I studied Philomena alongside lots of other topics, like Enron, Sarbanes Oxley, and grant-writing for non-profits. I was self-made and self-taught. Like Philomena Treese. All those hours of studying made me think we might have a lot in common.
When Sol caught me with my pipe dream on the screen in front of me, I tried to shut down the computer quickly, but it was too late. “Good for you. And why the hell not? You have the commitment and dedication,” she had said rashly.
I wondered briefly what had convinced her of these facts, before realizing she actually thought I had no free time, instead of all free time.
Sol kept on with the pep talk.
“And besides, I think Philomena Treese is the real deal. I think she’s looking for people with fresh ideas—not the usual Washington insiders who, let’s face it, will be filling these applications out by the hundreds.”
I shrugged and was about to close out my screen and dismiss the whole idea as a far-fetched fantasy, when Sol threw me one last lifeline. “You know, my advisor was talking about this very fellowship in class last week. He has some interesting ideas about what an application should look like to stand out. He was trying to talk me into applying, but I have zero interest. I can introduce you two if you’d like. Maybe he can give you some good ideas. Help your application stand out from the rest? It couldn’t hurt after all, right?”
Sol was on her way to the meat drawer of our refrigerator. I knew I had limited time before she grew weary of her attempt to help me. I jumped in feet first. “That would be great. Yes, please could you put us in touch?”
“Ok. Give me your school email address; I’ll do a virtual intro.”
“Oh, great. Actually, my school email is acting all wonky. Some spam I opened by accident is eating up all my emails. I’m using my Gmail right now.” I jotted it down and handed it to Sol, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But instead, Sol shrugged. “Sure. I’ll send him an email tonight and copy you.”
It couldn’t hurt, after all. Right?
I stared at the open application on the screen with its taunting banner across the top, “Your application is 7% complete.” I’d filled in little more than a few perfunctory fields: name, age, address. I could definitely use Sol’s advisor’s help in making this application stand out.
I sat in front of the screen for about an hour, but only did a little more typing and then saved the application at 8% (I’d added my Gmail address and a compelling mission statement), and closed out. Before heading to bed, I checked my phone and saw the copy of the email Sol had sent along to her advisor.
Her advisor had already responded. Sure, I’d love to meet your friend. Have her stop by during my office hours tomorrow.
The advisor’s so-called office hours were only two hours of the day and they happened to fall just before my shift at the coffee shop. I arrived early, worried I’d stand out or get lost. After a lot of consideration for my “look,” I dressed in a comfortable plum-colored wrap dress and a messy bun that would transition from student to coffee shop waitress with relative ease. The offices were well marked, and I realized quickly there had been no need to arrive so early. I also realized quickly that the advisor’s meager office hours were no exaggeration. He wasn’t there yet. There was a single uncomfortable looking chair situated outside the advisor’s locked door, and I plopped down in it. Turns out it wasn’t only uncomfortable-looking. While I waited, I scrolled through my phone self-consciously and tried not to focus on how ridiculously underworked Sol’s advisor was, and focused instead on how overworked I hoped to soon be.
A disheveled-looking man clothed mostly in tweed and clichés arrived right on time. He reached out a hand to me. “Ms. Boyle. Pleasure to meet you. Professor Tarragon, like the spice.” I was glad Sol had prepared me for this as he apparently started every new encounter the same way. I laughed in my rehearsed way.
Before leaving for class that morning, Sol had warned, “He’s corny, but otherwise totally great. You’ll love him.” I doubted the last bit was true, but I was quickly seeing that everything else she said about him was true. He was indeed warm and instantly likeable.
“Come in, sit down. No need to sit out in the hall anymore. I have indeed arrived!” He bellowed, and gestured me inside. I followed him into his office, which seemed to be furnished mostly with piles of bound manuscripts and books. In one corner, a lamp with the university seal was set atop a pile, and in another corner, a round slate was placed on top of a tall stack of books and actually seemed to function as a table. Professor Tarragon picked up a piece of paper from the “table” and read from it. “So. Sol told me a little bit about you here in this email. But why don’t you tell me your story?”
I marveled at the concept of printing out an email to refer to it later instead of simply pulling it up on his phone, but Professor Tarragon seemed intent on human interaction. He sat in his chair by a desk flanked by two more stacks of books and papers and put his feet up on a third nearby stack situated slightly lower than the desk itself. He stared at me, waiting for me to comply and tell him my story.
I had obviously given this a fair amount of thought or I wouldn’t have even followed through on Sol’s introduction.
I launched right into it.
“Philomena Treese and I are kindred spirits. I just know it. I, too, have a passion for bringing change to underprivileged kids. I’d like to think I inherited the legacy from my mother.”
He sat back and peered at me over his glasses. “How do you mean?”
“My mother—she was a legend in our small town in Pennsylvania. You know, like the local mayor, before she died.”
I did that air quotes thing, but in hindsight I realize Professor Tarragon missed the gesture.
“She was always helping everyone. Kids. Recovering addicts. Single mothers were her passion. She had been a single mom for some time and fought some serious demons in her lifetime—addiction, depression—all behind the scenes, with only me for a witness. Then she met my step-father, and things turned around for her.”
“But she died young?”
“Yes—she—“ I was about to say she succumbed to cancer. But I halted on the words. It was so hard to say it out loud. It was so very hard. I wiped tears from my eyes. My voice caught and I couldn’t say all I wanted to say. Professor Tarragon filled in the missing words, and surprise and grief prevented me from correcting him quickly enough. Our conversation quickly started to look like MadLibs gone wrong, with empty spaces provided by me and the all-wrong words provided by him.
“Say no more, your mother sounds like she had quite the life of public service.”
“Yes, she did.”
“And you are the daughter of a single mom turned pioneering local Mayor,” Professor Tarragon supplied.
“Yes, sort of—well, not—“
He waved me off. “And she took her own life. You’re having trouble talking about it. I get that. But it’s ok.”
“Oh! That’s not—she died last year—”
Tarragon started scribbling things down on a notepad in front of him. I felt a little out of control. The story was evolving so quickly. Too quickly. I took a breath while he continued writing. I thought about starting over. But it struck me that Professor Tarragon looked like me. The way he was scribbling words down on a page. Maybe they weren’t the truth, but did it really matter? If they were just words on a page? That had been my process for “writing therapy” ever since Dr. Flannery gave me the orange notebook the year before.
I sat still while Tarragon wrote, and I thought about how badly I wanted to work with Philomena Treese. Learn from her.
“I really want to craft a compelling story based on the best parts of my past, for my application. Does that make sense?”
Tarragon looked positively rapt.
“Perfect sense. You’re a wise young woman. Wise beyond your years. No doubt from the startling things you’ve had to witness.”
“So, again, I know it’s a long shot, but I’d be
grateful for any words of wisdom you have to share. I really want to make the best possible impression with Ms. Treese.” I knew I was laying it on thick, but I felt my time was limited. Tarragon’s office hours were only two hours long after all. I handed Tarragon the resume I’d been working on, along with a red pen.
He smoothed it out on the desk in front of him, and started marking it up hungrily.
“Come here. Look.” Tarragon waved me around to his side of the desk and invited me to look at my own resume over his shoulder. His tweed jacket smelled musty at that angle. Dust from the piles of books was working its way up my nostrils, too. I tried not to sneeze as I read the notes in the margins and the sentence inserts over his shoulder.
Some of the red words lined up with the story I’d just shared; most didn’t. Tarragon seemed to be endorsing the “embellished resume means to an end” philosophy. I weighed the harm with the benefit. If my words had moved him to craft this tale, what might they do to Philomena Treese?
In truth, my mother was a pioneering do-gooder who had never run for political office. She certainly didn’t take her own life. She fought for it. She wanted me to carry out her legacy of doing good. There had indeed been a scandal, but it was all completely of my own doing. My mother wanted me to move on from it, but I was still having trouble doing so. Despite running away from home. Despite landing on my feet in Georgetown.
But this red-lined document? As I stared over Professor Tarragon’s shoulder, I couldn’t help but think it might get me through the door to the next leg of my journey.
I took my marked-up resume and thanked Tarragon as I squeezed out of a narrow aisle in his office between the dusty piles, careful not to turn my back on him.
Or to look a gift horse in the mouth.
The Washington Truth, dated November 15, 2017
Excerpt from the Op Ed piece, by Nate Essuzare
…“Fake it ’til you make it.”
Arthur Smith, a leading career counselor had these words of advice for a standing-room-only crowd of transitioning professionals.
The attendees—composed largely of former executives aged 39-55 of some of the leading companies around the nation’s capital—heard advice about resume building, networking, and tips on beefing up their LinkedIn accounts during the day-long conference hosted at the Mandarin Hotel on Maryland Avenue.
“What do you mean?” A female attendee asked when called upon by Mr. Smith after the lunch break. “What do you mean when you say ‘Fake it ’Til You Make It.’ Do you mean we should lie on our resumes? Do you mean we should pretend we are something we are not?”
Mr. Smith leaned forward away from the microphone hooked up to his hotel-sponsored podium and said simply, “Honestly? You’ve been away from the workplace for a number of years taking care of your family and other things that are important to you, right? You don’t have a very marketable resume but you do have something those employers need more than line items on a resume. You’re here, right? That means you have the hunger, the passion, to make this thing work for the next leg of your journey. So here’s what I mean when I say: Fake it ’til you make it. I mean that you should say whatever the hell you need to get your next job, and then let your actions—your innate talent—speak louder than any words.”
I sat in the back of that room, observing the shock and quiet nods. The woman next to me leaned over, and asked, “Do you believe in all this?”
And I replied, “Absolutely.”
Chapter 9
I was working on that application for a few months, even after my meeting with Professor Tarragon, trying to get up the nerve to submit a resume with more compelling fiction than a New York Times best-seller list. And maybe I’d have let the deadline for applying to the Appletreese Foundation pass me by, if the universe hadn’t sent me a sign by sending Philomena and her gorgeous mother into my coffee shop one day.
I was thrilled to see them. It was as if they’d stepped right off the pages of the free newspapers provided by the coffee shop that often littered the tables after the morning crowd.
The coffee shop owner had this idea that if you provided free newspapers, people would stay off their phones, and if people stayed off their phones, they’d drink more coffee and buy more overpriced muffins. It seemed a fairly logical straight line way of thinking as the coffee shop had been in business over seven years. That was a long time in coffee shop life. Who was I to argue?
I smiled brightly at Philomena and her mother as I took their order at a small, round, high-top table where they were both huddled over a free left-behind copy of The Washington Truth. I heard Philomena say, “He really is something. God, I admire him so much. He’s got those Innovative Media folks jumping through lots of hoops. That’s for sure.” After they ordered, I told them their scones would be on the house. I don’t think either of them looked me directly in the eye.
They didn’t look at my nametag so they could thank me by name. They didn’t ask me any questions about myself, or give me a chance to lie about taking classes at Georgetown. They didn’t even give me a chance to regale them with a colorful story about my mother. (The coffee shop patrons used to love those.)
They didn’t even give me a chance to tell them all about the application and resume I was working on with the help of Sol’s advisor.
They merely took their free scones, nodded a distracted thanks in unison, and waltzed past me and then out of the shop as if I didn’t matter. As if I didn’t exist.
I felt deflated and gave up any idea of actually submitting that fellowship application if I even achieved 100% completion.
Who was I kidding?
The streams of people who came through the shop and talked to me and listened to me and flirted with me didn’t change a thing. Notable people were always coming through the shop on their way to somewhere important, and I had convinced myself I was someone worth talking to along the journey. Worth knowing. The way my mother was. But the truth was—I was no one to Philomena Treese. Or to Suzana Treese. Or anyone else in town for that matter.
I had left my past behind in Pennsylvania. But I hadn’t left me behind.
I was licking my wounds and cleaning up the Treese’s table when I saw the discarded newspaper they’d been sharing and discussing. It was folded inside out with an article about the impressive Jude Birch and his recent internet privacy win.
I repeated what Philomena and her mother had done. I studied the picture of Jude Birch coming out of the courtroom, and read the article accompanying the photo.
My mood perked up and I got an idea then. I googled a few phrases, like Sarbanes Oxley and whistleblowing. I googled a few companies. Did a little surface-level research: enough to come up with a half-cocked plan that I figured just might work.
A plan that resulted in me meeting Jude, Huck, and Finn a short while later.
Not long after I met Jude, I got a cheap tattoo on my wrist. The scrolls of my tattoo weren’t always visible at all angles. One of the hazards of having paid for a cheap tattoo was that it wasn’t exactly centered on my wrist and I could barely see it without turning my wrist inward at a bizarre angle. But when I did see it, it still took my breath away.
A-B-Y.
“Your name,” Jude had said perfunctorily, and maybe even a little bit quizzically, the first time he noticed it—only a few weeks after we started dating.
What he didn’t know is that he’d given me the idea for that tattoo. And for the name itself.
That day, while I was in a cab on my way to meet him at the Ethiopian restaurant, I was thinking that Jude Birch was only going to be my way into Appletreese Foundation—maybe even a fun one-night stand. He’d texted me—flirting—but something more:
I still don’t know your name.
Well, I’m not sure our relationship has progressed quite that far, Mr. Birch.
Fair enough. What should I call you at lunch?
Three dots popped up and then:
The future Mrs. Birch?
Ha h
a. Very funny.
Well, you seem like someone who could make a guy forget all before you.
All before you.
I had traced the letters. All before you. A.B.Y.
There had been something in those words—a hope I hadn’t felt since my mother was alive. A hope that maybe I could put the past behind me. That the past would really be something I, too, could forget. Something that would stop defining me.
The fresh start I was hoping for seemed within my reach. And before I knew it, and partly because of Jude Birch, let’s face it, I’d gotten the position at Appletreese, and Jude Birch had my heart. I got the tattoo as a reminder.
While Jude always thought Aby was my name, it was really my mantra.
All Before You. Doesn’t Matter.
All Before You. Is Forgotten.
All Before You. Doesn’t Define You.
After I got the position at Appletreese, and fell hard for the rising star politician, and committed to helping him get elected to an office he desperately wanted, I was like a baby flamingo. I’d eaten the shrimp. I’d become something new.
And the problem wasn’t that the past was always insisting on being remembered.
The problem wasn’t that I’d lied. After all, everyone lies.
The problem was why.
The Washington Truth, dated December 1, 2017
Excerpt from the Op Ed piece, by Nate Essuzare
….Jude Birch of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and lead counsel on the case of United States, ex rel. v. Innovative Media, d/b/a LessThan seems like the canary who caught the mouse these days. His pioneering victory from 2015 was just upheld on appeal.
Several parties filed “amicus briefs” in support of Birch’s position and against Innovative Media, including a small but mighty start-up company founded by a self-proclaimed band of corporate whistleblowers said to be gaining steam (and downloads!) with their newest app, Out The Bullies. Experts predict Out The Bullies will have Innovative Media’s market share diminished before too long.
Why We Lie Page 8