That time, Sarah Chan was more direct. She had understood before that I was applying for a job. Sadly, all the editorial positions were filled. There might be something in publicity, if I…? But as recently as June, I wouldn’t consider anything in publicity, anything except editing. Editing, working with writers, with words, was where my interest and talent lay. Anything else was a waste of time, I foolishly thought just a few months ago.
Now Sarah Chan poised in the middle of our handshake and looked at me curiously, her head tilted to one side.
“Have we met?” she asked.
I could confess all, say I’d moved, I was back for a third go, obviously not having learned the meaning of no.
Or I could think of it, as Maggie had coached, as a performance piece. Not lie, exactly, but play things out as far as I could.
“I don’t know,” I said, tilting my head to match Sarah Chan’s and looking her straight in the eye. “Have we?”
I’d had the feeling, when I was here before, that she wasn’t really seeing me. That she, like so many young professional women, saw me and registered: old, fat, housewife. And instantly the curtain slammed down.
Now she pressed her lips together and shook her head and looked puzzled. “You look awfully familiar.”
“So do you,” I said, mimicking her mystified expression.
“Oh, well,” she said, giving up with a more vigorous shake of the head. “Come in and tell me about yourself.”
This time, it seemed as if she really wanted to hear. She asked me about the literature classes I’d taken at Mount Holyoke, about my interest in Gentility. Although what I told her was virtually the same as what I’d said—twice—last year, this time she seemed to really be listening. And I’d gotten smarter in the intervening months as well. Rather than insisting that the only kind of job I was open to was editorial, I now claimed I was interested in all phases of the publishing business.
Ms. Chan tapped her pencil against my résumé and said there was something in marketing that might be right for me. Marketing? Of course! I loved marketing, or at least I thought I might, if I had any idea (this part I didn’t say out loud) what it was. Absolutely, I had time to talk with Teri Jordan, the director of marketing.
Walking along the halls, wending my way behind Sarah Chan through the cubicles, I was struck by how much the same the offices looked after all these years—the same, but not as prosperous. I’d been there when the company was flush from the feminist fever of the 1970s, when women were buying feminist tracts and classics by the great female writers as fast as Gentility could print them. Now, nobody read as much of anything, and Gentility was clearly feeling the pinch.
Scuff-marked paint and worn carpets aside, Gentility looked just as it had when I’d worked there last time, only all the people were different. Not only different, but younger, though I suppose we were all young when I worked there too. The only exception was the towering white-haired founder of the company, Florence Whitney, whom I glimpsed now only from afar. Mrs. Whitney was still a goddess to me, a decisive visionary who’d been a huge inspiration to all the women who worked for her, and I was glad not to be allowed to get too close. I might have knelt in adoration at her feet, and thoroughly given myself away.
The assistant’s station outside marketing director Teri Jordan’s office looked very empty. The chair had evidently been used as a dumping station for books, and the desk was dusty. That was the good news: This woman was almost certainly desperate for an assistant.
The bad news was Teri Jordan herself. It seemed clear to me even as we shook hands why this woman had had so much trouble hiring an assistant, why it was that I was able to walk in off the street and get an interview with her, right on the spot. Everything about her was severe, from her short slicked-back hair to her black suit to her grim line of a mouth. Ms. Chan, for one, couldn’t get out of there fast enough, as if she were throwing me into a tiger’s cage like so much raw meat.
I heard Maggie’s voice in my head—“Don’t let her intimidate you”—but it was too late, I was already intimidated. I’d been intimidated as soon as her handshake crushed the bones in my hand, intimidated as I surveyed the photographs of her three small children atop her completely cleared desk, which held only three perfectly sharpened pencils, all pointing directly at me.
“What makes you think you can work for me?” Teri snapped.
I felt my mouth go dry. Because no matter how nasty you get, you’re probably not going to ask me to show you my tits? Because this job is my best chance to get the life I most want?
Be bold, I heard Maggie urge me. Speak from your gut.
But my gut was responding as if she were Gary, home from a long day of drilling root canals. When he was stressed, he’d go on the offense, just as Teri was, and my cowed response had always been to speak in a soothing voice and try to get him to talk about what was really on his mind.
“What do you think it takes to work successfully for you?” I asked.
“Well,” said Teri, “the person has to be thoroughly reliable. I can’t take any more of these girls calling in sick every time they get cramps or a sniffle.”
“I haven’t been sick in twenty years,” I assured her.
She looked at me strangely. “You’re not allowed to be late, either,” she continued. “I’m here by eight, and while I don’t expect you to do the same, I’d still want you to be in every day well before nine.”
“I’m up most mornings by six,” I said. “Ever since—”
I’d been about to say that ever since Diana was born, I’d found it impossible to sleep late. But that probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
“I’m always up by four-thirty,” she informed me, just in case I should be feeling any sense of superiority about my six A.M. wakeups. “That’s when I exercise, then I get my house organized before waking up the kids to say good-bye.”
I eyed the pictures of the children—a girl who looked to be about six, with her front teeth missing and a long brown ponytail; a boy of three or four with severely parted hair, looking like a little political candidate; and a round-faced infant of indeterminate gender. It was hard to believe that Teri’s knife-thin body had produced these three soft little creatures.
“I work at home in Long Island on Fridays,” Teri was telling me, “but make no mistake, I’m not playing with my kids and checking my e-mail every few hours. I’m really working.”
I imagined her master bedroom with a huge desk and a full array of electrical equipment whirring and beeping, something like a command station. Did her husband stay home with the kids? I wondered. Or maybe she was the general to an army of nannies and housekeepers. It was hard to imagine Teri Jordan scraping by with a quasi-efficient au pair or day-care center and letting the housework slide.
“So part of your job,” she said, “will be to function as my ears and eyes and hands in the office on the days when I’m interfacing from home. Is that understood?”
She’d said “my job.” Did that mean I was hired?
“Now,” she said, “tell me your ideas about marketing the Gentility line.”
Uh-oh, apparently she wanted to know whether I was actually qualified before she hired me. Slight catch there. My only publishing experience, at Gentility itself, was inadmissible evidence. Plus, I still didn’t have a clue what marketing was.
But I did know Gentility’s books, as well, I’d wager, as Florence Whitney herself. I’d followed the company all these years, keeping track of the imprint and trying to read everything it published. Plus, as longtime director of Diana’s school book fairs, as a member of my library board and two local reading groups, I knew a lot about how books were packaged and sold.
“Gentility publishes some of the best books by women ever written,” I began cautiously. “There’s always a market”—I silently congratulated myself on finding a way to use the word—“for Jane Austen and the Brontës.”
“Yes, yes,” Teri said, waving her hand dismissively. “But
it’s a smaller market, and we want a bigger share of it. What do we do?”
“Uhhhhhh…” I was terrified of saying the wrong thing, for fear of blowing my chances at the job and also of Teri Jordan leaping across the desk and sinking her sharp little teeth into my throat. But saying nothing was definitely wrong. At least if I said what I really thought, as a devoted reader if not a professional marketer, I’d have some minuscule chance of being right.
“There are so many more factors vying for our attention now,” I said, “and the popular images of women are so much sexier and more idealized. The clothes, the bodies—young women feel like they have to look like Paris Hilton or they’re nothing.”
Even I, in the past few weeks, had found myself trying to measure up in ways that had never entered my mind before. Shopping for my new younger wardrobe with Maggie, I’d encountered clothes that were both narrower—were these clothes made for thirteen-year-olds? for men?—and more revealing than anything I’d ever owned. I’d felt like I was supposed to be both more feminine and more professional, less threatening as well as more ambitious, and I had to spend a lot more money in order to earn less. And no matter how well I fielded those conflicting pressures, I couldn’t even get a job.
Teri shook her head. “What does this have to do with marketing books?”
I’d gotten so worked up, I wasn’t sure I remembered my point myself.
“I just think you can’t sell the classics any longer with classic covers,” I said. “You know, the same old watercolors and portraits of nineteenth-century ladies. To get young women’s attention, you have to key into contemporary ideals of women’s lives, play with that in terms of bright colors, more exciting ads—”
Now Teri was shaking her head so hard that her hair was actually moving, which I would have thought to be a physical impossibility.
“I want you to understand,” Teri said, “that I’m the only idea person in this department. Are you going to be comfortable with that?”
I nodded, my mouth firmly shut.
“Are you going to be happy xeroxing and FedExing and keeping coffee—black, no sugar—running through my veins?”
Again, I nodded.
“All right,” Teri said, rising and—praise the Lord—not extending her hand and subjecting me to another bone-crushing handshake. “I’ll see you bright and early Monday morning.”
I didn’t let go until I was alone in Gentility’s ladies’ room. To anyone else, that place might not have felt like a temple of emotional expressiveness, but I’d gone through such big-time emotional events there that the mere sight of its peach tile walls set my heart on fire. I’d come here directly from the lunch when Gary asked me to marry him. Found out I was pregnant with Diana in one of these stalls. And right here, I discovered I was spotting and in danger of losing the pregnancy.
Now, though, it was joy that surged through me, elation and excitement that I’d actually landed this job. “Yes,” I whispered, pumping my hands. That gave way to a full-out chuckle, and then I let out a whoop, complete with arms stretched into the air.
That felt so good, I began to dance. I’d done this after Gary proposed, pranced around this very bathroom to the inner tune of our song: Elvis Costello’s “Red Shoes.” I had always remembered that as one of the highest moments of my life, and now I felt almost that good again. I closed my eyes as I swung into a real dance, hearing Elvis the Second’s voice in my head: “Red shoes, the angels wanna wear my red…RED SHOES…”
And I guess I was letting myself sing a little bit out loud, because when I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror, there was someone behind me, watching me with an enormous grin on her face.
“Good day?” she asked, still smiling as she moved to wash her hands.
She was so ethereal-looking, she might have been a ghost, with her pale red hair, nearly the pastel of the bathroom walls, and her alabaster skin, which looked even whiter contrasted against her all-black clothing.
“I just got a job here,” I told her.
“Really,” she said, arching her delicate eyebrows. Her eyes were the pale green of jade. “What are you going to be doing?”
“I’m going to be an assistant in the marketing department,” I breathed.
She stared at me for a minute, all traces of a smile now vanished from her face.
Finally she said, “You’re not going to work for Teri Jordan, are you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh.” She’d uttered only that one noncommittal syllable, but she looked like she was holding back volumes.
My heart lurched. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You’ll probably be fine.”
“What?” I insisted.
She studied me, seemingly trying to determine whether I could handle the news she was about to deliver. “Well,” she finally said, looking around the bathroom, as I should have done, and lowering her voice almost to a whisper, “she fired the last three girls who worked for her.”
“Really?” I said. While I’d experienced a range of emotions in this room, I’d never swung through the whole range in such a short time.
“I don’t think the last one made it through a day.”
“Really.” I felt my shoulders sag as my heart dropped toward the floor. “What’s the problem?”
“Mrs. Whitney—you know, she’s the head of the company—is apparently convinced that Teri Jordan is brilliant and wonderful. But that’s not what the people who work for her think. She’s apparently very demanding and not so scrupulous.”
“Not so scrupulous?” I said, thinking guiltily of my own dodgy scruples. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know the specifics,” she shrugged. “I’m in editorial.”
“Editorial,” I breathed. “That’s where I really wanted to be.”
“You can move up a lot faster on the business side,” she said, “if you can manage to survive Teri Jordan.”
I let out a sigh so deep, it seemed to have been trapped inside for years. In the past year, I had survived my separation, my only child’s departure, and my mother’s death. I’d grown both more brave and more afraid, more confident in my ability to deal with pain and more reluctant to open the door to any more of it.
“I don’t know,” was all I could manage to say.
“Don’t worry,” said the redheaded young woman, laying her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll take care of you.”
This waif was going to take care of me? I smiled weakly.
“I’m Lindsay, by the way.”
“Alice.”
“Ah,” she said. “As in Munro. Or Walker.”
I could have kissed her. “Everyone says ‘as in Wonderland,’ ” I told her.
“I’m not everyone,” she said. “But I’ll still be your White Rabbit.” And with that she vanished down the maze of corridors of Gentility Press, leaving me more nervous than ever about the coming week—and more excited.
Chapter 5
My house in New Jersey looked as strange and distant as if I’d been gone for years, not a mere few weeks. I stood on the sidewalk—mine was the only one on the block that was slick with ice and tamped-down snow—gazing at it as if I were coming home after a long journey. Everything about the place—the towering trees, the broad yard edged with its split-rail fence, the black shutters against the crisp white of the window frames and the warm beige of the painted brick—seemed quiet and peaceful, like a drawing in an old-time romantic novel, captioned “Home.”
Old Mr. Radek from next door edged down his driveway, using his snow shovel like a crutch, and when he caught sight of me he stopped and waved. This is why I’d avoided coming back these past weeks: I didn’t want to explain my new hair, my new clothes, what I’d been doing in the city, whether I’d be coming back for good. But Mr. Radek just waved at me, looking sublimely uncurious.
“Hello, Diana,” he called.
Diana. He thought I was my own daughter. Younger neighbors with sharper eyesight
would not be so easily fooled. And if one of my two close friends from the neighborhood had been in town, I would have had a lot of explaining to do. But Elaine Petrocelli and her husband Jim, now that their kids were all out of the house, had fulfilled a lifelong dream and were spending a year living in Italy, and my friend Lori, inspired in a kind of backward way by my divorce from Gary, had finally gotten out of her long-unhappy marriage and moved back to Little Rock, her hometown.
Rather than enlightening Mr. Radek, I gave him a friendly wave and headed up my walk. It was almost impossible to open the door because of all the mail littering the hallway, and the place was freezing because I’d turned the heat down before I left for what turned into my endless New Year’s weekend at Maggie’s.
Now the plan was that I would spend a whirlwind weekend getting the house ready to put on the rental market. The real estate agent I’d called assured me there was high demand for month-to-month rentals to people moving to Homewood or having work done on their own houses who needed a temporary furnished place to stay. That way I could store my things in the attic, even stow my car in the garage, and spend every month until Diana’s return at Maggie’s.
But standing there in my front hallway, my eyes lighting on one thing after another that I loved—the dented pewter pitcher I’d rescued from Mr. Radek’s garbage, the watercolor of the Irish hills done by a book group friend who’d died of breast cancer, the first note Diana had written from camp (“I love you like pancakes love syrup”), which I’d framed and hung on the wall—all I wanted to do was hurl myself on the ground and hang on so tight nothing could make me let go. How could I dream, even for an instant, of camping out in Maggie’s drafty loft, of wandering alone through the frigid (in every sense of the word) city streets, when I could be in this wonderful home?
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