“Alek?” I could barely speak.
“Maisie?” He answered.
“Maisie!” He repeated, and his smile grew wider, moving all the way up to those eyes, to the delight of Genette who was leaning on the receptionist desk, nodding her head and chewing on another brownie.
Aleksander Markovich and I had met in college while studying for our broadcasting careers. Though he didn’t resemble my brothers in looks—his brooding face with its hooded eyebrows were a stark contrast to my siblings’ open faces and blue-eyed smiles—he had immediately reminded me of them. I knew he came from a huge ethnic family as well, so that was probably it: the big brother syndrome.
Our tight-knit study crew at college was in need of an Alek. Stable, dependable Alek. Lots of late nights in the production room coupled with many trips to our favorite cheesesteak joint had sealed our friendship. Other than my best gal pal, he was the only one I trusted to talk about everything, including the ups and downs of my dating life. He was so available and so ... cozy. Since I wanted to be in front of the camera and he wanted to BE the camera, it was a perfect friendship, and we learned a lot from each other about the broadcasting business. After graduation, we were excited to take jobs at the first stations that offered them and just lost touch. Unfortunately, things like that happen to friends in college.
“What? How?” I managed to say as I gave him a sisterly hug. Hm. Same Alek, but when did he manage to become so buff? I guess carrying around camera equipment was a great workout.
“I’m visiting my friend Lars, who is your new cameraman here,” he said.
“I can’t believe it!” What were the chances that we would hire someone who knew an old acquaintance of mine?
“I didn’t know you were here, Maisie. I lost track of you after graduation and … well …”
I pulled myself together. To be honest, he didn’t lose track of me. I lost track of HIM. I was determined to hit the big time, and in my hard work had lost track of a lot of people.
Awkward silence.
“Brownie?”
That was Genette. Anxious to be part of the conversation.
I cleared my throat and turned to her, giving her an intense look meaning to convey the fact that I was quite aware that THIS was the new man she had indicated no more than moments ago and that she didn’t need to be so obvious.
“Oh, no, Genette, I couldn’t have another.” Alek smiled.
“I see you already have been seduced by the charms of Genette’s baked goods.” Of course.
I leaned down once more to collect my assorted droppings. Alek, ever the gentleman, leaned down to help me.
“Sure, Mais. You know I love sweets.”
“Mm-hmm.” That was Genette, suggestively.
My eyes met Alek’s, and our cheeks both began to turn pink. I was not going to let Genette turn an innocent college reunion into something more. I rushed to gather my goods, stood up quickly, and could barely speak.
“I … need to get back to my desk.”
“Sure, sure.”
“See you around.” I gave myself an internal facepalm. What an idiotic thing to say! Our office was the size of a thimble. Everyone saw everyone on a regular basis. If he was here for more than a minute, I’d “see him around”! Ooh, that Genette. Making something where there was nothing. The last thing I heard as I dashed away was her silky voice: “So, how do you know our Maisie?”
Argh.
In any case, when I said I was going to my desk, I had exaggerated a tiny bit. I slowed my walk when I reached the card table and ancient chair in the far corner of the offices that served as my space. When I had accepted the job, I knew that I was the low man, er, woman, on the totem pole. Not only would I have few billable hours, but I would also have few amenities. I was determined, however, to work my way up. This was the only job offer I’d received that was for an actual sportscaster, even if was part-time. Of course, I’d had offers for other jobs, but I knew that if I was going to reach the golden heights of working at a national sports network like ESPN or ONESport, I had to actually start in sports—not as the second junior assistant to a fashion copywriter somewhere.
I checked my outfit to make sure there were no vestiges of brownie on my outfit (there weren’t) and delicately moved the file folder that was chocolate-y to one side. As I did, I rewound the many conversations I’d had with my family about not using my connections to my foot in the door.
“Sweetheart, I don’t have much to give you, but please let me make a few calls to help,” my father had implored on more than one occasion.
“And have people say that I only got ahead because I was the daughter of Sal Valenti? No thank you.”
“I wouldn’t make the calls if I didn’t think you were qualified to do the job. You know I have high standards.” He would attempt to look gruff.
“Oh, Pop, you would be on the phone for thirty seconds, all business-like, then break down and tell them they had to hire your baby girl. And who would say no to a five-time champion college football coach? They’d hire me even if I couldn’t spell the word ‘football.’”
Any variation of that conversation usually ended in a friendly standoff. None of the boys used his influence, so I wouldn’t either.
Thinking of those many discussions, I picked up my phone and hit speed dial for the one person who understood those types of discussions with a father.
“Hell-oo—oo.”
“Hey, Phyl, it’s me.”
“Maisie! What’s up?” I could picture my best friend in one of her normal stances: curled up on her sofa and bent over her computer reading current events, her hair swept into a high ponytail and her huge glasses pushed up on her nose since she couldn’t be bothered to put in her contact lenses on a day off. I was sure she was dressed in her off-duty favorite outfit of an oversized football jersey, leggings, and ratty slippers.
“Same as it ever was,” I said, quoting a line from one of our favorite ’80s Talking Heads tunes.
“Shouldn’t you be covering some late-breaking sports event in that speck of a town where you now reside?”
“Har Har. Just because your job has you living adjacent to a major metropolitan area does not qualify you to look down your nose at me.”
“Adjacent!” She sounded much more indignant than I knew she really was.
“Face it, Phyllis. You tell people you live in Chicago, but you can actually see Wisconsin from your house.”
The merry tinkling sound that was her laugh brought a smile to my face.
“You got me, Mais. But this is where my current assignment is, so—”
“I know, I know. Practical you. Live near your work and drive into the city to play.”
“Although, I guess for you, it’s all the same, right?” She turned the conversation back to me.
“I’ll be out of here eventually, you know. I just need to build up my reputation and get enough video in my portfolio that isn’t from college.”
“You will, you will,” she said. “Anything interesting on that front?”
“I just covered a peewee baseball tournament.” I leaned back in my rickety chair.
“Mmh.”
“What?”
“Well, Maisie, I guess that’s—never mind.”
I pictured her twirling her ponytail around her hand. Phyllis had a definite ’tell’ when she was thinking. Our fathers had played football together in college and had remained close, and Phyllis and I grew up like cousins. We knew each other extremely well.
“Seriously, Phyl—let it out. You might as well say it as think it.” I leaned back a bit further, just reaching that precarious edge between full tilt and crashing to the floor.
“You know I support your whole ‘I’m going to do this on my own’ bit, but would it kill you to use your contacts to get your foot in the door somewhere?”
“Hey!”
“Hear me out. Just because you might drop some names in an interview doesn’t mean you wouldn’t make YOUR own way
once you got a job.”
“Pretty easy to say when you’re in charge of your dad’s newest car dealership, don’t you think?”
“In charge? Um, being sent here to work on a temporary basis to decorate the office is hardly ‘in charge,’ Maisie,” she said.
Pause. She was right, and I didn’t have a comeback.
“Ah,” she wisely pointed out. “No comeback?”
“I know, I know,” I returned my chair to its upright position. “Also, you’re trying to get a job in your real career that has nothing to do with being exactly like him.”
She sighed. Her career was not what one would call blazing a trail, but her big break was coming.
“You’re right, Maisie. But, listen, you have to at least find an interview that gets you out of that little backwater of a town. What could possibly go right there for you?”
Alek’s face popped into my mind. No. Even knowing someone who had a connection to a good friend here shouldn’t give me the idea to settle here for too long.
“What? What is the long pause about?” Phyllis asked.
“Nothing.” I didn’t want to start a whole dialogue with her about THAT. “Look, I have a production meeting in about a minute. Call you later?”
“Sure, honey. Anytime. And get your resume out there—along with all the references you have,” she said with emphasis.
4
“Are you kidding me!” I shouted as I pelted the TV with popcorn.
The final roster had just been announced for the Major League Baseball All-Star team, and one of my favorite players had been mightily snubbed.
“What is going on?” Devaney entered the front of the coffee shop balancing a stack of cups. As soon as she saw the clutter of popcorn on the floor that I had created when the announcers made statements I disagreed with, her face twisted to one side.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said meekly as I rushed to grab the broom and dustpan to clean the mess that had accumulated over the last quarter hour. Luckily it was our slow time between lunch and dinner, so no customers were there to witness my tantrum. “It’s just that I thought that he had a good shot at making the team. How on earth can someone with twelve home runs, a 50 RBI average, and a .367 OBP—”
I stopped when I saw her face. Oops. I forgot that I wasn’t chatting with my co-workers at the station or my brothers.
“Maisie, do you ever talk about anything but sports?”
“Of course. Well … sometimes.”
She shook her head and walked over to measure a new batch of kernels into the old-fashioned popcorn machine to replace the snacks that I’d been using as weaponry. Then she turned the TV to a station less likely to raise my blood pressure.
“There,” she said. “You like DIY home shows, right? Nothing controversial there, right?”
“Only if you aren’t annoyed by that blond woman’s voice,” I began.
“Bup, bup, bup,” she shook her head. “I’m turning the volume down so you don’t have to hear her. Just leave it there.”
She hip-bumped me on the way back around the counter as I completed my sweeping.
Sigh.
Another slow, syrupy day in our sleepy little town. The lunch “crowd” had come and gone. We would probably have a middling flock later in the day for sandwiches, and in the evening the young singles would come in for a bump of coffee and to socialize since there wasn’t much of a nightlife scene in town. Sometimes I almost felt guilty that there were two of us on staff on days like this, but one employee was not enough for the later evening.
Our gutsy owner, Joseph, had purchased the popcorn machine and installed the TV in hopes of drawing a bigger crowd. Most days, the set was tuned to nonthreatening fare like the home improvement show currently featured, and the most action the popcorn had received was my throwing fit earlier.
Devaney and I finished our prep and simultaneously walked back behind the counter and leaned on it, looking for all the world like two elderly women in a European village leaning out their windows to watch the passersby.
“Maisie,” Devaney began. I knew she was going to wax philosophical.
“Mm.”
“Who would you have play you in your life story?”
I shook my head and smiled. I liked Dev—I really did—but we were so different. Her world revolved around fashion, pop movies, and gossip. Today she had found a new topic: casting celebrities in our life stories.
“You know, Dev, for someone who thinks that I’M stuck on one topic, you sure have a limited conversation stock.”
“What?! I do not!”
I turned to her, my eyebrows raised thinking of how often she had dissected the love lives of those famous-simply-for-being-famous sisters.
“Well, if I’m that boring …” she began. I could see I had hurt her feelings.
“Oh, sweetie, I don’t think you’re boring. I just think it’s ironic that YOU think that I only have one topic to discuss.”
She was silent for a moment, then laughed.
“Maisie, it’s not that sports is boring. It’s just that you need to broaden your horizons. What did you do when you were a little girl?”
“Played baseball.”
“When you were older?”
“Played basketball … and lacrosse.”
“Did you go to dances in high school?”
I shrugged.
“No dances!” I would have expected less of a gasp if I had told her that I spent my high school days selling drugs.
“I didn’t say that, Devaney. It just wasn’t the focus of my life.”
“But you’re so pretty!”
What did she mean by that? Only pretty girls went to dances? Un-pretty girls don’t go? Pretty girls are supposed to like dances more than other things? And what is the definition of “pretty” anyway??
She backtracked.
“Maisie, I just mean that girls who look like you would absolutely have been in the ‘A’ group at my high school.”
“Define ‘A’ group, please.” I was starting to get a little peeved. We had never had this type of conversation before.
“You know,” she waved her perfectly manicured hands, “the cheerleaders, the jocks, the popular kids.”
I counted to ten.
“Dev, I WAS a jock. And an honor student. AND a popular kid, thank you very much.”
She thought about that for a moment.
“Well, your school was certainly a lot different than mine.”
“Apparently.”
Still leaning on the counter, we remained in silence, but only for a moment.
“Maisie, you know, I think you would have been prom queen at my high school.”
“What makes you think I would have wanted to be?” I laughed.
She stared at me as if to say “who wouldn’t?”
“Devaney, it just wasn’t that important.”
“Well, sister, you better think it’s important now. Because you know who gets the big jobs in television? The ex-prom queens and pageant queens.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but closed it just as quickly. She had a point. As much as I would like to think that I could climb the ladder on my abilities, I knew that the conventional wisdom is that so many women in my field had gotten their jobs based on their looks not their abilities. Drat.
“Dev, you are so right.” I scrunched my face in thought.
“But, Maisie, you don’t have to worry! You’re a knockout!”
I laughed.
“Seriously, you’re tall and willowy. Your eyes are that unusual violet color, just like Elizabeth Taylor. And your hair is so black with that natural wave. I love the way you wear it in that choppy little bob that looks so natural and beachy.” Then she stopped and snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it!”
“Got what?”
“Who should play you. Jaimie Alexander.”
“Lady Sif from the all the Thor movies?” I had a vision of the Amazonian character armed with a javelin-type weapon.
> “What? Oh, yeah, she played that, too, but I mean like in Blindspot.”
“I don’t have tattoos,” I said drily.
“Those are painted on.” She smacked my arm.
Hm. I guess Jaimie Alexander wasn’t a bad person to have people think you resemble. It would be uncomplimentary to have someone think you look like, well, someone uncomplimentary. And I couldn’t argue that her haircut wasn’t cute—after all, I had it, too, didn’t I?
“You know what, Dev? This isn’t such a bad little game after all!”
“See? And we didn’t have to mention OPBs or RPIs,” she nodded her head wisely.
“RBIs or OBPs,” I laughed.
“No! No sports right now. Movie casting.”
“Fine,” I said. “But when we’re done playing ‘casting call,’ do you think you can learn just a little about baseball? Trust me, men like it if you know about it.”
“They like it, but do they like it when girls know more about it than they do?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question. I had never NOT known less about sports than most of the boys when I was younger, since I was surrounded with it at home. Now that I was older, I was not exposed to many men who knew more than I did, since I still mostly socialized with the guys at the station or my dad and brothers.
Yep, sports broadcasting is a male-dominated field, and as a woman, if you can’t cut it with real knowledge, you are not taken seriously. I thought again about how people believed that women in sports were only “fluff”—pretty ex-pageant queens. Thank goodness for women like Michele Tafoya and Andrea Kremer and Holly Rowe. They show how the job can be done with class. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be one of the first women reporting from the sidelines of a football game!
“Dev, I’m not saying you have to be able to win a sports trivia contest or anything. I’m just saying you might want to know a few of the basics, so that when you’re out on a date with a guy at a baseball game, you know what’s going on and you won’t be bored.”
“What about the guy? Shouldn’t he learn a little about things I’m interested in?”
She had a solid point. When we first met, I thought that Devaney was something of an airhead. I realized as we got to know each other that there was depth to her.
Game On Page 3