Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  For the record, I tried those dry eye disease drops, and they are excellent. I still use them.

  Soon after my son’s playground accident—which costs unreimbursed thousands in dental reconstruction and eventually thousands more, when it all has to get redone a second, third, and then fourth time—my colleagues and I are asked to complete our yearly 360 reviews: a multiday, time-consuming task in which we are asked to solicit and write reviews of those above, below, and on equal footing with us. The previous 360s had taken place after I’d been at the company for only a few weeks, so I wasn’t obliged to complete one back then. Which means I have no idea, when writing this year’s reviews, that these reviews determine how much of the 2016 bonus pie each of us gets. In other words, it’s in my best interest to denigrate my co-workers for my own financial gain.

  Instead, I write glowing reviews, even for McKenna, whom I praise for her drive, organizational skills, and dedication, because while I definitely have my personal issues with her, professionally these attributes are true, and I believe in noting the good in everyone, even those who might make our lives difficult. My friend Tad likes to joke that I’m the kind of person who says, “Ivan the Terrible? Not so terrible.”

  I blame my father. “If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, then don’t say anything at all,” Dad always said. Perhaps your parents did, too. It’s taken me an entire lifetime to unlearn this rule, golden as it may be, or at least to take exception to it when the occasion calls for it. Like in a sanctioned corporate version of a teen slam book.

  After the results of the 360 are tallied, Sharky pulls me aside to say he’s read complaints about my dedication to the job. “From whom?” I say. (From McKenna, duh.)

  That’s ridiculous, I say. The op-eds I’ve been writing for our various foundation clients have garnered us money, gratitude, praise. The hour-long, TED talk–style PowerPoint presentation I just produced for the CEO of a pharmaceutical company had their head of communications asking me if I’d be willing to jump ship and come work for her instead. The yearly internal company magazine, highlighting the outstanding work of ten employees, has just published a long feature, with photos, on me and my work. In other words, in my first year on the job, in a company with seven thousand employees, I’ve been singled out as one of the ten to watch. Sure, I don’t love my job, but I am grateful for it and have been nothing if not 100 percent dedicated to it and to the company, to the point of having turned down an opportunity to be a staff writer on a hit TV show to prove my commitment.

  “This is not about who,” says Sharky. “Or about your work. It’s about fit. Are you a good fit for this place?”

  “Not a good fit” is HR doublespeak that can spell doom for older workers. At fifty, that’s me. I am both the oldest person on our team and exactly the age at which phrases like “good fit” get thrown around. A year from now, a fifty-two-year-old Facebook employee will sue Facebook for age discrimination after he, too, is told he’s a “poor cultural fit.” In his suit, he will mention a 2007 speech by Mark Zuckerberg, in which Zuckerberg said, “Young people are just smarter.”

  But this time, for this job, I was careful when signing my employment contract. HR had tried to get me to sign another at will contract, but I’d refused, so the company has to prove cause for my dismissal if they want to fire me.

  Sharky’s job, I can sense, is on the line, too. Everyone at the company knows our 2016 numbers are in the toilet. The CEO has told us in a company-wide meeting. It’s been reported in the news, too: an embarrassing 0 percent growth heading into 2017, compared to a high of 11.4 percent as recently as 2013. Our own team, or so I’ve heard, is over one million dollars in the hole. Which explains why the money guy is literally always looking over our shoulders and yelling. Plus it’s an election year. Hillary Clinton is winning in the polls, and no one in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry is sure what this means for their bottom lines—will the U.S. finally institute single-payer healthcare?—so nearly every one of our clients has been either tightening their belts or halting their marketing budgets altogether until after the election. “This is about McKenna, isn’t it?” I say.

  “It’s not just about McKenna,” says Sharky. “Leslie also said she had to pick up your slack when you were off gallivanting in Hollywood.”

  “Off…gallivanting?” I am shocked by this statement. Leslie and I sit next to each other. We are both single mothers, and we’ve bonded over this fact and its difficulties daily. I’ve edited all of her work without complaint whenever she’s asked me to do so, which is often, and I’ve picked up her slack countless times. I take a deep breath, the shock of this Et tu, Brute moment settling in. “I took vacation days to do that job on Younger,” I say. “I wasn’t ‘off gallivanting.’ I was working. On my own earned time. And even if I was off gallivanting, Leslie would have still had to pick up my slack anyway, just like I pick up hers whenever she’s out of the office or on vacation.” It takes everything I have to go against my own nature and break my dad’s golden rule about not maligning others. Lashon hara, we Jews call it, this “evil tongue” talking behind someone’s back, and it is considered worse than idolatry, infidelity, and murder combined. “Who do you think did all the heavy lifting on her security system campaign? I did. On my own time.” Her writing on that campaign was so bland, I was worried it would cost us the client. (It did.) I spent hours late at night, off the clock, editing and rewriting what I could.

  “Then why did you write such a glowing review of her work?”

  Because who shits on their co-workers like that? I want to say. What kind of monsters do we all have to become in order to earn a living? I think back to my first day of work, Leslie’s weak handshake. “Because,” I say, “up until this moment right now, I thought she deserved it.”

  Earlier that year, The New York Times had published an op-ed entitled “360 Reviews Often Lead to Cruel, Not Constructive, Criticism,” in which the author highlighted such comments as “stop using your looks and personality to get things done,” “I never really liked you,” and, my personal favorite, “You seem to be constantly traveling all over the world. Is that really necessary?” aimed at an employee whose job was in international relations. Years earlier, the Harvard Business Review published a scathing indictment of 360s, which they called “at best, a waste of everyone’s time, and at worst actively damaging to both the individual and the organization.” The data generated from these reviews is not only bad, the author wrote, “It’s always bad….Why? Because your rating reveals more about you than it does about me.”

  There’s also the thorny issue of LIFO, which is a management-speak acronym for last in, first out. Which, in my department, is me. I ask Sharky to level with me. Is my job on the line? Should I be polishing my résumé? He can barely look me in the eye. “Yes,” he says.

  I have lunch with Aaron, the account executive with whom I’ve been doing all of my foundation work and with whom I get along well. “I need to tell you something,” he says. He’d written a glowing 360 review of me, without any criticisms, but McKenna had kicked it back to him, telling him he had to write something negative, too. Not knowing what to say, he made something up. “I said something like, ‘Sometimes she can get a little overenthusiastic because she’s still new to the job and learning.’ ” But now that criticism, he’s since learned, is being used against me. He feels awful.

  So that’s why Leslie probably wrote something negative as well, I think. To save her own skin. I get it. She’s a single mother, too, and she knows things are bad, and one of us has to go. I ask Sharky to show me Leslie’s three negative comments, each of which I quickly debunk with written proof.

  Thus begins several months of trying to simultaneously prove my worth at work while secretly sneaking off for other job interviews. “Where are you off to for two hours this afternoon?” McKenna asks, when she sees it blocked off on my calendar. />
  “Doctor’s appointment,” I say. The real answer is Buzzfeed. For an informational interview with Ben Smith, to whom I’ve reached out, among fifty others, hoping to jump ship before I sink.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Little Buddha

  NOVEMBER 2016–FEBRUARY 2017

  On November 11, 2016—two days after Trump’s election—an email appears in my inbox from Ken Kurson: a company-wide missive, sent to everyone working or freelancing for the Observer. “As you have probably heard or will shortly hear, the Observer has ended the print edition of the New York Observer,” it begins, making no mention of the fact that our owner, Jared Kushner, is now the president-elect’s son-in-law, or what this will mean either for us or for the paper. “A few columnists, who were edited by Lorraine,”—that would be me—“will be assigned to new editors,” he writes, along with a long list of other housekeeping minutiae, such as the fact that pizza day will be moved to Monday instead of Tuesday. He ends with this kicker: “Our future is brighter than it’s ever been. We are hiring journalists and investing in storytelling.”

  Really? I think. Hiring? Why not me? I had by then written eight columns for the Observer, all of which have done well or gone viral, but here I am, still relegated to freelancing. I quickly respond to Ken’s email: “Pizza day? How had I never heard of pizza day? When does the pizza arrive? How would one find their way to said pie? All sounds good and normal to me. Onward!”

  An hour and a half later, his pithy response lands with a sick thud in my inbox: “1 pm. How come you never asked me out?”

  Email received from Ken Kurson, 11/11/2016

  I start to hyperventilate. I can’t catch my breath. I’m clutching my chest. My PVCs are going into overdrive. I feel like I’m having a heart attack. Sharky, who sits behind me, takes notice. “What’s going on?” he says.

  I show him the email. “Holy fuck,” he says. “That’s totally not okay. Are you okay?”

  “I can’t…breathe,” I barely eke out. So that’s why Ken never officially hired me. That’s why I ended up working here at the PR firm instead of there in the newsroom. He wanted to fuck me, not edit me, but he knew if he hired me and tried to fuck me, he’d be liable.

  Oh my god. It’s all so clear now. I’m such an idiot.

  That lunch, way back when, when he offered me the $65,000 a year to jump ship and then mysteriously took the offer away: all a ploy to get in my pants. It had nothing to do with my writing, my skills, what I could offer to the paper. I’m just a body. A cock hole. An amalgam of ladyparts. All of the skin-crawlingly icky emails and comments come back to haunt me, obvious breadcrumbs: In another life, I’d be Mr. Copaken; I love your sloppy seconds!; Are you proposing marriage to me?; What would be my chances on the open market of finding a soul mate?; Pussy chase; Wow, it’s so weird—here we are talking about your story about your breast cancer while I’m staring at your breasts.

  We’re still a year away from Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo. Still in the era when speaking up about such things can get you blackballed. Plus, as a freelancer, I don’t have the rights of an employee, so I can’t even go to the Observer’s HR department to report this. If my editor Lorraine is gone—my only other contact at the paper—to whom would I even report his email anyway? And let’s not forget who Ken’s best friends are: Rudy Giuliani, Jared Kushner, and our new predator-elect.

  I feel on the verge of throwing up. This is no longer icky boundary crossing. It’s sexual harassment, plain and simple. From his company email address, no less. And this nine-word email, on top of Trump’s pussy-grabbing election, on top of fretting every day over losing my third job in three years—first for spending too much time at Sloan Kettering, then for not “dumbing it down and making it shorter,” now for a $1.2 million budget hole and a toxic co-worker and god knows what else—turns out to be too much for my body. Eventually, after rereading the email a dozen times, I slump over in my office chair and pass out.

  The next thing I remember, I’m in the waiting room of an emergency room. No, no one in my office called an ambulance to get me here. I wouldn’t allow it, afraid as I was of any surprise bills during a moment when I might soon be out of a job. Instead, after I fell out of my chair, Erin, one of my co-workers, apparently ordered an Uber and helped me into the back seat, telling the driver to get me to the nearest hospital. I have no memory of this other than the feeling of being gently maneuvered into the back of a car by kind, female hands. The waiting room is crowded. Noisy. I feel boxed in, alone. Still struggling to breathe. This is no place for a woman having a panic attack or whatever the hell this is. I google the nearest doctor’s office, a few blocks away, and show up without an appointment. He’s not in my plan. I leave. I call my cardiologist’s office from the street. Tell the receptionist it’s an emergency. Come right now, she says. We’ll squeeze you in.

  Now I’m half clothed on an exam table, sticky electrodes glued to my chest. “You need to rest,” says the cardiologist, seeing a dangerous level of PVCs, “until we get this under control.” When she asks about my various stressors, about what happened in the seconds leading up to my blackout, I tell her about Ken’s sexually harassing email, about an admitted rapist winning the presidency, about the constant threat of getting fired with two kids in college. She can’t do anything about the first two, she says, but she can at least make sure I’m not heading into the lion’s den of a job in crisis every day for a little while, as my heart heals. She hands me a prescription for various medications that will stop my heart from skipping so many extra beats plus a note to my employers stating that I am not to go to the office for now.

  I still put in dozens of hours for a big—oh, the irony—heart valve client from my bed, but this enforced month of recovering at home, followed by weeks of steady recuperation back at work, during which I’ll faint two more times, once hitting my head on McKenna’s desk on the way down, will ironically save me from getting fired before the end of 2016. Employment judges do not look favorably upon employers who fire their workers while they’re on disability and/or still passing out at work, and HR knows this.

  When I’m finally off the beta-blockers, well-rested, back in good health, and moving forward with a half a dozen marketing assignments, Sharky stops by my desk to say, “We have to talk.”

  I see the real pain in his face and know it’s over.

  My official termination meeting takes place on February 17, 2017. The firing happens, of all places, in our newly built meditation room, which is the only private room not currently being occupied by our colleagues when Sharky stops by my desk to do the deed. The meditation room has a single cushion in it, for reclining during the meditative breaks no one ever has time to come in here and take, as well as a small stone Buddha and a few sad-looking chimes.

  I stare at the Buddha, as we walk into the room, realizing he will now become one of the thousands of visual memory scraps I keep in my mental storage box, recorded during moments of violation, pain, sadness, or fear, each begging for release into the world, transformed. A slice of pizza, for example, is now forever paired with receiving that sexually harassing email from Kurson. Any gun, whether noticed on a cop’s belt or a movie screen, conjures my muggings. Bananas trigger the day after my hysterectomy, when I left a trail of blood on the stairs in search of sustenance. And from this day forward, whenever I spot a small Buddha, I am immediately brought back to this sunlit room.

  Because I’ve walked in first, in front of Sharky, I wonder whether I should take the one floor pillow or leave it for him. It’s a small room. There’s probably not even room for two chairs if we wanted them. “You take it,” he says, reading my thoughts. “I have bad knees.”

  I sit cross-legged on the meditation cushion, pushing my skirt between my knees so as not to flash my boss, and I suddenly regret this positional choice because here we are: Sharky, all in black, his pro-basketball-player-sized frame towering ov
er my tiny body; me, self-consciously hiding my underwear behind the fabric of my skirt like a nervous kindergartner during story time, sitting so low to the ground, I can barely make out Sharky’s facial features from here. He looks like a movie screen projection of himself that I’m trying to view, in vain, from the first row. Moreover, the sun’s so bright, my giant boss appears backlit, a hulking figure in dark shadow. Even if I’d remained standing, the physical power imbalance between us would have been comical, but this?

  “I’m doing you a favor,” he says at one point. “Believe me. You don’t belong in here. You belong out there”—he points to the outside world—“making shit that matters. One day, you’ll thank me for this.”

  “That’s not your call to make,” I say. “I need this job. My kids need me to have this job. What ever happened to ‘You’re indispensable to the team,’ when I asked for a leave of absence to work on Younger? That was two months ago.” The Younger writers’ room ironically starts this week, but the job is now no longer mine to reclaim. “Is there any way at this point to save my job? A pay cut? Part-time?”

  “No,” he says. He’s sorry. He’s really sorry. (I’m crying now.) This is the worst part of his job. I’ll land on my feet. He knows it. There’s nothing he can do. “It’s about fit. You’re not a good fit,” he repeats like a mantra whose meaninglessness is the point. Apt, since we’re in the meditation room.

  “Not a good fit!” Rafe, a senior creative executive, had said to me, unable to stop laughing, when he’d heard my job was on the chopping block a month earlier. The two of us had done a lot of brainstorming together and got along well. In fact, whenever he had a thorny problem he couldn’t solve, he’d come over to my desk and ask me to sit with him, quietly, as we took turns free-associating. “That’s ridiculous! They knew exactly who you were when you arrived here, and you have never once disappointed us. They hired you because you’re you, not because they wanted you to fit your square peg into a round PR hole. This is bullshit.”