Ruth dug money from her purse for the coffee they’d finished long before and said, “That might have been more of a story than you wanted, and I don’t know if it helps, but it sure was fun to relive.”
“Thank you so-so much. It’s so not what I expected and so something I want to think about. Because you hear all these stories like ‘I knew the second I met him that I’d be with him for the rest of my life’ and you wonder if it’s bull or if there’s just maybe another way it could go. Oops there’s my bus. Do you mind if I run?”
“Run, run, run. It’s fine.”
Funny how things turn out, Ruth thought. The white-hot friendship with Vivian couldn’t be transplanted from one place to another. But the friendship with David had blossomed.
When they’d first become lovers, she’d thought they’d wasted a lot of time in Africa. But later on, after several couple-friends’ mad infatuation subsided, only to reveal they didn’t much like each other, she thought maybe it was better their way. The friendship part is harder. Better to get that under their belts, so to speak, before passion muddies the waters. Because when they did become passionate, friendship definitely took a back seat.
Was it the same with her work? Did she need to like Mimosa more before she could love Violins & Wine? Was it that her revolutionary idea was only good in the context of Mimosa because the cold hard truth was that it was just less phony than its surroundings?
Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe middle age is just the time when it’s not reasonable to expect that kind of passion from work. Is it time to give up and grow up?
CHAPTER 11
Old Is New
RUTH AWOKE SUDDENLY, with pounding heart and sweaty body. Since the start of her hormonal seesaw, she’d sometimes awakened like this three or four times a night. Falling asleep afterwards was always an ordeal; thank goodness it was morning.
She sat up in bed, listening. The hum of the furnace reminded her of the sound of rushing water in her dream. She pieced it together.
The dam had burst at its base, with a hole like a seven-year old’s missing tooth. The hoarded water crashed through the gap to the other side, where the red clay gladly soaked it up. No longer two of the four elements, dry earth plus water, they became a new element, a different kind of earth. It was moist, redolent, contented.
Miraculously, the walkway above the dam remained intact. Ruth walked across from south to north, chatting with her mother Helen about all the things they’d never really discussed while Helen was alive. They strolled arm-in-arm, speaking fluidly. Her mother, a child of the depression, told how she’d learned to grit her teeth and do what needed to be done. Ruth, a child of the sixties, had tried to feel comfortable with herself. They could barely hear each other over the roar of crashing water on their right, but the spray on their faces, the sunlight, the joy of emotional connection more than made up for whatever fragments they missed. Helen brought out a scrapbook of Ruth’s childhood artwork that neither had seen for many years. They oohed and aahed; they were struck by its freedom and artistry.
The dream images evoked nameless feelings that flitted around her head and shoulders like a persistent mosquito while she tried in vain to catch them. They were there as she showered, dressed, inhaled coffee, kissed David good-bye, and headed to the bus station in her workhorse of a commuter’s car.
The most unsettling dream element was the conversation. It kept drawing her attention against her will, like a car accident along the road. In real life, their conversations had always been transactional, centering on recipes or travel schedules or Josh’s grades. Through them all, Ruth would try, usually unsuccessfully, to stifle her bratty annoyance.
“Ruth, darling, is Josh happy about getting into Cornell?”
“Of course, mom. Why else would he have applied.”
“Harry’s niece went there too, you know.”
“I know. Because you’ve told me 100 times.”
She wondered if the dream related to her mysterious emotional distance from her product line idea. She stowed the dream images on her growing list of things to think about later, and began her daily trek via the bus to the Port Authority Terminal, the cross-town subway to the East Side, and the five-block walk uptown.
SHE’D RESERVED the eighteenth floor conference room, alerted her team to devote the entire day to a meeting about a new project, arranged for lunch to be brought in, asked Terry to join them at two o’clock and Roger at three o’clock. Her objective—at least the one for public consumption—was to make substantive progress; what she really wanted was to pump herself up or, at least, prime the pump.
Gathering the things she needed from her office, she saw a group of people had closed off half the width of forty-seventh street between Lexington and Third. They erected tables, tents, signs and assorted booths on the now-pedestrian-only street. They must be setting up for a street fair. A mini-street fair, she thought. Lucky them; unusual for mid-town; unusual for mid-week. Inexplicably, she thought of the dam.
In the conference room, everything was ready. Colleen would hold everyone’s calls. It almost felt like summer-camp. This was exciting. Finally, she thought.
Ruth announced they’d be starting the meeting with a game. They needed to approach today’s subject with a fresh point of view and the game was a kind of warm-up.
Each person had to say three things about herself or himself that no one else in the room knew. Two of the details should be true, one a lie. The others had to guess the lie.
“But Tom has quite a significant advantage over us.” Pat’s voice was close to a whine. “His tenure here has been rather short, so we don’t know much about him.”
“Hey, Pat, it’s only a game. Besides,” Tom added, “I may have an advantage in terms of my lie, but I’m at a disadvantage for yours.”
“We’ll do this quickly,” Ruth said. “I’ll go first.” She rattled off her details. In fourth grade, she’d purposely hung out with stupid kids so she’d feel smart. In high school, she was the third runner-up in the Miss Bronx Teenager contest. She’d once slept in the same bed Tom Cruise had slept in.
“Who’s next?”
“I’ll go,” Judy said, who was more dressed up than usual in a black suit. She hooked the metal clip of her pen on the cardboard back of her pad, then balanced it on her lap as she slipped one hand under each thigh. Leaning forward, she listed her details, a bit more slowly than Ruth had.
“One, the woman I call my mother is really my aunt.” She brought her hands out of their hiding places and used them to hook her dark brown hair behind her ears, then folded them on her pad.
“Two, yesterday on the subway home I saw Woody Allen. Three, I broke the same bone in my body two times, about a year apart.” She swayed from side to side in her seat with pleasure. “I’m done.”
Tom brushed back the hair that had fallen in his eyes and avoided eye contact, focusing on the center of the circle. He used to stutter. He was dating his older brother’s ex-girlfriend. He was the anchor on his university’s four-man one-mile relay. “Next?”
Pat pulled her expensive brown silk sleeves down to her wrists and said, in a monotone, with no introduction, “Once on a vacation in Indonesia, I came close to marrying someone to help him in his quest for an American green card. Yesterday I was in Saks and I paid with a twenty-dollar bill but received change for a hundred. When I was a youngster, I had a pet boa constrictor.”
They wrote their guesses, then secrets were revealed—Ruth never entered the Miss Bronx Teenager contest, Tom never stuttered, Judy didn’t spot Woody Allen, and Pat never almost-married anyone. Points were scored for correct guessing and also for fooling the others.
“Nice going, Tom. Lunch on me, anywhere you want within ten blocks. We’re all warmed up now, able to look at familiar things with fresh eyes, so let’s get started. Today we’re going to brainstorm the word “old.” What it means, what it evokes, what it implies, anything at all.” She turned to a page on the flip chart with the
single word “old.”
Ruth had allotted forty minutes for brainstorming. Wanting to get at the thoughts that were deeply buried, she reminded the team not to comment on or criticize any of the ideas until the end, and to wait out the silences.
Sure enough, the words, as well as the ideas they reflected, had gone from the predictable—”granny,” “wrinkled,” “prune,” “dry,” “boring,” “weak,” “sick,” “death”—to realms that surprised even those from whose mouths the words came. Like “pearl,” “pinnacle,” “accepting,” “diamond,” “sparkling,” “Aunt Sylvia,” “valuable,” “loving,” “perspective,” and even “beautiful.”
At the end, breathless with mental exertion and discovery, Tom said he was amazed to find the ideas, or maybe values, he’d always carried without his knowing they were there. Judy agreed.
“Now let’s take it a little further,” Ruth said.
For the next two hours, the group delved into some of the ideas they’d generated. They wrote stories about imaginary older women, some beautiful, some not. They clipped pictures from magazines, sorted them into categories and compared results with each other. They tried to match the others’ verbal descriptions with their clipped pictures.
Then they broke for lunch. Colleen brought in the caterers who’d been waiting outside, and Ruth took down the flip chart sheets containing the brainstorming results, the pictures and the descriptions. She rolled them together, rubber-banded them, and stashed them in the corner.
While putting together their salads and sandwiches, they returned to the game they’d played, diving into the details of the “truths” and “lies” as Ruth had hoped they would. She revealed that David’s cousin was a movie director and, when they’d once stayed in his guesthouse in Hollywood, they’d found out afterwards who had preceded them. Tom was somewhat reticent about his juiciest tidbit, the older brother’s ex-girlfriend, saying only that she was someone he’d known a long time and that his brother wasn’t upset by the new constellation.
Judy spoke of her aunt-mother and uncle-father matter-of-factly. “It’s no big deal, really. My mom died in childbirth and my father couldn’t handle it, so he ‘gave’ me to my mother’s sister and her husband, who had been unable to have their own children. My father died about a year afterwards, in a car accident. But Diane and Arthur have always been “mom” and “dad” to me, even though they always told me the truth. She asked Pat about Saks.
Pat fussed with her salad fixings, adjusted her ham three times so it was lined up perfectly on the rye bread, and determined that three was the perfect number of ice cubes required by her ginger ale before she finally admitted that she hadn’t returned the excess change to the cashier at Saks. “Don’t be silly. It’s Saks we’re talking about, not a shoe-shine guy. Saks doesn’t need the eighty bucks.”
“But neither do you,” Tom said.
“Don’t pretend you’d have done it any differently,” Pat said, as she changed the subject to the boa constrictor. She was just confessing that it had lasted only one day in the house before her parents made her return it to the pet store, her consolation prize being a horse, when Colleen poked her head in the door.
“I know you said to hold your calls, but Roger said it was really important and you would really, like, want me to disturb you. But then it’s not disturbing, is it? Or is it?”
Ruth heard the gloom in Roger’s gravelly voice immediately. “Look, I hate to break in on your planning session, but we got a problem that won’t wait.”
“What?”
“You know those new high-density plastic bottles we ordered for the ‘Mauve Magic’ Buy-and-Get-a-Bonus samples for the holiday promotion? The ones with the mini-pump?”
“Mm-hmm. New vendor, sexy color, fast delivery, good price.”
“Right. Well, it looks like there ain’t no free lunch after all. We just got a MayDay call from Packaging. The formula is breaking the seal on the pumps. More times than Quality Control allows. They say they could change the pump, but that would mean a different bottle, which means ordering from a whole other vendor, and that means time tick-tockin’ away. Or we could change the formula, and that might do the trick, but the testing would mean great big monster delays. And the posse has to figure out what to do right away, like yesterday. I know if there are delays, yours is one of the asses that will be bit, so I just thought … ”
“When are we meeting?”
“Twenty minutes. Twenty-sixth floor conference room.”
She’d been crazy to think she’d get through the day without an interruption. But it was a good first go-around, she reassured herself, and would provide material for creative thinking about marketing.
She asked Colleen to coordinate everyone’s schedules and reserve a conference room to continue today’s work. As everyone left, she overheard Pat stage-whisper to no one in particular, “Sheesh, I sure hope we don’t have to start with more fun and games.”
CHAPTER 12
Running Into Herself
WHAT A DAY it had been. The dream, the meeting, the pow-wow with Roger. And then, as if that weren’t enough, just before she left for the day, Colleen told her about a disturbing conversation with Jeremy. He’d been slumming on the eighteenth floor while Ruth had been up with Roger. He’d said one of the ways new management would be cutting costs was through secretary-sharing.
“He said he was sure I must have, like, heard about it through the secretary grapevine. He made like it was no big deal.”
Then he gave her a list of five people she could choose to work for, in addition to Ruth. Because of Ruth’s seniority, he was giving her first choice. And he’d try to limit her to two people instead of the usual three, but he couldn’t guarantee it.
She needed to tell him her preferences within two weeks, though the changes wouldn’t go into effect immediately.
“The thing of it is, I’ve asked some of the other girls, you know, my friends, and no one’s heard anything like this from Jeremy. Or anyone else, neither. So it’s not really a company-wide policy, right? Is he punishing me? Or, did you … you know … like, complain about me? It’s not about my messy desk, right?”
Ruth was so tired, her anger could only energize the major bones in her body, though she breathed a little faster and shallower at the audacious power-play. A school-yard bully ploy. He didn’t even try to disguise it by doing the same with some of the other secretaries. She explained that it wasn’t about Colleen at all, it was about her. He was trying to squeeze her. First he eliminated the charity events, now he was trying to eliminate half of Colleen.
“But what should I do? Maybe I should change companies because these big daddies are so really annoying and part of me so wouldn’t mind. I’d miss you like crazy, but still. But would that hurt your, you know, prestige-stuff more? If I left?”
Ruth said she’d think about what would be the best move and get back to her. She knew that right now, though, thinking about anything having to do with work was what she was trying not to do.
When she finally left, she forced herself not to march or stride, tried to stroll. Half-way down forty-seventh street a mime from the street fair appeared beside her. She hated mimes and the way they imitated you with annoyingly relentless cheer; they were like a piece of toilet paper you couldn’t unstick from your shoe.
This one didn’t have a white-painted face or a suspendered black jumpsuit and she didn’t do rubbery-body mime routines. She was dressed like a French café-singer with black beret, dark red lipstick, and dangling cigarette. She played Edith Piaf’s “Je Ne Regrette Rien” on her accordion as she shadowed Ruth.
The mime removed her hands from her accordion and dramatically adjusted her beret, tucking in a wisp of dark black hair and ensuring the angle was just right. But the accordion’s bellows kept opening and closing, the keys depressed themselves, the music continued.
Even Ruth was impressed. I’ve heard of player-pianos, she thought, but never a player-accordion. As others gathere
d to watch, Ruth saw the mime’s face mirror the surprise on her own. Finding herself publicly mimicked, she shifted her face into neutral, or so she thought. The mime’s face changed, too, with prominently contracted eyebrows creating a washboard in her forehead and a tight stern mouth holding her cigarette. A child commented to his mother on how “the lady was making the same face as the other lady.”
Is that me, she thought? Fierce? Angry?
Her surprise appeared on her face, then on the mime’s, so she tried even harder for facial neutrality, and saw another angry-lady imitation. They became like a pair of face-to-face mirrors generating an endless series of reflections. Ruth finally escaped by dumping a few coins in the mime’s basket.
As if to spite someone—herself or the mime?—she marched over to the fair, determined to be carefree. Tonight was the meeting at which David was submitting his official request for early retirement. The thirty days weren’t even up, but he thought it wasn’t fair to the administration to make them wait since he knew he’d be taking the deal. She was in no hurry to get home and talk about it. Unless he’d changed his mind.
She meandered over to a “Do It Yourself Mask” table sponsored by the mid-town homeless shelter and did it herself, painting and decorating a mask that covered the top half of her face. She chose a hot dog and ear of corn from a vendor and congratulated herself on making a spontaneous choice. No pros and cons.
It came to her that she would choose a new bottle and pump from her ace-in-the-hole vendor—reliable, speedy, expensive—for the leaky seals. Time was, as Roger put it, “tick-tocking away” and she’d take budget flak instead of schedule flak. Mauve Magic would be only a little late and more than a little expensive but totally safe. She’d make up some of the budget bulge with her other Buy-and-Get-a-Bonus program, the “Color Me Beautiful” line.
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