.
But it was for guests, not me. I took a deep breath.
I walked to the big wooden door that led to the partners’ offices, then punched in my four-digit access code on the pad next to the door. I heard a soft click, and realized that I was relieved my code still worked.
I was in my office in seconds. I closed the door behind me. I was in my second home—although sometimes in the past it had felt like my first, with all the time I spent there. The thing was, I had liked it. And I had missed it.
[16]
There was a big pile of papers and mail on my desk, but I paused in the middle of the room. I had to reacquaint myself with the place. After a couple of weeks away, it was almost as though I had never seen my office before.
It wasn’t an overwhelmingly feminine space, but any astute observer would figure out quickly that it was a woman’s office. Instead of hanging pictures or prints on the walls, I had opted for framed charts of Cuba and the waters around it. On the west wall was a big square map of Havana, my favorite. I had learned the hard way that trees didn’t flourish in my office—either because of sharing breathing space with a lawyer, or because I had drowned them with too much water and fertilizer. So I had wrangled funds from a friend in the accounting department and investe
d in four tall, artificial royal palm trees to place in each corner of the room. The trees looked pretty real in the soft light—so much that more than one visitor had asked how I managed to keep them looking so healthy indoors. So many palms had died on me in the past that I didn’t even go near them in garden stores. I was convinced that my very presence caused them to wither and die.
Accounting had granted me a budget to furnish the office, and I had bought an antique wooden desk, a credenza, and a dark-green-leather chair. For a while I haunted auction houses on the weekends, and I found two sleek, tall polished-silver lamps with sea-foam-green linen shades for my desk. I also spotted a silver upright lamp, then found a shade that matched the others, so all three seemed like a set. Across from my desk I placed two oversize, too-comfortable armchairs I’d had upholstered in a green-and-white checked pattern. It took a while, but I had gotten the office where I wanted it—comfortable, but formal and professional, the kind of place where I could get work done and feel at home. It might have seemed excessive to spend so much energy and money furnishing an office, but it wasn’t when I considered how much time I spent there. I also had to make sure the room projected the image of a serious player—in the testosterone-drenched environment of the partners’ floor, little signals meant a lot.
My eyes finally landed on the huge pile of documents awaiting me. I had put my purse down on my chair when my cell phone rang. I looked at its screen and saw that it was Luther. What timing. I let it ring twice more before answering.
“Daisy, it’s so good to hear your voice,” Luther said. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything. I just needed to know how you’re doing.”
“You’re not interrupting anything,” I said. Then, without even thinking, I added, “I wanted to hear your voice, too.”
“Really?” Luther asked, every bit the eager schoolboy. I felt a smile cross my lips and my heart beating fast. I might as well have been back in junior high.
“I’m at the office, I just got here,” I said, starting to unconsciously sort through the mail and files on my desk. “I’ve got a truly frightening pile of work to catch up on.”
“So you’re downtown,” Luther said. “I’m at the office, too. You know, I’m only a couple of blocks away. Want to get together?”
I looked at my watch. Two o’clock. I had planned to spend at least two hours in the office, opening mail, visiting with the staff, checking in with my partners.
That was what I had planned to do.
“Sure,” I said, grabbing my purse.
We agreed to meet for a late lunch at Bice, an Italian restaurant in the Grand Bay Hotel, in a half hour. I knew it was a place that Ariel would never patronize—he seldom went out for lunch, unless one of his clients insisted, and then he only went to the Cuban place across the street from his office. To him, spending an hour or two on lunch was a waste of time, an indulgence eating up billable hours. Unless, of course, he could add the time to the client’s bill.
I walked to the door, thinking that I was just going out for an hour or so, and that I could come back after lunch. I knew, though, that this was probably an unlikely scenario. In Cuban Miami, there was no such thing as a one-hour lunch—Ariel excepted.
I had just started to turn the knob when there was a familiar soft knocking on the door. I sighed, realizing that this wasn’t going to be a quick, clean getaway. The door opened, and I knew I was going to be late to lunch with Luther.
“Maria,” I said with a smile, thinking up some story to tell my secretary about why I had to leave.
Maria and I got along very well and, perhaps most important, we really liked each other—which wasn’t always the case in the pressure-filled atmosphere of a high-powered law firm. We worked well together and respected one another, and under normal circumstances I would have been happy to spend time with her. But this wasn’t an ordinary day, as I knew that Maria would be perplexed by my leaving right after I arrived.
She called me at home every couple of days, asking when I was next planning to come to the office. There were a lot of matters that needed my attention, she said. I knew that Maria was perfectly capable of taking care of some of my business on her own, or by consulting with one of the other attorneys or paralegals. The majority of my case work, though, required my personal attention. Judging from the pile on my desk, she had made sure she was ready for me.
Maria was a wife and a mother herself, so she outwardly understood and supported my leave of absence. We had never really talked about it, but she knew that I took the leave because the number of hours I had been working had stretched me close to the breaking point. She also knew that, as a Latina woman, I had to work longer and harder than my partners. I had the added pressure of being a wife and mother, though, while the male partners all had stay-at-home wives who organized their lives and took care of their children. I didn’t resent this disparity—it was the price of admission for playing in the big leagues—but it took a toll on me. I knew that pioneers always paid a price for their accomplishments, and as a woman and a Latina I had double pressure to be a model minority. The inescapable reality, though, was that in order to preserve my marriage and health—and to see Marti during the daylight hours—I had needed time away.
Maria was a mother hen, always cautioning me to take care of myself and worrying about me. As much as she supported my decision to take a leave, though, I knew she was inwardly worried about her standing in the firm. Because I was a woman, and because I practiced immigration law, I was perceived as lowest in the hierarchy of partners. Now there was a possibility that she could become a lame duck because of my actions. She knew she wouldn’t be fired, but if I left the firm she would probably be sent back down to the second-floor secretarial pool. Maria was in her late fifties, a few years from retirement, and after spending the last twenty years at the firm she wanted to go out on top—as personal secretary to a partner, and not just one of the dozen or so secretaries on the floor below.
We had never talked about it, but it was clear that Maria’s future at Weber, Miranda was in my hands, therefore that she had a big stake in what I decided to do. Although I had no obligation to come into the office, she prodded me to do so. We had worked together long enough for me to know exactly how her mind worked.
Needless to say, Maria was Cuban.
Maria had figured that she should find a way to produce billable hours despite the fact that her boss was on official leave—if she continued to generate income for the firm, then the partners might recognize her value. Whenever I had showed up at the office during my leave, she’d had work all laid out for me, so I could zip through case files in record time. Then, after I left, she cleaned up the mess, billing out cases and writing up invoices until the next time I returned. I had to approve the bills she sent out and, although I would never admit it, I wasn’t really sure that the hours she billed correctly reflected the amount of time I had worked. As long as the quality of work was high, my partners never asked questions. And, since the clients never complained, I wasn’t about to bring up the subject.
“I heard you were here!” Maria said with true zeal, kissing me quickly on the cheek then pushing past me to get to the desk. She had a foot-high stack of files pressed against her chest.
“Thank God you came in today,” she panted. “There’s so much work we need to do!”
Maria knew of my arrival at the firm within moments. Word traveled fast. Ashley was the only person I had encountered on the way in, but I was sure she had risked her acrylics sending out an e-mail alerting everyone to my presence. I groaned inwardly when I saw Maria busily opening several files and efficiently arranging them on my desk.
“You’re looking great, Maria,” I said, trying to soften her up for the coming blow with an innocent fib. Maria looked the same as ever, in a dark blue shirtwaist dress, black pumps, and her chin-length salt-and-pepper hair pulled back off her face in a severe style. Maria always wore two pairs of glasses, both hanging from gold chains that inevitably go
t tangled—one pair was for reading, the other for distance. I figured that wearing bifocals was a white flag to the aging process that she wasn’t willing to wave.
Her back to me, Maria waved off my compliment. She was busy with the files, which had spread out to cover all the space on my desk.
“Okay, Margarita, I’ve arranged the files in a certain order,” she announced. “This way you can get through them as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
She waved her hand from left to right. “These are urgent, these are important, these are necessary but no rush.” She indicated the last, highest pile. “These you can take home with you. I’ve marked the relevant pages with Post-its, which should make it easier for you.”
Maria had never before prepared files for me to take home, but I decided not to point it out.
I was still standing close to the door, my purse over my shoulder. Maria must have figured that, having just arrived, I hadn’t had time to put it down yet. This made what I had to tell her even more difficult.
“Maria, thanks for doing all this,” I said. “You’ve done a terrific job. It’s really amazing.”
I looked over the neatly stacked documents on my desk with open admiration. Maria’s organizational skills were legendary, but this time she had outdone herself. If she kept it up, I wouldn’t even be needed—an alarming thought.
“Here.” Maria took out a document from the top of the urgent file. She started to explain what it was when I stopped her. Still standing by the door, I spoke as gently as I could.
“I can’t look at that right now,” I said. “I have to go out for a couple of hours.”
A stricken look came over her face. “You’re leaving now?” she said, sputtering. “But there’s so much that needs to be done!”
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