In Sheep's Clothing

by Mary Monroe

  “Your sister had polio, too?” I asked, surprised that I was enjoying this rare interlude.

  Ann shook her head and waved her hand. “Not at all. The doctor called it, uh, oh, hell, I forget. But something about mimicry. Truly impressionable people, like my sister, like to mimic the people they adore. My sister was so fond of Cousin Bett that she wanted to be like her, disability and all. Once Cousin Bett moved away, my sister started to walk like a normal toddler.” Ann paused and an unbearably sad expression slid across her face. In a voice that was one step from a whisper, she told me, “I tried to help my sister be herself. All her life.” She sucked in a deep breath and looked at me with tears in her eyes. “I did all I could do for that girl. But . . .” she paused again and dabbed at her eye with the tip of her finger. “You can’t help somebody who can’t be helped.”

  “I know just what you mean,” I said. It was only then that I realized we had on identical sweaters. The only difference was mine was blue and hers was black. If Ann did notice that coincidence, she did not react. I knew it was in my best interest not to bring it to her attention. We couldn’t have looked more like one another if we had tried. I felt at ease for the moment. But I had learned to stay alert when it came to dealing with Ann Oliver no matter what the situation was.

  “My folks worked their way up from the farms of North Carolina,” she said proudly. I never would have guessed that her family had come from the South. That explained her full name being “Annie Lou.” A faraway look appeared on her face as she continued. “They worked their way through law school, moved to California and raised my sister and me in one of the finest neighborhoods in San Francisco.” She talked in a slow, level way that made it seem like she was talking to herself. Her eyes drifted around the room. The few times she directed her attention toward me, she blinked and stared for a few moments before looking away again. But each time she did that, she smiled. “My sister did everything she could to keep our house in an uproar. Drugs, convicts, you name it. No matter what we did to try to help the girl, it did no good. Delores was her name. She dropped out of school in the tenth grade and had two babies before she was eighteen. Mom, well both of my parents really, told her that if she couldn’t live by their rules, she couldn’t live in our house.” Ann excused herself and got up to get a bottle of Evian from the refrigerator. Returning to her seat with her eyes on me and a mysterious grin on her face, she said, “The ungrateful wench cussed out everybody in the house and left that night. Three years went by and we didn’t know if the girl was dead or alive. Daddy hired a PI and they found her living in a garbage-strewn barrio, on welfare with an ex-convict, in one of the worst parts of Oakland. She came home only for a minute. Just to get money and to cuss us all out again. My folks gave up on her after that.”

  “Sounds like my Uncle Pete,” I said.

  Instead of commenting on my comment about my wayward Uncle Pete, Ann just gave me a blank look and continued. “I was the only one she kept in touch with and that was only because I was the only one in the family who was still fool enough to give her money. A thousand dollars here, a thousand there. It was never enough. I helped her out for years and she was as bad off when she died as she ever was before. A few weeks ago, she got a job working the counter at a Starbucks. The discount stores, K-Mart, Starbucks. Places like that were the best she could do with her education and attitude. She called me and demanded money so she could move. I went to take her the money the same day. She moved into another dump of a neighborhood. Most of her neighbors were on welfare, Section Eight, food stamps, crack. Oh, but you would have thought that place was Shangri-la if you had seen the everpresent grins on some of those tortured faces. Delores was working the morning shift at this Starbucks. One of her neighbors had enough sense to open a day-care center in her apartment, so she kept my sister’s kids. My sister had to catch one bus at four in the morning and transfer to two more just to make it to work by six.” Ann paused again and screwed up her face like she was in pain. She rolled her eyes and sucked in a deep breath before continuing. “I hate to keep bringing it up, but my sister lived in one of the most obscene and dangerous neighborhoods in San Jose. A snake pit has more class! Piss-stained old couches were on the ground in front of the buildings! Old mattresses were piled up on the ground between the buildings. One night when I was over there I saw a hooker—one of my sister’s friends—doing her business with a trick on one of those mattresses!” Once again, Ann had to pause. This time to catch her breath.

  With tears in her eyes, she cupped her hands and rolled her eyes up toward the sky, as if she was about to pray. Her eyes flashed angrily when she looked back at me. I shifted in my seat. I was anxious to leave, but my curiosity forced me to remain. “On any given day you’d see naked kids in the middle of the streets bouncing around like monkeys! Those same kids, some as young as five, would run up behind me and try to snatch my purse. They all looked alike so I couldn’t even identify them well enough to call the cops! I was visiting my sister in that jungle that day I got mugged.”

  Ann gave me a defiant look before taking a long drink of water. She set her bottle down so hard the table shook. “I bought my sister a car so she wouldn’t have to stand out on that dangerous curb at four in the morning. One morning when I was leaving her place, the girl who babysat for Delores told me that that lowlife punk she had living with her made her leave the car at home during the day so he could get around to the bars and wherever the hell else he went while she was at work! So she was STILL taking a bus to work at four in the morning. That punk-ass nigger, who never got out of bed before noon every day, was more important to her than her own damn safety. That was the last straw. When I took the car back, she stopped speaking to me. But not before telling me that I was just jealous because she had a man and I didn’t.” Ann’s last sentence was funny but she didn’t laugh, and neither did I. She narrowed her eyes and continued. “My sister went from bad to worse. When that punk dumped her and moved in with the woman in the apartment across the hall from her, she went off the deep end. I don’t know if she overdosed on purpose or not.” Ann got frighteningly quiet. As a matter of fact, the room was so quiet all I could hear was the hum of the refrigerator.

  “I am so sorry to hear that,” I said, meaning every word. “What about her kids?”

  “They’re with my folks.”

  “Ann, if there is ever anything I can do for you, please let me know,” I said, rising.

  Ann blinked at me and nodded, with her lips pressed into a tight line. “Trudy, thanks for that tip about . . . Pam,” she said stiffly. “I kind of need someone to look out for me for a change.”

  I smiled and leaned over to give her a much needed hug. At first, she whimpered and turned away, rejecting me the same way she had the day I visited her condo. But then she rose and wrapped her arms around me, giving me the longest, hardest hug I had ever received. “Thanks again, Trudy,” she whispered, her voice cracking.

  On my lunch hour I took the credit cards, the ID, and the birth certificate in Ann’s name out of my purse while I occupied the handicapped stall in the ladies’ room. I cut them all in two.

  I could not bring myself to use these particular cards anymore, and I planned to pay them all off no matter how long it took. But I didn’t feel like I had turned in all of my chips. I still had some leverage as far as I was concerned. After what I had learned about how convoluted, weak, and inconsistent the whole credit system was, I knew that I could always get more credit cards if I wanted to.

  CHAPTER 48

  Because of my chat with Ann in the break room I already felt like a totally different person. I no longer felt like the lowly servant girl she had made me feel like on too many occasions. Now I felt “sisterhood” toward this mysterious woman even though I did so with some apprehension. As strange as it was, it seemed like Ann and I had bonded.

  The fact that I had destroyed all of the fraudulent credit cards and the rest of the documents that I had obtained in her name was pr
oof that I’d undergone a major transformation.

  So many thoughts crowded my mind, my head felt like it was going to explode. There were valid reasons for my behavior. I was still lucid enough to know that I’d been raised right. My daddy had been and still was a good role model. I had not been raised to be greedy and deceitful, or a crook. It was important for me to convince myself that I was not a bad person. But something beyond my control was responsible for what I’d done to Ann.

  The trauma of losing my mother, my brother, and my Uncle Pete (even though I was still mad at him for leaving this planet owing me ten thousand dollars) were the things that made me so angry at the world that I lashed out the only way I could. I had convinced myself that my encounter with the robber in the liquor store had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was a twisted thought but I felt that there should be something good in my life to make up for all the bad things that had happened to me. Ann Oliver’s good just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  As far as I was concerned, the party was over. The biggest problem I had now was paying off all the debts I had run up. It was going to be a huge job, but not impossible.

  Before I left work, I hid in the handicapped toilet stall again. This time I took out my pocket calculator and figured out how much I could pay each month with just my income, and how long it would take me to pay off the money I owed. The results were mind-boggling. According to my calculations, by making only the minimum payments on the credit cards in Ann’s name, it would take me twenty years to pay them all off. I went over the figure three times and each time I came up with the same results. I got so light-headed, I almost fainted.

  I was so upset I made myself sick. By the time I returned to my workstation I was almost delirious. “Pam, I don’t feel well at all. Will you let Mr. Rydell know I went home sick?” I said, grabbing my jacket. Pam gasped and put a personal call on hold. I was out of the door before she could get out of her seat.

  Because I’d left work early, I rode the bus home without Freddie. It was just as well. I was not in the mood to discuss my latest meeting with Ann with Freddie anyway.

  I cried myself to sleep that night. I felt better by morning knowing that I’d made a constructive decision about something. The biggest beast on my back now was the staggering amount of money I had to pay out over a twenty year period to pay off the credit cards. To my surprise, the more I thought about that the less painful it felt.

  I took an earlier bus to work than my usual one. That’s how anxious I was to get to work. However, sharing my revelation with Freddie would have to wait until lunchtime or the ride home.

  Later that morning when I arrived at Ann’s office with my hands full of brochures, interoffice envelopes and other items addressed to her, she concluded a telephone conversation by slamming the telephone down. A split second later she greeted me with a stiff smile. Even though I had not listened in on this conversation, I was certain that it was the mean Jamaican she had just hung up on.

  “Would you believe I am still trying to find a headstone for my sister’s grave,” Ann said in a nervous voice. I couldn’t figure out why she felt she had to explain herself to me. She had made it quite clear that had no value in her book. But I went along with it anyway.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” I offered, going along with her lie.

  I gently dropped all of Ann’s correspondence into her in box and held my breath because a bold thought pushed its way into my mind: I was going to invite Ann to lunch and I was going to pay for it with my own money. And instead of comparing sob stories about the misfortunes we’d both endured, I would encourage, no insist, on hearing about some of the exotic cities she had been to. I would get more information from her about the complimentary trips that I would eventually be able to take, per the company’s policy. Here I was working at a glamorous travel agency where I would eventually get to travel real cheap, or for a fraction of the cost, to the far corners of the world. I would meet some truly interesting people for a change. Poor Freddie. I was so sorry for her because she had to work at a boring bank at such a dead-end-ass job as a bank teller. But that was life.

  I had to remind myself to get a passport. In my name, of course.

  “That’s a nice color on you, Ann. Not everybody can look good in that shade of yellow,” I said, making a mental note to go shopping soon to get myself some more yellow items. I would go back to shopping at the discount stores from now on, though. Or at least until James and I got married and he added my name to his credit card accounts.

  “Thank you, Trudy. Uh, I was just about to call you,” Ann said, caressing her chin. There was a stony look on her face that made me have some concerns right away.

  I stood as straight as an arrow in front of her desk. “Oh? Did you need something?”

  “You might want to shut the door,” she sighed, raking her fingers through her hair. She took a swallow from her tall Starbucks cup and cleared her throat and smiled some more. I smiled, too, wondering if this was about the raise they told me I might receive after completing three months. I was certainly going to need the extra money now that I didn’t have those dangerous credit cards to fall back on!

  Not taking my eyes off Ann’s face, I backed to the door and shut it with my foot. “Is something the matter?” I figured that was the most appropriate thing to say. Bringing up my raise would probably make me sound too mercenary. Wendy and Pam had told me that during one of their bathroom stakeouts they had overheard Lupe tell Ann that one of the other women they’d interviewed for my position had ruined her chances by bringing up money and benefits too early in the interview.

  “I think you should sit down for this.” Ann waved me to the chair facing her desk. She sat ramrod straight, her chin held high as she placed her hands palm down on the desk like a sphinx.

  I eased down onto the seat across from her, positioning my butt so close to the edge of the chair, I had to cross my legs to keep from sliding off.

  With a straight face she told me, “Trudy, I’m going to recommend that you be terminated.”

  CHAPTER 49

  I could not believe that I was in the presence of the same woman who had shared such a painful part of her life with me in the break room the day before. I could not believe what I had just heard. I still could not believe my ears when she repeated herself. “I am going to recommend that you be terminated.”

  I let out a gasp that almost choked me. I know that it is impossible for time to stand still. But for a few moments I was frozen in time. When things started to move forward again, like my legs, I asked, “What did you say?” It felt like a sledgehammer was pounding around inside against the walls of my head. I immediately developed a headache that was so severe, the throbbing could be felt at the base on both sides of my skull. I couldn’t take my eyes off Ann’s face. There was emptiness in her eyes that I had never seen before. It was like she didn’t have a soul. “I’m going to be fired?” A sharp cackle tumbled out of my mouth. “What did I do?” I started to rise, my jaw still moving but no words coming out. Ann motioned me back to my seat. But I ignored her. If they were firing me I had nothing else to lose by being defiant.

  “It’s not what you did. It’s what you didn’t do,” she said stiffly with one eyebrow raised so high it looked like a horseshoe. She waved me back to the chair again. This time I sat back down. Not to obey her but because I was so stunned I felt like I was going to fall flat on my face.

  Clearing her throat she plucked a Palm Pilot out of a drawer and then a spreadsheet from a manila folder. The spreadsheet had already been filled with items on every single line from top to bottom. Pecking on the screen of her Palm Pilot with the tip of her claw-like nail, she licked her lips and began to chew me out. “On a regular basis you did not write down the telephone numbers of some extremely important prospective clients. You didn’t arrange the limo service requested by members of the Second Baptist Church during their trip to Jamaica. They had to take a gyp
sy cab from the airport to their hotel.” Ann held up a finger and shook it at me. Then she made a fist and slammed it down hard on the top of her desk. “A gypsy cab, girl! Driven by one of those patois-speaking, nappy-headed Rastas with a bad attitude. I don’t even ride in cabs myself, period ! Can you imagine how hellish and uncomfortable that must have been for them? Six little old sisters in their seventies! Grandmothers! That’s reason enough for them to be treated special; which is why they came to Bon Voyage to book their travel plans in the first place. We are unique because we are more client-focused than our competitors. Our purpose is to please our clients!” Ann paused and returned to her sphinx-like position and gave me a steely look. “You made a flight reservation to New York for a regular client sending him to La Guardia when he specifically asked for Kennedy. He didn’t realize the mistake until he was already at the airport. He missed a very important business meeting.” Ann rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling and shook her head. “I don’t know how we are going to make that up to Mr. Meacham.” She stopped long enough to clear her throat and give me one of her penetrating stares. “Now”—she sighed and cracked what she tried to pass off as a smile—“would you like to get a cup of water before we continue? You look like you could use it.” She looked over my shoulder and nodded toward the door.

  “I’m fine,” I said with as much coldness as I could come up with on such short notice. I folded my arms and looked her straight in the eyes.

  “Next,” she said, glancing at the spreadsheet in front of her. “You seem to have a problem with punctuality. You missed most of the last two staff meetings.”

  My mouth dropped open and stayed that way for a few seconds because it took a lot of effort for me to speak again. “The first time I was late was because my daddy had chest pains and I had to take him to the hospital. Last week I was late because an eighteen-wheeler jackknifed on the freeway and my commuter bus couldn’t move for two hours. I explained all of that to you.” I gave Ann an incredulous look. She glared at me and blinked. “You even made a joke about how old the buses in this area are, how you see them broken down on the streets all the time,” I reminded her.