by Pamela Crane
Lately Felicity had become Robert De Niro to my Ben Stiller, always scrutinizing me, finding fault with me as I struggled to fit into her family. No matter how much I won over everyone else, Felicity would make sure I lost in the end.
I followed Oliver to the back porch, taking my fourth glass of wine with me. Pinpricks of white decorated the sky. The chilly night air invigorated me, sobering me up just enough to realize how close Oliver stood next to me, our arms brushing. I could almost feel his body heat smothering the cold.
“You okay?” I asked.
He stared straight ahead into the darkness. “Nope. Not really.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
He scoffed. “Unless you can perform miracles, I’m not sure anything would help.”
“How about a hit?” I offered him the vape pen that I brought with me to Felicity’s—her anxiety was contagious—and his lips curled up in a grin as he shook his head.
“Didn’t you learn your lesson about this stuff? If Felicity sees that she’s going to rip you to shreds.”
“It’s CBD oil, without THC, the stuff that gets you high. Perfectly legal. You can even buy it on Amazon.”
“Still…” Oliver shrugged. “You know Felicity and her sanctimony.”
“Eh, she’s all bark and no bite. You’re a big boy, aren’t you?”
Our eyes locked, frozen for a long moment. A rustle of leaves across the garden, at the edge of the porch where a massive lilac took over the corner, broke the spell.
“Did you hear that?” I stepped toward the increasing crunch and snap of yard debris, searching the gaps in the bush for movement.
Oliver took the e-cig. “Probably just Meowzebub rustling through the leaves on another mouse murder spree.” Taking a long drag, he exhaled and closed his eyes. “Wow, I haven’t done pot since college. What are you doing to me? Turning this responsible dad into a pothead.”
I chuckled. “Like I said, it’s not pot, it’s CBD, you old man. Besides, one hit won’t make you a junkie. You’ve had a lot going on and this can help ease anxiety. God knows I need it to deal with my boss’s racism and sexism.”
“Still that bad, huh?” Mortimer Randolph was notorious among my family by now.
“It’s getting worse. His sexual harassment is getting more blatant, and when it’s not sexually suggestive, it’s racist.”
“Why don’t you just quit?”
I rolled my eyes in shameful admission. “I need the money, Ollie.”
“I’ll give you money if you need money, Mare. You’re family.”
“Absolutely not. I don’t take charity. I just wish I didn’t have to debase myself to earn a buck.”
“He’s ancient, isn’t he? Maybe he’ll die and leave you all of his money.”
I chuckled. “If only I was so lucky.”
A click behind me startled us both. Turning around, we saw Felicity standing in the doorway, scorn writ large on her face. Oliver quickly passed the vape pen back to me, and walked to the door as if nothing had happened. I tucked it back into my pocket.
“You need me for something?” he asked.
Felicity observed me carefully, harshly.
“Your mom called and needs your help fixing her toilet. Something about the seal leaking. Can you run over there real quick?”
“Sure, honey.” Oliver kissed her cheek on his way into the house.
Felicity remained standing in the doorway, hands propped on her hips.
“What were you just doing with my husband, Marin?”
“Can you relax a bit? I know things are hard for you, but you need to lay off Oliver.”
“Don’t tell me how to handle my own husband. Clearly you’re not doing a bang-up job with your own marriage, Marin.”
“What does that mean? I thought we had mended this schism between us.” I had forgotten I was dealing with Argumentative Felicity.
Felicity stumbled back a step, then swiveled to head inside.
“Can you tell Cody I’ll be out here if he needs me?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Twenty minutes and an empty e-cig and wineglass later, I needed another drink. I slipped into the house, not wanting to draw attention to myself. I could overhear Cody and Felicity talking in the living room. No, not talking. Arguing. Again I found myself hiding in the shadow of the doorway, listening. Whatever was going on with them, it was hush-hush enough that they were hiding it from me and Oliver.
“I keep apologizing, but you keep refusing to forgive me. What else am I supposed to do?” It was the same tone Cody used with me when he knew he was wrong.
“Prove you actually care,” Felicity argued back.
“I don’t know how, Felicity.”
“I think you do.”
“Look, Felicity, that was a long time ago.” Cody was speaking in a voice I’d never heard before. Low and husky and…needy. “We can’t go back to that. Think of our families.”
“I don’t want to think,” she replied with that same yearning.
I shifted enough to glance inside, my breath held and blood screaming in my ears, just in time to see Cody leaning forward to kiss Felicity. Their lips were hungry and eager as his arms pulled her in. I choked on that breath.
When Felicity broke the kiss—not my husband, but Felicity!—she cupped his hand and walked toward me. I found myself rushing down the hallway, my body working on autopilot as I slipped into the powder room beneath the stairs. The echo of their footsteps above me broke my heart step by step. On a stair just above my head they stopped, and Cody spoke first.
“I don’t know, Felicity.” His voice was muffled by the inches of wood between us. “Marin is just outside. What if she comes in?”
“She won’t. I just watched her light up a joint.” Not a joint, but no matter. “She’s probably as high as a kite right now…or on her way to it.”
Cody heaved a heavy sigh. Remorse? Hesitation? I silently begged him to stop. “I don’t know if we should be doing this.”
“I’m tired of the pain, Cody.” Her voice was silky and full of longing. “I just want the pain to stop. Please, help me make it stop.”
I could no longer breathe the pungent smell of lemon cleaner and despair. I couldn’t stand here, lurking under the stairs, waiting to hear my husband take my sister-in-law to bed. My stomach clenched at the imagery. My heart dropped to the floor. I ran out the front door, into the yard beneath the wedge of moon, jumped into my car, and cranked the engine. It rumbled an attempt, then stalled. I sobbed and screamed into the steering wheel, angry and devastated that Felicity’s grief was about to swallow the rest of us whole.
Chapter 22
Marin
Mortimer Randolph lived up to the expectations his hoity-toity name conjured. White. Uber-rich. Part cutthroat attorney, part asshole. I was Anne Hathaway to his Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, only he wore Brooks Brothers. I was unlucky enough to work for him as his personal assistant, a job description that included no end of humiliating chores. Such as fetching his socks along with his coffee. Or massaging his bony shoulders along with his inflated ego. Or ironing his KKK robe. Kidding, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the sonofabitch had one tucked away somewhere. I stuck around long enough to discover that he had one good quality. The only quality that made him redeemable to me and gave me the motivation to put up with him rather than kill him:
He thought everything—and everyone—was for sale, and no price was too big.
Karen Delacroix, his long-suffering legal secretary, also experienced firsthand the old pinchpenny’s many disgusting habits and sexism and prejudices, and despised him almost as much as I did. We often compared horror stories, a great tension-reliever, sitting in his expansive kitchen over coffee (of course, making sure Maleficent Morty, as we hatefully called him, wasn’t skulking about) and trying to one-up each other with regard to who had suffered the worst from his latest humiliation. Sadly, I usually won. But I
was grateful I had an empathetic confidante in Karen. I don’t know how I would have survived without her.
I entered his home office with fear and loathing. The room was as big as my entire first floor, lined with rich cherrywood bookcases stuffed with legal books, several obscure Lawyer of the Year awards, and a lion head mounted on the wall behind his desk. Several times a year Mortimer went on exotic hunting expeditions with his stuffed shirt cronies from the bar association, always returning home with another grisly trophy for his collection. There wasn’t a room in the house where I didn’t feel the glass eyes of a caribou or a muskox or a grizzly bear staring down mournfully at me. Shooting defenseless beasts was Old Morty’s way of compensating for the fact he probably hadn’t gotten his wrinkly willy up in twenty years.
Although Mortimer worked from his multimillion-dollar Tudor home in the ritzy Squirrel Hill North neighborhood, he always wore a suit. As if he slept and showered in one. Never once, not even when he came down with COVID last year, did I ever see him in anything but a jacket, trousers, and shined shoes. Mortimer was as stiff as his starched shirt.
Sitting at his antique Kittinger desk, his wrinkled hands were focused on peeling an apple with the paring knife he demanded moments ago.
“What would it cost me to convince you to join me for a dinner with the partners on Friday night?” His icy blue eyes rose to ogle me—lingering on my legs—before returning to the apple peel that fell to the table, which I would later be expected to clean up. One white caterpillar eyebrow was raised in anticipation of a win. He always won.
“What’s the dinner for?” I asked.
While he was still the managing partner of his law firm, he rarely showed his face at the office anymore. Most of my job entailed that of a trophy assistant, running personal errands with the occasional trip to his downtown Pittsburgh office to pick up files for the more demanding cases that required the input of “the best lawyer east of the Mississippi.” His words, not mine.
“I need to impress some potential clients, but we have to show more diversity in our firm. Since you’re Black, but not too Black, I thought it would look good to have you there.”
Not too Black. I guess I was light enough to impress these pricks but not too dark to embarrass him.
I should have known not to be so bold to assume I had anything else to offer him but my skin color. Mortimer Randolph would have fit in perfectly during the days when selling people was as normal as selling cotton. But my leaky plumbing and rotting floorboards demanded I take advantage of the offer. Maybe if I could pretend it was an acting gig of sorts I could suffer through it…
I thought: How much do de job pay, massa? I said: “What’s the pay?”
“How about an extra $50 per hour?”
A couple hundred dollars would hardly do anything for my home improvement. My pride was worth at least double that.
“Ehhh,” I wavered. “I already have plans…”
“How about a flat $1,000? Plus I’ll cover your meal, of course.”
Now we were negotiating.
“Okay, I can cancel. But if you want me to dress up, you’ve got to purchase what you want me to wear.”
He thought for only a moment, bushy eyebrows wagging.
“Deal. Just pick out a dress you like and charge it to my American Express. Don’t come looking like a…what’s the word you people use? A ho. This is a classy affair.”
A ho.
“Oh, and make sure you do your hair to look extra Black. I want to make it clear we support colored folks.”
Colored folks.
“I’ll have my driver come pick you up at your house on Friday night at seven o’clock sharp. Although I dislike the idea of venturing into the ghetto at night. Only low-class people there. Barely human.”
The ghetto. Low-class people. Barely human.
I inhaled a calming breath. I bit my bottom lip. I counted to ten. But something snapped inside me. I couldn’t go on being a doormat for this demeaning prick. Job be damned. If I didn’t speak up for myself now, I never would.
“Mr. Randolph,” I began calmly, “I have something to say, and I would appreciate you not interrupting. First of all, I would never dream of showing up at the dinner wearing anything that might embarrass you, your prospective clients, or myself. Second, I suppose I should thank you for not using the N-word, but the term colored folks is just as offensive and ignorant. And third, yes, I live in Wilkinsburg in a modest house in a poor part of town, but it is far more of a home than this, this…shrine to your inflated ego!”
I felt a trickle of sweat running down my forehead and angrily flicked it off. Mortimer looked at me like I was a human oddity in a sideshow exhibit, more curious than angry at this point. I kept going.
“For years I’ve endured your ogling my goodies, making me feel less than human. And I’ve been your arm candy for more stodgy dinner parties than I care to remember, overhearing your pompous ass partners refer to me as ‘Morty’s brown sugar,’ and worse. I’m supposed to be your personal assistant, but you treat me like a glorified maid. You like to see me steppin’ and fetchin’ like some simple-minded slave out of Gone with the Wind, don’t you? Well, welcome to the twenty-first century, old man!”
Mortimer reared back in his chair and steepled his knobby fingers. He was smirking, enjoying the show, daring me to keep digging my own grave. I obliged the old bastard. There was no stopping me now.
“I’ll have you know, Mr. Randolph, that I’m proud to be a Black woman, a Black woman with intelligence and talent. I’m a damn good actress too, did you know that? No, because you never once asked me a personal question, treated me like a real person. To you I’m just as much a trophy as those pathetic animal heads on your walls. I don’t intend to stay a poor nobody, working for chump change, all my life. I’m going to start my own production company someday, once I get the funding. And as for looking extra Black, sure, I can do that. I’ll get a huge Afro, so wide it won’t fit through the door! Maybe I’ll stick an Afro pick with a Black Power fist in it! But why stop there? I’ll put a bone in my nose too. That should convince your white-bread clients I’m Black enough!”
Mortimer looked at me inscrutably. “Are you quite through, Miss Portman?”
“Almost. You know, Mr. Randolph, I could raise quite a stink with a sexual harassment suit against you and your firm. I could file a racial defamation suit too. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But it would be a waste of time. After all”—I flashed a sarcastic smile—“you are the best lawyer east of the Mississippi, aren’t you?”
Mortimer rocked forward in his chair. “I am indeed. Now, Miss Portman, would you mind putting down the knife?”
“What?”
“The knife in your hand. You have made quite a mess of my desktop.”
I looked down. The paring knife was indeed in my hand; I must have picked it up at some point. The desktop was riddled with small punctures where I’d stabbed it during my tirade. I gently sat the knife down next to the spiraling apple peels.
“I’ll get my things,” I said, turning to leave. “I’d appreciate it if you would mail me my last check.”
“One moment, Miss Portman. You’re not fired. No one’s ever had the—pardon the expression—balls to stand up to me like you just did. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll make you another deal. If you promise not to raise a stink, as you say, I’ll let you keep your job—I rather think you need it, yes?—and I won’t ruin your reputation in this town, which I promise you is well within my power to accomplish. And just to show you what kind of man I am, I’m giving you a raise. How does another dollar an hour sound?”
Skinflint. “That sounds fine, sir.” I could feel my swallowed pride hitting my gut like an anvil.
“Very good. I’ll see you at seven on Friday. Oh, and Miss Portman?”
“Yes?”
“I’ll double your rate if you flirt a little with the new clients. Flash a litt
le chocolaty thigh, make a few risqué comments. Get ’em a little hot and bothered.”
Same old same old. “Yes, sir.”
“Incidentally, Miss Portman, I will take the cost of repairing my desk out of your pay, of course. Now, before you leave”—he gestured at the apple peels—“do be a lamb and clear these away. Good night, Miss Portman.”
“Good night, Mr. Randolph.”
I grabbed the peels in my fist and was about to deposit them in the waste basket when Mortimer said, “No, no. The kitchen.”
I should have stabbed him with that paring knife when I had the chance.
Heading down the hallway, a cleaning woman I’d never seen before scuttled into the kitchen.
“Nasty old bird, ain’t he?” The gray-haired woman tossed the words behind her, pulling her mop and bucket, whistling tunelessly.
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but for some reason she seemed strangely familiar.
**
I dropped my heels inside the doorway when I got home that night, aching for a foot rub that I knew Cody would be good for. He loved doting on me, even when it meant massaging my sweaty soles. In fact, the guilt of what he had done with Felicity might even motivate him to do a little extra, as if he could ever make up for it.
The debate on whether to say something to Cody plagued me all night, well into the morning as I slipped out the door on my way to work. It was a thin-ice decision. Say something and create a crack in our relationship that would eventually send us both falling to a frigid marital death. Or skirt the whole topic by staying safely on shore and pretend everything was fine.
I was an actress, so pretending was in my blood.
Cody called to me from the kitchen when he heard the door swing shut behind me. “How was work, honey?”
It smelled like tacos tonight. Spaghetti, tacos, and ribs were about the extent of Cody’s culinary abilities.
“I’m seriously about to either quit my job or kill my boss,” I grumbled as I set my purse down on the dining room table on my way through the house.