“Anyone know who the new guy—or woman—is?” asked Natalie. Marlena and the other two document-coding temps, the pianist Roger, whose wife had just left him, and Lisa, who was an NYU grad student studying for her master’s in American history, shook their heads.
Marlena and Natalie in particular were very warm and welcoming to me and made my first day at Newter & Spade—which seemed to issue a new house rule every half hour—a lot easier to adjust to. Natalie was a stunning émigré from Russia, a refugee, actually, whose parents came over during Jimmy Carter’s administration when a lot of Russian Jews were allowed to leave the country. Natalie had been just a kid then. She grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and bore no trace of an accent. Not a Russian one, anyway—surprising for someone who came from a neighborhood nicknamed “Little Odessa.” In fact, she sounded like she’d lived in Brooklyn all her life. Natalie was engaged and temping because her fiancé didn’t want his future wife to work; he was Old World that way, so she was just picking up assignments until she got married.
Our personal phone calls from the document-coding room were monitored, Natalie explained, so she had to routinely retreat to the ladies’ room and use her cell phone to call the florist, the bandleader, and other vendors she and Dmitri had hired for their wedding. She asked me to accompany her and keep a lookout to make sure no one came in who might rat her out for not being at her computer terminal. One of her conversations must not have been too pleasant. I heard her screaming invectives at someone in Russian.
“The son of a bitch says pink roses are impossible!” she spat after cutting off the person at the other end of the call. She snapped the phone shut and tossed it in her purse.
“You’re the customer, Natalie. Isn’t it a cardinal rule of consumer economics that ‘the customer is always right’? What kind of florist would refuse to provide pink roses for a wedding?”
“Florist? That was Dmitri! He says pink roses are a deal-breaker. Says people will think he’s a fairy whose wife pushes him around before they’re even married. ‘Pussy-whipped,’ he said to me. I hate that phrase. Son of a bitch.” She struggled to wriggle her engagement ring off her finger and dramatically threw it in the bottom of her pocketbook. “Son of a bitch! My mother is right. He has no class.”
Natalie and I returned to the coding room to learn that Ramona had stopped by and, on not seeing us, had demanded to know where we were. Marlena had apparently defended our right to go to the ladies’ room and invoked the word “sweatshop” in a voice loud enough to make our supervisor even testier than usual. Given Marlena’s forthrightness, I expressed my surprise that Ramona hadn’t had her canned ages ago.
“Not only is my work too good for them to do that, but that skinny witch is afraid of me,” Marlena said. “Scared I’ll bring Al Sharpton and the NAACP down on her head.”
“Would you?” I asked her.
Marlena smiled. “Depends on Ramona. I’d like to think I probably wouldn’t do a thing except go home to my boys and cry about it. But let her wonder.”
Speaking of wondering, I suppose many people might wonder why I decided to stay at Newter & Spade based on what I had already experienced there within just a few short hours, including the lunch now destined to be filed in the annals of my employment history as the meal of Alice’s Egregious “Izzy.” The firm certainly didn’t treat people well. You’ve heard the expression “the fish starts rotting from the head”? A sort of British public school hierarchy prevailed. It began with the way the most senior partner behaved to his underlings and filtered all the way down the food chain to the temps’ treatment at the hands of their immediate superiors.
I stayed for a number of reasons. First of all—and I apply this to all aspects of my life—I am not a quitter unless I am pushed beyond the brink of humiliation, as I was by Uncle Earwax. Second, Tina was leading me to believe that I was not as employable at one of these major law firms as I had optimistically thought I was, and even if I investigated what another temp agency might be able to do for me in terms of placement, the results would probably be pretty much what they currently were. With a sigh of resignation, I also expected to become inured, as I’ve always done (usually for far too long), to my situation. I’ve managed to put up with a lot as long as I continue to remind myself that the circumstances are only temporary; and beyond performing my assignments with diligence, I have no emotional investment at stake. At five-thirty, I clock out and go back to my life, such as it is.
There were some genuine positives to be considered as well. The other Newter & Spade temps were very nice people. Marlena and Natalie were feisty and gregarious, and while Lisa and Roger tended to be quiet and keep to themselves a little more, I got the impression that they were nonetheless pleasant and friendly. I enjoyed the opportunity to expand my circle of acquaintances.
If we wore headphones and kept the volume low, Ramona did let people listen to music on a Walkman. Natalie had just loaned me hers to hear one of my favorite songs, the “Shoop-Shoop Song: (It’s In His Kiss).” I was bopping my head to the music while devoting the rest of my attention to a stack of memos from one of the tobacco company executives to his board of directors, when Eric Witherspoon poked his head in the door to introduce himself to the room and mention that he was now working on the case. “So if I call down here and ask for some information, you’ll have a face to put with the voice,” he said affably. I was too embarrassed to look at him directly. I had the not-so-irrational fear that if he saw me there, he’d probably make the assumption that my document coding was as inept as my ability to handle a lunch tray and insist that Ramona find a more capable replacement. A trained chimp, for example.
“You, sorry, excuse me. What’s your name again?” He was standing right behind me.
“Me?” I swiveled around in my chair. “Alice Finnegan,” I replied too loudly. He was looking very corporate in a navy single-breasted suit. I realized I was still wearing Natalie’s headphones; I slipped them around my neck and lowered my voice. “Sorry again about that mess yesterday. Root beer can’t be very good for worsted.”
Eric thrust his hands in his pockets. “Well, it could have been ‘worsted,’” he joked, “I might have been wearing white.”
I figured it might be considered a sign of disrespect to a senior associate if I didn’t laugh.
Where’s your integrity? The man has a totally lame sense of humor, Alice.
“Thanks. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who laughs at that joke.”
That’s because it isn’t funny.
“Well, maybe it was the way you told it,” I replied pleasantly.
“You’re okay, muppet,” Eric said, tapping the back of my chair. “You’re okay.”
After Eric left the document-coding room, all four of my co-workers spun their chairs around to face me. Marlena arched an eyebrow.
“Just being friendly,” I said.
“Unh-huhmmm,” she sardonically responded.
I related to them the unfortunate circumstances of my first encounter with Eric Witherspoon. “I felt it might be the better part of valor to be extra nice to him so he doesn’t complain to Ramona that she assigned a complete doofus to his case.”
“What’s with the ‘muppet’?” Roger asked.
I shook my head. “I haven’t a clue.”
“Kind of an endearment, wouldn’t you say?” Lisa chimed in, my first inclination that she was intrigued by office gossip as much as anyone else in the room.
“Muppet? An endearment?”
“It is if you like sock puppets,” Marlena replied dryly.
By the time I got home, I felt like I’d run a marathon. Ordinarily, I walk up the two flights of stairs from the lobby to our third-floor apartment, and I feel horribly guilty when I don’t, as it’s pretty much my only form of regular exercise; but this evening, even the act of retrieving the mail from the box seemed like an overexertion. I’d been tense all day, anxious to put my best foot forward at Newter & Spade, particularly af
ter my stellar stumble into Eric Witherspoon on the day of my interview.
I pushed the button to call for the elevator. As I waited, I was joined by a tall, rugged-looking guy carrying a worn black Gladstone bag, the kind I remember our family pediatrician sporting. I’d never seen him before; if I had, I certainly would have remembered. It was one of those moments where you kind of want to flirt, but you’re totally embarrassed to, because it’s so obvious that you’re flirting, so you play this “I’m not flirting” cat-and-mouse game with your eyes. Check out the other person; when you catch him checking you out, look the other way with an air of feigned unconcern. Repeat as needed until you reach your destination, at which point you will mentally kick yourself to kingdom come for not having started a conversation.
The elevator arrived. It’s the kind that has an automatic sliding inner door and a heavy outer one that has to be opened by the passengers. The sandy-haired man stepped forward and reached for it, allowing me to precede him into the car.
“Thanks.” I smiled sheepishly. When he smiled back, I quickly glanced at the wall in front of me, pretending to observe a new scratch in the woodwork.
Go for it, Alice.
I pushed three and he reached past me and pressed the button for the sixth floor. “Live here?” I asked the guy.
He shook his head, and gestured with his thumb back toward the line of intercom buttons. “No.” He gave a little chuckle. “Just making a house call.” The elevator door slowly closed.
I looked down at his bag. “Wow. I didn’t think people did that anymore.”
“Well, this is kind of an emergency.”
“Well, I think that’s pretty neat, anyway. In this day and age.”
The guy smiled. “Not really, when you think about it.”
“I’ve been having a pretty rough day myself, you know. First day at a new job.”
I feel like an idiot.
He looked down at his black bag, then back at me. “I wish I could help you, but I’m afraid I don’t have the right tools in here.”
“Oh, well,” I replied.
Now what?
We reached the third floor.
Shit.
“Alice Finnegan,” I said, thrusting my hand at him while I backed open the outer elevator door with my tush.
“Dan Carpenter.”
Silence.
“Well, have a nice evening,” he added.
“Yeah, thanks. You, too.”
The elevator door closed with a quiet thumph. After recounting the saga of my first day at Newter & Spade, I thought about telling Gram about this charming M.D. who makes house calls, but as the name “Dan” sprang onto the tip of my tongue, I decided not to embroil her in a discussion of men so named. She always became agitated when she spoke of the husband who’d abandoned her. Grandpa Danny might have behaved like a heel when all was said and done, but he was her grand passion. As far as I knew, the blazing torch she still carried for him was the reason she never remarried. What man could ever hold a candle to such an Olympicsized flame?
I did phone Izzy, though. A cute-guy sighting in my apartment building was a rare occurrence and worthy of a news bulletin. “So, do you know of any doctors who make house calls nowadays?” I asked her. “Even pediatricians?” When I described Dan Carpenter’s looks, she sighed.
“Honey, if I’d had a pediatrician like that when I was a kid, I would have been continuously bedridden with every childhood illness known to man.”
“But not the disfiguring ones,” I added. “You’d be mortified to have him practice his bedside manner when you looked like hell, all red and pockmarked and swollen. No mumps or measles, chicken pox or scarlet fever.”
“Shit. That about covers them all. How’s a girl ever to meet a doctor when she can’t start young?”
After a few weeks, I had the Newter & Spade routine down cold. There were even the rare days when I looked forward to coming in to work because I enjoyed our coding-room camaraderie. Funny thing was that we temps shared so much of our lives, secrets, wishes, and fantasies with one another between the hours of nine-thirty and five-thirty (with occasional overtime), and yet we never took our friendship beyond the office walls—although Natalie had once or twice conspiratorially dragged me downstairs to the Korean nail salon across the street for a manicure during business hours. The first time she convinced me to accompany her, I felt like a juvenile delinquent playing hooky.
It was Izzy to whom I confided things I felt uncomfortable discussing with anyone else, including—or perhaps most especially—Gram. Sexual harrassment was one of those things. Not only was Isabel my closest friend, but she knew the big law firm drill. There was very little Izzy hadn’t seen in all her years of temping for attorneys.
“There’s one partner who completely gives me the willies,” I told her one evening after we’d caught a Julia Roberts movie together. “An older guy. Bart Harrison.” Even speaking his name left an icky taste in my mouth.
“I think I know him!” Izzy exclaimed. “Looks sort of like Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island?”
“That’s him! He always seems like he’s holding a dry martini and should have a wife named Muffy, if not ‘Lovey.’ How do you know him?” I asked her.
“About ten years ago when I was working at Sullivan Proctor, he was the world’s oldest senior associate, passed over for partner for about the umpteenth time. I’m not sure of the circumstances, but there were rumors…”
“Maybe he wasn’t a rainmaker,” I posited, referring to attorneys who are promoted primarily for their ability to bring new clients into their firm.
“Nah, that wasn’t it. What happened was that he had a series of secretaries quit on him, then they edged him out as gracefully and as quietly as they could. Putting egos aside, no one easily gives up ninety-plus grand a year—which is what he was making back then as the Methuselah of senior associates—without a good reason.”
“I can take an educated guess as to why they dumped him,” I said. “He’s come down to the coding room a couple of times, which is rare enough for a partner, but he’s got an agenda. I think the only reason he shows up himself rather than send one of his underlings—or even phone us to look up what he wants—is that whenever he walks into the room I get the feeling that he’s a lion who hasn’t eaten in a week looking at a bunch of juicy hyenas. The things he says, thinking he’s being funny or jovial—Marlena always looks like she’s ready to drop him in one punch. He made some ludicrous remark about black women smelling differently from white women, told Natalie he hoped her fiancé was an ‘ass man,’ and made some crass remark about her ‘cushiony lips.’ He asked Lisa if she wanted to come to his office for a private tutorial—Lisa’s the grad student. He wondered aloud if Roger was gay, being the only guy working in what Mr. Harrison called a “hen house,” then when Roger said he was recently separated from his wife—God knows why he’d even bother to share any personal information with him—Harrison kind of leered at the rest of us and told Roger he had a lot of options available to him if he wanted to ‘get over’ his grief. The man’s a total pig.”
“Did he ever say anything to you?” Izzy asked me.
“He stares at my chest or my legs or both, depending on what I’m wearing on any given day.” I filled Izzy in on all the details. “I’ve been very careful how I dress, too. On my first day of work Ramona handed me a sheet of Newter & Spade’s house rules, which included a pretty conservative dress code. But there was one day when I was wearing a cocktail dress. I was so bleary-eyed from waking up before dawn to get one of the first audition slots for a Noël Coward play so I could get it over with and get to Newter & Spade before nine-thirty that I forgot to bring a more suitable change of clothes. And, in the world of Murphy’s Law, it was one of the days that Bart Harrison chose to make an appearance in the document-coding room.
“We work in a pretty isolated area, and ordinarily no one from the firm sees us unless we go up to the dining room for lunch or if they m
ake a special trip to the coding room, so since I wasn’t planning to eat upstairs—wouldn’t have been permitted to eat there, as it turned out—I figured I was safe. When Ramona stopped by to check up on us, make sure we weren’t all taking a bathroom break at once or stretching our legs in the alcove by the coffeemaker, she gave me a reprimand about my wardrobe. Actually, she forbade me from entering the company cafeteria dressed as I was.
“Harrison came in at around two-thirty and he smelled like a distillery. Do you remember if he drank during the day when he was at Sullivan Proctor? Because it sure seemed to me like he’d had a quite a few with lunch.”
“I’m pretty sure he did,” Izzy said, then added sarcastically, “although within the cloistered confines of these white-shoe law firms, alcoholism’s like a badge of honor. But even if Ramona seems to have it in for you, she’s still a woman. She’ll listen to you if you go to her and mention the way Harrison treats you and the other women in your department.”
So I did.
But not before a considerable amount of agonizing over it.
Alice, can’t you just ignore the guy when he makes asinine remarks? That’s all they are. Is it really that big a deal?
Are you kidding? You are kidding, right?
Think about the potential consequences.
Isn’t this what people are supposed to do when they are sexually harrassed on the job? The proper channels, I mean. Going directly to their supervisor to lodge a complaint. I’m standing up for a room full of temps whom Mr. Harrison is treating with phenomenal disrespect. I despise people who get their rocks off by bullying and humiliating others. It’s enough to give me hives. Put it this way: I can’t afford to not carry this banner.
Sometimes the person who charges into battle waving a big red flag is the one who gets shot down first. You need this job. Just show up, do it, and then go home. Some causes just aren’t worth dying for, Alice.
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