Part 5
CALIFORNIA AGAIN
Chapter 20
I looked down at my phone on the plane. I had just watched the video of Blazer toddling down the hall. He propelled himself with an expression of thrilled disbelief, as if he’d imagined many things but not this. Then he plopped down onto his bottom and looked startled, as if ending up on the floor was yet another unexpected development.
We had crossed the international date line. I would be home, and it would be Friday morning again. I was looking forward to seeing the family. Though it’s too bad, when you have a traumatic anniversary, to experience it twice.
Grinding thunder from the gray cloudy sky and an answering grinding within me, like a setting on the food processor when Melissa makes baby food. A familiarly ominous ache: my period, two days early. A notification of internal gears in motion. I pressed on my abdomen and kneaded hard with a fist while pulling my suitcase through the terminal; I theorize this speeds it along. The pressure made me feel better, anyway, until I took my hand away. I swallowed an aggressive but non-liver-damaging quantity of ibuprofen. My Conch and phone, recharged after the flight, buzzed with a barrage of pent-up messages and alerts.
Thinking about you today, Christine had written, cautiously and sensitively. I tried several potential replies and then left her message there, unreplied to. She would understand.
I had an invitation from Greer to her failure party (delete!), and a message from Brad, which I read twice: Signing’s on! Great work. See you tonight. I opened and closed my jaw a few times to clear my ears.
I’d bought an apple at the airport to tide me over on the trip to the office. The apple had come shrink-wrapped to a cardboard plate. I had to use my house keys to rip the plastic, somewhat negating its hygienic protective powers. The apple was mealy. I wished it were crisp, and thinly sliced, and fanned upon a real (not cardboard) plate. I could not wait to get home.
My ears were still stuffy, but my eyes too hadn’t adjusted to being home. Everything had a tinge of the unfamiliar and looked glossy, intriguing, and at once both veiled and real, like a film. How sedately people here drive, I thought, as I glided down El Camino Real. They must be soothed by the pleasant weather and the abundance of places to buy burritos. A shiny white self-driving car glided along in the next lane, parallel to mine. The two guys inside, freed of having to drive the car, looked underutilized, with no function except to smile self-consciously at passing drivers. I had anticipated problems with my ears, but it was the visual adjustment I always forgot about, the way that travel reset your sight and recalibrated your attention.
The parking lot of the office was about half full. It was Friday night, after all, a time when non-high-achievers often go home. A few familiar cars were in their usual spots—Stefan’s bus, with its gathered curtain in the window, a huge pickup truck, and in our visitor spot, Brad’s car, with its surfboard strapped to the roof. People waited in line at a food truck that had pulled up near the lobby door. I scanned the menu on the side of the truck as I passed. Crepes, available with various combinations of asparagus, prosciutto, honey, walnut, lemon.
The lights in the lobby were off. Tony was away. The extruded pasta sculpture cast loopy shadows. I headed straight for the iris scanner, and there was Michelle.
She was leaning against the guard’s desk, biting a fingernail. When she saw me she took her hand out of her mouth and straightened up a little. I thought she looked a little afraid to see me.
She’s only an inexperienced entry-level young person, I thought, and she probably is afraid. This made me like her better.
“You came back,” she said. I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I gave her the quickest, skimmiest of hugs. I told her about an article I had read on the plane.
“Fascinating stuff,” I said.
“Thanks for letting me stay at your house. Your kids are cute.” Our eyes were at exactly the same level, which did add a feeling of intimacy to ordinary conversation—it was as if I were seeing right in. “You look dirty,” she said.
“It’s been a long day,” I said. And then I felt entitled to press, just a little: “You’re here.”
She nodded. “I have a job.” She blushed. “An internship, actually. Well, a job. Part-time.”
“At Conch?” I no longer interview all candidates or am as involved in hiring as I used to be, but I usually review résumés over email. I felt uncomfortable with the idea of her at Conch.
She looked embarrassed. “No, no. Brad got me a job working at one of the companies he invests in. I’m going to advise on the youth audience. You know, the millennial market and what we’re up to.” She grinned. “I’m supposed to meet him—he’s inside.”
“That sounds like it could be promising.” I looked inquiringly at her. “Are you comfortable working with him? He’s kind of difficult…”
“They say stuff about you too,” she said.
“OK, right.”
Shouts and stomps came from above us. It sounded like someone had just won at foosball.
“People are really excited about whatever it is you’re doing right now. Like, crazy excited. And they have beer and crepes. Are you going up?”
I remembered being at Gorvis the night before our launch, and how we’d all sat around on bouncy balls and speculated, with limbic shivers down our spines, about how different the world would be in the morning. Think of all those people asleep in their beds, someone had said, not knowing that when they wake up, Gorvis will have changed the world as they know it. It’ll all be different. We’ll remember this night forever. Well, I did remember it, as a matter of fact. I could hardly remember the product, but I remembered the feeling of belief we’d all had. We’d been so fervent then, the same as the Conch employees were now.
“They think we’re doing a deal,” I said. “I have to go break some bad news.”
I dreaded having to go through with what I was about to do. But I had to; it was the right thing for Conch. I leaned in, waited for the beeps, and started through the door.
“Tell your husband thanks for hosting me,” she called.
“I will. It’s nice to see you…” She didn’t say anything. I did a little circling gesture to elicit what I needed.
“Miranda,” she admitted.
“Nice to meet you, Miranda,” I said, and slipped through the door.
* * *
—
“Brad, do you have a minute to talk?” He looked up at me, interested, glad to see me, not suspecting what I was about to say. I had a feeling much like the one I’ve had in the moments before giving notice at a job, when it feels as if the ground is shifting, and your perspective changes as the ground tilts, like being on an airplane.
Outside the conference room the office was in full Friday night, celebratory disarray. Conch employees ate asparagus crepes and squirted craft beer from a keg in the microkitchen. Some were even working.
“So, Shelley,” Brad said. “Looks like we squeaked it out.” He smiled, tired and relieved. The contract lay on the table, thick and interlaced with plastic tabs showing where to sign. You might think contracts would all be electronic now, but though all the markup and negotiation is done over email, we still sign paper. Later we upload the documents to our data center for corporate record-keeping.
I sat down on the opposite side of the conference table. Brad opened his hands, cheerful and exuberant. “No more charging,” he said. “Love it.” He slid the contract toward me. His attention flicked over to his phone. This was not the last problem he’d solve today. Then he noticed, belatedly, my expression. Perhaps it was that I wasn’t picking up the contract.
“What’s up?”
I looked into his eyes.
I gulped. Nothing to it but to do it. “I want to preface this by letting you know it may be unwelcome news.” That’s also my standard opening gambit when I have to fire someone. Brad’s expression clouded.
I took a deep breath. “I’ve decided not to go forward with
the Powerplex deal.”
Brad stared. Then he shook his head.
I kept going. “This merger’s not a good idea. There are problems with explosions from the Powerplex parts. It’s not even a good goal, to encourage constant long-term Conch use. Some people can’t handle continuous wear; we’re already seeing the mental health impact on some users. We’re not doing users any favors if we push them to the point of collapse. There’s no reason to take this forward.”
“Phil’s on board,” Brad said. “It’s a done deal. You just need to sign.” He jiggled his fingers in the air, as if I needed help with the concept.
“I won’t.”
He stood up and rubbed his forehead. “I can’t believe this.”
I shook my head.
“You can’t make a unilateral strategy decision like that.” He was pacing the room, wringing his calculator in his hands.
“Actually, I can.”
“The board won’t support you.”
“That’s their choice,” I said.
“I put myself on the line for you.”
“Thanks for the opportunity.”
“God damn it, Shelley,” he said, thumping his calculator down on the table. “I expected you to show some leadership on this.”
“This is leadership,” I said, steely.
Brad sighed and rolled his eyes. He slammed the door back on his way out. “This is the last time I put a woman in charge.”
I could hear him moving through the office, bellowing. “Deal’s off. Back to work.” A whoop went up, from someone who hadn’t been listening. This made Brad madder. “Get that keg out of here.”
I sat for a moment at the table, looking out the window at the marshland and the hills. I stacked up the contract and all the papers on the table, and I threw them out. Then I left the room and went through the office to look for Cullen. The office was emptier already. I found Cullen in the lobby, in front of the fish tank, meditatively sprinkling fish flakes on the surface of the water. I told him about the counterfeit factory, and my trip, and how Brad had taken the news. We talked about how to scale back the productivity algorithm to reduce the number of time-optimization prompts.
“It’s too much,” I said. “Any of the data you’re getting from my beta testing—or the beta testing of people like me—it has to go. I’m not a sustainable model. We need to take out all the real-world testing and walk it back.”
“How will users take that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we should tell them that Conch is so effective you should only use it in small doses.”
“That’d be a switch in our messaging.”
“It’s a pivot,” I agreed. “You’ll have to iron out the details.” That’s a great phrase I love. Who even irons anymore? But the very act of saying it irons out having to go into what the specific problems are. Anyway, they would be Cullen’s problems now.
He understood that, and he hugged me. “I thought you’d hang in there longer. Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about what might be next for me. It’s not as fun as it was in the beginning, you know?”
“I get it,” I said, and it was the first time we had ever acknowledged to each other that we’d have lives after Conch. Some people love to start tasks, and some people like to complete them. I love both, which is the most unusual type, but I knew what he meant.
* * *
—
“This is good,” I said, turning Nova’s ice cream cone, assiduously licking up the melted parts and getting it organized. Nova, ahead on her scooter, dinged her bell and glided down the path. We were near the Stanford Dish, on a trail that loops through the foothills and goes by the Dish itself, an enormous radio telescope. The weather was pleasant, as it so often is where we live; lots of zealous joggers were out, industriously completing the loop as if it were their job. A woman in a straw hat power walked past and smiled at Blazer in his stroller. Up ahead the Dish, cocked to one side, towered over the hillside.
It was what I’d once heard called “a Swiss day,” which was a great rebranding of cold spring weather: a densely blue sky, buds on the trees, yet another opportunity to wear fleece. It wasn’t the kind of day that made a pitch for ice cream, but knowing how scarce time was, we’d seized the moment. It was, after all, my birthday. When we reached the top of the hill I breathed in deeply; my sinuses were exquisitely clear.
Rafe stopped the stroller and gave Blazer a bite of ice cream from a plastic spoon. “And the supercharger goes…into the electric car,” he said, as Blazer’s mouth opened. With a deft turn of the spoon Rafe recaptured some of the ice cream that had dripped down Blazer’s chin. “Watch out for the runner,” Rafe called to Nova, picking up speed ahead. She flashed her sandal sole as she sped away. “How’d it go with Brad?” he asked.
“Not good. In fact, it was bad.”
“He’ll come around,” Rafe said, spearing his ice cream with his spoon. “Give him time.”
“It’s not going to be like that. It’s not going to…” I shook my head, to stave off any false hope he might offer. Down below us sprawled the red roofs of Stanford, with Hoover Tower poking up like a stylus. Beyond was a fuzz of treetops, a comma of Bay, and a bank of low gray mountains. I’d known the first time I’d come here that my future was in this place. Once, on a winding drive through foggy hills, struck by the possibility all around me, I’d said to Rafe: it’s like a postcard here. Rafe shook his head. It’s like a video game, he said, which was truer.
My phone chirped in my pocket. “It’s ringing,” I announced.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Rafe said.
I shrugged.
“You don’t think that the board will really…” Rafe didn’t have to say more.
“I did the right thing,” I said. “That’s what leadership is. To be clear, I’m doing this for the company. It’s not for me, or for us. I’m doing it because it’s the right business decision for Conch. In the long term they’ll realize I was right, but meanwhile…” I trailed off. “It’s over. I’m going to be out of a job.” I licked the ice cream until it was flush with the top of the cone. “Brazil, here we come.” I tried to sound peppy and pleased. I had known it would come to this since before I’d boarded the plane home, but to be here and say it was different. I buried my emotion in eating my ice cream. “I bet they don’t have mint chocolate chip in São Paulo. Or what do I know, maybe they do.”
Rafe stopped in the middle of the path. He spoke without looking at me. “I turned it down,” he said.
“I don’t usually like these little chocolate bits, but—wait, you did what?”
“I said no.” He was looking straight ahead, not meeting my eyes. There was a dark pink flush rising up from his neck, past his jaw and into his cheeks. He leaned on the stroller’s handlebars. “I couldn’t go through with it. I turned down the job.”
My jaw dropped open. “How was that?”
“It was also bad.” He attempted, with moderate success, to smile. “It means I’m done there. I’ll have to find something new.” He still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known that—I’d really believed you’d make yours work. You always do.”
I bit off a crisp, waffly bit of cone and crunched it. I was secretly pleased he’d assumed this. “Well, too bad we’re not going. I heard they have great Japanese food there.”
We looked at each other, him trying to read my tone. I touched his back gently and saw there were tears in his eyes. He didn’t want me to see that. “Look, Nova,” he said, turning away and pointing. “Cows!” Nova isn’t interested in farm animals. She didn’t slow down to look, and instead it was Rafe and I who stood there, marveling at the grazing red cows, and other things.
“We’ll figure something out,” I said.
We watched Nova drop her scooter by the side of the path to jump on and off a low wooden railing. We unclipped Blazer from the stroller, put him down on his feet, and he took off after her, his little plaid shirt unbuttoning from
the bottom, showing a band of white diaper and pudge. He grunted as he waddled toward her. Nova, pin-thin and all angles, jumped back on the scooter and glided away, her dress and sweatshirt hood floating behind her. I could hear her calling to her brother, her high voice in instructional mode.
Rafe put his arm around me as we stood by the stroller and watched them go.
“Careful!” I yelled. “Nova, not too far! What are you doing? Nova, that’s too far! Come back!”
“So,” Rafe said, as if it were just dawning on him, or as if it were a truth too difficult to hold continuously in mind. “No job for me. No job for you.”
I nodded, having grasped this. I ate the point of the cone.
He said, wonderingly, “What are we going to do now?”
I looked ahead, down the trail and up at the radio telescope, its antenna pointing into the sky. What was I going to do now? It was a very good question. An excellent question. A question I was absolutely going to have to answer. I was always asking myself that question, and I’d never been short of answers. But at that moment, I just wanted to do nothing.
Acknowledgments
I’m indebted to several books that informed my thinking on women and work, including Aihwa Ong’s Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self, and Anna Fels’ Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. Shelley cites statistics on women CEOs very like those from Fortune.
I’m so grateful to my incomparable agent, Alexandra Machinist, for her support and countless good ideas, and to my exceptional editor, Jenny Jackson, whose encouragement and vision took this way beyond the minimum viable product. Thanks to Hillary Jacobson and Amelia Atlas at ICM and to Zakiya Harris and everyone at Doubleday for their work on this book.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 33