Six
A BRIDGE TO NOWHERE
In the end, it was her hair that did it. Siren-songed me with its “bohemian” accent. Kind of a mix between Freddie’s from A Different World (before the last season, when she discovers a comb) and that black girl’s in The Craft. Brown with blond streaks that went every which-a-way. Unruly. Made my first suit—H&M with the pockets still sewn shut—look like it was trying too hard. Brown-noser. I sat with my back arched, feet crossed right over left at the ankles. She levitated for a moment above her chair, using its arms and her triceps to suspend herself in midair like a gymnast before sticking her landing on the seat Indian style. Barefoot. I could work for this woman.
Turns out, even sociopaths sometimes go shoeless.
“Oh, my God, Helena, go get the new Elle Décor.”
“Jeanne?”
It’d been two years, three temp jobs, and four quarters of grad school since I’d heard her voice, but I knew it right away, just like I knew exactly why she was calling. Or more specifically, whom she was calling about. We had a Super Glued bond, Jeanne and me. The stuff survivor’s guilt and horror-flick romances are made of. Suffering together through something so horrendous, the two of us had nothing left to do but fall for each other and be secretly ashamed. For less than six months, we had both worked for a Manhattan interior designer with manic hair and personality to match.
“Whyyyyy…” I needed to hear Jeanne to bitch-slap me back to the time when we triple-fact-checked fax cover sheets and examined e-mails as if they were trace evidence against us. Back to the forty hours a week when we traded in the four elite years we’d spent being somebody for the chance to say we worked for a somebody. In some sick iteration of occupational sadomasochism, I needed her to say it…saaay iiit. My mouth was starting to water. Tears swarmed, and my teeth clenched. The fingernails on my free hand stabbed the lifeline there—the reading was off the charts. I was burning calories standing still.
“I’ve said too much already,” giggled Jeanne, losing the battle to suppress more. “Just go buy it” (hee) “and turn to page 149” (hee hee).
And that was that. She hung up, and I clapped my phone closed. The nearest Borders was a three-minute power walk toward the White House. I ran like a wacko with something important to tell the president. There wasn’t any time! I didn’t ask about Jeanne’s postapocalyptic life, and she didn’t give a crap about mine.
She was the only person on the planet who knew I’d been humiliated by lack of printer ink. And I’m pretty sure I alone knew she’d spontaneously combusted over a discarded bucket of popcorn—the special holiday kind with four separate thingies for powdered cheese, red/green caramel, regular caramel, and just regular. There was a time when Jeanne knew me better than anybody. Now only her voice was familiar. Had she made it? Done what she said she would all those times we sat staring at our Mac screens, IMing each other about how much we hated one-third of our lives?
Really, this was about revenge, an emotion that most closely translates to “closure” in grown-up speak. I had a boyfriend who was so about to propose, a lead on a job with the New York friggin’ Times, and in less than a month I’d have my master’s degree—but Jeanne’s voice took me back to the apartment in Harlem where we popped our “assistant to” cherries. When I showed up for my interview, it was Jeanne who answered the door, who said she was excited to be learning from a “successful black businesswoman,” who told me this would be a great place to start. In our Ivy League remix of Cinderella, answering the phone by the second ring would someday transform us into CEOs. Glass ceilings were involved! She would be our fairy godmother. When the dust settled, we devolved into dum-dums every time someone forgot to turn the answering machine on. Whatever, it made sense to us then—the whole pay-your-dues thing.
And anyway, who the hell still uses answering machines? Emotionally detached (and, we guessed, sexually frustrated) interior designers who send e-mails like this:
“A properly working copier/fax/printer is essential to the basic administrative function of our office, and I expect everyone in the office to take the initiative to alert me if there is a problem or if we need to order new print cartridges. I do not expect you to wait until AFTER I’ve asked you to print a document for me before anything is done about it or anyone decides to mention it. Thanks.”
It was the “Thanks” that got us.
She threw a temper tantrum when Jeanne and I “failed” (not forgot) to turn the machine on before escaping for lunch one day. We’d been warned. First, neither one of us had used a damned answering machine since living with our parents. Understandably, the thing was hidden away like Boo Radley. Both mesmerizing and terrifying, it was shoved way back on the bottom shelf of the one desk facing away from the front door. Nobody had to know we stocked our high-profile office with supplies from the Goodwill on 135th Street. Second, it was always so damn hard to tell whether the red light for “on” was, in fact, on. We wasted the first fifteen minutes of every lunch break quizzing each other.
“Do you think it’s on?”
“I dunno. Do you think it’s on?”
“I dunno. Do you?”
“F*cking A.”
Then one of the four of us (yes, it takes four assistants to screw up an office) would martyr herself, volunteering to plant a cupped hand over the power indicator to see if it was blinking red or if the sun was trying to get us fired—again. Of course, the light wasn’t on because we’d each already pushed the button two, maybe twenty, times and didn’t have the superhuman powers necessary for time travel, which would’ve helped in figuring out whether the thing had been on in the first f*cking place. After debating the issue for however long, we’d just declare the machine on and break out for lunch, gulping down spinach and avocado salads in the hopes we’d make it back before She did.
We never did.
Our final warning came one day in the “office” (the third bedroom in her rent-controlled apartment on Seventh Avenue). We’d been giddy because She was on her way to Midtown, which meant at least three hours of non-nail-biting “work” could be done. Our hopes were immediately dashed when instead of walking out the door without saying good-bye as usual, She walked into the office/bedroom with tears in her eyes. They refused to fall to her cheeks, professional that She was, but for once we weren’t fooled. They were there—mucking up her huge brown eyes. The same ones that had convinced me months before that I’d be better off here. That working in a prewar building in Harlem, the same one where Spike Lee shot a few scenes of Jungle Fever, was the right thing to do. If the on button was that clear, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
“One of you forgot to turn on the answering machine…again,” She hissed from the doorway, not looking at anyone, so really everyone.
Blank, scared-shitless stares.
“I obviously don’t know who did it,” She said, still gazing up at the ceiling as if Jesus H. Christ was going to help with the interrogating, “but if it happens one more time, someone’s going to have to go. I’m not sure who. I guess you guys can just decide amongst yourselves or something.”
Was She just being the crazy we’d come to know and loathe, or was She actually this upset about a bootleg answering machine? Once, She brought me into her office (the second bedroom) to tell me that She dreamed about fabric samples at night and understood that the rest of us weren’t as committed: after all, it was her name after the @ of our e-mail addys. I walked out thinking how lazy I was and didn’t IM Jeanne for more than an hour. Then I did something wrong, and She wrote back, “I’ve explained several times that you have to send correspondence/ attachments to my other e-mail account. Thanks.” If I couldn’t make it with her, then with who?
Only once did I get something right. Looking at the Post-it that proved it kept me sane: from going postal, if you will. It was stuck to the invoice to end all invoices. I spent all morning on it. The extra spaces between each letter of her name (added for aesthetics) were symmetrical. The design fee was hiked up to ridiculous, and the whole thing was typed in the passive voice, a tone so impersonal She could have written it herself. The invoice was placed back in my in-box with a two-by-two diploma attached—“Great Job!” Jeanne took a Polaroid as a joke. I laughed when everybody else did, then tacked it to the bulletin board above my computer. Congratulatory punctuation validated my existence. Maybe we should have checked the machine one more time.
After explaining why someone needed firing, She left us there with our empty mouths open. We didn’t defend ourselves or each other. The front door slamming echoed back to us, the ending bell. Still we waited—me, Jeanne, Valentina (who actually was an idiot), and Laura (who just acted like one). Minutes passed before anyone said anything, before anyone breathed.
“Do you think she’s serious?” whined Valentina, whom I mentally nominated to be thrown to the She wolf.
“Ummm, no. She’s just tryna drive us insane,” answered Jeanne.
“Mission a-f*cking-ccomplished.” This was me, obviously.
“God, I gotta get out of here,” sighed Laura, who lost it one day when I left a sweaty glass on the antique desk in the living room. It left what I thought was an unnoticeable water mark. Laura hid it under a stack of papers whenever She came around.
That was our life from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.—a constant roller coaster of wondering whether we’d do something stupid enough to get canned or so stupid we thought we deserved it. Like the day I took a retard pill and said I had nothing to do after She asked why I was so chatty with Jeanne. Backpedaling, I explained that usually my “list” was finished before the end of day, thus leaving plenty of time to giggle about bestiality Web sites with Jeanne (don’t judge). I thought this explanation made me look efficient and task-oriented. It’s not like I copped to the countless cups of peach tea I drank in order to have something to do in the bathroom for five minutes every hour. Despite its growing necessity, I never put peeing on my list.
The “list” arrived in our in-boxes each morning in response to a bullet-pointed e-mail we sent at the end of each day with the subject line “update.” In it were punchy action verbs that justified our presence in her home:
UPDATE MAY 30, 2002
Called Savafieh at 12:55 p.m. and the rug should arrive by 4 p.m. on July 9th
Received Farrow & Ball samples via FedEx and placed them in your box
Made reservations at Ouest for three at 8:30 p.m.
Wrote responses for the Japanese article and placed them in your box for review
Your mother called at 3:53 p.m. and she would like for you to call her back
The trick was to write things down as soon as you did them, no matter how dumb it felt. Otherwise you might forget and then end up scrounging for bullet points at around 4:58 p.m. and have only four or five on there. Ten was ideal. We saved each of our “updates” in a desktop file labeled by the month and year. After She got our update, she’d e-mail us back the “list,” which laid out all our to-dos for the day and made it possible for the four of us to never have to speak to her directly. AOL was the Great Oz of our office.
Adding to the office intrigue was “the box.” We each had one, and in it She placed the still-bleeding documents we’d offered up as sacrifice. This is how it went—send update, get list, write out some rando fax cover sheet from list, place in her box, e-mail her that cover sheet had been placed in her box, wait ten minutes, IM Jeanne about how stupid this is, get e-mail that revised sheet is back in your box, walk three feet to box, pick up sheet with red marker seeping through to the back, and start at go.
It’s no surprise then that we became totally obsessed with her personal life. Someone that automatic couldn’t just switch it off at quitting time. What were her friends like? Could we have been friends if we didn’t know her secret identity? One of us heard She was dating a landscaper, and the rest immediately got busy imagining their life together. Right when I was Googling his name, She appeared at my shoulder, handing over her Palm for syncing. She never said anything about it, so obviously it was true. We figured they’d make great lawn-mowing babies. Also, She filed her family photos with the rest of the business stuff, which we thought was weird until her mom called and Jeanne picked up the phone. They chatted for a few seconds about how things were going. The old lady ended with what we thought was advice: “Remember, everything that glitters isn’t gold.” Now we’d found at least one piece of the puzzle, even after we each got this:
“As you know, I always call in several times a day for my phone messages, even while I’m in production. Yesterday afternoon my mother called the office to let me know that she and my father had arrived safely home from their trip. Who spoke to her and why didn’t I get the message? I didn’t get this message when I called in at five or five thirty p.m., and it was not included in anyone’s updates.”
Your mother hates you! Why do you care whether or not she made it back okay? And who even cares about stuff like that? This isn’t the 1800s. Cruise ships don’t get lost at sea. Plus, it wasn’t me who took the message.
The filing cabinet became our own private rabbit hole—we’d jump in whenever we got bored with the tedium of message-taking and try to make sense out of a world of hot air. Legend had it that Jeanne once found a letter in an unmarked folder from a famous black actor She dated—briefly. Simply put, according to Jeanne, it was a Dear John letter in reverse. I felt sorry for her sometimes, wondering if all She really needed was someone to love. If a strong black woman just couldn’t catch a break. I was twenty-two, dating a West Point grad, and feeling authoritative in my head. She was thirty-seven, running out of time, and filing her dates. But sympathy was way too close to forgiveness. So I clung to that story like a threadbare security blanket, desperate for confirmation that the slights we felt were real.
Take the morning routine, for instance. There are some people who live and die by the chipper morning salutation. Despite being raised every morning on Frances’s “You’ve got to ri-ise and shi-ine and give God the glory, glory,” I am not one of these people. And needless to say neither was She. But damn, can a sista get a “Hi”? Sometimes we got a half-eaten “Hello,” given grudgingly as She fumbled through whatever paper was in her hand at the time, and considered ourselves lucky. That’s why I decided that finishing my list early and trolling the Internets for crazy animal-loving freak shows was not only totally indicative of my commitment to hard work but also remuneration for her social retardness. She didn’t think so.
“Yesterday you mentioned that you often have nothing to do (other than what I have given you on your list that day). I will assume that this means that you have completed everything for my upcoming NBC segment on bedding and pillows—research in terms of identifying new resources, trends, who will loan us things for the segment, etc. Please put all of this completed information in my box for me to review at the end of the day. Thanks.”
How awesome would it’ve been if I replied, “You’re welcome,” and then high-kicked my way out the front door? Too bad I opened that Platinum Student MasterCard senior year.
Funny, it was a credit card that eventually swiped Jeanne’s job.
The boss lady decided that working from home wasn’t working for her anymore and wasted no time renting a one-bedroom apartment on Madison Avenue near the Met. The assistants set up shop in what was formerly known as the living room, and She worked out of the bedroom. The day we moved on up, She instructed via “the list” how to orchestrate the placement of furniture, tea bags, dishes, files, Jo Malone candles, topiaries, and books. Turning on the heat somehow got left off. It was past January. We stuffed our office chairs with puffy coats and ham-handed at our keyboards with gloves on for hours before realizing how ridiculous we looked. Adrienne sent me an e-mail about unacceptable working conditions, and we decided to grab breakfast across the street at E.A.T.
E.A.T. is a fancy acronym for stupidly expensive deli. A plate of scrambled eggs and bacon was like $15. She ate there once in a while but made it a point to complain about the high price of breakfast. When we went, Whoopi Goldberg was waiting two people in front of us on line. Made me think of that line in The Color Purple—“This side last a lil’ while, Ms. Sophia. Heaven last always.” Jeanne said we should use our corporate credit cards for breakfast since (a) we were obviously suffering in unacceptable working conditions, and (b) that basically made this a business expense. Made sense to me. Pass the jelly.
She lost her shit when she got our bills. We’d been typing all morning with mittens on, which is to say really, really carefully. Wouldn’t anybody with a beating heart have let it slide? It’s not like we bought something that would accrue in value. It was breakfast, for grape jelly’s sakes.
The next week Jeanne got called into the bedroom office via the phone intercom: “I need you back here. Thanks.” We exchanged a brief glance as she got up to walk through the kitchen and into whatever shit storm She had in store. At two years, she was the veteran of the bunch. None of us were positive this was about eating at E.A.T., but we’d learned never to hope. Jeanne came back into the living room office with a smile so big I thought maybe she’d gotten promoted to like “head assistant” or something.
“She fired me.”
“Whaaaa?”
“Yep.”
“Are you okay?”
“Finally.”
If I had been a better twenty-two-year-old, I would have left with her in some valiant display of loyalty. Instead, I watched her go and prayed I wouldn’t be next. Because for all our collective bitching, I still wanted this maniac to think me worthy of another “Great Job!” Really, I just wanted her to look me in the f*cking eye. So even after She made me write her a check for $15, I managed to smile through reading this:
“Received your check for your AmEx charge. Please leave $15.00 cash in my box instead (I will rip up the check). As I explained to you before, if you make any additional personal purchases on the corporate card, you will no longer be able to continue working here. If you are still unclear about this for some reason, you should read page 34 of the office policy that was given to you on Friday.”
There was something missing at the bottom. I was in a no-thanks land.
Without Jeanne there to complain to, to commiserate with, it was all I could do to last through lunch. Whatever happened after was anyone’s guess. I stopped trying—because despite all my f*ckups, I had been trying. Now if my update was longer than four bullet points, I was having a good day. Messages weren’t purposely forgotten, but they weren’t purposefully written down either. Up until then, I’d made it one of my duties to shout “Hello” as loudly as possible when She walked through the door in order to (1) point out how crappy She was at saying it and (2) maintain my own human decency like how Tom Hanks paints a bloody face on a volleyball in Cast Away. Now whenever She came in, I commenced a staring match between me and my computer screen. It made my eyes hurt, and it was worth it.
In the end, in the Clue game of my life, it was the HP Inkjet, in the office, with a forgotten résumé, that did me in.
I’d been working double duty as a production assistant on her television show (I made the mistake of looking for my name in the credits once) and as her unofficial in-house scribe. Whenever someone e-mailed her, asking her expert advice, I was the one who wrote back. It was the only worthy experience of my day, and I stretched a hundred-word reply on the correct pronunciation of “chaise” to take at least two hours. That’s around the time I realized what I wanted to do and started trolling Monster.com for gigs that had “write” in the title. What got me wasn’t the faxing out of my résumé during work hours. Who doesn’t do that? What got me was the copy of my résumé left in the machine overnight.
Again with the phone intercom. “Helena, can you come back here?” Maybe she wanted to congratulate me for looking for another job. I’d made it perfectly clear that I had an English degree that I planned on using. She even said that this would be a great opportunity for that, since, you know, She was so “well-connected.” In fact, her best friend was the editor of a magazine. I overheard them once talking on the phone, talking about doing their own laundry at a coin-operated ’mat, and figured I was golden. Until I wasn’t. I guess She didn’t think I would ever actually try to make it. That filling my heart with hate every day would be fulfilling.
She was barefoot once again. I took a seat on the chair facing her without being offered and crossed my legs dramatically, all Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, trying my hardest to act like I was interrogating her (it works for interviews).
“I was looking in the fax machine last night and found this,” She said with such dinner-theater emphasis on the word this that I almost let out a gasp when she flipped over the wayward copy of my résumé lying facedown on the coffee table. Is She for real? My résumé? I thought She’d printed out all the orange-alert e-mails I’d sent to Adrienne and Gina about how “f*cking psycho” She was.
“Okaaaaay.” To keep my face looking serious, I stared at the space between her eyebrows. “You do know that I want to write, right?” Ending a declarative sentence with the mocking inflection of a question. Perfect. I was handling this like a Law and Order extra.
“This is unacceptable, Helena. You won’t be able to continue working for us. We’re going to have to ask you to leave.” It was the first time She acknowledged her many personalities. And for the first time in six months, I felt like she might have actually gotten a glimpse of me.
“That’s fine,” I replied, faster than I thought professional, but I couldn’t help it. I’se free nah! “Do I have to stay all day, or can I leave now?” She looked away. Her wild curls wilted.
Still pinching my deserted résumé, She mumbled something about finishing up anything outstanding on my list. My eyes were still rolling when I sat back down at my desk, ready to write my final update. It only took ten minutes and two spell checks to come up with this:
Dear She,
I believe that all working relationships should end with an evaluation. I would like to say that I enjoyed my experience here, but sadly I cannot. Your complete lack of managerial skills and overall menacing demeanor are key factors in my displeasure here at your company.
To send blatantly rude e-mails and end them with a mocking “thanks” is not only rather childish, but totally unbefitting of a senior manager. On a personal note, to enter a room and offer a rather weak and mumbled “hello” and to communicate entirely by e-mail in a rather small office are behaviors indicative of one who does not value sociable relationships with his/ her employees, which is clearly distinctive of this office and totally antithetical to a congenial work environment.
Lastly, to treat your employees with not only a nonchalant manner, but actual disdain, is offensive and the foremost reason this office has an alarmingly high employee turnover rate. I say these things because I believe you should cultivate the qualities that are befitting of a true leader in order to have a successful business and life.
I am pleased to be moving forward to a position where my talents are not only properly utilized but appreciated. I sincerely hope that you find the necessary characteristics to enjoy normal business relations with your employees and colleagues, who for the most part are severely dissatisfied with your simply mean behavior.
I hope this helps,
Helena Andrews
Bad. Ass. The guts to read it aloud to her face would have been nice, but I settled for the grammar skills. In reality I didn’t have another job lined up, but there was no reason for her to know that. The letter was my first grown-up resignation. Once the send button was fired, including a few names in the BCC field, I made a beeline for the front door and never looked back—that is, until Jeanne decided to call me two years later with news.
The trip down trauma lane didn’t take long at all. I’d snapped out of it by the time I got to the magazine section, scanning the titles for Elle Décor. I could’ve just skipped through the pages right then and there and gotten it over with, all dirty like. But I didn’t want randos around when I saw whatever it was Jeanne wanted me to see. This was a private moment. I bought my copy and ran to a storefront across the street.
Page 149, please tell me something good, or at the very least something so depraved it makes me smile. And there She was. Her hand was on her hip, and the other was resting “naturally” against the fireplace in her living room. Gone was the desk with my water-glass stain. She had on a heavily bejeweled tank dress, probably from Bendel’s. Her biceps were as muscular as I remembered. I could even tell without my glasses that her fingernails had been manicured—French—and She was wearing that nude lip gloss. She looked like your mom’s cool younger sister visiting from the big city for the weekend. Why couldn’t things have worked out between us? I like the big city. I like weekends.
But one of these things was not like the other. Something was…missing. Oh, f*ck! Where her hair should’ve been, there was…nothing. Not a hat or hijab. She was bald as the day she was born, if, in fact, she had been.
I stared at that image for the devil knows how long, wishing it wasn’t true and glad that it was. I closed the magazine and carefully slipped it back into my purse. There was a brief moment of silence before I called everyone who knew what She’d put me through, feeling a twinge of shame each time I phoned another friend but forcing it down. “One word. Four syllables. Alopecia.” The more times I said it, the more sadistic I started to sound, sort of like She did when the couch pillows weren’t karate-chopped just so. Her hair was gone, sure, but maybe it was my moral fiber that was receding. Maybe that’s what Jeanne wanted me to see.
So in the end end, the for-real end, the no-more-sequels end—it was the hair that got me.