Rocking the Pink

by Laura Roppé

  “Hand me the spatuler,” I instructed Brad one morning as I scrambled eggs for our breakfast.

  “The what?!” he asked, an incredulous smile forming on his lips.

  “The spatuler.”

  “It’s called a spa-tu-la,” Brad said, imbuing every syllable with condescension.

  “No, it isn’t,” I countered. You idiot.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it isn’t.” In a huff, I pulled out a big dictionary and slammed it onto the kitchen counter. I was positive I was right. My mom was a great cook, and I’d heard her use the word “spatuler” my whole life!

  I flipped to the appropriate page of the dictionary and scanned down the left column until . . . I’ll be damned, it’s a spatula.

  There was no denying it: I was half Brooklyn-ese.

  I had signed up with a temp agency and was assigned random office jobs—typing, answering phones, data entry—usually for a day at a time. After a few weeks, I got a plum assignment: organizing file cabinets for a full week! The best part was, if the employers liked me, they might extend my contract for three months. I’d be in the money.

  The night before starting my new assignment, I went to bed plenty early to ensure optimum file-cabinet-organization readiness the following morning. About an hour after I’d drifted off to sleep, I dreamed I was standing on a train track with a train hurtling toward me at an alarming speed. The train light was rapidly advancing, but—oh no!—I was rooted to the middle of the track! To save myself, I leaped with abandon out of the way and into an adjacent thorny bush.

  As it turned out, I actually made that life-or-death leap in the real world, too—off my bed and into my nearby closet. And right onto my face. Without breaking my fall, even a little bit. My face smashed right into the high-heeled shoes sitting at the bottom of my closet.

  The next morning, as I arrived at my new temp job, I had a swollen shiner, scratches all over my face, and a broken blood vessel in my eye. Hello, my name is Laura! Nice to meetcha! How’s that for a first impression? My new coworkers immediately asked me what on earth had happened to me. My response? The classic response of anyone feeling too embarrassed to admit a shameful truth: “I fell.”

  Now, I ask you, which do you think is a better sell to a new employer: “I have night terrors that cause me to leap out of bed and slam my face on a pile of shoes in the middle of the night” or “I am the victim of brutal domestic abuse”? Apparently, I thought the latter. But letting an employer believe I had battered-woman syndrome turned out to be the wrong choice: Despite my expert filing work, the company did not renew my temp contract at the end of the week.

  A couple months of sporadic temp work later, I finally landed a permanent job selling tours to Turkey, though I’d never been there. Brad got a job working for a famous yacht skipper who was preparing to compete in the America’s Cup (a fancy-shmancy sailboat race, so we were told), even though Brad had never stepped foot aboard a yacht. Between my job selling Turkey tours and Brad’s job promoting a highfalutin yacht race, he and I endured our year off before law school as the Couple with the Most Random Jobs on the Face of the Earth.

  A few months after my high-heeled face-plant and shortly before the start of law school, my sixth sense was buzzing.

  “Brad,” I said, “if you’re thinking of proposing to me, please don’t. I love you so much, but I don’t want to get married until I’m thirty. I don’t want to break your heart.”

  When I came home from a rough day of selling tours to Turkey a couple weeks later, Brad had cleaned the little house. Strange. Next, I saw that he had prepared a steak dinner for us. Impossible. When, after dinner, Brad told me to close my eyes, I thought eagerly, Dessert? To my shock, though, he got down on one knee, ring in hand, and asked me to marry him.

  Despite my clear directive of only a few weeks earlier, I did not hesitate in my answer: “Yes!”

  Despite my tendency toward excitability and my nighttime visions of oncoming trains, Brad loved me.

  Much later, when I had gathered my wits about me, I stipulated that I would take Brad’s name on one condition: “You have to promise to always use the accent on the é in Roppé.” I had noticed that Brad and other members of his family were lazy about their accenting—sometimes they accented, and sometimes they didn’t. “With the accent on the é,” I continued, “the name is exotic, sort of French sounding. Ro-pay. But without it, well, it’s just ‘Rope.’”

  Brad agreed.

  A year later, at the blowout bash following our fairytale wedding (a generous gift from Dad), our elegantly clad friends, most of whom had just finished their first grueling year of law school, devolved into sweaty heathens and partied like it was 1999.

  As Brad and I departed the wedding reception, I drunkenly invited every single wedding guest I walked past to join us upstairs in our honeymoon suite, while Brad, walking two feet behind me, soberly uninvited every single guest. When Brad and I arrived, as husband and wife, at the honeymoon suite overlooking the San Diego skyline, I looked around, confused.

  “Where is everyone?”

  Brad just laughed his silly laugh.

  Chapter 12

  After all of our oncologist shopping, Brad and I finally settled on Dr. Andrew Hampshire, an unassuming family man of my exact age, whose easy laugh struck me as an anomaly for someone in his line of work.

  Dr. Hampshire was warm and instantly likable, even when he was the bearer of bad news. And, most impressive to Brad and me, he was a dead ringer—both physically and temperamentally—for the best-friend character, Wilson, on the medical drama House (who, strangely enough, also happens to be an oncologist). Brad and I loved that show, so it was a no-brainer.

  In addition to reminding us of one of our favorite TV doctors, Dr. Hampshire was ridiculously knowledgeable about cancer, and particularly about this newly discovered villain on the scene, triple negative breast cancer. He’d read all the latest studies and been to the latest triple-negative summits (facts we discovered when Brad, who’d initially been wary of Dr. Hampshire’s youth, interrogated him in a manner befitting an episode of Law & Order).

  And, best of all, Dr. Hampshire, who much later insisted we call him Andy, understood our complicated sense of humor (i.e., that it was Brad’s job to make jokes and mine to laugh at them). Indeed, despite the serious context of most of our discussions with Dr. Hampshire, visits with him inevitably devolved into chortles of laughter on all sides.

  But at my first appointment, as Brad and I searched for a doctor who could turn our world right side up again, we had not yet eased into the comfort of our cancer-comedy routine. No, at our first oncology appointment, Dr. Hampshire was warm but all business, matter-of-factly detailing the chemotherapy I would endure over the course of the next several months.

  “We have to hit the cancer with the strongest chemo drugs available because it’s so aggressive,” he explained.

  “Bring it on,” I told him, full of false bravado. And, handing him a picture of the girls, I added, “Here’s why I need to get better. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Dr. Hampshire looked at the photo—I mean, he really looked at it—and nodded. He had a wife and three young kids of his own. His daughter’s poem about a nature hike with her heroic dad was hanging on the wall behind his head, I noticed.

  “If you were my wife,” Dr. Hampshire said, and he looked right into my eyes, “I’d recommend this exact chemo regimen. It’s best to do everything in your power against this thing now, so you never second-guess yourself later.”

  My life was in this man’s hands. And he would care for me as if I were his own beloved wife.

  Dr. Hampshire shifted his gaze to Brad, who nodded.

  Brad trusted him. An understanding had passed between them.

  We’d found our man.

  Brad handed Dr. Hampshire a copy of my album. “And there’s also this.” His voice quavered, just a little bit. “She wrote all the songs.” Brad looked over at me, his face a
wash in tenderness and pride.

  Dr. Hampshire scrutinized the CD cover, looking surprised. “So, you’re a rock star?” he asked me, grinning.

  “Well, no, not really.” I’m pretty sure I batted my eyelashes shamelessly at him. “But when this is all over, I’m going over to England to film a music video!” I sounded a little bit maniacal, even to myself.

  Dr. Hampshire was gracious. “Laura,” he said, a fountain of reassurance, “you’re going to film that music video. You’re going to be just fine.”

  I clenched my jaw. Damn straight.

  Thank you, Dr. Hampshire.

  Chapter 13

  Newlyweds Brad and Laura Roppé sat side by side on the first day of Constitutional Law class. The professor looked down at his class list, taking roll in alphabetical order:

  “Bradley . . . Rope?”

  “Ro-pay,” Brad corrected. “Here.”

  The professor smiled at Brad and then looked down at his list, searching for the next name. “Laura . . . Rope?”

  “Ro-pay. Here.”

  The entire classroom erupted in laughter.

  At the end of my first year in law school, I was number one in our class. Brad, a big grin on his face, told anyone who’d listen, “I’m sick of her riding my coattails all the time.”

  Two years later, as Brad and I graduated from law school together, hand in hand, I’d slipped to number two.

  “Number two? Loser!” Brad needled me, laughing. “I knew you were riding my coattails all along.”

  In any event, being a “loser” didn’t seem to hurt my employment prospects: I had my pick of jobs at graduation time. Without a thought, off I went to work as a civil litigator at my top pick, one of the most prestigious law firms in San Diego. Hypnotized by the world of high salaries and pretty offices, I didn’t stop to think, even once, What do I want? I just plucked a low-hanging plum off the tree and took a big, juicy bite, without considering whether I even liked plums at all.

  It didn’t take long before I figured out that studying to become a lawyer was a helluva lot more fun than being a lawyer. My daily life became about people fighting over money—whether relating to a real estate deal gone bad, a business contract turned sideways, or a busted employment relationship. Every day was all about money, money, money and fighting, fighting, fighting. My daily life was other people’s problems—OPP—and no, I wasn’t “down with OPP.”

  The swanky law firm where I worked was right out of the movie The Firm—sleek marble tables, plush leather chairs, and floor-to-ceiling views of the skyline. Elegant older men with silver hair and designer suits cut through the quiet hallways, their assistants twittering and trailing behind.

  I worked long days, well into every evening, and most weekends, too. I never said no when someone asked me to do any task, no matter how big or small. I kept track of time worked on my cases in six-minute increments, to be billed to the client—the system known in the law field as keeping track of “billable hours.” At the end of the first year, I felt immense satisfaction at being the attorney who’d logged the most billable hours in my entire firm. I was a workhorse.

  Consistent with my impeccable, precise surroundings, my suits were tailored to perfection, hugging the stick-thin frame I had worked so hard to achieve with a daily five-mile run and strict no-fat diet. Everything about me screamed “type A,” right down to my A-line bob.

  The three “elders” of the firm could not have been more different: Doug, the managing partner, had a singsongy way of asking, “How’re you?” as he passed in the hall; Gary, the top rainmaker, was formal and exacting and intimidating as hell; and Curt, the swashbuckler, was pure, unadulterated masculinity—I was pretty sure I ovulated every time he entered the room.

  The women partners were especially interesting to me as I tried to imagine my future as a partner at this firm. June was an old broad in the tradition of Bette Davis, calling ’em like she saw ’em, smokin’ and drinkin’ whiskey after work with the big boys. Sue was a billable-hours machine, churning out briefs and depositions at such a rapid-fire pace, I didn’t have more than a five-minute conversation with her over the course of eight years. Her manic work ethic did not appeal to me, though I was following right in her footsteps.

  The woman who influenced me most was my mentor, Janice, who was like no one else I’d ever met in my life—a tornado. She was an African American woman who, through sheer tenacity, had risen to the esteemed rank of partner at a major law firm in her early forties. But she hadn’t accomplished that feat by staying on a traditional path; no, she had gone the opposite direction: When every other attorney was dressed in conservative gray, Janice wore electric pink St. John knits, flashy scarves, and Prada heels. She was all woman, daring everyone in the room not to notice her. She was charming, flat-out stunning, and funny. She cracked jokes, even in the courtroom. And, man, could she bring in new clients. She was fascinating to me.

  One day, Janice buzzed me and told me to come into her office. When I walked in, there was Eric Allen, one of the NFL’s premier defensive backs. Janice knew I was a huge football fan and that I was enamored of Eric Allen’s athletic prowess (okay, his gorgeous eyes).

  As I approached this Adonis-like man to shake his hand, a high-pitched squeal caught in my throat, and I worried it would escape from my mouth. That wouldn’t be very lawyerlike, Laura. Keep it together.

  “Laura, this is Eric Allen.” Janice motioned to me. “Eric, this is my associate Laura.”

  Eric Allen extended his hand, and I shook it. Way too hard.

  And then, in a staccato voice that was three octaves lower than my normal speaking voice, I barked out, “Nice to meet you!” Ugh. I had overcompensated for the squeal I had tried to suppress. It was my trying-to-seem-professional voice, only on major steroids. I sounded like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” Mr. Allen replied generously. But his amused smile was undeniable.

  Janice heckled me about the Eric Allen Incident for years after that. And, I had to admit, it was pretty damned funny. My embarrassment was well worth it, though: Even when Janice was laughing at me, which was often, I gloried in the warm light of her attention.

  She and I sat in her office many a night after everyone else had gone home for the day, talking endlessly about “our dreams,” though I can’t for the life of me remember what I contributed to those conversations. Janice told me about how she wanted to own a law firm one day and create a place where lawyers could find balance in their lives. And what were my dreams? Well, I just adopted hers. “Me, too” was my mantra—the easiest and only thing to say, since I’d stopped dreaming for myself.

  Janice and I were working on a case as cocounsel with a huge national law firm in Washington, D.C. This particular litigation involved writing endless legal briefs, the sheer volume of which was too much for any one person to accomplish. The writing tasks were therefore divided up between me and the associate at the other law firm, a guy named Alan. Alan and I spoke on the phone almost every day to integrate our portions of the legal briefs. Based on his voice, which was sort of nebbishy and passive, I had a visual image of him that popped into my head every time we spoke: a tall, skinny white guy with brown hair and glasses. A stereotypical accountant. Or, I guess, more aptly, a corporate lawyer.

  One day while Alan and I were on one of our many phone calls to talk about our never-ending writing tasks, he told me a story about a lawyer in his firm who always interjected into any conversation the fact that he’d been on the law review at his Ivy League law school. In a mockingly pompous voice, Alan imitated the man to demonstrate his point: “‘That reminds me of when I was on law review . . . ’”

  We both chuckled. “Oh, how annoying,” I said. “I hate it when people never stop bragging about their resumes. Especially when their accomplishments aren’t recent.”

  “You’re right,” Alan agreed. “A person can’t rest on past accomplishments forever. You have to keep growing, getting
better.”

  “Totally!”

  And then Alan’s tone shifted. He sounded contemplative. “Honestly, I worry sometimes I dwell too much on my NFL days . . . ”

  His NFL days? I didn’t hear anything Alan said beyond that phrase. What the hell? Alan had played in the NFL? My mind was reeling. Was he a kicker? Does. Not. Compute.

  “Alan, go back a minute. What do you mean, your ‘NFL days’?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said nonchalantly. “I played in the NFL.”

  Silence hung in the air for a beat while that sank in. “What position?”

  “Defensive back. For the Eagles.”

  What?! I was stupefied. I had been talking to this guy every day for months! Throughout that time, my mental image of him had become so fixed in my mind, I was finding it hard to readjust. He must not be so skinny, I thought.

  About a month later, Alan and the other lawyers from his firm paid a visit to my firm’s San Diego office.

  Janice buzzed me. “Come to the conference room,” she said. “Alan wants to meet you.”

  After months of talking on the phone and working so hard on our legal briefs together, it would be a pleasure to finally meet Alan face-to-face.

  When I entered the conference room, Janice was standing next to a man who could not possibly have been Alan. But then she said, “Laura, this is Alan.”

  I smiled. Alan wasn’t tall and skinny. And he didn’t wear glasses or look like an accountant, either. In fact, he was handsome, and muscled, and masculine. Oh, and one other thing: Alan was black. I burst out laughing as I hugged my long-distance friend. And after a few moments of warm conversation, I felt comfortable enough to admit to him, “You know, Alan, this whole time, I thought you were a tall, skinny white guy with glasses!”