Pink Slip

by Rita Ciresi

  I gave Karen another smile that made my lips hurt and turned the conversation back toward her baby. Karen sat there singing the praises of breast-feeding so long I was sure her boobs would start leaking milk all over her monogrammed sweater. She finally wound up her La Leche League lecture by saying, “Where has the time gone? I promised to stop in and say hello to everyone. I suppose I’ll start with Mr. Strauss.”

  Although I knew it might get me into deep doo—doo, I just couldn’t resist. “You really think Mr. Strauss is gay?” I asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’m usually pretty dense about that kind of stuff,” I told her. “But I’m curious. How you get that impression. Of a guy’s gayness. Or gaiety. Or whatever you want to call it.”

  “Well. Little things. For starters, he’s a good dresser—”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. He’s got some ugly ties.”

  “And he sent me flowers when I was told to stay in bed. And flowers again when the baby was born. I mean, he’s just too nice to be straight—”

  “Now, now,” I said. “What does that say about your attitude toward men?”

  “Well, Lisa,” she said, “your attitude toward men is very clear.”

  “What is my attitude?” I asked. “Tell me.”

  It was my good fortune that the baby chose this moment first to gurgle, then to open its mouth and throw up—a big yellow cheesy gob that looked and smelled revolting.

  “Oh God,” Karen said. “How awful. I’m so sorry—”

  “Quite all right,” I said, thrilled she would have to clean the vomit up.

  The baby started to cry.

  “We’ll be leaving now,” Karen said.

  “Of course.” I smiled, wished Karen well, and told her good luck with her baby—but I did not chuck his cheery little upchucked chin before I sent them on their way. As my final send—off, I pleasantly threatened her, “I’ll be sure to invite you to my bridal shower.”

  After she departed, leaving the sour smell of her baby behind, I clutched one of my blue pencils so hard it snapped between my fingers. Then I logged on to my word-processing program and began updating my résumé. Two hours later I was in the ladies’ room, and a designer from the art shop stopped me. She ducked her head to check if there were any feet beneath the stall doors before she whispered, “I know it’s supposed to be a secret—but congratulations, I heard you’re tying the knot!”

  Strauss and I got our comeuppance at the next divisional meeting, held in the small auditorium, where Human Resources was due to present the new sexual-harassment code. Attendance was de rigueur. For legal reasons—Boorman Pharmaceuticals is required by law to fully educate each of its employees about the policies and procedures of said sexual-harassment code—roll was taken; we each were required to sign our names on a numbered legal sheet before we sat down. I deliberately straggled behind. Strauss’s overly bold signature was on line 23. I was number 27—and also number 28, because as I signed my name I took wild glances up and down the auditorium to find out where he was sitting so I could snag a seat on the other side of the room. My signature ended up spilling onto two lines and looked like it came from the pen of a split personality.

  My efforts went for naught; Mr. Wayne Lamarr waved me down to the front. Just in case there were any questions on the wording, he asked me (as the editor who put the seal on the final draft) to sit in the front row—along with the social worker who was going to give us a canned presentation, a company lawyer, and our leaders, Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger and Eben Strauss.

  That morning—knowing I would see Strauss in this most absurd of settings—I had deliberately donned a mixture of the provocative and the respectable. Over the Natori bra and underwear Strauss had given me, I put on a semitransparent silk blouse and a black skirt, making the whole thing look chaste by covering it up with a long wool jacket in pristine pastel blue.

  Although my skirt was above the knee, it was not high enough to warrant the sober, level stare I got from Dr. Schoenbarger as I passed by. At that moment I was sure she knew something more than she had last week. My face flushed as I headed for the last seat in the row, which would, of course, happen to be right next to Strauss.

  “Good morning,” Strauss said, in a tone at least thirty—five degrees chillier than the tone he used to greet me that first dawn I woke up in his bed.

  “Good morning,” I repeated.

  He looked away when I sat down, taking his elbow off the armrest to make sure it didn’t brush against me. I looked at his legs—I, at least, bore no ill will toward his knees—and tried hard not to look at his hands. I wanted to touch his hand. Maybe he wanted the same, because he looked down at my fingers, gripped all too tightly around my pen and legal pad.

  I dropped my pen to the pad, as if to say, Not to fear—I don’t plan on taking notes.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Fine. You?”

  “The same.” He paused. “Everything going smoothly in your office?”

  “Of course.”

  That is, when my blood sugar isn’t dropping. After I skip lunch.

  He adjusted the cuff on his shirt. I noticed it was a little dingy. “You know to speak to Peg if there are problems.”

  “I don’t need to speak to Peg,” I said. “Unless Peg has said something critical to you …”

  “Nothing critical has been said of you,” he told me in a mild voice. “You have nothing to worry about on that count.” Then he turned to the person next to him—one of the corporation lawyers—to give him equal time.

  I bit my lip and wished I could ask him: What does Peg know? And who—if anyone—is going to pay for it? My stomach curled into a tight ball. I wished I had called in sick to work, so I could have attended the session the following day for the Finance division. How could I ever have believed that Research and Development—the brains as opposed to the brawn—was the most exciting division at Boorman? I turned around and quickly inspected the auditorium. Among the dull sea of faces in R&D, a definite pattern emerged: Women without any power—i.e., the secretaries and everyone in Editorial—sat stage left. In the middle bank of chairs sat women with slightly higher responsibilities—some of the lab technicians and the director of the art shop (who, I felt like pointing out to Strauss, wore hot—pink glasses, not green)—and the bespectacled scientists. Stage right sat whatever good old boys could be found in our division—some of the guys who worked below Strauss on positioning the latest drugs on the market. I couldn’t even figure out what those guys did all day, besides hustling paperwork around the headquarters of the FDA and being wined and dined by university deans eager to get corporate sponsorship for the labs at their own major research institutions.

  My mood felt vinegary as the cafeteria’s cole slaw and turned even more sour after the meeting was called to order by Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger.

  The presentation consisted of a windy introduction by Wayne Lamarr and a clipped message from Peggy about how sexual harassment was against the law and would not be tolerated. The social worker trotted out a few innocuous platitudes, and then we were shown a film. Strauss and I never even went to the movies together, I thought as the lights went down and the video machine began to flicker.

  I knew this film would be about fifteen minutes long, just like the “shorts” they used to show before the feature presentation at the Roger Sherman Cinema to convince the audience they’d gotten their money’s worth—the documentaries with educational overtones, which seemed purposefully made to encourage the unruly kids in the front rows to throw popcorn at the screen and inspire horny teenagers, slunk down in the backseats beneath the balcony, to get grabby. The officious tones of the conarrators (a plain brunette in a red jacket and a man in a blue blazer, who on closer inspection looked remarkably like the Tidy Bowl Man) brought to mind the movies shown to us in junior-high-school health class over the strenuous objections of our local priests, the Archbishop of Hartford, and even some of our mothers whose English w
as good enough to raise a protest. These movies warned about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. They defined the terms syphilis and gonorrhea. They explained how babies were made and even showed us a scene that made my ears ring and the blood flow to my feet: the last three minutes of a natural childbirth. Although I had tried to laugh along with the rest of the kids, the labor seemed all too real. My heart had pounded with fear and I had bit my lip to keep from crying out when the bloody infant, still attached to a pulsing purple umbilical cord, was triumphantly lifted by the father and placed on the belly of the mother.

  Boorman’s featured presentation failed to move me. It was a low-budget affair that showed various scenes of inappropriate verbal and physical behavior, such as men calling women sweetheart, honey, and sugar pie, men standing too close to women at the Xerox machine, and men winking at women across the conference table. After each scene a question was flashed on the screen—IS THIS HARASSMENT?—always followed by another screen that firmly told us YES. Although the conarrators spoke of subtle coercion, the advances shown were obvious enough to fly at any cocktail bar’s happy hour. The plot was predictable and the characters no more complex than horny white heterosexual Midwestern males in Arrow shirts and Van Heusen slacks and their modest female coparts in polyester dresses. One guy looked vaguely like Hook Roberts, but this was about as close to realism as this movie was going to get.

  I wasn’t so naive that I thought such power plays between men and women never happened. But it galled me to think that someone would try to reduce my relationship with Strauss down to this. By law the film should have had everything to do with me—but in reality, it had nothing. Nothing. Where was the clatter of a root-beer can falling to the bottom of a vending machine? Where was the aria from Gianni Schicchi? Where was the man whose half-brother came to him in the middle of the night? Where was the girl whose mother told her, Thank God for your health and don’t expect nothing more and whose father would rather have had his balls cut off with a pinking shears than ever once tell his daughter he loved her? Where was the boredom that came from sitting in front of a computer terminal for hours? The claustrophobia of entering the workplace before the sun even rose above the trees and leaving only after the day had long gone dark, and the sad moment when you realized the headlights of the car promised only to take you back to a cold apartment? Where was the guilt and the loneliness and the desire every human being on earth had to be held in someone else’s arms, to hear a lover call your name and whisper, Listen to the rain?

  We were sitting in the dark. I sensed Strauss’s arm next to mine. He had on one of those wool jackets I loved to stroke. The moment the lights went back on, I saw a long strand of brown hair on his left sleeve. I blinked, and stopped myself just in time from reaching out to pluck it.

  It was my hair. Mine. And I couldn’t be certain, but I thought that was the jacket he wore the afternoon he came back from Omaha, the one I stripped him of when we fell to the floor of his apartment, and he shoved the pillow under me, and said, Oh God Jesus, you feel so good, while I said, Oh God, yes God, give it to me give it to me, this is what I need …

  You’d think, by now, that Strauss would have taken that jacket to the dry cleaner’s. You’d also think, in the heat of the moment, we would have come up with something more original to say. In bed, maybe, everyone became a stock character. But the reasons people went between the sheets—now, there was a story worth telling. And not surprisingly, this was exactly what the movie didn’t illustrate.

  After the movie the social worker took the podium and told us what we had just learned: that unwanted attention and unwelcome advances made for a hostile work environment, and a hostile work environment would not be tolerated by the top management of Boorman. She talked about the need to create a productive working atmosphere and to form healthy relationships with those outside the office. Nobody asked her for a definition of the term healthy relationship.

  The actual sexual—harassment document—twenty-six pages long, and printed in enough copies to kill an acre of redwoods—was passed around for inspection. Key points were read aloud by Mr. Wayne Lamarr and the corporate lawyer. We were all urged to study the document and refer any questions—or grievances—to Mr. Lamarr, who would field our inquiries in strict confidence. Any questions?

  Stage left remained silent. The folks in the middle bank of seats decided to maintain professional decorum, but stage—right male hands shot up all over the place. It was obvious the guys had trouble with the whole code, which they expressed by stabbing their forefingers at the document and questioning the wording, posing hypothetical situations (Now say I call my secretary honey—is that harassment? I call my wife honey. I call my mother honey, for Christ’s sake!).

  In his responses, Mr. Lamarr sang the company line. Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger provided backup in her forbidding alto. The social worker kept referring back to scenes in the movie, Strauss remained silent, and when I was asked to offer a comment on the phrasing of section sixteen, I graciously deferred to the lawyer, who, after giving us a tedious explanation of quid pro quo, then pontificated for fifteen minutes on everything from equal opportunity to single—sex harassment to whether gay men should be allowed to be Boy Scout leaders, until Mr. Wayne Lamarr cut him off.

  “Any closing remarks?” he asked.

  Just to prove she was the head honcho, Peggy stood and repeated, “Any more questions?” with a finality that made it clear that whoever prolonged this meeting another second risked being drawn and quartered. Peggy nodded and pronounced the meeting adjourned—a command that had the same effect as a priest saying, “Mass has ended. Go in peace.” The cushioned seats snapped back, people laughed and grumbled and called across the room to one another, and Strauss surprised me by saying, “That should give you plenty of material for your novel, Lisar,” before he stood up and walked away. I bolted for the bathroom, having drunk far too much coffee again.

  On the way out of the ladies’, I had the misfortune to pass Strauss and Peggy—both giving off extremely bad body language—as they walked back to their executive suite. At first it seemed to me that Peggy was a teacher marching an unruly student down the hall. Then she metamorphosed into a bodyguard in a bulletproof vest, protecting some celebrity from the prying eyes of the paparazzi. She’s pissed, I thought. But she’s going to save him. She wants to whomp his ass on the golf course. She needs somebody to remind her to take her Dramamine.

  I felt sick—and vulnerable to her wrath and scorn—until I realized that in order to save Strauss, she had to save me, whether it agreed with her principles or not. For the moment, I was safe.

  I felt better after I ate lunch. Maybe there was something to be said for Strauss’s blood-sugar theory. In the afternoon I wouldn’t have gotten so annoyed that the women in Editorial were wasting company time doing a trash-town number on the new sexual-harassment policy if they hadn’t so inconveniently interrupted my own hard work. Inspired by Strauss’s comment about my novel, I had clicked back into my personal files and was deep into a really hot reconciliation scene between Thomas Akins and Donna Dilano:

  “Take off those goddamn glasses,” Thomas growled, before he threw the power locks of his Saab, flicked Donna’s leather seat into the recline position, and fucked Donna until she saw more stars than … than … who?—the learned astronomer in Whitman’s poem?—Galileo?—an Iowa farm boy lying in a dark cornfield?—a group of grammar—school children on a field trip to the Hartford observatory?

  The piercing laughter of my coworkers zapped my concentration and made me unable to decide on any of those poor choices. My office door was cracked just an inch open, but even over the whoomp—ah—whoomp—ah of the Xerox machine, I could hear a trio of them reenacting some of the absurd scenarios played out in the orange-colored film.

  Look out, I’m about to call you honey!

  Can I pat you on the shoulder, dollcakes?

  Depends on if your name is Steve …?

  You know you’d be fiat on
top of the boardroom table in no time if he wanted it—

  How about that new guy in advertising, the one in the Camaro—

  I’d pay him to harass me.

  The hair bristled on the back of my neck. Was it possible that some women found Hook Roberts attractive? That more than anything almost sent me out there, à la Schoenbarger, to put a stop to their nonsense, but then I realized that if I weren’t the boss—and Strauss’s ex—lunch—hour—quickie—I, too, would be out there, joining in the conversation, if not leading the way with my comments: I bet the CEO flies his whores in from France on the Concorde! Hook Roberts can whack off in my pencil cup for all I care! Lunch-hour sex at Boorman?—just working here already gives me enough problems with my digestive processes!

  I ground my heels into the carpet and kept my butt parked on my ergonomically correct office chair. I kept my ears peeled, waiting to hear my name mentioned—or Strauss’s—but the trio of giggling women remained prudent enough not to refer to either one of us. Everybody wanted to keep their jobs, I thought—including me. Christmas was coming, after all, and they had to buy presents. Lately that was all they talked about, these women—the married ones may have complained about their husbands, the sole divorcée did a routine number on her ex, and the single ones bemoaned the lack of good dates, but they all agreed on one thing: Food and holidays took top priority. I sat there listening, both wanting to scorn them and join them, before I gritted my teeth and returned to the computer, scrolling up to just before Thomas Akins screwed Donna Dilano right out of the solar system and straight up the Milky Way. I wrote:

  Donna Dilano felt anything but love as she stared into Thomas Akins’s eyes, which were grayer than the pots her mother used to boil spaghetti in (change later, don’t end in preposition). “Let me out of this car, you self-righteous, moralizing prick!” she growled.

  “Take off those goddamn glasses!” Thomas growled—

  But Donna just growled. So Thomas couldn’t growl, could he? unless I wrote: