This Could Hurt

by Jillian Medoff

  The first annual engagement survey was set to go out in January of 2006 (raffle prize: 2G iPod mini). Then Lucy’s mother got cancer. Luckily, Lucy was emotionally prepared (re: footnote 21), and signed on as Valerie’s caregiver. Though she offered to distribute the survey (always a team player!), Rosa said to wait until Valerie finished chemo. By June, Ellery’s benefit plans were chiseled again, which meant Lucy had to retweak the questions. Regrettably, she was still using the original 2003 template, which had long before become corrupted, so she asked Horatio in IT for help. Unbeknown to Lucy, Horatio in IT was sleeping with Leo in HR, and she happened to breeze into Horatio’s cubicle just as he was breaking up with Leo. Leo begged Horatio to reconsider,22 but Horatio stuck to his guns. “We’re done, and that’s final.”23 The moment was awkward for everyone, and while it shouldn’t have had any impact on the survey, distribution was delayed. Meanwhile, Leo was upset about the breakup, and spent several afternoons with Lucy complaining how rude and unfeeling Horatio was to dump him at work and how he’d never do that to anyone. He also said he didn’t want the survey going out during Open Enrollment. Coincidentally, Rutherford announced they were acquiring two companies, one in Charlotte, the other in Louisville, and to please hold off on distribution.

  The first annual engagement survey was set to go out in February of 2007 (raffle prize: 3G nano with video), but Charlotte fell through and Louisville took longer than expected, so Lucy had to wait. This was okay because in June, Leo sent out a series of e-mails announcing Ellery’s new wellness initiative, and staff complained (via e-mail) that HR sent out way too many e-mails (not just about wellness, fatness, “Knowing Your Numbers”—about everything). In the meantime, Lucy redrafted questions to reflect three separate benefits and pay programs: (i) NY/Raleigh; (ii) Atlanta; and (iii) Louisville.

  The first annual engagement survey was set to go out in January of 2008 (raffle prize: 5G nano with video camera, FM radio, and pedometer). However, on January 4, the board voted for Atlanta and Louisville to adopt New York’s benefits and policies, so Lucy had to redesign the questions. By April, Louisville was off, but Rutherford said to go ahead with the original survey. (Which original survey? Lucy wasn’t sure.) Rosa disagreed. Their debate was prolonged because the CEO took his three daughters to Vietnam and was off the grid until the end of June.24, 25 By the time they compromised on twenty-five questions and Lucy redrafted them, the market crashed and layoffs were underway. Rosa said, “Better to wait.”

  Between September of 2008 and November of 2009, the economy was in free fall, so the first annual engagement survey was the last thing on anyone’s mind.

  In November of 2009, the final layoffs were over (or so they were told), and the first annual survey was resurrected. Rosa and Rutherford agreed on everything: fifty questions, focus groups in all facilities, senior leader interviews, a raffle for an iPhone, and dinner at Mia Dona. But then Lucy got distracted by monumental life events and blew off the survey.

  Baking under the hot sun, heels sinking into the soft grass, Lucy felt her eyes burn with tears. More than a decade earlier, Rosa had tasked her with a simple project that should’ve taken six months, tops. Yet despite knowing the importance of this project, Lucy had failed to attack it with her usual fervor, and now Rosa would never see the fruits of their labor.

  You deserved better, Rosa, she thought.26, 27, 28

  Her phone vibrated. It was her mother. “Where . . . are . . . you?” Valerie was panting, hard.

  Where was she? Lucy looked around. The cemetery grounds, somewhere up in the Bronx, were lush and green with rolling hills, fields of flowers, and headstones from here to eternity. It was an interesting vista, one she would’ve enjoyed but for the sound of her mother gasping for breath. “Mom! I can’t talk. Where are you?”

  “. . . Elliptical . . . three . . . miles . . . Oh! . . . Oswald’s funeral . . . I forgot.”

  “Her name was Rosa,” Lucy said bitterly, which wasn’t fair because Valerie was merely parroting back Lucy’s own words.29 Still, show some respect, for God’s sake. She hung up.

  Show some respect: Rosalita Guerrero, HR chief, executive VP, was dead.

  THE FUNERAL WOULD’VE been lovely, but it was the first week in August and sweltering. Rosa hated the heat. This, Lucy learned during her interview in 1998. “I do poorly in summer,” Rosa had told her. Turned out she also hated the cold, so she did poorly in winter, too. Peter Dreyfus was forever in her office, adjusting the thermostat. Today’s heat and ungodly humidity would’ve made Rosa very unhappy. Then again, she’d be alive.

  Rivulets of perspiration ran down Lucy’s back, soaking her black linen suit. Her phone vibrated in her pocket, but she ignored it, figuring it was the least she could do.

  So, the weather was ghastly. The flowers were wilting. People were overheated, pink-cheeked, and moaning. The priest was a stranger and unnervingly childlike, with doughy hands and cherubic face. (They tried to get Father Joseph from Rosa’s Bronx parish, but he was ninety years old and suffered from vertigo, so they brought in a much-younger substitute, who, while not without compassion, had never met Rosa and spoke without feeling.) And Nando, that cocksucker, was in Vegas because he had a nonrefundable flight there he refused to forfeit.30

  But other than that, Lucy decided, shielding her eyes as she scanned the hordes of well-dressed mourners gathered around Rosa’s grave site, the turnout was a triumph. Except for Nando, Rosa’s entire clan was here: Marcy, the nieces and nephews, extended cousins, and people from her old neighborhood she considered family. Doormen and porters from her current building showed up to pay their respects (Rosa was a big tipper), as did coworkers from all her previous jobs. It would’ve pleased Rosa greatly to see the size of this latter group, and despite knowing none of them, Lucy personally thanked each one for attending. One decrepit man wearing an old-timey suit, pocket watch, and spats pumped Lucy’s hand with a gusto that surprised her. (“Al Moscowitz,” he rasped. “Rosie’s mentor.”) But the biggest group, by far, was from Ellery. Rutherford had hired a coach bus, and the entire New York office hitched a ride. Some knew Rosa well, others only in passing, some just wanted the morning off. Whatever the reason, employees were everywhere on the grass, like sheep in mourning clothes. Board members in somber suits clustered together, anxious to move the sadness along. Business units found each other, as did the mailroom guys, maintenance men, and building employees. Sanchez wasn’t here, which was fine. Lucy lacked the wherewithal to make polite chitchat; it was all she could do to avoid Rob, who stood in the back, looking lost in a rumpled suit. Among the other no-shows: Peter Dreyfus and Leo’s boyfriend, Thomas.

  As the odd young priest started his homily, Lucy continued to sweat from her scalp, which dribbled into her eyes. With her frizzy halo of hair and mascara-streaked cheeks, she probably resembled Alice Cooper circa 1973, a look inconsistent with her newly minted status as chief. Stupidly, she’d deferred to Leo on all funeral matters and now she could kill him for insisting people speak at the graveyard, amid nature, instead of inside the air-conditioned church. Nor would he let Lucy help. From the moment Rosa tumbled at the Hilton until half an hour earlier, Leo had been the lone showrunner. In the hospital, he conferred with her doctors and fetched her Starbucks. Then, after she died, he made plans with Marcy and the odious Nando; coordinated with the undertakers; and met with Rosa’s lawyers, financial advisors, and condo board. Lucy kept expecting him to fall apart—especially when Marcy called to say that Rosa’d had an aneurism during the night and expired instantly—but he was remarkably stoic. Even so, she feared a storm was brewing down under.

  Now Leo stood beside her, red-faced and dripping. She squeezed his hand. “You good?”

  “I just can’t believe she’s really dead.” He squeezed hers back. “You?”

  “I can’t either; it all feels surreal. But you put together a beautiful funeral.” Was this proper etiquette? Lucy wasn’t sure; she should’ve googled it. “Rosa would’ve been pleased.”
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  They both glanced at her casket. A color photo of Rosa from one of Ellery’s earliest annual reports was perched on top. Marcy had given Leo candid shots,31 but he went with the professional pose. In it, Rosa wore pearls and red lipstick, eyes bright behind thick glasses.

  After the homily, Lucy took the opportunity to s-l-o-w-l-y turn her head and check out Rob. At first glance, she saw tears, but when he mopped his neck, she realized it was sweat. If they were still speaking, she would’ve told him his wool suit was too heavy for this heat. In fact, she was surprised Maddy didn’t suggest an alternative, but given his startlingly distended belly, maybe nothing else fit. Lucy felt sympathetic; Rob must hate himself for getting so plump. They hadn’t talked in almost four months—not since he kissed her. Earlier, they’d exchanged cordial hellos, which would probably be the extent of their conversation for a while, maybe forever, given their newly divergent lives. Though Lucy preferred not to admit it, this was a relief.

  Directly behind Lucy, Kenny was standing tall, eyes forward, jaw set. He’d been so helpful this past week, taking on Leo’s work to keep the department running smoothly.32 Beside him, Katie cried noisily. She and Rosa had grown very close. Lucy suspected Katie was also feeling the loss of her mother all over again, which made her feel like crying, too, since she’d just hung up on Valerie (Really, though. Was it too much to ask that she step off the elliptical before dialing?), but she fought against her tears. As Katie’s mentor, it was her duty to stay strong. Mentoring Katie was helping Lucy find her best self, which required, among other skills, reconsidering her long-held idea that sincerity was synonymous with weakness. Lucy was working hard to be earnest, which felt more revealing, but also more human. “It’s better to be kind than to be right,” Rosa liked to say. While Lucy didn’t buy this completely, she was willing to give it a go.

  Seeing her glance his way, Rutherford nodded. He was standing with the board, looking presidential in a trim gray suit, shiny wingtips, and dark aviators. His clothes were pressed, his hair immaculate—the guy barely broke a sweat. His only concession to the ungodly heat was a few beads of wetness above his upper lip.

  You are too perfect, Mr. Beaumont, Lucy told him silently, nodding back.

  Unbeknown to anyone, over the past seven months Lucy and Rutherford had forged a silent partnership. Since last January, they’d been spending evenings together, working on a hush-hush plan to reconceive Ellery as a profitable business. A shrewd man, the CEO was in fact more self-aware than Lucy originally thought.33 In their first meeting, he explained that the only way to save Ellery was to strip the company down to its studs and rebuild from the bottom up, essentially creating a new organization. “I’m tired of helming a battered ship. I can’t spend the rest of my career watching it sink.” Then he asked Lucy to help him shape Ellery’s future by “throwing some ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.”34 “Throwing some ideas,” Lucy learned, meant sitting in his office after hours while he expounded on complex business theories. At first, her lack of facility with numbers slowed them down; she often had to interrupt his “spitballing” and “blue-skying”35 so he could walk her through basic corporate finance. But once she figured out the mechanics and math, the rest was a breeze. They needed board approval and large infusions of cash, so her next task was to produce a PowerPoint deck (her forte) they could copresent. In the meantime, she was studying C-suite management journals to prepare herself for an executive role in the new company.36, 37 HR chief, Rutherford made clear, was just a starting point for her, careerwise.

  “At this time,” Lucy heard the doughy priest say, “I call on several people to offer a few words. Rutherford Beaumont will be speaking first. Rutherford, will you step up, please?”

  Lucy had agreed to say a few words, but only if she could go last. While this was a coveted spot, she feared she might cry, and needed to be able to hustle off to the ladies’ room to compose herself. When he heard this, Rutherford had balked. “It’s perfectly appropriate to cry.”

  “You’re a man. You can take off your pants and speak in your boxers. This is my first week as chief. Better I keep my clothing on.”

  Rutherford could be a hard-ass, but did have moments of kindness, or maybe he was a kind man who had moments of hardness. Either way, he did right by Lucy. During their working sessions, he spoke lovingly of his third ex-wife—he spoke lovingly of all his ex-wives, even the horsey girl from Virginia who ran off with a jockey.38 Naturally, any time he mentioned his ex-wives, daughters, colleagues, or any other female in the United States and abroad, Lucy felt a stab of jealousy.39 Now, as she listened to him describe Rosa’s integrity, loyalty, and humanity, it occurred to her that Rutherford was one of the few men—business or civilian—she hadn’t manipulated into making a pass at her, thus compromising their respective positions, or at the very least making it unpleasant to sit in a meeting together. This, she realized, was an unlikely success story, one she must share soon with Dr. Ahmet.

  Lucy held many ideas about sexual dynamics in the workplace. When she was younger, a good-natured, raring-to-go ingenue with firmer tits, she had no inkling of her carnal powers or how to wield them. Indeed, had she been more conniving, she could’ve had her middle-and upper-age managers falling all over themselves to approve raises, promotions—anything she wanted. But the idea of using her body as currency had never appealed to her at all. Ironically, now that she was in full command of her sexuality, she was too old and invisible to be desired, either by her same-age peers or younger subordinates. While the old-olds showed interest, their greatly diminished authority (like her looks) would yield nothing. At the moment, however, she was poised for an executive-level career; she couldn’t afford to ignore anything.40

  Rutherford’s comments were having an emotional effect on the crowd. Lucy heard sniffling from all sectors. “Losing Rosa is a tremendous blow,” he concluded. “Her impact on this organization is immeasurable. Without her contributions, Ellery as we know it wouldn’t exist today. Her influence is in every aspect of our business. ‘It’s all connected,’ she used to tell me. ‘And it all flows through HR—our policies, people, personality, and perception. HR is a warm, beating heart that pumps blood into the organization; HR gives Ellery life.’ But I believe it was Rosa who connected us all. Rosa was our warm, beating heart. Rosa gave us life.”

  So dreamy, Lucy thought.

  Next up were select executives, including the assbag Chuckles Mayfield, who banged on about his devastating loss. Lucy found this curious, given how lousily Chuckles had treated Rosa while she was alive.41

  A gaggle of young women stood in the back. Lucy didn’t know any of them personally, but saw them around the office. Or maybe it was different women. (At twenty-five, twenty-six, they all looked alike.) She had only distaste for these girls, who showed no deference to the proceedings as they chattered like magpies and flipped their hair. Compounding their abominable behavior was their abominable clothing. Lucy came up during the worst period of women’s business attire, the era of flesh-colored pantyhose, floppy bow blouses, frilly dresses, Colonel Sanders neckties, and bulbous white sneakers, like moon shoes, for office commuting. While she wasn’t hoping for a return to polyester, these girls wore flimsy skirts, sleeveless tees, and the sin of sins—flip-flops. Today they wore black skirts and shirts, but they still wore flip-flops on their feet! To a funeral!

  For the record: Lucy hadn’t gotten rid of Maisie Fresh Butler only because she lacked personal boundaries, basic skills, and common sense. She also came to work in a dress that looked like a dress but was actually a beach cover-up! During lunch, Maisie went to her gym’s rooftop pool, took a swim, and then returned to her desk still wearing a wet bikini!42 Lucy knew this because years before, she’d done the same thing. Which is what these dumb girls with their instant-access lives didn’t realize: Lucy Bender was fully versed in office hijinks. She, too, used to messenger house keys to friends a block away, Xerox pictures of her ass, and read People at her desk, inside a fold
er marked “Important!” Since she’d already done it all, little could shock her. In sum: when she was fighting the Man, these antics had made her laugh; now that she was the Man, they were unacceptable.

  Hearing Chuckles call her name, Lucy felt a flash of panic. But she squared her shoulders, stepped up to the podium, and cleared her throat. “What can I say about Rosa Guerrero?”

  HOW COULD LUCY sum up the whole of Rosa’s corporate life? How could she sum up anyone’s life? She admired her? Respected her? Loved her—or was love too much? Was it possible to love someone who indirectly paid your mortgage?

  Over the years, Lucy had served a panoply of bosses: Pol Pot, Buzz Aldrin (lost in space), the Invisible Man, Smelly Cat, Chang aka Eng (aka Siamese Twin), Stone Cold Fox,43 Topper, Dr. Zaius, and Captain Chaos. Some she revered, others she tolerated, most she couldn’t bear. As a manager, Rosa often blurred the lines between boss/mentor/colleague/confidante. Coming from banking, Lucy wasn’t used to intimacy at work.44 At the same time, she liked Rosa too much to maintain a professional distance, which made it hard to admit that after her TIA and subsequent stroke, Rosa had never been the same.

  Her phone vibrated. It had to be her mother. Oh, Mom. That Lucy knew she’d have to go through this again, and soon, made today’s awfulness worse. Maybe not next year, maybe not in five years, but eventually, inevitably, she’d stand on this dais in a tasteful black suit and eulogize Valerie. Then, in time, some as-yet-unnamed individual (a man, hopefully) would stand up and eulogize her.

  What could Lucy say about Rosa that didn’t sound saccharine or trite? She was like a sane mother, fierce big sister, wise aunt. She showed me how to be an adult. She taught me not to fear my future. She was everything I aspired to be. All of this was true, more or less, so that’s what she said, more or less. “Recently, Rosa was training me to take over for her. What a gift this was, to work so closely together. I knew it was difficult for her to hand over the reins to me, a younger, lesser person, just as it will be difficult for each of you, when the end comes, to accept that your career is over. Yet Rosa never let her ego get in the way of a job well done, even if it required, as in this case, relinquishing the job to someone else. I will never forget Rosa Guerrero. She was my boss and mentor but also my friend. She compelled me to dig deep and find my best self, to be kind more often than right. I will never be one-tenth of the woman she was, but I will spend the rest of my days trying.” Then she lifted her head, acknowledged her fellow mourners, and stepped down to assume her new role as chief.