About Face

by Carole Howard

  The moderator summed up and brought the session to a close by focusing the group’s attention on the name of the product line. He presented six options, asked everyone to rank order them with six points for their first choice, five for their second choice, etc. He tallied the results on a large piece of posterboard:

  37: Passion: Loving Who You Really Are

  44: Violins & Wine: For the Woman Who Keeps Getting Better

  46: About Face

  12: Beauty’s Rewards: Getting the Best from Life

  10: Peak: The Best is Yet to Come

  33: Always: Let the Good Times Last

  7: Vintage: The Great Years

  It was over. Ruth, Pat, Sandy, and the moderator gathered to compare their immediate reactions. They all, including Pat, agreed that if there had been a tide-turning, it was definitely in the direction they wanted. Sandy was anxious to look at the videotape to compare body-language with verbal language, and to check the transcripts for further clues, as well as to verify that the moderator hadn’t unwittingly steered the conversation.

  Ruth was pretty sure she’d gotten what she wanted. Riding down in the elevator, she asked Pat for her reaction. “It was interesting,” she said. “I see what you mean about the difference between regular focus groups and other approaches.”

  “Good,” Ruth said. “Surprising,” is what she thought. On the spot, she hatched an idea. “But even so, I’m thinking the handwriting is on the wall. I think this idea—no matter what we call it—might be dead.”

  “What do you mean?”

  They stepped out of the elevator and talked in the lobby.

  “I’ve been thinking that Jeremy really doesn’t like this idea and he is the boss, you know. He comes from another industry, it’s true, but we’ve been bought. Life is different. Besides, he might know better than me. I suppose if the results of this new round of groups were a slam dunk, hundred and ten percent positive, which I doubt, I might change my mind, but … well, I doubt it.”

  CHAPTER 19

  One Hundred Ten Percent

  “COLLEEN, CAN YOU do me a favor?” Ruth stage-whispered as she leaned out of her office towards Colleen’s desk.

  Taking in the detritus of photographs, plants, file folders, figurines, and assorted dime-store accoutrements, she marveled that this seeming chaos was, in fact, more orderly than it used to be.

  Very shortly after Jeremy had arrived, he’d looked askance at Colleen’s desk. Ruth had been surprised at the level of detail to which he devoted his attention, but she’d laid down the desk-law, hoping it would pre-empt the need to lay down the clothes-law. Ruth knew that Colleen might look swamped by her desk material, but she always got things done fast and well. It was strictly a question of appearances. She told her she needed to keep a minimum number of square inches open so it resembled what the rest of the world considered businesslike. “Better to pick your battles,” she’d advised Colleen, “and your desktop is not a battle worth fighting. Certainly not with Jeremy. You’ll definitely lose.”

  At first the difference had been dramatic, but the desk had started to re-sprout. Ruth made a mental note to lay the law down a little lower.

  Colleen put down her Charlie Brown mug and looked up. “You betcha. That’s what they pay me for.”

  As Colleen bounced into the office, Ruth shut the door behind her. “Shutting the door? Cool! What’s up?”

  Ruth motioned for Colleen to take one of the chairs facing the desk. “I need your help. But,” she enunciated each word separately, “It. Has. To. Be. Strictly. Confidential.”

  Under their garish-purple lids fringed with thick black lashes, Colleen’s eyes widened. She leaned forward in her chair and tried to pull her mauve leather skirt down a millimeter closer to her knees.

  “Sure. Anything. You know that. But are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. But I need someone I can trust to help me figure something out.”

  “Really? Me?”

  “You’re smart and I know you’re on my side. And also you don’t take shit from anyone. Not your boyfriend, not your parents, and not from the folks around here. Well, I guess you do take a little from me, which is as it should be. But not from most people. This is good.”

  Colleen uncrossed her legs and hooked her hair behind her ears, revealing her purple-starburst earrings, as she smiled and said, “Really? Me? Wow, that’s great. Cool. Thanks a lot. What do you want me to do? Is this like a secret mission kind of thing?”

  “Exactly. Very secret. The only problem is I’m not sure exactly what the mission is.” She put her elbows on the desk and folded her hands as if she were a first-grader as she explained how she knew there was something going on, she just didn’t know what yet. It could just be takeover nerves and people wondering who was in and who was out. People were forming alliances with various Big Daddies, but she was biding her time.

  “But what can I do?”

  “I know a lot about a lot, but you talk to the other secretaries and hear other things. So just keep your eyes and ears open, that’s all. Who knows, maybe I’m just being paranoid. Or maybe I’m being careful.”

  “Sure thing. Easy. I’m on the case. Gossips R Us.”

  “And be discreet.”

  “Discreet’s my middle name. Absolutely. Discreet. What does it mean, again?” Ruth looked up, eyes wide, frowning.

  “I’m kidding. Gotcha!”

  Ruth went back to the second round of sketches and storyboards she’d received from the ad agency. This version had a chorus of spokeswomen, mostly non-famous, instead of a single middle-aged celebrity who implied everyone could be as beautiful as she if they used this-or-that product.

  She stared at the faces and tried to imagine their lives. Some, no doubt, lived pampered lives, with massages, facials, plastic surgery, and servants. Maybe that accounted for some of their enduring beauty. But, surely, most had led lives filled with work, family, pain, joy, with loss, aging, worry, vacations, disappointments, promotions, enlightenment, pride. The tapestry of human experience. It was remarkable how attractive they all were, in different ways. Different expressions of female beauty. Like her African masks.

  Jeremy called and asked her to come right up to his office. She’d been half expecting it. She was ready for him to tell her he’d decided to pull the plug on her project. She’d show him how much money had already been spent, so he might as well let her carry through with the concept-testing phase of the project. It was a big gamble, but she had to do it.

  But that wasn’t it. As soon as she walked into his office, he said he’d been re-thinking his opinion of the old lady idea. He just wanted her to know that he still wouldn’t call himself “enthusiastic,” but he acknowledged he came from another industry and might not know as much about cosmetics as she. Yet. He reassured her that she shouldn’t hold the new round of focus groups to unrealistic standards.

  “They don’t need to be a hundred and ten percent positive or anything like that. Just regular standards will be fine.”

  Was that a smile? Or just the shadow of one? But she heard what he said, loud and clear. 110% positive. Exactly what she’d said to Pat. She didn’t imagine it. Two snakes, not one.

  Now she needed to find out exactly what kind of cahoots Pat and Jeremy were in. What, exactly, were they cooking up? She had her first hot flash of the day. ninety seconds long. Not the longest, not the shortest.

  Ruth went to the women’s room to clear her mind, a habit she developed in childhood, when the single bathroom in her family’s apartment provided the only privacy. Sometimes she even went to a different floor to avoid running into anyone who might want to dilute her escapism by talking shop.

  She spent a minute in the carpeted anteroom, in front of the mirror. Hearing what might be sniffling, she clicked her blush-on compact shut as noisily as she could, then blew her nose and coughed. A toilet flushed, then no more sniffling. Hand-washing, then the noisy hot-air hand dryer.

  Ruth kept her attention on her face
in the mirror, darkening her eyebrows with brushed eye-shadow and fussing with her hair. Pat emerged from the porcelain-and-steel inner sanctum, her face neither red nor puffy. Upon seeing Ruth, Pat immediately ordered her features to assume their ready position. Without the sniffling, Ruth wouldn’t have detected anything.

  “These allergies are driving me nuts,” Pat said as she looked away.

  “I know what you mean, David has them too. Have you tried vitamin C? He’s had good success with that.”

  “Good idea.”

  Pat was about to leave when she turned back to Ruth and said, “I’m still dissatisfied with the cobalt blue bottle we’re using for the ‘April in Paris’ bubble bath. The color’s good, but the cloudy glass is pitted and the clear glass is just somehow not right.”

  “Find a viable alternative, on budget and in time, and I’ll consider it. Get Tom to help you if you want.”

  Ruth turned back to her reflection, adjusting a pin on her suit jacket so it hung at a slightly more acute angle. Pat was still standing at the door.

  “I’ll be out in a minute if you want to talk about something else.”

  “No, not necessary. I’ll let you know about the bottle.”

  In her office, the phone was beckoning. “Hi Roger. I hope this is a good-news call.”

  “Not quite. I’m not sure what kind of news it is.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “I’m here with the R&D team, working on the middle-aged woman thing, trying to nail down what we’ll present to you and Jeremy on the tenth. And we’ve come up against something. Not a problem, exactly. More like a dilemma, I guess you’d say.”

  “Dilemma? Details, please.”

  “It’s just that these here products aren’t really different from our regular products. They’re fine products, they’re good. But the thing of it is, is that they’re fine for everyone, not just your old ladies—”

  “Roger!”

  “Yeah, yeah, mature women. So we’re a little stymied. Plus there’s other stuff, too. Could you come up here to talk about it?”

  She put down the phone and waited for the day’s second hot flash to subside.

  By the time the elevator got from the eighteenth floor to the twenty-sixth, she’d run through the primary-color emotions. Anger, as usual, was first. It lasted until about the twenty-first floor, though the target shifted around. First was David, whose impending retirement plan was making her feel this project had to be good enough to be her last.

  Then there was Jeremy. His main flaw was not being Dean, the best boss in the world, and his slightly-less-major ones were too numerous for this ride. Carlos’s sin was the superiority with which she imagined he would regard her present situation.

  Pat was a minor irritant, mostly because of her derision for the “women’s libbers,” without whom she wouldn’t be where she was today. She’d be home with her trust fund. Or being an underpaid and undervalued museum docent in her tasteful clothes. Is this why we struggled so hard? Actually, thought Ruth, it probably was. So a woman could be as successful—and, inevitably sometimes, as much of a jerk—as a man.

  The main target, as usual, was herself, for caring about it all so much.

  As the elevator made the transition from the headiness of rapid climb to gradual deceleration and, finally, to a practically imperceptible stop on twenty-six, she worked her way up to her version of acceptance. She was who she was. If this current maelstrom didn’t work out, maybe retiring wouldn’t be so terrible. It was a teeth-gritting admission, but it was the best she could do.

  Roger’s office—indeed, all of Research & Development—was an enclave of testosterone in a sea of frippery. It was brown in all its guises: tan walls, deep walnut desk, black-and-white photos, paintings of boats and landscapes in browns and greys, and carpeting that would be called “taupe” by anyone but its occupant. The flowers were white, the plants huge and vertical. No curves or arcs.

  When Ruth walked in, she sensed from the silence that they’d been talking about her. Applauding, denigrating, or gossiping?

  “You guys look like you’ve been here all night,” she said. “Is it really as bad as all that? Thank God there’s no smoking in this building or I have a feeling I’d be choking on ‘Essence of Cigar.’”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” John MacDonald said. “Welcome to our world, missy. Glad to have you aboard.” He pointed to the seat next to him, as the two placid sausages that were his lips became a claymation smile, a moving picture frame for his big misshapen teeth. He could be a sweet old guy out of the office, Ruth knew from the few times he’d come to her benefits, but was a tough bird at work. His jacket was off, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up.

  “You know all the guys, don’t you?” Roger asked. She looked around. Besides Roger and John, there was Samuel Francis, Mr. Stick-Up-His-Behind. He was the only one still in his jacket and tie and his “hello” was an infinitesimal nod of his carefully-coiffed head.

  On the far side of the table was a new guy, Danny Jones. His round brown face with short curly black and gray hair fringing his male-pattern baldness seemed friendly. Or, at least, not guarded. Or maybe it was just the gap between his two front teeth.

  “Is the party over? Can we get down to business?” John looked at his watch.

  They recapped the morning’s discussion for Ruth. Except for a few out-of-the-box ideas that were unworkable, most of the possibilities for the new line boiled down to lighter makeup, not the heavy stuff that tended to crack and cake on older women’s thinner, dryer skin. They might instinctively go for the heavier stuff, but they were better off with less. Plain and simple.

  Fine, thought Ruth. Good and honest and true. In a sense, they were exactly the kind of products Ruth had envisioned all along, products that said, “Don’t hide yourself, let your beauty show. Better to look good as a fifty-year-old than foolish as a fifty-year-old who’s trying to look twenty-five.”

  Samuel cleared his throat and looked at his delicate hands in front of his face as he rolled a pencil in the fingers of both hands as if he were rolling a joint. He said that all the products existed in other lines.

  “And?” Ruth asked. “What’s the problem?” They didn’t have to say they were new products, they could just say they were pulling together things that are great for mature women. And it would mean no R&D, no extended product launch pipeline. A much quicker time to market. “Isn’t this good? What doom-and-gloom are you all seeing that I’m not?”

  “What you’re not seeing is that Jeremy doesn’t think it’s good,” Samuel said.

  Roger’s shaggy brows came alive as he explained that Jeremy had dropped by unexpectedly about an hour before. They’d filled him in.

  “He was not a happy camper. He kept using the word ‘cannibalize,’ as in ‘cannibalizing our other lines and our customer base.’”

  Ruth slammed her fist on the table. This was not true; Jeremy was wrong. The important part is the people they’d pull away from the competition.

  John agreed. Jeremy’s opposition took him by surprise, too.

  “Exactly what did he say?”

  “He talked a little about how you’ve got such a good idea, it deserves more creativity, not just a tired old rehash of existing stuff. Things like that.” John shook his head slowly.

  That didn’t make any sense. It must be some kind of cover story. She looked around at the faces staring at her. “I’ll talk to him.”

  As she returned to her office, she didn’t bother with any subtly-shaded emotions as she went right to the main event, bewilderment. She was waiting for the Polaroid picture of this situation to begin to come into focus.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Off the Wall

  “I KNOW THERE’S A GIANT POSSIBILITY you’re going to think I’m totally crazy. Especially you, Carlos. I do, too. But do me a favor and don’t say anything about it yet. Really, I just want you to hear me out and think about what I say. Then, maybe in a day or two, you can tell me what you think.�
� The sound of her own wobbly voice reminded her of Purchasing-guy talking about intangibles to Jeremy.

  “And when we do eventually talk about it,” Ruth continued, “you might wind up thinking it’s interesting or you might think it’s off the wall, or who knows what? So you’ll just tell me. And, Carlos, go easy.”

  “Si, senora.”

  When she began, she looked at the purple-haired young woman at the bar, then checked out the two young men who looked too Wall Street to be in such a down-home TexMex place, and at the bartender polishing glasses just like they do on TV.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking about this idea ever since that day at lunch when we talked about our fantasy jobs. I tried to ignore it, but it just moved into my brain uninvited, like a squatter.”

  When she’d finally told David about it, he urged her to go public with Vivian and Carlos, even if they did think she was nuts. It was the only way to evict it from her brain. So she’d decided to risk humiliation as an antidote to obsession.

  As if to prepare her, she’d had a dream in which she was cleaning up some of her own vomit. Afterwards, she was sitting on an unknown man’s lap. Both she and he were wearing business clothes. She looked down to realize she’d left some vomit on his leg. He saw it, too, though he didn’t recognize what it was. Ruth was tortured by the anticipation of her shame when he realized the terrible truth.

  When she woke up, the dream felt negative. It must be telling her to abandon her nauseating idea. Halfway through the day, though, she remembered that she and her shrink had concluded, years ago, all her dreams about vomiting or “bathroom matters” were usually about creativity. Letting what was inside her come out for everyone to see made her feel exposed and frightened.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” Vivian said. I won’t say anything until you tell me I can. This is asking a lot but, for you, I’ll be silent, at least I’ll try to be silent, no I really will be silent.” Vivian pointed her long-neck beer at Carlos, saying, “And you, too, Carlos, right?”