Houston, We Have a Problema

by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  “Okay.” He stood up, too. “M’ija . . . thank you. Tell your mother I’m —”

  “No, Papi,” she said firmly. “You tell her. You call her tonight, at Sabrina’s.”

  He nodded his head slowly, as if the concept of communication in a relationship were just beginning to dawn on him. “No, you’re right. I’ll tell her. I’ll call her.”

  When Jessica left, he was taking the pie out of the oven. “Ai, chingado!” she heard him say. He’d probably burned his hand.

  She didn’t turn back. Her father would learn not to touch a hot chicken pot pie without a pot holder, she told herself. And he’d learn not to let a good woman go, either.

  39

  Jessica walked into work the next morning feeling as though she’d aged several years. Between dealing with her mother’s unhappiness and recognizing her father’s denial of it, she was emotionally wrung out. She’d called Sabrina at ten p.m. and got voice mail. Eventually, she’d decided her parents’ situation was out of her hands. It was time to get back to her own life.

  So she’d put on a suit again and dragged herself into work.

  As she walked past Mr. Cochran’s office to her desk, Jessica couldn’t help overhearing part of her boss’s phone conversation.

  “What’s the name of that assistant on forty-one? . . . The blonde, yeah. Sarah? Susan?”

  Jessica put her bag on her desk as quietly as she could, her ears on hyperalert. She knew that Mr. Cochran meant Susan Wright, in Sales. She looked over at Rochelle and saw that she was listening to their boss, too.

  He went on: “Didn’t Dwight say she was looking to transfer to another department? Maybe I can bring her in to replace Olga.” There was a pause, then Mr. Cochran laughed and said, “Exactly. Probably should have gone with someone like that to begin with.”

  Jessica stifled a gasp. “Someone like that”? What did that mean?

  The moment Mr. Cochran left the office, Jessica turned to Rochelle. “Did you hear what he said?” she demanded. “That he should have hired someone like Susan Wright in the first place? What do you think he meant — that he should’ve hired someone white?”

  Rochelle looked surprised and shook her head. “No. You think? No, I’m sure he meant something else.”

  But Jessica wasn’t so sure by then. The more she thought of it, in fact, the more she became sure that was exactly what Mr. Cochran had meant. She didn’t want to think it, but the evidence was all around her. He and all the other brokers were white, weren’t they? While Jessica, Rochelle, and Olga weren’t.

  In fact, she didn’t know why she hadn’t realized it before. None of the brokers at McCormick were people of color. Except, she amended, for Troy Williams upstairs. And Brad Wu. And Joe Vargas. But still, she told herself. That was almost none, considering that McCormick employed over two hundred people.

  Jessica looked over at Rochelle and noticed that she’d gone back to surfing the web, complacent as ever. But Jessica couldn’t be that calm. Her nerves had already been on edge when she’d come through the door. And now she was starting to suspect that Mr. Cochran might never promote her, no matter how hard she worked or how much she deserved it.

  Calm down, she told herself. You’re overreacting.

  What she needed, she realized, was some good advice. Then she smiled to herself. A week ago, that thought would’ve been followed by a visit to Madame Hortensia. This time, however, she meant real advice. She pulled her cell out of her purse and found Jonathan’s number, then dialed it from her office phone.

  No answer. His voice mail came on, and she said, “Hey. Just me. Don’t worry — I’ll call you back later.”

  Then she remembered whom she would have called before she’d met Jonathan. Her other Madame Hortensia. She stood up. “Rochelle, I’ll be right back.”

  She walked down the hall to the door that led to IT. She went in and waved to Ling, who smiled, then let herself into Xavier’s office.

  “Xavier.” She saw then that he was on the phone. “Oops! Sorry!” she whispered.

  He cupped his hand over the phone and motioned for her to sit and wait. She did.

  “Right. . . . Right,” he said. “Okay, I’ll see you at lunch tomorrow, then. . . . All right. Bye.”

  Jessica looked down at his phone screen. She couldn’t help but notice the name on it — C. Ortiz. He was talking to Cynthia again.

  Xavier hung up and began typing on one of his computers, his face only half-turned in Jessica’s direction. He looked . . . not annoyed, exactly, but busy. She wondered if maybe she should come back later. But she couldn’t go back yet. She needed to talk to someone.

  “What’s going on?” he finally said.

  “I’m completely freaking out here. I’m scared Mr. Cochran isn’t really considering me for the broker job after all.”

  He stopped typing and gave her his full attention. “Why do you say that?”

  As calmly and quickly as she could, Jessica summarized everything that’d been happening lately, up until the conversation she’d just overheard Mr. Cochran having. “And now that I’m thinking about it,” she ended, “there are hardly any nonwhite brokers here.”

  “There’s Joe Vargas,” Xavier pointed out. “And Brad Wu, and Troy Williams.”

  “Right,” said Jessica. “One Latino, one Asian, and one black guy. Just enough for the company to claim diversity. But that doesn’t mean anything. And none of them are women, either.”

  “There’s Cathy Baumgardner, and Carol Simon. Glenda What’s-her-name . . . Linda Corelli,” Xavier said. Then he stopped, seeing the look on Jessica’s face.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m just . . .” She was just nervous, she realized. About the job, about her parents, about everything all of a sudden.

  “Look,” Xavier said. “He’s not going to not hire you because you’re Latina, or because you’re a woman, or anything like that. If everyone else who applies is less qualified than you, and he hires a white guy anyway, then you can sue the company. And he knows that. You know how paranoid everybody is about lawsuits around here. He’s not going to be that stupid.”

  Jessica thought that over. It was true. Mr. Cochran was completely paranoid about lawsuits. But . . . “What if someone more experienced does apply for the job?”

  Xavier shrugged, but not unsympathetically. “Did you remind him that you’ve been gaining experience ever since you got here?”

  “Yes. I mean, I tried.”

  “Well, that’s all you can do. Sometimes it takes a while, you know? Sometimes you have to put in a real effort to show them you’re ready to move up, you know? Look at me. You know how many times I got passed up for promotion before I moved from full-time support to part-time programming?”

  “How many?” she asked.

  “Three. And even then, I had to do a lot of programming for them in my spare time before they even gave me the pay raise.”

  Jessica frowned. “That sucks. It shouldn’t be that way.”

  “I know,” said Xavier. “But it is that way. Unless you’re the boss’s nephew or something like that.” He smiled, and she smiled back. They both knew how that went — several of the boss’s nephews were working in other departments at McCormick.

  “Well, don’t give up,” Xavier said. “Maybe you should try to talk to Mr. Cochran about it again. This time take him a list of things you’ve done to save or make money for your department. Show him what he has to gain by promoting you.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Jessica said. Although she was already trying to compose that list mentally and realized there wasn’t much she could put on it. She laughed. “Then again, maybe I should just forget it. I already work hard enough as it is. Maybe I should try again to get a job doing web design somewhere else.” She was half kidding but wanted to see what he’d say.

  “You should do both. Try to get the promotion here, and apply for other jobs at the same time. Always keep your options open.”

  Jessica and Xavier sat there
for a little while, reflecting. She was glad she’d talked to him. His advice was just as good as Jonathan’s would have been, she was sure.

  When Xavier glanced down at his phone, Jessica remembered he’d been talking to Cynthia and assumed he wanted to get back to her. “Well, I know you’re busy,” she said. “I’d better let you go. I didn’t mean to interrupt —”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m glad you came over. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  She felt the need to say more. “Thanks for listening, Xavier. Even though everything about my career is totally screwed up now, talking to you made me feel better.”

  He shook his head. “That’s because you know that I know that you’re just having one of your dramatic moments. Your career isn’t totally screwed up. Either Mr. Cochran will come to his senses, or else you’ll find a better job somewhere else. You’ll be fine.”

  She had to laugh at herself. She was being dramatic. It all sounded so easy, the way Xavier described it. But she couldn’t help getting the last word. “You’d better hope I don’t find a better job, because then who would you whine to at lunch?”

  Xavier pretended to throw a pencil at her. “Get out of here.”

  Jessica scampered away in a much better mood.

  40

  Xavier’s pep talk had gotten Jessica through the rest of Wednesday afternoon. But when Thursday morning rolled around, she lay in bed, awake since four a.m., and seriously considered calling in sick. The thought of going back to her desk and doing her work with a smile, without hope of being appreciated for it, almost made her sick for real.

  Don’t be a baby, she told herself as she sat up to turn off the alarm clock. Now wasn’t the time to fall apart.

  Later, in her car, as she circled the skyscrapers that surrounded McCormick, Jessica thought again of the conversation she’d had with Xavier. Maybe she didn’t really want this broker job enough.

  Sure, she liked wearing nice suits, and she’d love to make more money, but the golf thing and The Wall Street Journal . . . the butt kissing on the clients and the big bosses . . . that wasn’t exactly how she’d envisioned her career. Really, now that she was thinking about it, had she ever even imagined being in insurance this long? She’d started working there only to get away from the Centro and all the bad choices she’d made there. It had seemed, when she got the McCormick job, like a good omen at the time. As though she’d changed her life for the better and put herself on a path to success.

  What did she really want? Well, to be appreciated, for one thing. There was no use working hard if no one was going to notice. Or, worse, if everyone else was just going to take credit for your work.

  Also: She knew work wasn’t supposed to be fun, but did that mean it had to be boring all the time? Insurance, she had learned over the last three years, was exactly as boring as everyone imagined it was.

  Obviously she needed to leave McCormick, and not for another insurance job, either. But where would she go? With her level of experience, she could probably be an assistant at another kind of company. But what if all the corporations ended up offering the same thing? The chance to work hard, with no chance for advancement.

  She could be an assistant at a nonprofit — if she wanted to be poor.

  None of the galleries or museums in town wanted someone with an art history degree. No, they wanted either MFAs or socialite volunteers. Her job as “curator” at the Centro had been a complete fluke, she’d realized since leaving it.

  For a while now, she’d been fantasizing about starting her own multimedia minifirm. She could design web sites, business cards, brochures, safety posters — anything. But that was a long way off. She didn’t yet have enough clients to make it more than a hobby. Certainly not enough to quit her job. Unless, of course, she wanted to move back in with Mami and Papi.

  She wound through the parking garage on mental auto-pilot. Like a mouse in a well-known maze, she scurried through all the elevators and security checkpoints that led to her office. When she reached her desk, she still hadn’t figured out what to do.

  But she would think of something, and soon. She’d start combing through the job sites on her lunch break.

  “Did Lois tell you what she heard about Olga?”

  “No. What?” Jessica had just sat down and turned on her computer.

  Rochelle rolled her chair closer to Jessica’s. “Remember that trip she took to the casinos a while back?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, maybe she won a bunch of money. Enough to quit her job.”

  “What? That doesn’t make sense,” said Jessica. “Didn’t she go with Shelley from Accounting? If she’d won that much, Shelley would have told the whole building the moment they got back.”

  “Well, that’s true. That’s a good point.” Rochelle concentrated for a moment. “Maybe she finally sold enough of those SpeedSlim things to win the big prize. Maybe she’s in Aruba right now.”

  Mr. Cochran walked in, and Rochelle rolled back to her desk. Jessica stayed very casual as she turned to her own computer and pretended to be busy. He didn’t say anything to either of them, which he’d been doing more and more lately. These days, he went into his office without a word and closed the door behind him. It occurred to Jessica that even if she did get her promotion, things wouldn’t change much. She would still be in an environment where people showed up, did their work, and went home. Was it too much to ask that Mr. Cochran show a little appreciation? Or that they all work more as a team? What this place was missing, she suddenly realized, was a sense of community.

  It was almost lunchtime. Jessica wondered if she should call Xavier and ask him to have lunch. They’d gotten off schedule with their weekly lunches, both of them busy with their own drama. Jessica remembered the phone conversation she’d walked in on the day before. If she’d heard correctly, he was having lunch with Cynthia today. She sighed. Maybe it’d be best if she didn’t count on regular lunches with him anymore.

  Jessica supposed she had to be happy for her friend. Xavier had never really said why they’d broken up — he wasn’t the type to kiss and tell, and Jessica had never had reason to believe that Xavier found any fault with Cynthia. From her outsider’s perspective, though, Jessica had always thought that Cynthia pushed Xavier around too much.

  At least, that’s what she’d thought then. Now . . . now that she’d been going out with Jonathan and not wasting time with Guillermo, and especially since her conversation with her father, she finally saw that a guy could be nice and do things for a girl selflessly, without being a pushover. Now that she rethought the whole thing, Xavier had probably wanted to take Cynthia to the church suppers and the petting zoo and all those other places, because he was a good guy, and he was happy spending time with her. And seeing how cute she was, who could blame him? Although, then again, she did have to wonder how much a girl who loved teddy bears would be willing to put out.

  It was too bad Jessica hadn’t met Xavier first, before Cynthia, she mused. She would have been a better match for him, and if they’d been dating all along, they both could have avoided a lot of personal drama. She tried to imagine it: herself, wanting to go out and party all the time, and Xavier in his serious professor shirts and glasses, wanting to stay home and talk about programming. She would try to get him to make out in the stairway, the way she had with her ex back at the Centro, but Xavier would be too worried about his boss and the work on his desk. She stifled a giggle. It was probably for the best that Cynthia had found him first.

  Rochelle’s voice cut through Jessica’s thoughts.

  “Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . Well, I can’t say I blame you, girl. . . . Uh-huh . . . Okay. Okay, I’ll tell her. . . . All right. Have a good one, then, Olga. Keep in touch, you hear?”

  Rochelle hung up and turned her chair to Jessica’s, shaking her head in amazement all the while. “You were right, Jessica. Olga sure did quit.”

  “What? I can’t believe it. Did she get a job at another brokerage?” If so, Je
ssica would have to get her new number. Maybe, if she got desperate, she could ask Olga to hook her up.

  “Nope,” said Rochelle.

  “Did she quit so she could sell SpeedSlim full-time, then?” Had Jessica been missing out on an entrepreneurial opportunity?

  “Nope.”

  “Did she win big at the casino, then?” Maybe, Jessica thought frantically, she should at least start playing bingo online. . . .

  “Nope. None of that. She didn’t have anywhere else to go to at all. Just a little money put away in savings.”

  Jessica was completely puzzled. Had Olga gone crazy?

  “She said,” Rochelle explained, “that she left because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Looking at you, sitting here doing your work all the time, had got her to thinking. She was about your age when she started here, you remember.”

  “It got her to thinking about what?” Jessica was almost afraid to hear the answer.

  “That she’d been here long enough, and she didn’t want to sit over there at that desk for the rest of her life.”

  Jessica shuddered. It was as if, with that one remark, Rochelle had sentenced her to a life in prison.

  “I’ll be right back,” Rochelle said. She got up and practically ran down the hall — probably to spread the gossip, Jessica knew.

  Normally, Jessica might do the same — call Tiffany on forty-two to tell her what had happened. But she couldn’t talk to anyone now. She was too disturbed. Olga had been Jessica’s age when she’d started at McCormick. She’d been here that long, and she was a secretary. And now, after all these years, she was finally tired of it.

  Like a scene from a sad movie, Jessica saw a vision of herself at this desk, with a calendar above her head, its pages blowing off one by one. Always doing the same things, every day. Joking with her co-workers about a rich man coming to take her away.

  Jessica shuddered again.

  That was it. She had decided. She wasn’t going to wait around for Mr. Cochran to change her life anymore.