Sweet Bye-Bye

by Denise Michelle Harris

  I walked around some more. A breeze of cold morning air rushed past me, raising the loose braids on the side of my hair, and I thought I probably looked like a flying chicken.

  “Good morning,” I said to the couple with the little dog.

  “Good morning to you,” said the husband.

  The wife just smiled and gave me a nod.

  I kept walking around and soon spotted a pile of dog pooh that sat in the grass waiting for someone to come along and to clean it up. Some owners were so irresponsible. I put on the yellow rubber dishwashing gloves that I’d stuffed in my pocket, opened the handles of the scooper, and locked the fork-like jaws around the pooh. Then I took out the bag, placed the poop securely in it, and headed for home.

  In the top of my closet was the Tiffany box that my tennis bracelet had come in. I took down the pretty aqua blue box with black letters and a white satin ribbon around it. I’d splurged one day and bought it for myself after Eric kept promising to get it for me, only to let last year’s birthday pass. Instead he’d given me a Reebok sweatshirt.

  I removed the blue pouch from the box and took it outside into the backyard. I put the yellow dishwashing gloves back on and retrieved the bag of poop. Tearing it open, I dropped its contents into the pouch. I placed the pouch in the box, put the top on, wiped it all down really well, and slipped the ribbon back on.

  I placed the Tiffany box inside some bubble wrap and another box, then mailed it to Mina at the office that afternoon. Mina Everett was full of crap, just like her present.

  10

  Big Payback

  My job was sending me away for two days to an “Effective Presentation Seminar” in Sacramento. It was hosted by Les Brown, and some of the country’s most influential motivational speakers would be speaking. The two days promised to be entertaining and the food was bound to be good. I was trying to get ready to leave the office, but by chance I was still there for the mail run.

  I heard people saying, “Mina . . . Tiffany box . . . Propose.” And people started getting up and heading over to the other side of the room where Mina sat.

  “What’s going on? What’s going on?” the front receptionist came to our area and asked.

  “Mina got a Tiffany box . . . Her boyfriend’s proposing through the mail!”

  “C’mon, I’m on my way over there now!” The women giggled and walked across our floor.

  I looked down at my desk and cleaned it off real good. I opened my drawer and took out my keys to lock up the drawers.

  The women came back past my area walking really fast. Their hands were on their chests and they were frowning. Some people giggled. Others laughed out loud.

  I picked up my things to leave. Gary, the guy who sat next to me, raced back to his seat and sat down.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “Trust me, Chantell,” he said with his palm extended outward like he was directing traffic. “You don’t want to know.”

  I grabbed my briefcase, my cell phone, my DKNY watch. I asked Gary to water my plant and fought to hold a straight face; I was out of there.

  11

  Canun Does Chantell

  The two-day seminar had been great, but when I returned, it seemed my entire office had gone berserk.

  Both my phone and Canun’s were ringing off the hook with calls from upper management in New York. They were calling every hour, it seemed, to see if Canun had gotten Skyway Modems to sign off on the deal yet. Canun Ramsey was stuttering and pacing the floor, and voilà! Enter Chantell into the scenario.

  I didn’t know the details of the deal, but was being congratulated by my coworkers. Canun was sweating as he gave me the full scoop: “Your account has agreed to do this large test, but I’ve got a meeting, and I’m on my way out the door.” I nodded. He said, “Call your account. We need to get the creative elements from them to get it started right away.”

  Skyway Modems, it seemed, had agreed to spend $100,000 to let us test out the effectiveness of our new product soon to launch, called the “Sunday Disk Drive edition.” This new product was simple, but a novel concept really. My understanding of it was this: We, the newspaper, would be willing to put a cardboard disk onto the front of our Sunday edition of the newspaper to promote a business. This sounded like a win/win deal. It gave the business, in this case Skyway Modems, an opportunity to put an attention-grabbing message right there in the highly sought-after consumer’s face, and it made us at the newspaper innovators, pioneers even, of an effective and exciting new way to disseminate information. Management said it would be way more effective than a local TV commercial or radio station spot, and better than any billboard could do! Yep, the pressure was on, but the potential was there. Whichever newspaper office could pull this off, and be the first in the country to get this new product sold, would look like a superstar!

  Canun grabbed his coat and wrote a couple of things on a yellow notepad on his desk. “Chantell, our CEO himself thought of and created this new product and he’s super anxious to get it tested. They’re ringing my phones every three minutes for the contract.” He swallowed. “I got all of the major legwork done, Chantell. This will be a nice little bonus for you. So make sure you get the contract signed and everything turned in as quickly as you can.”

  I nodded as I took in his words. Canun was bidding on making VP soon and wanted to look good in the eyes of the top executives. He took a tissue, patted the back of his neck, and left.

  I headed back to my desk happy. Canun was not a strong salesperson, yet he’d gotten my account, Skyway Modems, to agree to pay to test it out. This was major! I was impressed.

  Although it was believed the disk drive product would be super effective, it was also very expensive to produce. Once we could prove its effectiveness, other advertisers were sure to pay top dollar for the Disk Drive edition without hesitation, at all the papers across the country. Now that Canun had sold it, I knew what I needed to do: I needed to get over to Skyway, get the artwork, get the contract signed, and get this deal all wrapped up.

  The excitement was contagious. We were talking about an additional $7,000 on my next commission check, and though I hadn’t been the seller, when your account agrees to do something like this, you shine too. After all, if it weren’t for all of the relationship-building that I’d done with the account, then they would not have agreed to run with this in the first place. Right?

  I called the CEO at Skyway, Mr. Strautimeyer. He was a ball-breaker. You had to have all of your ducks in a row when you approached him. Last year, I’d seen him make another sales rep cry. Well, I certainly had a newfound respect for my boss, Canun. I guess he wasn’t the “coattail rider” that my coworkers had nicknamed him after all.

  Mr. Strautimeyer’s assistant put me right through to him.

  “Hello, Mr. Strautimeyer, it’s Chantell Meyers from the San Francisco Daily News. How are you today?”

  “Well, I am fine, Chantell. How are you?”

  “I am just great.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I know that you’ve decided to promote your new modems via our new Sunday Disk Drive edition, and I wanted to swing by this afternoon to pick up the creative. What would be a good time for you?”

  There was a silence. Then Mr. Strautimeyer cleared his throat. “I didn’t agree to that, Chantell. Your manager, Canun, mentioned something or another, but I was not even totally clear on what it was. And well, to be quite frank with you, Chantell, you already know that I’ve allocated my entire budget for this year.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said and rubbed my forehead. The deal wasn’t closed at all. It was a little hot in there.

  Already, Mr. Strautimeyer had spent over a million dollars with me this year promoting his new wireless modems. I held the phone to my ear and contemplated. Think fast. Maybe I should try to give him a tiny push. Maybe that would get him to give it a try. However, I was reluctant to risk the working rapport that we had built. I didn’t want to push him too
far. But Canun had already opened the door, it was my job to try. So here goes . . .

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, why don’t I stop by and show you the prototype, and perhaps you can—”

  “That won’t be necessary. I am extremely busy.” And he hung up without so much as a good-bye.

  That was finicky Mr. Strautimeyer. In the time we’d worked together, I’d learned a few things about him. One, he never said good-bye. Two, he didn’t ever want to feel like he was “sold” or pushed into anything. And three, he’d just stopped this supposed big Sunday disk deal dead in its tracks. I exhaled and sat back in my chair.

  Why had Canun put me in that position? He made it sound like the deal was signed, sealed, and all that I had to do was deliver it. Little weasel was always trying to move up the corporate ladder on someone else’s back.

  Needless to say, after that the rest of my day didn’t go so well. Not only did I have to deal with everyone coming over to my desk to ask, “What happened? What happened?” I also had to phone the VPs in New York and explain that there was no deal. What was I going to say to them by way of explanation—that my manager had never really had a deal? And oh, by the way, he’s an idiot. I don’t think so! I took the heat. I said that Skyway decided against going with the Sunday Disk Drive project. But of course, to them it looked like once I got involved, the deal went sour.

  You were only as good as your last deal in this business. If things kept up this way, I was going to be looking in the paper for a new job.

  12

  A Better Time

  My California king-size bed was my place of solitude and comfort. It had three high mattresses and a stepstool next to it that I used to climb up into it. I lay under my goosedown comforter, which was encased in a cream-and-yellow satin duvet cover with little pink and yellow flowers on it. I looked over at the nightstand to check the time. It was 10:54 p.m.

  I lay in bed and thought about the massive to-do list that I’d left on my desk. Even then as I lay in my bed, Mr. Strautimeyer’s comments made me feel uneasy. He was truly a businessman’s businessman, and if he thought I was trying to manipulate him into that deal, I could lose his business.

  Two crystal picture frames sat next to my alarm clock on the nightstand, illuminated by the moon’s light that came through my window and hit them just so. One was of Eric and me together; we’d taken it in a photo booth at a carnival. The other was of just myself in a little black dress, at a nightclub in the city.

  I’d tossed and turned so much over my awful day that my head wrap slipped off again. I rewrapped my hair and tied it up again. When I had told Canun what had happened on the phone with Mr. Strautimeyer, he had said he was shocked that Skyway didn’t sign the deal. The little rat even had the nerve to try and look at me like I’d done something to mess it up!

  I sighed and put my hands under my head and tried to go to sleep, but I tossed and turned and was up again. Work was a mess, and my romantic life was a mess. I wanted Eric there with me, to hold me, to comfort me. But I knew that if he were here, that would only lead us to areas that I was trying to stay away from. I was convinced that we needed to get married, and even my new copy of Glamour magazine confirmed that the best way to get married was to not have sex with the guy. I twisted and turned in my feelings of emptiness and loneliness. I was on my back, then on my side, then my scarf came off again. I put it back on. I had to remember to write out my checks in the morning. Water, cable, garbage, phone. I’d get to them.

  I closed my eyes again and dreamed, or I remembered, I don’t know which. I was somewhere between dreamland and the place where your memories are stored. With my eyes closed, I remembered a better time for me. I must have been five or six years old. We were upstairs in the balcony at church. I wore a white ruffled dress that coordinated with my socks and the bows in my hair. I never liked dressing that way, but it gave my Grandmother Hattie such satisfaction to see me so proper-looking. I preferred my Big Ben jeans with the yellow patch on the back pocket. But Grandma said that I was a little lady and that I should dress as such. My ponytails were neatly combed and perfectly parted with barrettes that hit my neck as I ran. My bangs curled down and bumped under on my forehead. My caramel skin and almond eyes caused people who didn’t know me to make comments.

  “Mrs. Brumwick,” the neighbor watering her grass from across the street would yell over, “your grandbaby is just precious! She looks like a dolly!”

  My grandmother would beam with pride as I stood there with my best shy-coy look.

  But at church, this look never worked. There, my appearance fooled no one. I could kick a kickball from here to Timbuktu and the congregation knew it. There, all of the members’ children knew to stay out of my way because I was bossy as all get out. My personality was strong and even my demeanor said “Follow me.” And that’s exactly what lots of the children used to do.

  But not asthmatic little Keith Rashaad Talbit. He was the goody-two-shoed, sickly little grandson of Sister Edna. She started bringing him to church just weeks after he was born. His parents died in a fire when he was just a baby, and Sister Edna raised him alone, with the help of the church members. By the time he was a year old, Keith Rashaad Talbit had become the unspoken godchild of every member of the church.

  This little boy was always a runt for his age, and a bookworm. His semisweet-chocolate brown skin was usually dry, ashy, and itchy. He kept hive ointment handy in his pocket just in case he got too nervous.

  Pastor Fields and the rest of the congregation always kept an eye out and an ear open to make sure the kids weren’t teasing him. They did the best they could to protect him. But sometimes, the little girls made jokes with Keith as the punch line. More times than not, it was me spearheading the “make-fun-of-Keith” sessions after church let out, or during church, upstairs, after Mother Ola Rose Pearl had dozed off.

  Some Sundays, Mother Pearl would bring a ten-pack of Freedent gum to church with her—the kind in the light blue wrapper that advertised it didn’t stick to dentures. She’d open a few packs and give us all a stick. Those were some good times. The parents always dreaded those days, and they could tell them right off because they’d glance up to the balcony and see all of our jaw muscles working in tandem, almost uniformly, much like little cows grazing. After a couple of minutes, one of the parents would always come upstairs, get the wastebasket out of the corner, and make sure that every child made a deposit.

  In my dream, I vividly saw Mother Pearl go to sleep. Her chin slowly lowered and covered up her neck, then she suddenly jerked her head back up again. Her silver, fluffy hair was parted in the middle and combed straight downward. She wore thigh-high stockings that she rolled down just below the knee.

  Pastor Fields was speaking, and Mother Pearl sleeping. I pulled out a new deck of cards from my shiny little black purse. I gathered three other little girls from the pews and found a nice corner. We spread the cards out on the floor and proceeded to play my favorite game.

  “Okay, ladies,” I said, “let’s play some Concentration.”

  I was darn good at it too. The best in first grade. I gave them the rules.

  “Okay, whoever loses has gotta kiss Keith Talbit and wear his Coke-bottle glasses! Molina, it’s you and me. You’re first.” I gestured my hands toward the cards like the ladies on Grandma’s favorite show, The Price Is Right.

  “I’ll go,” said Molina, “but I’m not kissing Keith, Chantell. Noooo-no!”

  “Look,” I said, “rules are rules, and if you’re not going to play fair by them, then you don’t get to play!” I looked around at the other girls to see which would take her place.

  “Chanteeell,” she whined. “I want to play, but boys are gross! They make me tho’ up.”

  “I know, Molina. Life is hard, though. Sometimes we don’t get to make the rules. Sometimes”—I shook my head—“we just have to live by them.”

  And I almost felt sorry for her. After all, we were talking about the always-coughing Keith Rash
aad.

  Molina stared at the cards on the floor. Resigned, she said, “Okay.” She turned over a queen and a six of diamonds.

  “Hah! No match. My turn,” I said, as the two other girls watched.

  We continued to play until we got down to the last six cards. Molina was happy because she had thirteen matches and I’d only had ten. If she got one more, then there would be no way I could win. I told myself, Forget that! I wasn’t kissin’ nobody.

  Molina flipped over a three, then over another three. “Yaayy!” she said out loud.

  “So what, Molina!” I said. “Anyways, I’m not kissing anyone, because you shouldn’t be kissing people in church. That’s wrong! We’re here to learn about God and Jesus!”

  Molina ignored me and matched up the last four cards to win the game. The other two girls, who had been watching quietly, finally chimed in. “Chantell, you said yourself that if you’re not going to play fair by the rules, then don’t play. And our parents kiss in church all the time.”

  “Yep, sho’ do. And people even get married here, so you know they be kissin!” said that other little one with her head moving.

  I inhaled deeply and rolled my eyes. Stupid girls. Why were they in my business anyway? I got up, walked over to the pew, stepped over Ola Pearl, and went over to where Keith was and sat down next to him. He was quiet, looking at the preacher with his hands folded in his lap. I took a deep breath, leaned over, and pressed my lips into his cheek. Keith adjusted his glasses with his fingers and looked at me, but before he could say a word, I whispered, “Oh shut up, Frog Face.”

  I still remembered how that little kiss made me dizzy.

  I opened my eyes again. It was late, I was tired and groggy, but I was smiling. That was a memory that I had forgotten all about. I used to be so bold. I’d say whatever I wanted. I took nobody’s mess. Not now, though. Nowadays, I was always fearful, and miserable even though I pretended that I wasn’t. And when those weren’t my concerns, I was worried about what people thought of me. Where had that fearless little girl gone?