The Cotton Queen

by Pamela Morsi

  “The tandem training.”

  He took the disk from my hand.

  “I’ll look at it,” he said. “Polish it up a bit, if I think it needs it, and pass it on to the next level. It’s hard to be patient, but things take time.”

  I nodded and I waited.

  It was almost six months and several excellently written proposals later, that I finally heard. Or rather I read, in the company newsletter, that T-Training was the newest innovation in network-wide I.T. compatibility. And heading up this project was the new vice president for Information Technology, Larry Thrushing.

  I confronted him only after I’d seen with my own eyes the proposal he’d submitted. It was exactly what I’d handed him on that floppy. The only polishing I detected was the change in authorship. And he didn’t even have the generosity to list me as a contributor. I was stunned. I felt that for all my hard work I’d been stabbed in the back.

  Larry didn’t even blush when he gave me his explanation. “It was a good idea,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere if they thought some low-level nobody had come up with it. Without my name on it, it was dead in the water. Now, don’t worry, Laney. I’m going to continue to take care of you. I’ll still be your boss, just on a higher level.”

  So Larry was promoted and Mr. Carmington was given his position. He was older, slower and less knowledgeable about virtually everything.

  “You and I are going to get along fine, Lucy,” he told me.

  “Laney,” I said. “My name is Laney.”

  “All right, Laney,” he replied, as if he were almost annoyed at having to use my actual name instead of what he thought I was called. “That will be fine. Please remember this, maybe you should write it down...”

  I grabbed a pencil and a yellow pad.

  “I take my coffee with one teaspoon of sugar and a single dollop of half-and-half. Do not, under any circumstances, bring me coffee that’s been whitened up with powdered creamer. It sours on my stomach. Half-and-half is what I want. Make sure that you always have that in the break room refrigerator and that it’s fresh.”

  That night when I complained to Robert, he howled with laughter.

  “At least you don’t have to speculate on where his priorities lie,” he said.

  “I don’t think this is funny,” I told him. “The guy doesn’t seem to know anything about anything.”

  “That’s probably why Larry put him in there,” Robert said. “The old guy would just get in the way and Larry’s confident that you can handle the department on your own.”

  “Then why wasn’t I even considered for the director’s job?”

  Robert shook his head. “Baby, don’t get mad at me,” he said. “You’ve got to be realistic. You’re barely twenty-four years old. And you’re gorgeous. Nobody on senior staff is going to look at you and think to themselves, ‘that’s director material.’ It’s just not going to happen. You just keep working at it. You just keep exceeding the mark day after day, covering for Carmington and keeping things smooth. Eventually somebody is going to notice.”

  “I don’t get a lot of satisfaction in making my boss look good,” I told him. “It’s what I’ve been doing since Aunt Maxine first put me to work. And I was a lot more willing to help Uncle Warren shine than any of the Bozos I’m currently spinning plates in the air for.”

  Robert laughed again. These days he laughed about almost everything.

  Unlike myself, Robert was not having to work hard and wait patiently in someone’s shadow. He was making money hand over fist. We both worked sixty to seventy hour weeks, but while mine netted me a comfortable salary, Robert got huge bonuses and stock options.

  The price of oil had gone through the roof. The boom was big and with the Reagan administration cutting back on federal regulation, there were big profits to be made in the industry.

  Robert worked on the finance side. Small independent oil companies who had leased prospects contracted with him to come up with investors to pay for the expense of drilling. Since nearly everybody wanted a piece of the action, working guys with their life savings and ancient old widows with their husbands’ annuities were lined up to buy in. If the well came in, everybody made money. If it didn’t, the investors lost everything, but the companies, who had so little of their own capital invested, were in a good position to lease more land elsewhere that new investors would pay to develop.

  Robert was good at finding the people and selling the shares. Greg was, too. They were close colleagues and friendly competitors. Both making more money, more quickly than they’d ever imagined.

  Hilary, Greg’s girlfriend, was out of the picture now. I never knew what happened to her. After my graduation party, I never saw her again. Several weeks afterward we went to a weekend gathering and he was with someone new.

  “What happened to Hilary?” I’d asked Robert.

  He shrugged. “They broke up,” he told me. “Greg didn’t give me any details. But he doesn’t seem to be suffering from a broken heart.”

  No, he didn’t.

  He was showing up with a new girl on a bimonthly basis, each one blonder and bigger breasted than the last. Greg was drinking deep and laughing long. And my Robert was, too.

  One afternoon the two of them had taken off early, gone by the car dealership and both showed up at our front door in brand-new BMWs. Robert’s was fire-engine red, Greg’s was powder blue.

  “I can’t believe you bought that car,” I told him later that evening. “You just went out and bought it, without even discussing it with me.”

  That irked him. “Why would I discuss it with you?” he asked. “It’s my car. Are you going to try to tell me what I’m going to buy for myself with my own money?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you what to do about anything,” I said. “But with the renovations that the architect has come up with for the house and that big vacation you’ve been talking about to the South Pacific, I thought that at least you’d want to talk about it. We’re supposed to be sharing each other’s lives.”

  “We are. We are, babe,” he insisted. “Don’t be mad about the car. I know you’re worried that I bought it to pick up chicks. Well, that may be why Greg bought his, but I bought mine because I really like it. I like having a snazzy, good-looking vehicle to drive. Damn, don’t you think I’ve earned it?”

  “Of course you have,” I said.

  We made up. We made love. And I forgot all about it. I had just been jealous. The man I loved was more successful than me and I should be proud instead of resentful.

  A couple of months later, on a gray and boring Thursday, I’d forgotten some papers that I’d been working on at home. It had been a horrendously busy week and I’d hardly seen the inside of my home, but I needed those papers. I just couldn’t do without them. So in lieu of a lunch break, I went home to get them. I was annoyed to find a Datsun 280Z taking up the space directly in front of the house, its vanity plate read Perfect 10. I rolled my eyes and found another parking spot down the street. When I walked back to the house, I was surprised to see the BMW in the driveway.

  Once upstairs, I was more surprised to see one of Greg’s cast-off buxom blondes bouncing her silicone titties over my new king-size bed while she rode my Robert screaming, “Go, stud! Go! Go! Harder! Harder!”

  If before that moment someone had asked me what my reaction might be to finding Robert with another woman, I’d have honestly answered that such a sight would have me bursting into tears. That’s not at all what happened.

  I was calm. I was dry eyed. And I was out for revenge.

  Robert’s overpriced graphite tennis racquet was leaning up against the wall next to the door. He was always just leaving it there and I’d hang it back in the closet for him. I picked it up and without bothering to remove the protective cover, I delivered a forceful forehand return directly on the sex cheerleader’s big gaping mouth.

  She jumped and screamed. Her nose was bleeding. I began pounding the racquet into Robert who was scrambling
to escape. I managed one direct blow to his private parts that had behaved so offensively to me. Then he was screaming, too.

  I was screaming. They were screaming. I was still lobbing and backhanding. The girl had blood dripping all over her and the next blow I landed had her scurrying out of the room, down the stairs and out the front door, stark naked. Robert was half bent over, holding his jewels, trying to fend me off with one hand. He managed to wrench the racquet away from me before I did much more damage.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” were the words I finally deciphered coming from his mouth.

  When I finally stopped, he threw the expensive racquet across the room.

  He remained bent over, cursing and complaining about his injury.

  I was ready to complain about my own.

  “How could you?” I asked him. “How could you, stud?”

  That word, at least, captured Robert’s attention. He wasn’t going to be able to lie about it or weasel out of it. I’d believed my eyes and my ears.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Laney, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it. It was just so easy. It seemed so basic and simple. I never thought you’d find out. I never wanted to hurt you.”

  None of his answers made me feel any better.

  For two long days we wrangled over it, two long days of pleadings and recriminations. I wasn’t interested in his excuses. I was unmoved by his tearful regret. In the end, there was only one apology that seemed sincere enough for me to accept.

  “Laney, let’s get married,” Robert said to me finally.

  “What?” I was incredulous.

  “I think all this freedom, all this not having things tied up and settled down, I think it’s not good for me,” he said. “If I’d actually vowed to be faithful, I’m sure I would have been.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I even believed him. I wanted to throw his too-little-too-late offer back into his face. But I didn’t want to lose my little house that I’d come to love. I didn’t want to admit to my mother that she was right and that I did get hurt. I didn’t want Robert to become Greg, moving happily on with his life, forgetting all about me. I think it was those reasons more than his insistent declarations of love that led me to my answer.

  “All right,” I told him. “I’ll marry you. And we’ll forget that this ever happened.”

  BABS

  LIKE FIREFIGHTERS running into a burning building or soldiers patrolling the war-zone perimeter, I grew accustomed to driving into Dallas for my new job, always aware of the danger there. I liked what I was doing. My job was not the most creative, I suppose. All the exciting planning and design details were done by Ardith or Geoffrey. I was involved with the grunt work. Making sure the table setup was exactly as planned, the caterers were fulfilling their commitments and that the site crews followed through with cleanup. The locations I worked were mostly downtown or at one of the country clubs. Our clients were wealthy, corporate or both and they were willing to pay a great deal not to have to think about whether the napkins would clash with the posters from the new ad campaign.

  And I have to admit that it was a very good feeling when I was able to call Acee and tell him that I was no longer going to need my stipend.

  “I’m not making enough to take on the mortgage yet,” I admitted. “But I’m working toward that goal.”

  He didn’t make light of my efforts or tell me that it was unnecessary. Acee, being Acee, expressed thanks and applauded my efforts.

  So despite still having that queasy stomach on the morning drive every day, I was feeling pretty good about myself and my life.

  That was until Laney called me.

  “Guess where I’m calling from?” she asked me.

  “Where?”

  “Fiji.”

  “Oh, my heavens! That’s fabulous.”

  “It is, Babs,” she said. “It’s totally fabulous. You just can’t believe how beautiful it is here. And guess what else?”

  “What else?”

  “Robert and I got married three days ago.”

  I was so stunned I just gasped, for a moment I couldn’t speak.

  “Babs? Are you there?”

  “You got married?” I finally managed. “In Fiji?”

  “No, we actually got married in Houston before we left,” she said.

  Somehow that was even worse. My only daughter, the most important person in my life, had made the most important change in her life and she hadn’t even invited me to share it. As a mother, somewhere I’d gone really, really wrong.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Ardith told me when I confessed the news to her. “It happens all the time. These kids don’t do anything like we’d hope they would. When they get back, we’ll throw a lovely party for them, as fabulous as any wedding reception and we’ll be saved all the white dress and thirteen bridesmaids nonsense.”

  But upon Laney’s return, she made it quite clear that she was not having any big fancy party.

  “You can have a small celebration at your house,” she told me. “No catering. No cake. Family only.”

  It wasn’t enough, but I accepted what I was offered, a small, intimate family gathering. Fortunately the family was growing larger all the time. And I defined it on a grander scale, inviting the entire Hoffman clan, as well. With all the cousins now married, the inclusion of the spouses and their families, they pretty much made up half the town’s population.

  Robert and Laney drove up that morning. He had never visited McKinney and spent some time wandering around the downtown neighborhood. He liked it very much, but not in a way I particularly appreciated.

  “The place is like a time capsule,” he said. “It’s a throwback to another era. It’s completely frozen in the fifties.”

  “Most of those buildings are turn-of-the-century,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but the fact that nobody’s figured out a better use for downtown space since then, it’s just wild,” he said. “You could just put a fence around it and sell tickets. Welcome to Retro World! Maybe you could make a two for one deal with Six Flags Over Texas.”

  I just tried to ignore it and think the best of him. He was Laney’s husband and therefore I was obligated to get along. But the man just wouldn’t let the subject drop.

  “We like it the way it is,” I heard Pete telling him that afternoon at the party. “The good news is we can still walk around and window-shop and have everything close at hand. The bad news is, these old buildings can’t be refitted for a business like mine where lots of high-tech equipment is used.”

  “So, you just leave the downtown alone and build out on the perimeter?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what we’ve done so far.”

  “Well you’d never see that in Houston.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Pete agreed. “The land values downtown are through the roof. They’re knocking down everything to put up all those new skyscrapers. I guess you could say that we’re lucky here. We’re booming, but not so fast or so successfully that we’re going to choke on it.”

  “Canapés?” I said, offering a plate between the two.

  The party was going very well. The children were running wild in the backyard, giving their parents an opportunity to converse at normal volume in the living room and the den. The entry hall was a virtual mountain of packages for the newlyweds. And on the formal dining table I’d laid out my pièce de résistance. Laney had refused to have a cake. So, in substitution, I had five dozen tiny marzipan swans swimming among edible flowers on sterling silver trays.

  She’d groaned aloud at the sight, but I was certain that in the long run it would make for lovely memories. With that in mind, I shot an entire roll of film just of the table.

  I expected Aunt Maxine to help me serve. But she seated herself in the den recliner and allowed the festivities to come to her. Doris filled in and, as always, she was amiable and competent. Her older boy was now a freshman at U.T. and she was very proud of him. She chatter
ed on about his classes and his activities to anyone who would stand still long enough to listen. But when the two of us were alone in the kitchen, her topic of discussion changed abruptly.

  “I wanted you to know that Acee is really pleased about how you’re getting on with your life again,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad about it, too. And I’m sure that with two boys to educate, the last thing you and Acee need to worry about is supporting his ex-wife.”

  Doris shook her head. “Oh, it’s nothing to me,” she said. “It’s Acee’s money and even when things get tight, I just laugh, ’cause I’ve seen a lot worse times in my life.”

  “Yes, I guess you have.”

  “I think it’s funny when people whine about having to pay bills,” she said. “I love to pay my bills, ’cause it’s such a thrill to have the money to do it.”

  “I think you may be right, Dorrie,” I said. “I get a bit of a thrill out of paying mine, too.”

  I was chuckling and glanced over at her. She was looking at me intently, thoughtfully, seriously.

  “What?”

  “You do know, Babs, Acee is still in love with you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My first thought was to deny it, but how could I presume to know Acee? Doris did know him and she was not the kind of woman who needed to fabricate drama in her life.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she assured me quickly. “I know that he’d never do anything about it. He’d never leave me or hurt me. He loves me, too, I’m sure of that. I just wanted you to know that. In case, well, in case you ever needed to know that.”

  I tried to be honest with her. As a woman who is basically unsure of her own mind in terms of relationships, I tried to be as open as I could on how little I understood of my feelings.

  “I love him, too, in my own way,” I said. “I guess I always will. But I was never able to love him the way that you love him, Doris. And I was never able to make him happy. These days, he seems very happy.”

  “Thank you for that,” she said.

  Laney burst into the room with two arms full of dirty dishes.