The Partner Track: A Novel

by Wan, Helen

  The women were all younger than I was, probably in their mid- to late twenties. The tallest had flawless caramel-colored skin, and when she spoke to her friends, I heard a Caribbean lilt to her voice. The other two women were Asian, with dark complexions and open, friendly expressions. Tibetan, I guessed, or maybe Thai.

  And each of these three young women had in her care a fair-haired, blue-eyed child.

  It was so striking, this parade of young brown women and their small white charges. I glanced at the big round clock above the cash register. 10:18. The apparent witching hour for the gathering of Manhattan nannies. The harried career moms who employed them would have dashed out of the apartment hours before, fingers flying on BlackBerrys and iPhones, en route to some hectic desk job or other—one that came with diplomas on the wall, files in the credenza, an assistant, a speakerphone, a window with a view to the streets below. The very same streets their nannies roamed every day of the week, until the career moms rushed home to relieve them, just after dark. Just in time for a single bedtime story.

  I took my newspaper and sat down at one of the narrow little tables against the wall. “15 Killed in Kabul Bomb Attack.” “Jobless Numbers Rise 2 Percent.” “Congress in Partisan Standoff on Drilling Reform.” “Councilman Steps Down amid Growing Bribery Probe.” There was no good news anymore.

  I glanced, for distraction, down into the stroller that was parked next to me. A pink-cheeked child was tucked inside, with blond curls and impossibly long blond eyelashes. She must have been four—really, a bit old to be pushed around in a stroller anywhere but New York—but there was no denying that she was adorable.

  The bell jangled again, and in walked a woman who was obviously not a nanny. She was by herself, first of all. She had a perky, well-cared-for look about her. She was about my age, petite, ash blond, pretty. She wore gray yoga pants, a sleek black racerback tank, and cross-trainers. A fluorescent pink water bottle, a compact fanny pack, and an iPhone were strapped efficiently to her waist.

  She walked up to the counter, ordered a whole-wheat bagel with one Egg Beater, and then turned around toward me. I could feel her taking me in—my messy hair, my jeans and flip-flops, the expensive stroller parked at my feet. She walked right up and looked inside the stroller. She sucked in her breath.

  “Oh. My. God,” the woman said to me. “That baby is just gorgeous.”

  I blinked at her. She had caught me off guard; in the workaday world of midtown, commuters usually didn’t just walk right up and talk to each other. But maybe these were the unspoken rules in Weekday Morning Nonoffice World and people felt free to just start talking to strangers. I glanced over at the child’s nanny, trying to catch her eye, but no luck.

  I looked down at the little girl, then back up at the yoga woman. Not wanting to seem rude, I smiled.

  Yoga Pants leaned down toward the stroller and waggled her fingers in the face of the clearly sleeping child. Then she bent way down—revealing impressive cleavage in the gentle V of her tank—before reaching into the stroller and actually tickling the girl’s nose.

  “Hey,” I said, alarmed, rolling the stroller a couple of inches closer to me. “Um, I’m not actually—” I began, glancing over at the little girl’s nanny, who, along with her friends, was now busy inspecting the available flavors of Vitaminwater.

  Yoga Pants stood back up and smiled at me. “So how long have you been taking care of this little angel?” she asked.

  I curled my fingers possessively around the handlebar of the stroller. “Uh, well…”

  “And do you come into the city from Queens? Or from someplace else?” she asked, still smiling in a beneficent way.

  “No, I’m—I actually live just around the corner,” I said. What was I doing? Why didn’t I simply explain her mistake to her? What was wrong with me?

  Yoga Pants beamed at me. “You know, I just think it’s so smart for parents to get an Asian-speaking nanny these days,” she gushed.

  Did I know how to speak Asian?

  I smiled uncertainly.

  “Listen, you seem really sweet. Let me give you my phone number.” Yoga Pants fished a card out of her tiny fanny pack. She tilted her chin toward the stroller. “Once this one gets off to full-day kindergarten, which looks like it might be any day now, you might find yourself in need of another job. Rob and I have plenty of friends who’d just love a referral to an Asian nanny who’s already familiar with the neighborhood.”

  She handed me her card.

  “Thanks, that’s nice of you,” I said, almost meaning it.

  She waved a hand gaily in the air. “Oh, it’s nothing. That’s just how I am. I love to help people!”

  “Toasted everything, CC, and lox!” the guy behind the counter called out, brandishing a brown paper bag.

  “That’s me.” I stood, picked up my paper, and retrieved my bagel.

  I felt, somehow, that I should say something to Yoga Pants. She had, after all, in her own special way, just tried to find me a job.

  “Well, it was very nice talking to you,” I said, standing there a little awkwardly, with my bagel.

  “Don’t lose my number, now,” she said with a magnanimous smile. “You just call if you ever need a referral to another family.”

  “Okay then,” I said vaguely, taking a few backward steps toward the exit.

  “Wait!” she yelled. “You’re forgetting the baby!”

  I smiled uncertainly, waved, turned my back, and scurried out the door.

  Out on the street, for no reason at all, I started half-running, half-jogging, my flip-flops slapping noisily on the pavement. As I ran, I laughed hysterically. I was actually laughing. It made no sense, but suddenly I felt giddy and exhilarated. I felt oddly free.

  I ran halfway up the block before I worked up the courage to look behind me. I paused, bent over slightly, with my hands on my thighs, trying to catch my breath. I half-expected to see Yoga Pants storming up the block, accompanied by an NYPD officer and an angry mob of Upper East Side nannies, pointing me out. There she is! That’s the impostor! Stop her!

  I started running again, heading east. Up ahead, I spotted a bank of anonymous, old-fashioned pay phones—one of the few that still existed in this part of Manhattan. I slowed to a walk. I looked around cautiously—not sure exactly who I expected might stop me—and then stepped toward the first booth. I didn’t know that I was going to do it. It was automatic. My fingers didn’t need to be told what to do.

  I dialed my old work number.

  Morbid curiosity had gotten the better of me. The line rang three times, but instead of clicking over to my own familiar recorded greeting, I heard Margo’s voice: Hello. You have reached the voice mailbox of Ingrid Yung. Please be aware that, effective immediately, Ms. Yung is no longer associated with the law firm of Parsons Valentine and Hunt, and any personal messages left on this line will not be retrieved. If you are calling with a business-related inquiry, please dial zero for Reception, and your call will be redirected to another attorney.

  Only someone who knew Margo as well as I did would be able to detect the sad little hiccup in her voice that revealed itself at the very end of the message. Good old Margo. I missed her.

  Back home, in the relative safety of my apartment, whose mortgage I would soon not be able to afford, I tossed my newspaper and bagel onto the polished marble counter, sank down at my kitchen table, and held my head in both hands. My God, I was losing it, I was really losing it. I had just pretended to be the guardian of a strange child. I had just dialed my own voice mail.

  I had the sudden, wrenching thought that I had become the kind of person that other people felt sorry for. Me. Ingrid Sabrina Yung. That was, after all, why Yoga Pants was trying to help me, right? Because she thought I was someone who needed a job?

  Well, I admonished myself, you do need a job! What, was being a nanny really so beneath me? Hadn’t Rachel always said that I was great with Isabel and Jacob? Maybe, just maybe, I could do worse than to call Yoga Pants
back.

  In all the books and movies, wasn’t that exactly what happened to career girls like me? Weren’t we forever coming to some work epiphany or other, cursing out our domineering bosses once and for all, finally speaking our minds and telling them what for, then flouncing dramatically out of our midtown glass towers to discover an amazing untapped aptitude for cupcake baking, or handbag sewing, or dog walking, or some such? Isn’t that how we were all expected to start over and save ourselves, if all those stories were to be believed? Either that, or meet and marry Mr. Right and hope that he had a decent place to live?

  Well, I couldn’t bake, for one. I’d never been big on sewing, either. And I’d recently tried what I thought was the Mr. Right route and had found myself painfully, tragically, mistaken.

  Oh God. I suddenly felt very, very tired. I folded my arms and laid my head down on the table.

  So this was what it all came down to. After all my hard work, I would not be making history after all. I would be calling Yoga Pants to be placed with a family who wanted an Asian-speaking nanny.

  I sat there with my head on my kitchen table for a long, long time. I breathed in and out, steadily, listening to the muffled sounds of midday traffic drifting up from nineteen stories below, and thinking.

  I was shocked by just how swiftly and completely I’d been shorn of the identifying, qualifying marks—briefcase, BlackBerry, business section of the Times—that had inoculated me for all of these years. I realized, with something very close to guilt, that I’d spent the better part of my life diligently accumulating, and then jealously guarding, my private trove of these Inoculating Marks. We all hoarded them—all of us Minority Darlings who had made it this far.

  We collected something else, too, unbeknownst to the other colleagues we shared laughs and drinks with after work. We kept a meticulous tally of all of the slights and slurs collected over the years—each look of surprise on a new client’s face upon first meeting, every hushed, broken-off conversation when we entered a room. On rare occasions, in trusted company, we aired them out, dusted them off, and tossed them around like war stories. Rolled up our sleeves and revealed them to each other, like battle scars.

  Did I ever tell you about the time a woman handed me her dry cleaning as I stood behind her in line?

  That’s nothing. Did I tell you about the client who used the N-word on the phone before finding out I was black?

  How about the time Professor Cahill asked if I’d been to Stanford on an athletic scholarship?

  Please. I’ve been asked if both my parents are legal.

  And so on.

  I saw now that I’d spent the better part of my life trying to insulate myself from all kinds of hurt. And it had almost worked. All those years, it had almost become possible for me to live my day-to-day life ignoring the differences that existed between me and any other Times-reading, dark-suited, smartphone-toting business commuter in the city. Until now.

  Making partner, I’d somehow thought, would make me whole. I would become immune to the little humiliations I had collected over all these years. But it hadn’t worked. It would never work. It had been doomed from the start. I knew that now. I also knew exactly what that made me—just another dropout, just another Minority Darling who had come really, really close.

  TWENTY

  I was curled up on the couch when the phone rang. I stirred and sat halfway up, bleary-eyed. I still didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I let it ring until the machine picked up.

  Hey, it’s Ingrid. Leave me a message. Beep.

  “Ingrid-ah,” my mother’s cheerful, chirpy voice came through in Mandarin—it was soothing, somehow, and my heart hurt as I thought about how much I missed my parents, how hard it was going to be to disappoint them. They’d sacrificed so much, coming here from Taipei as grad students with nothing, so many decades ago. What would it feel like for them to know that I’d had the American Dream solidly within my grasp but had let it slip from my fingers?

  I strained to hear my mother’s message. Her voice sounded plaintive, braver and louder than she would have sounded if she’d been calling me at work, but still tentative all the same. “Ingrid, Daddy and I haven’t heard from you in a little while, and we just wanted to see if everything’s all right. Give us a call when you can. I know you must be working so hard, as usual. You must be very busy at work. Love, Mom.” Beep.

  I had to tell them.

  I threw off my blanket, picked up the phone, and dialed my parents’ number. My hands were shaking badly enough that I messed up the first time and had to dial twice.

  I didn’t know how I was going to break this news to them, but they deserved to know the truth. They were going to be devastated. In my parents’ world, it was a tragedy if the only Ivy your child got into was Cornell.

  The phone rang three times before my father picked up. “Hello?” he said. He sounded cheerful, and that made my heart break just a little more.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said, as brightly as I could manage.

  “Oh, Ingrid.” I could hear him take the phone away from his ear and holler to my mom, “Yan-Mei! It’s Ingrid! Hurry up! Hold on, sweetie, Mom’s coming, we’ll put you on the speakerphone—”

  “No, wait, Dad? Actually, don’t put me on speaker—”

  There was a loud squawk, and both my parents’ voices came on together. “Hello!” shouted my dad. “Hi, Ingrid!” said my mother’s happy voice. “What a surprise! Only six o’clock! You don’t usually call so early! Did you get to leave work early?”

  Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. I nearly laughed.

  “Actually,” I began, “that’s sort of what I was calling you guys about.”

  And then, without having prepared anything in advance, without having scripted how I’d do it, I just blurted it all out in a big crazy headlong crush of words. I told them—in Mandarin, so there would be no miscommunication—everything that had happened. About Marty Adler and Ted Lassiter and Hunter’s horrible skit and the country club and the Diversity Committee and Dr. Rossi and Zhang Liu and the terrible meeting with the client where everything had gone horribly wrong and yes, I even told them about Murph.

  I described the horrible meeting in Adler’s office and admitted that I was home now—had been home for many days, in fact, thinking.

  I expected that my mother would cry. She didn’t. In fact, both she and my father were silent for what seemed like a very long time. When my mother finally did speak, she lapsed back into Mandarin, sounding extremely calm and practical. Matter-of-fact, even. To my surprise, she actually reminded me of Rachel.

  “Well, you’ll come home and get a job here, that’s all there is to that,” she said, with finality. Her voice softened. “Maybe you can talk to Cindy Bai or Susan Wu—maybe they know of a local lawyer here who could use a little help around the office. Just until you get back on your feet.”

  Help around the office? Me, who’d been about to become the first female Corporate partner at one of the most powerful law firms in the world? Well, hell, maybe I could, maybe I would. Maybe it had come to that.

  “It’s not that easy, Mom,” I said. “I don’t want to rush into anything. I just need to think things through right now.”

  There was another pause.

  “It’s not too late to apply to medical school,” she said.

  I started to laugh. And once I started, it was hard to stop. It felt great to laugh out loud.

  My mother sounded annoyed. “Well, I’m just saying, you still could.”

  My father interrupted, “I think Ingrid’s right. She just needs some time to think about things, Yan-Mei.”

  My heart swelled. Good old Dad.

  Then my mother said quietly, “You could come back home, Ingrid. Start over. There are lots of nice places for young people to live in Maryland and Virginia. I’ll help you look.”

  I didn’t want to live in a nice place. I wanted to be in Manhattan.

  “I’m sure,” my mother continued, “in a different
city, no one will even care that you’d been on some bad project with some mean, bad boss at some company up in New York. Maybe they won’t even know of this Valentine company. Maybe no one will even have heard of it.”

  I sighed. “They’ll have heard of it, Mom, believe me. They’ll all have heard of it.”

  After a pause, I said, “I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to tell you all of this. I wish my news were better.”

  My mother sighed, too. “Ingrid-ah.” She paused, and I could tell she was trying to bring herself to say something difficult. “Your father and I were always so worried about you with that job, living in that lonely apartment, not eating proper meals, working so late every night and coming home by yourself at three in the morning. Maybe”—she hesitated—“maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Please come home. All you need is some time, to try to figure out what will make you happy.”

  I sat there pressing the receiver to my ear, stunned. All along, I’d thought that my parents weren’t equipped to hear about when my life turned bad. When in fact, maybe all they’d wanted was for me to be happy.

  “Your mother and I raised a smart girl,” my dad said. “You’ll figure out a way. I’m not worried.”

  All of this time, I thought I’d been busily protecting my parents. When it turned out perhaps they hadn’t needed much protecting at all. But maybe I had.

  “Promise me you’ll at least think about coming home,” my mother said. “Maybe in the fall. Things always seem to look so much brighter in the fall. Remember you used to tell me that?”

  I smiled into the receiver. “Yes,” I said softly.

  After we said good-bye, I sat there for a minute longer, thinking about what my mother had said.

  The fall had always been my favorite season. There was just something I loved about that sharp autumnal crackle in the air, which I still associated with new lunchboxes and the delicious whiff of spiral notebooks and Magic Markers. I loved going back-to-school shopping with my mom for new sweaters and skirts at Sears and Penney’s. Fresh starts, in other words. Fall felt like a fresh start. One could go away over the summer and come back a totally reinvented self.