Younger

by Pamela Redmond Satran

  “What’s that you’re doing?” Teri said, stopping dead in her tracks and sliding her enormous dark glasses—on her sharp little face, they made her look like an alien—down her chiseled nose.

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s just something I’m working on.”

  “What is it?” Teri said, a smile flickering on and off her lips like a lamp with faulty wiring.

  “It’s not quite ready,” I said. “I want to get it completely pulled together before I present it to you.”

  Lindsay had advised me to outline my idea in writing and give it to Teri in a memo. That way, Lindsay said, she’d at least have to give me credit for what was documented as mine.

  “Let’s have a preview,” Teri said, dropping her briefcase and already reaching across my desk.

  What could I do? Tell the teacher? I showed her the notebook—I wanted to be able to carry my notes back and forth from Maggie’s with me, and besides, I was paranoid about entrusting the plan to the computer before I was ready to show it to Teri—and explained my idea in broad terms. Teri listened, looking not at me but at the paper, nodding as I talked. I felt vaguely guilty, thanks to my Catholic girlhood, for working on this project without telling her, or maybe I was just afraid that she was pissed off. Which she looked. Though she looked like that almost all the time.

  “This has possibilities,” she said when she’d finished reading. “I’d like to see this more fleshed out.”

  My heart soared with relief and pleasure. I was finally on the right track. My boss liked my idea and had given me the green light to develop it. I imagined myself presenting the idea to Mrs. Whitney, with Lindsay providing backup, Thad lending his support, Teri looking on with the pride of a mentor.

  Which she certainly could be, now that I was open to giving her a chance. Maybe the problems between us had been more my fault than I’d acknowledged. I’d been holding back from her, not bouncing my thoughts off her or asking her to tell me about marketing. Maybe, as Maggie pointed out about my attitude toward Josh, I was just a big old age bigot, and I’d discounted Teri’s expertise because I knew she was a lot younger than me. If Lindsay saw Teri as being from a different generation, so did I, but in my case it was a younger, more callow, less creative and less sensitive generation—the kids who came of professional age during the dot-com boom and congratulated themselves, rather than history, for it.

  But she had more than a decade in the workplace on me, I reminded myself. She had a degree in marketing, a field I barely knew existed a month ago, and she successfully balanced a high-powered career with a houseful of kids, something I hadn’t managed to do. Sure, she was tough, but you had to be tough to accomplish as much as she had. Teri Jordan deserved my respect, and I vowed to improve not only my job performance but my attitude.

  Most of the day I spent energetically working my way through the in-box on my desk, which Teri always managed to keep piled with projects. That day I tripled my efforts, actually managing to deposit the last completed item on Teri’s desk just as she was leaving for a meeting with Mrs. Whitney.

  “Is there anything else you have for me right now?” I asked her. “Because if not, I thought I’d spend some time on the classics project.”

  “Good idea,” Teri said, disappearing in an efficient hustle out of her office.

  This was great. Now I could work on my project during regular hours rather than having to do it before Teri got in in the morning or at Maggie’s at night. I could be open about what I was doing rather than having to sneak and hide. The new openness fueled my energy for the project itself, so that I managed to finish my list of titles and possible authors for the introductions while Teri was still in the meeting. Printing it out, I brought it into her office to set on her desk with the pile she always took home with her to read in the evening.

  That’s when I saw it: the memo Teri had written to bring into her meeting this afternoon. She usually asked me to spell-check and copy her meeting memos, and it briefly crossed my mind as odd that she hadn’t today, but I’d dismissed my misgivings. Maybe she’d decided not to do a memo, and maybe she simply saw how hard I was working and decided not to bother me with what was essentially a mop-up job.

  But now I saw the real reason Teri hadn’t asked me to prepare the memo. There it was, in the heading for the very first paragraph: NEW DIRECTION FOR CLASSICS LINE. And there was an outline of my idea, presented as Teri’s exclusive work, even including the cover ideas I’d been working on when she’d arrived this morning.

  “What are you doing in my office?”

  It was Teri, back from her meeting. I was standing there, holding the memo. Despite myself, I felt my cheeks color.

  “I was just putting something on your desk,” I said, feeling my face begin to burn even hotter, “but then I saw this.”

  “You have no business rifling through my papers.” Teri wasn’t looking at me. Instead, she hurried to position herself behind her desk, gathering everything into a pile.

  “I can’t believe you presented my idea when I told you it wasn’t ready,” I said. “And you didn’t give me any credit at all.”

  “I’ve made it very clear,” she said, “that I’m the only idea person in this department.”

  “But you’re not!” I cried, forgetting about what I should or shouldn’t say. “I mean, this was completely my idea, and I think I deserve at least some of the credit.”

  “That’s not how it works,” Teri said.

  “But that’s how it should work,” I told her.

  “Listen,” she said, finally looking at me. “This was all outlined during the interview. I’ve already had one problem with you around this issue on your very first day of work. I’m starting to think that maybe there’s no way you’re going to be happy in this job.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, and then I just stood there, the words choked in my throat. How had we gotten to this point with such dizzying speed? Was she about to fire me? I was afraid that if I asked that question, she’d say yes. And then it would be over. And I was not going to let her get rid of me so easily. I was not going to do that to myself.

  “I can be happy in this job,” I said finally.

  “Good,” she said, beginning to pack up again. “As long as we understand each other.”

  “We understand each other.”

  I understand, I thought, that you’re a self-aggrandizing control freak. But I’m not going to let you get the better of me.

  “Good,” Teri said again. “Then it should be clear to you that it’s a compliment that I take these ideas into a meeting with Mrs. Whitney.”

  Teri took her coat off the hook and shrugged it on, then slipped on her sunglasses, even though it was already nearly dark outside. “Now that I know you’re capable of so many excellent ideas,” she said, “I’ll expect nothing less of you.”

  “Right.”

  “I already set up a meeting with Mrs. Whitney for Thursday to present the full concept, so you’ll have a memo ready by then.”

  “Thursday?” I croaked.

  She patted my arm so enthusiastically I was afraid she was going to raise a bruise. “I have complete confidence in you,” she said. “Remember, we’re a team.”

  “Of course, Teri,” I said to her retreating back, wondering whether it was possible to sue for spiritual harassment. Was there any way for me to hang on to my job and at the same time keep her from sucking my soul?

  “Just don’t tell her your ideas,” Maggie said.

  She was working on a new sculpture, only now she had moved on from encasing a cow’s heart in a cement cube to embedding a duck’s heart in a papier-mâché sphere. She’d dropped the duck heart into a condom—more symbolically powerful than a balloon, she claimed, even though, like the heart itself, no one would ever know it was there—blown up the condom, and then layered the papier-mâché over that until she’d created an enormous globe.

  “I have to tell her my ideas,” I said miserably. “She’s already set up a meeting
with Mrs. Whitney for Thursday to do the full presentation.” I shook my head. “I never thought I’d long for the day when all she expected from me was a good cup of coffee.”

  “Insist you be included in that meeting,” said Maggie.

  “And then announce in front of everyone that the concept is really mine?” I shook my head. “Teri would flip.”

  “What if you held out some ideas from the main proposal?” Maggie said. “I mean some of your best ideas. And then at the meeting you could pipe up with them as if they’d just occurred to you.”

  She stepped back and cocked her head, surveying the ball. “Does it bother you knowing there’s a lot of air around the duck heart?”

  I gave her the look that remark deserved. “It bothers me knowing about the heart, period,” I said. “Everything else seems beside the point.”

  “I’m afraid it’s going to rattle around in there,” she said.

  I didn’t think a real live—or in this case, real dead—heart could actually rattle, but rather than debate that hypothesis, I pointed out that it was unlikely that anyone would be able to shake a sphere as big as a Volkswagen around to find out.

  I wished my mind were clear enough to focus on such problems as the sounds emitted by dried duck hearts, but I was too distracted by my concerns about handling Teri and the upcoming meeting. I worried I wouldn’t have the nerve to publicly present an independent slate of ideas, having already experienced Teri’s wrath.

  “She’s not going to attack you in front of everybody,” Maggie pointed out, “and the important thing is that you get credit for your great ideas. Make sure your little friend, the editor, is in the meeting, and her boyfriend the honcho too. That way you’ll have more ammunition on your side in case Teri tries to fight back later.”

  I knew Maggie was right. If I was going to succeed, I was going to have to swallow my anxieties and take on Teri at her own game. I was going to have to be brave enough, finally, to act like a grown-up.

  Maggie moved back a few paces and then stepped forward to smooth a bubble from her papier-mâché.

  “Did I tell you?” she said. “The Vietnamese adoption people are coming to check me out.”

  “They’re coming here?” I cried. Maggie was still hoping she was pregnant, but she was also going ahead with the adoption application, to keep all her bases covered. “When?”

  “Sometime this week,” she said, applying a fresh sheet of wet newspaper. “They deliberately leave it vague.”

  “What?” I said, looking wildly around the room. I wasn’t sure how a place with so little furniture in it managed to look so messy. “We’ve got to clean this place up!”

  Maggie shook her head with an elaborate show of unconcern.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “They just want to see how I live. I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “But they want to be sure this would be a good place to raise a baby,” I told her. “We should at least pick up a little, clean up all this glue, maybe put a rug down.”

  Maggie stopped working, holding her sticky hands in the air like a surgeon’s.

  “I have no intention of putting on a big show,” said Maggie. “I’m an artist, and any child of mine is going to be raised in a creative environment.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s just—”

  “I don’t want to get a baby under false pretenses,” she said.

  “Right,” I said, feeling as if a big faker like me didn’t have a right to argue with Maggie’s purity. “Of course.”

  She was still holding up her hands. “Shit,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom. I guess I should start wearing rubber gloves, but I just love the feel of that cold glue on my hands.”

  I heard the water blasting in the bathroom as she hurried to wash her hands before she used the toilet, and I experimentally reached out to touch the glue, which did feel weirdly cold, as if it had come from somewhere deep in the earth. I wished then with a pang sharper than I ever could have anticipated that I had a creative career of my own, something I alone was in control of, something no one had to give me and that no one could take away. I thought of the aborted novel I’d never looked at after I’d packed it away in the attic. It seemed now that, as with so many other things in my life, I’d given up too easily because I was so terrified of failing. That was something I couldn’t let happen again.

  “Shit,” I heard from the bathroom. “Shit shit fuck fuck.”

  The bathroom door burst open, and there stood Maggie, looking as if she was about to cry, something I hadn’t seen her do since third grade.

  “I got my period,” she said.

  “Oh, God,” I said, feeling devastated for her. She had been sure that the insemination had taken. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I guess now it’s especially good those adoption people are coming so soon, huh?” She wiped an incipient tear from the corner of her eye.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s great you have the other option under way.”

  And then I thought of the thing I’d wanted to say before, the thing I’d bitten back because Maggie had been so adamant about not wanting to change anything about the loft to impress the adoption agency. I’d never be able to live with myself if I thought my living there was the reason Maggie didn’t become a mother.

  “You know, it might be better if I wasn’t here when the adoption people came,” I said gently. “I could pack my stuff up in the tent, find somewhere else to stay for a few days. I mean, it looking like someone else lives here might complicate things for you.”

  Maggie stared at me. “But that would be lying,” she said finally.

  “Not lying,” I reminded her. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  She gazed at me another minute. “I’m not going to do that,” she said finally. “In fact, I’m going to make a point of telling them you live here. You’re my best friend. You’re a mom. What could be bad about that?”

  I could think of a hundred possibilities, but before I got the chance to begin enumerating them, Maggie stepped back into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  Chapter 12

  I offered to stay home that night with Maggie, but she shooed me away, saying she could certainly weather getting her period by herself, and besides, she wanted to be alone with her duck heart. While I would have been happy to spend the evening comforting Maggie, I was also dying to see Josh again.

  We’d been out a few times during the week, but tonight, he was cooking me dinner. I expected maybe bratwurst and frozen fries, or a hearty pot of chili—the kind of thing Gary used to make on the rare occasions when he cooked. And since, after all my shopping, I hadn’t gotten around to actually making anything too elaborate for Josh last time, he didn’t have a very high standard to live up to.

  So I was surprised and impressed to find a gourmet meal in progress when I arrived at Josh’s place. Vegetables and exotic herbs were spread across the kitchen’s stainless steel countertops, and something that smelled wonderful was bubbling on the stove.

  “I didn’t know you knew how to cook,” I said, kissing the corner of his mouth. He’d obviously been tasting his efforts; the preview was delicious.

  “I don’t,” he said. “I called my mom, like, ten times today.”

  His mom. I forgot about people having moms—I mean, people I was having sex with. I could only hope that she was older than me.

  “So what are we having?” I asked.

  “Some salad thing. Let’s see, shrimp with garlic and vegetables. And this kind of mushroom risotto—that’s my mom’s specialty.”

  That was one of my specialties, too.

  “How about a cocktail?” I said.

  “I got something better,” he said, holding his fingers to his lips and making a sucking sound. “A little…”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and my confusion must have showed on my face.

  “I got us a couple of blunts,” he said. “You know, spliffs.”

  And when I still loo
ked baffled: “Pot.”

  “Ooooh,” I said, the light dawning. “I don’t think so.”

  I had smoked pot, of course. Round about the last time I’d gone on a date—twenty-five years ago.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “If nothing else, it’ll make my food taste better.”

  This really made me nervous. I had pleasant memories of my few experiences with marijuana, but I’d spent so many years warning Diana of its dangers that I’d begun to believe them myself. It can damage your lungs. It can muddle your thinking. And it can lead to harder drugs. By the end of the evening, I might find myself down under the Williamsburg Bridge, selling my body for a hit of crack.

  But what really scared me was what I might say to Josh under the influence. My dim memories of smoking include lots of outrageous statements and wild laughter. Who knew what I might confess, with all my inhibitions dismantled?

  I was about to suggest that I mix us a nice martini instead, when Josh lit up the joint. He took a really deep drag and held it out to me.

  Maybe more than I was afraid of becoming a crack ho, I was afraid of Josh seeing me as uncool. I accepted the joint and took a light puff, trying not to inhale. Josh, in turn, poured me a glass of white wine, and I sat on a stool near the kitchen counter sipping the wine while he stirred his risotto and we passed the joint back and forth, companionably quiet.

  Then Josh suggested we put on some music and said there were some things he wanted to play for me to update my taste from Marvin Gaye.

  I looked skeptical. “Not like the rock they were playing in that club that night,” I said. “Because if it’s that—”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “Do you like rap?”

  “Uhhhh, I don’t think so.” An Everest of pot was not going to make me that cool.

  “But if you like Marvin,” he said, “and Aretha, I really think you’ll like this.”

  He put on something then that was a little bit rap and a lot more soul. “I’m going down…,” a woman sang, and I thought, Sister, I know just what you mean.