Tonight, Sarah had on a deep purple shirt that set off her hair. She looked comfortable and casual, even though her pants were velvet and she wore heels. Her cell phone was barely noticeable, tucked into her waist in a black velvet cover the exact shade of her pants. In her jeans and t-shirt, Meredith felt like Sarah’s tomboy sister. Even if she’d worn her work outfit, a salmon-colored cotton dress, she knew she would have felt naive and frumpy. She reached up to flatten her out-of-control curls. Her body, she reflected, was more like a boy’s than a woman’s. Sarah was about twenty pounds over the ideal weight, but she came off as voluptuous and sexy. Well, at least I like my hair color, she thought. Even as an adolescent, she’d been happy with auburn.
Meredith had met Sarah four years ago, when they came together as roommates. Freshly transplanted from New York and not knowing a soul in New Mexico, she had answered an ad posted on a University bulletin board for “Roommate Wanted.” She had spent an hour that day, traveling through University departments, tearing off little tabs from the signs so that when she got home to the bed at the hostel she had seven or eight little pieces of paper with phone numbers and miscellaneous information like, “parquet floors,” or “two car garage.” “Near university” had called her back and it wasn’t until she sat down with the roommates that she remembered their sign.
“Three roommates in picturesque 4 bedroom house with yard near UNM, looking for a 4th. You are a non-smoker, male or female, grad student preferred, pets considered.”
The house had seen better days, but it had a nice sense of space. The yard had raspberry bushes and a hammock. The moment Meredith stepped in the door she knew she had to live there. The three roommates were nervous, eager to please, and Meredith guessed that they must have had a bad run of previous applicants. She was aware that she came off as quiet and reliable, and that that demeanor was going to get her the fourth bedroom. When she saw her room, which was the smallest in the house, she hesitated, and they instantly gave her $60 a month off the rent to make up for the size.
The three people followed her around like a unit as she toured the house. It wasn’t until days later that she began to distinguish them from one another. Gerald was a history student. His dirty blond hair hung over his eyes like fringe. Stooped and tall, Gerald stood over people like a benevolent vulture, his neck curving out of rounded shoulders. Gerald was always studying. “Reading,” he called it because he derived too much pleasure from his studies to call it work. Meredith would come home in the evenings to find him cross-legged at the kitchen table, his woolly socks peeping out, and a cup of steaming tea next to one of his mammoth-sized history texts.
Somewhere early into Meredith's time in the house, Gerry and the second roommate, Dulce, became a couple. Dulce was always flowing past Meredith like water. Multi-shaded skirts swishing like small whirlpools at her ankles, silver bracelets and rings reflected the room back in miniature. She was a jewelry major. Unlike Gerry, Dulce couldn’t take much of her work home with her. She’d be gone at the studio for as many as forty-eight hours a shot. On especially rough weeks, Gerry would sometimes pack a lunch and thermos and take them to Dulce while she worked. Yet, they were pretty independent of each other, Meredith always thought. Neither seemed to suffer from jealousy. If they fought, it was quietly. Meredith couldn’t remember ever hearing one of them raise a voice to the other.
And the third roommate was Sarah. Mellow and dazzling Sarah. Rigid and determined. Self-centered and unreliable. She was always blowing everyone off, forgetting dates, leaving people waiting for hours, winning forgiveness out of people with her charismatic allure. When she wanted to, Sarah made people feel like they had a valuable place in the world. Friends who arrived at their four-bedroom house angry would leave wishing they were more like Sarah. In later years, Meredith would marvel at how split Sarah was: going through columns and figures until she had accounted for the last penny, leaving the house without turning off a gas burner under an empty pot on the stove. Sarah’s charm filled in the potholes that were scattered throughout her personal relationships. She was easy for people to forgive.
Excusing Sarah’s mistakes: burning a cigarette hole in Meredith's favorite blouse, deleting Meredith's term paper the night before it was due, and holding no grudge gave Meredith a heady feeling. Lately, however, it was harder to forgive Sarah’s acts of egotism. Old wounds were reappearing. Sometimes, Meredith would be woken in the middle of the night by a fit of rage over a ceramic mug that Sarah had carelessly broken three years earlier. She’d sit up in the dark, heart thumping, chest tight, reliving the memory of Sarah’s casual apology with fiery clarity. “I forgave her for that years ago. Why is it coming up now?” she’d wonder, as she sat in the dark.
Snapping back to the conversation in the restaurant, Meredith took a sip of water and smiled at Sarah as she realized Sarah was still talking about her current flame. She wasn’t going to let past grievances ruin her relationship with Sarah. Sarah paused for a moment and Meredith took the moment as an opportunity to interject.
“Do you want to order dessert?”
Pulling into her driveway for the second time that night, Meredith was not surprised to see it was 11:30. As she stood in her kitchen boiling water for tea, she tried to analyze why old resentments were suddenly surfacing. Sarah hadn’t changed, so why was Meredith so angry with her? She wracked her brains but there was nothing. She loved Sarah more than any friend she’d ever had. Of course Sarah had flaws. But who didn’t? There was no point in getting angry about things that had always been part of Sarah’s personality. Still, Meredith reminded herself as she climbed into bed with the tea, the good parts far outweighed the bad. They could communicate on every level, like soul sisters. They finished each other’s sentences, for goodness sakes! At least, sometimes.
The nights were beginning to cool down. Meredith snuggled up into her pillows and sipped her tea in the dark. “No more bad dreams,” she told herself sternly. Outside, the coyotes were howling. The streetlight shining through the trees made a lacy pattern of shadows across her ceiling. They moved as the wind blew slightly. “Life is good,” Meredith told herself. “Despite long commutes and lousy jobs, this ceiling makes up for a lot.”
The next day, one of the secretaries, Donna, popped her head into Meredith’s office. “Have you heard the news?” she asked.
“What news?” Meredith asked.
“Lisa Ramos had a fire last night in her house. It burnt to the ground.”
“Oh my god!” Lisa was a secretary in their office. “Was anyone hurt?”
“No, they all made it out in time except the cat.”
“What a relief,” Meredith said. She felt tears well in her eyes for the cat. Don’t be dumb. She has three kids! Who cares about a pet? “Thank goodness.”
“Yeah. But she didn’t have renters insurance,” Donna said.
“Why not?”
Donna shrugged. “Probably she just had other needs that seemed more urgent. She’s a single mom with three kids, and, well, you know what secretaries make here.”
“Are you having a collection?” Meredith asked, pulling her purse out from a drawer.
“Yes. Just as much as you can afford. Every little bit will help.”
Meredith wrote out a check and handed it over. “I have some household goods, too. Extra blankets, a blender I never use. They can have my old microwave. I’ll start a sign-up sheet. I’m sure lots of people have kids clothes they don’t need anymore.”
Donna eyed the check. “Whoa, Meredith. This is probably more than you can afford. It can be less, you know. We’re asking over at the administrative office too.”
Meredith shrugged. “It’s only money. Besides, I just got the programmer’s raise. I’ve got some extra cash to spare. I’ll post the household goods sheet up front.”
The new accountant, Kira, knocked on Meredith's office door. “Hey, Meredith, have you heard the latest?” From her tone, Meredith could tell she wasn’t talking about Lisa and her bu
rned out home. She shook her head as she offered the folding chair to Kira. Meredith felt her underarms break out in a sweat. She always felt nervous around new people. If she had her way, she’d never meet anyone new. She’d just keep her small circle of people unchanged throughout the years. Easing into the seat, Kira leaned in confidentially and said, “They’ve hired a new chairman.” Meredith was surprised. The search had been going on almost a year. Bernard Archibald was the unofficial interim chair, but he didn’t do much more than sign annual leave requests and memoranda. Each doctor had taken on a small piece of the job and the Office Administrator, Loretta, walked around with dark circles under her eyes.
“Who did they hire?” Meredith asked, amazed at how out of the loop she’d become since she’d gotten her own office. Or was it because she was no longer a secretary? The other secretaries had gone to lunch together three days in a row now without inviting her. And the bearer of fresh gossip was a new person, and the accountant to boot.
“His name is Lou Tartelo. He’s from the East Coast. New York or Boston or something.”
“Hmmm.”
“Aren’t you from New York?” Kira asked.
Meredith nodded.
“So you’ll have something in common with this guy. Maybe you guys will fly back together over the holidays.”
“I never go back. I’m a New Mexican now. What do you think this East Coaster will do when he sees our New Mexican doctors treating patients in jeans and Birkenstocks?”
Kira shrugged. At thirty-two she already had the demeanor of a jaded, old lady, surprised by nothing. “He’ll have to get used to it or he’ll make a lot of enemies fast. They’ll eat him alive in this office.” Meredith wondered how Kira could make so astute an observation after only two weeks on the job.
“So, are your parents still in New York?”
Meredith nodded. A phone started ringing down the hall.
“Is that my phone?” Kira stood. “They’re having a welcoming reception for him at five o’clock on Monday. In room 220.” The big, gray conference room adjacent to the office.
“That’s classy,” Meredith said.
Kira shrugged as she turned to go. “State money.”
Thinking it over, Meredith decided that she didn’t care that none of the secretaries had bothered to fill her in on the gossip. The truth was that a month ago she would have spent hours debating over which of them would be assigned to him; the secretaries speculated endlessly on questions like who was too busy or pretending to be too busy. But in Meredith’s present position, Lou Tartelo’s arrival didn’t affect her life at all. Her main interactions were with medical students or residents doing research and the occasional faculty member who needed to process statistical information for research.
The background noise rose suddenly outside her door and Meredith could see three secretaries, Marlena, Debbie, and Donna gathering in the hall to go out to lunch. By the time they reached the front lobby, there’d be seven or eight of them. On impulse, Meredith grabbed her purse and jumped up, thinking, I’ll just have to be assertive and show them that nothing’s changed. I’m still the same person I was when I was a secretary.
But coming back from lunch she realized that everything had changed. Her salary was higher. She wasn’t scrapping together pennies to feed herself or pay rent. She had her own office instead of a desk in a hallway. She wasn’t the same oppressed person they had championed when she was paying her way through school by working as a secretary. She cringed at the way they indiscriminately slammed the doctors over lunch and she worried because they got back to the office fifteen minutes late.
One of the perks of working at the University was free classes, and when Meredith was a secretary, she had taken the maximum allowed, two each semester she’d worked there. She’d even paid extra and taken three sometimes. She regarded enrolling in classes as a moral obligation--classes were part of her paycheck, a bonus added on to make up for the low salary.
In her first few months on the job, hair pulled back, enthusiastically hurrying up and down the halls in stockings and painful shoes, still pecking away at her computer when the rest of the support staff was migrating toward the front door, she had somehow endeared herself to the secretarial crowd.
“You keep taking classes,” they’d say, nodding in approval at her as they stood outside the building on cigarette breaks. No other secretary took classes, and Meredith's endorsements did nothing to alter that. Unlike Meredith, they came home to hungry children clamoring to be fed. They cleaned houses in the evening, washed and folded laundry, shopped for groceries.
When Meredith was a year away from graduating, the computer programmer quit. Typical of their department, no one would be hired for at least two months.
The first few times Doug asked Meredith a programming question, she was doubtful of her ability to answer it. But she knew the answer every time. All the abstractions from class became real-life situations and she was thrilled to apply what she had learned. At the same time, two of the doctors she worked for quit to earn higher wages at a private hospital in town. A block of time opened up in Meredith's schedule and after talking to her, Doug asked the interim chair if Meredith could help out his area until they hired a new programmer.
Meredith was so flattered to be asked, so bored doing spreadsheets and typing dictated notes that she wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for a salary adjustment. The other secretaries got on her about that but she couldn’t justify asking for more money when she didn’t even have her degree.
“It’s a great learning experience for me,” she’d told Donna, who’d sat with her arms crossed, shaking her head in silence.
But it had been a great experience, until they’d added another doctor to her workload, and then, another one six weeks later. Even before the new doctors she’d been having trouble, Meredith remembered. She’d begun to resent the interruptions from programming. Just as she’d gotten a design moving fluidly from her head to her fingertips on the keyboard, Corky or one of the others would come barging into the room, expecting her to drop everything to send a fax. Or make a copy. One time Corky dropped her Rolodex cards on the floor and told Meredith to re-alphabetize them.
Meredith shook her head. Thinking of Corky always made her mad, so she generally avoided thinking of her. She picked up her mug and headed into the break room. There was always a pot of vile coffee in there, but she preferred the earthy taste of tea. I did it, she thought for the thousandth time as she watched her mug slowly turn in the microwave. I’m no longer a secretary. It didn’t stop people from treating her like support staff, but that would eventually fade away.
Lily came into the room as Meredith was dunking her tea ball. “You’re going to the party for the new chair, right?”
“Nah. Why bother? I’ve got better things to do with my free time.”
Lily lowered her voice. As administrative assistant to the former chair, she knew a lot more dirt than most. “Some people are fed up by the way this department has no sense of community. They’re going to be paying special attention to who shows up to this party and who doesn’t.”
Meredith shrugged. “That should enhance a feeling of community.” She took out her tea ball and held it, dripping, over the sink. “No one can make us go to an event outside of work time. If they wanted us to go, they should have scheduled it at two o’clock instead of five.”
Lily poured herself a cup of coffee and dropped a quarter into the Styrofoam cup taped to the machine. “Well then, at least think of the new guy. How do you think he’ll feel if only half the office shows up to welcome him? He won’t have a very good opinion of the staff if we aren’t at his party.”
“If he’s like the rest of them, he won’t have a good opinion of the staff whether we’re there or not.”
Kira walked in, and Lily brushed past her on the way out without saying hello.
“What new guy?” Kira asked.
“Oh, the new chair,” Meredith said quietly. “If the doctors wa
nt everyone to show up to this party, why did they schedule it after work hours? If they want a good turnout, then they should stop treating us like second class citizens.” She was starting to fume. “They treat us like dirt and then expect us to come to their rescue!”
“We?” Kira asked, “Do the docs treat computer programmers that poorly?”
“Oh, well, I used to be a secretary here,” Meredith sputtered. “Before you came. Besides, we’re all of us still staff. They’re faculty.”
“I’ve only been here a short time, but I’ve enjoyed interacting with the faculty. They’ve been every bit as kind as the staff has.” She looked at Meredith. “You aren’t a secretary anymore. I wonder if you could knock that chip off your shoulder. It might make life easier for you.”
Meredith was taken aback. Who the hell did this woman think she was?
“I’m sorry,” Kira said, almost instantly. “God, I sound like your mom. It just seems like you’re making things harder on yourself than they need to be.”
Meredith didn’t know what to say. She barely knew Kira, and this conversation seemed like one she should be having with Sarah. “Well, they treated me like crap when I was a secretary,” she said meekly. “I’m still holding a grudge.”
The party for Lou Tartelo took place in the large conference room. The food was catered by the cafeteria. There was no alcohol but plenty of soft drinks. From her seat across the room, Meredith could hear the new chair’s voice. He sat like a king, strenuously ignoring the fact that his throne was a fold-up chair. An entourage of people sat around him: Bernard, the now-former interim chair and his favorites made up the inner circle. They held plastic cups of Coke and Sprite like they were lead cut crystal with luminous red centers of Pinot Noir. Just beyond this circle and almost blending in, except for the strained facial expressions and resentful body language that tagged them as second best, was another group of doctors; those in the department who hadn’t garnered the favoritism of the former interim chair.
Searching For Meredith Love Page 2