Opening Belle

by Maureen Sherry

  I just shrug at Amy. “Look, the Glass Ceiling whatever meeting last night was all fantasy. In the clarity of the day, I hope we all realize what bullshit it was. Do we really think we can change this place?” My voice is flat and resigned.

  “This is our first opportunity,” says Amy, and I see she’s been writing names, drawing arrows, as if she’s masterminding a plan.

  “Which means what?”

  “Confrontation. Calling them on the bullshit. Publicly demeaning an employee is wrong. Let’s start there.”

  “Okay, Rosa Parks,” I say sarcastically. My two phone lines are ringing. I ignore Amy and answer. “Yes?”

  “Say something before I say something.” It’s Amanda. “We have to stop trying to fit in with them. It’s wrong. This is our first chance and if I say something I look like some muthfreaker badass from Queens, but you’re the one they respect, you’re the one they’re dumping on. Confront them. Call them on this bullshit.”

  “Look, you first. I have way too many people depending on me at home. I’m not your groundbreaker.”

  Amy looks at me with something bordering disgust. Amanda goes silent.

  CHAPTER 7

  How Not to Meet Your Husband, Part II

  FROM WHERE I sat nine years ago in that Arctic-cold Las Vegas ballroom, the sea of men in dark suits appeared to all have splendid lives. When you’re the girl who was left on the literal curb, the climb back to normalcy appears as easy as ascending the sheer side of El Capitán, far off and unattainable. My fiancé had dumped me over a year before, making the trading floor and work my comfort zone and the only place I wanted to be.

  I was putting all my former love energy into work and sure, I had a job where complete focus was translating into extra dollars, but I was certain I was the sorriest millionaire there ever was. That’s why when the guy working the video and lights that went along with the presentation—a guy so cute I had noticed him at several of these conferences—came up behind me and said, “Hey,” I thought for sure he was going to tell me that my giant head was reflecting on the screen and could I please somehow make myself disappear. I turned toward him, ready to comply, ready to vaporize.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, not even making eye contact.

  “Wait, what?” he asked. “What are you sorry for?”

  “For my head being in the way.”

  He laughed, and that’s when I looked up. He was tall and liquidy, with joints that seemed to gush synovial fluid. He shrugged his shoulders and they floated instead of moving the way most thirty-year-old shoulders do. He was a sandy-blond guy with biceps peeking from a simple black button-down shirt that looked natural, rather than steroidally supplemented. This guy looked like it all just came to him so easily.

  “Who said your head was in the way?” he asked me sweetly.

  “I heard myself think that,” I said, letting those stupid words out before being screened by my brain.

  Surfer guy laughed and pushed back some of his longish hair. He had beautiful green eyes that looked electrically lit. I hadn’t looked a guy in the eyes in a long time.

  “No, I, um, just wanted to say that your bag is open and, well, it looks like you may want to shut it,” he said, all Boy Scouty.

  I bent to look at my bag and saw what he saw: a slightly tattered Speedo bathing suit, goggles, bathing cap, and an envelope of small bills that had opened itself and spread money, like litter, throughout. Dishevelment had become part of my latest look.

  “Are you running away from home?” he asked, and when he smiled, my eyes welled up. Nobody had tried to flirt with me since Henry. Nobody had made me laugh since Henry. Nobody. I turned away.

  Since Henry dumped me, the only place I felt calm was in water. The YMCA near my apartment opened at 4:45 a.m. and losing myself in a chlorine bath each morning, crying into a pool so big, mixing water with water was my most comforting place. I carried a Speedo suit around like an anxious person carries tranqs. I had the equipment I needed to swim in case things got bad, in case life presented me with a swimming pool in an over-air-conditioned, glitzy hotel in Las Vegas.

  “Name is Bruce,” the cute audiovisual guy said, not giving up so easily, “as in Wayne.”

  Leave it to me to find the only penniless guy in a roomful of investment bankers, and a Batman fanatic at that. I tidied my bag, zipped the top, and turned from him.

  “This is the last presentation,” he continued to my back. “Want me to show you the real Vegas?”

  “Yeah, no. It’s not my kind of place,” I said not unkindly as I imagined shows with high-kicking women wearing rhinestones or smoke-filled gambling halls. “I mean, I have stuff to do.”

  “Yeah.”

  Marcus Ballsbridge, sitting in the row in front of me, turned around as if asking if I needed a save. Back then the older guys on the desk treated me like some heartbroken puppy they rescued from the shelter. I turned toward the guy.

  “I have things to do,” I said weakly.

  “Can totally see you have big plans for your afternoon,” he murmured, nodding to the swimsuit. “And I bet they don’t get a lot of Speedos in the pools here.”

  “Yeah, well, my thong bikini is in my other bag. The one with the handcuffs and blindfold in it.”

  He laughed. I made a cute guy laugh.

  “Seriously,” he said, “I found this cool place near here . . .”

  Several minutes later, for some illogical reason, I rose from my seat and followed Batman out the door. He grabbed a messenger bag as we passed the booth he’d been working from. Attached to it was a well-loved skateboard. I left a ballroom of universe masters to hang with some lunatic and only minutes later was standing in my wool navy suit in ninety-degree weather in a skatepark in Las Vegas. I didn’t care that I hadn’t dressed for the occasion, that I was wearing pumps with heels meant for a woman sitting at a desk or propped against a bar. I didn’t care that this guy could be insane. I just liked being my version of irresponsible; away from everyone who knew me, away from people who knew that my fiancé dumped me, that I was unable to eat like a normal person, and that all I did was work and swim. There was nobody at Doc Romeo Park who felt sorry for me.

  At first Batman lent me his giant skater sneakers, which were so big my ankles did U-turns in them. Then I tried skateboarding in my heels, which the twelve-year-olds surrounding us, our fellow skaters, all needed to watch. I finally gave up on footwear and rode barefoot and bareheaded, ’cause while Bruce Wayne’s feet were big, his helmet was too small. I have a huge head.

  “Is all that cash your drug money?” he asked.

  “What cash?” I said. Some little kid had lent me his wood, which I had just learned was skater-talk for board, so Bruce and I were then skating side by side, while the sole of my pushing foot burned with the heat of the asphalt and the friction of each push. Self-inflicted pain felt good to me recently, like it was some designer brand of cutting oneself. I knew I had to stop doing things like this to myself, hurting myself, but wasn’t sure how.

  “Those ten-dollar bills all over your bag.”

  “Oh”—I shrugged—“it’s from lap dancing. Those are my tips.”

  Bruce pretended to fall off his board. “No, seriously.”

  “They’re tips, but tips for other people. I like to be prepared.”

  “You mean you carry cash around just to hand to anyone who needs a tip? Someone who is nice to you? I can be nice.”

  I smiled. “I can’t stand how when in a big hotel everyone tips the person who cleans your room or bartends but then you see the bent lady scrubbing down the lobby bathroom and nobody tips her ’cause it’s just not the usual point of interaction, or the guy who has to dust all the floorboards or the man who has to separate the garbage.”

  “Wait, you tip the floorboard-dusting guy?”

  “People don’t even notice him. It makes me sad.”

  “Are you from some long line of cleaning people or something?” he joked, and I was silent.
<
br />   “You are.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I just notice people. I see their faces. I think of their stories. Their jobs suck. They don’t want to be there. I love my job. You probably love yours too.”

  “So you think of their stories and then give them money? I don’t get it.”

  I sighed.

  “Fuck me, I’m an ass. I do get it. You make a lot of dough and you feel bad about it. That was guilt money I saw.”

  “The tips are to tell them they aren’t invisible and that I appreciate the clean wooden moldings and that they’ll get a better job soon. It’s nothing more than that.” I skated off, leaving him behind.

  “Hey, I don’t believe you never rode a skateboard before,” he yelled after me. “Nobody skates like that her first day out.”

  I hadn’t exactly lied to Bruce, but I hadn’t told him I was a decent snowboarder and a lot of the movement is the same. I didn’t tell him because some part of me wanted to impress him, wanted to actually flirt with a guy I had absolutely nothing in common with.

  I climbed a staircase to get ready to drop into a half-pipe. Something was overpowering me. I felt a ridiculous high from the danger while Bruce just stood with folded hands, either daring me or incredulous that I would do something so stupid. I had no business being on a half-pipe, with no shoes, no helmet, and on a little kid’s board, but I felt nothing but brave and something bordering euphoric. Batman wasn’t so sure.

  “Not sure you should take this your first day out.”

  The boys had lined up to watch.

  “Don’t give in to peer pressure,” Bruce continued. “Twelve-year-old dudes are not your peers.”

  “Whatever,” I said, “I live in New York,” as if this actually meant I was badass or something.

  “Well, you want to drop into this one fast and then move horizontally to slow your speed.” Batman looked generally concerned. I’d done this in the snow. I was about to blow his mind.

  Just as I dropped into it he shouted, “I live in New York too.”

  There’s a terrific difference between hitting snow and hitting cement. With no boots, or any footwear at all, I got a scraping that was a confusing blur of which body part was hurt more. When I stopped spinning, I mostly felt relief, glad that I had movement everywhere and confused that my butt felt like it was smack on the cement with no fabric between us. After the relief of being alive passed, everything started to hurt.

  “Did I hit my head?” I asked nobody. “ ’Cause I don’t think I hit my head.”

  Bruce was everywhere, several Bruces in fact, and it was hard to tell what he was doing to me. He kept telling me I was okay, which I knew. He told the boys to get the fuck away ’cause they kept saying things like “Holy shit” over and over. I said something like “Don’t curse at little kids,” which made him laugh, but then his dude-who-stands-arms-folded-outside-the-front-door-of-an-Abercrombie-store face crinkled in real concern again, and the shirt that I so admired back in the conference room was off him and getting pulled up my legs.

  “What are you doing?” I said while being sharp enough to note the guy had one decent set of abdominals, and “Wooo,” because this time I could see his tattoo. It was the face of the Caped Crusader.

  “What a girly tat.”

  “Just try not talking,” he said. “You scared the hell out of me and I need a minute.”

  He pulled me up into his arms and carted me off to his rental car, putting me across the backseat. He got a jug of water from somewhere and moved from cut to cut, dabbing at my wounds.

  “Damn, you’re really not hurt too badly.”

  “It must have looked so funny,” I said, slightly giggly. I hadn’t done anything dangerous in so long. I saw him grin.

  “You are so competitive. What the hell was that about?”

  “I just thought I could nail it and, you know, impress you.”

  “Damn,” he said, looking at some bump on my forehead, just when I looked down and noticed I had no skirt.

  “Where is my skirt?”

  “You shredded it, you crazy shredder.” But he wasn’t laughing. “I think I should take you to the hospital.”

  “No way. No hospital for me.” Having no skirt on seemed like the funniest thing I’d ever heard of. I had no skirt. I laughed and laughed until I stopped seeing Bruces and I was left with only one. “I liked it more when there were four versions of your torso,” I said, which made his face crinkle again.

  “Definitely taking you to the hospital.”

  “No hospital!” I shouted, and then laughed again with the sudden thought, Who doesn’t wear a skirt to the hospital?

  “It tore right up the back. Those little kids will remember this as the happiest day of their lives, seeing a woman with your ass in a thong. Holy Mother of God. Good thing I’m gay.”

  I put my hands down around my bottom; everything was all covered up down there.

  My heightened clarity was making me blanch. “Did I really just moon those boys?” I asked tentatively, thinking that gay guys have the nicest manners and man, did I have Bruce Wayne pegged all wrong.

  “My shirt makes a good skirt,” he said kindly. “Let’s go get you some ice.”

  The problem with pulling up to the Bellagio Hotel, where the guest rooms number exactly 3,933, is that swooping bellmen and valet parkers need to keep things moving. They don’t want to hear the story about how you lost your skirt. It was then that I saw that Bruce, a guy whose real last name was McElroy, didn’t care what anyone thought. He hoisted me over his shoulder and carried me through the casino, now conveniently filled with hundreds of fellow bankers and clients—a bare-chested Adonis carrying me in my bloody white blouse, a purple welt across my forehead, a shirt making do as a skirt, and no shoes. It was our oil and gas analyst who started applauding when he saw me, and soon the whole place looked up from their pursuit of money to join in the clapping. That’s how Bruce and I made our way to the elevators, to thunderous applause and whistles. These guys had never once seen me behave badly and here I was, after I finally went on a date, a one-hour date, and I returned bloodied and half-naked. They told that story for years.

  I remember thinking in my semi-woozy state that the blinging money machines in the background were telling me that this time I had really hit the jackpot, ’cause as the elevator doors closed, Bruce whispered into my ear, “Was only kidding about the gay thing.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Ex-Change

  IT IS THURSDAY. Thursday is the new Sunday in our house—as decreed by the higher power at our Park Avenue preschool. Thursday is the dreaded school chapel day.

  Chapel goes something like this: children arrive dressed for the Titanic crossing—bows, cashmere sweaters, itchy tights, even crinoline. They shuffle with one or both of their parents into the chapel room, where a very talented group of teachers play and sing their heart out to happy God music. The main storyteller relates a sugar-infused Bible story such as David just wrestling Goliath or Moses taking a boating vacation, or my personal favorite—when Adam and Eve eat forbidden fruit, they are punished by having to wear fancy party clothes. Then we all sing songs, while sitting on the floor holding on to our squirming children, and wonder how we can possibly stand up again since our legs have gone to sleep.

  There is an order to how the parents and children sit in chapel. The billionaires sit along the front sides of the room. They tend to be cooler than the rest of us and usually have only one parent in attendance. They don’t have to care if anyone likes them so they don’t show up just to be seen. The billionaires rarely wear business suits and seem to know it’s all right to have a wife with a little paunch. They have hired enough help to insulate them from the annoying millionaire parents who are pining for a playdate. Instead they have their kids play with either fellow billionaire offspring or the full-scholarship kids, of which there are three. They seem genuinely enchanted by their children.

  In the front of the chapel sit a group that Bruce, who used to ha
il from this land of exclusion, calls the “PA Ladies,” the not-employed-out-of-the-house, Park Avenue mothers. The school thinks PA stands for “parents association.” These are the wives of the millionaires who want to hang with the billionaires. They feel the need to have two adults frame their three-foot kid and they work the crowd like a networking slam. They titter back and forth with their grown-up friends while insisting their kids remain quiet, making a low-level noise that’s distracting. They give their children the names of expired ancestors such as Baxter, Ford, and Wyeth. Not coincidentally, some are also the names of New York Stock Exchange companies. Their men wear sharp suits and smell good, and their women wear triple-ply cashmere tops tossed over super-tight low-riding jeans. Their abdominals that occasionally peek from beneath their sweaters reveal nothing about having had multiple children because they only stay pregnant for eight months, induce early, have a Victoria’s Secret C, which is the cesarean combined with a tummy tuck, before returning to their two-hour daily workouts. Their shoes tend to be expensive, with delicate high heels that rarely hit pavement, and they have jewelry usually purchased from each other. They are the peer group of my coworkers’ wives and they look at me either with pity for not marrying one of their tribe or with what I believe is the bad-mother glare, like they know something about my kids that I don’t. It doesn’t help that my daughter’s contribution to the “Whose Mommy Am I?” bulletin board contains a drawing of a straggly haired lady with text transcribed from her mouth stating, “My mommy only likes to read the Wall Street Journal.” The other darlings’ pictures state, “My mommy reads Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!” or “Goodnight Moon.” Who is that sucky mommy who only reads the Journal? Needless to say, we don’t socialize too much.

  Toward the back of the room are the working schlumps—the oddballs, including me and three other moms in business wear. We tote oversized bags with electronic gear all set to silence. We sit on the carpeted floor with the most difficulty, given the way we are dressed, and we try our hardest to not check our phones during chapel time. We don’t necessarily want to hang with the billionaires but wouldn’t mind living like them.