Left Neglected

Chapter 3





I am sitting in the front row of the Wang Theatre, just to the right of center. I check my watch and look up again, stretching my neck, searching the faces of the densely crowded aisles for Bob. A small elderly woman walks toward me. At first I think the woman must want to tell me something important, but then I realize that she’s eyeing the empty seat to my left.

“This seat’s taken,” I say, placing my hand on it.

“Is someone sitting here?” the woman asks, her brown eyes murky and confused.

“Someone will be.”

“Huh?”

“SOMEONE WILL BE.”

“I won’t be able to see if I don’t sit in front.”

“Sorry, someone’s sitting here.”

The old woman’s muddy eyes suddenly turn lucid and piercing.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

A man two rows back gets up from his seat and heads up the aisle, maybe to go to the men’s room. The old woman notices this and leaves me alone.

I touch the collar of my snakeskin coat. I don’t want to take it off. It’s nippy in the theatre, and I feel beautiful in it. But I don’t want someone to steal Bob’s seat. I check my watch and my ticket. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Where is Bob? I take off my coat and save Bob’s seat with it. A chill slithers up the base of my back to my shoulders. I rub my bare arms.

I search for Bob again but soon get taken in by the magnificence of the theatre—the regal red velvet curtains, the towering columns, the Greek and Roman marble statues. I look up. The ceiling is open air, a breathtaking view of the night sky. While I am still enchanted with the stars above my head, I feel the subtle weight of a shadow fall upon my face. I expect to see Bob, but instead it’s Richard, my boss. He tosses my coat to the floor and plops down next to me.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” he says.

“Of course I’m here. I’m so excited to see the show.”

“Sarah, the show is over. You missed it.”

What? I look back at all the people standing in the aisles and see only the backs of their heads. Everyone is leaving.





T U E S D A Y


It’s 3:30, and I have a half hour, the first gap of the day, before my next meeting. I begin eating the chicken Caesar salad my assistant ordered me for lunch as I return a call to the office in Seattle. While I’m chewing lettuce and the phone is ringing, I start skimming the emails that have accumulated in my inbox. The managing director picks up and asks me to brainstorm with him about who of our four thousand consultants would be available and best suited for an information technology project coming in next week. I talk to him while I alternately type responses to a number of emails from the UK about performance evaluations and eat.

I can’t remember when I learned how to have two completely different professional conversations going at once. I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I know it’s not an ordinary skill, even for a woman. I’ve also mastered the ability to type and click without making a sound, so the person on the other end of the conversation isn’t distracted, or worse, offended. To be fair, I choose to answer only the emails that are no-brainers, the ones that just need my yay or nay, while on the phone. It feels a little like having a split personality. Sarah talks on the phone while her crazy alter ego types. At least the two of me are working as a team.

I’m the vice president of human resources at Berkley Consulting. Berkley has about five thousand employees in seventy offices located in forty countries. We offer strategic advice to companies all over the world in all industries—how to innovate, compete, restructure, lead, brand, merge, grow, sustain, and, above all, make money. Most of the consultants who work to deliver this advice have business degrees, but many are scientists, lawyers, engineers, and medical doctors. They are all extremely bright, know how to think analytically, and excel at finding creative solutions to complex problems.

They are also mostly young. Consultants at Berkley typically work where the client is. The consultants for any given project can be based anywhere in the world, but if the client is a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, then that is where the consulting team will live for the duration of the project. So for twelve weeks, a consultant from our office in London, staffed on this case because of his medical background, will live Mondays through Thursdays in a hotel in Newark.

This lifestyle is workable for the young and single, and for a while, even the young and married, but add a few years and a couple of kids, and living out of a carry-on starts to get old fast. The burnout rate is high. That poor guy from London is going to miss his wife and kids. Berkley can throw more and more money at him to keep him, but at some point for most people, it’s not enough to make it worth the toll this job takes on families. The few consultants who persevere beyond five years go on to become managing directors. Anyone still standing after ten years becomes a partner and, as a result, extremely wealthy. Almost all are men. And divorced.

I came to Berkley with a background in human resources and an MBA from Harvard, the perfect hybrid of experience and pedigree. My job requires a lot of hours—seventy to eighty a week—but I don’t have to travel like the nomadic consultants. I go to Europe once every eight weeks, China once a quarter, and New York for one or two overnights a month, but this kind of travel is all predictable, finite, and manageable.

My assistant, Jessica, knocks and enters my office with a piece of paper that reads, “Coffee?”

I nod and hold up three fingers, meaning a triple shot of espresso and not three coffees. Jessica understands my sign language and leaves with my order.

I head up all recruiting, the assembly of high-priority case teams, performance evaluations, and career development at Berkley. Berkley Consulting sells ideas, so the people who think up those ideas are our most important assets and investments. An idea that any one of our teams comes up with today could easily be on the front page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal tomorrow. The teams at Berkley guide and even create some of the world’s most successful companies. And I create the teams.

I have to know the strengths and weaknesses of each consultant and every client to fashion the best fit, to maximize the potential for success. The teams are asked to crack all kinds of cases (e-commerce, globalization, risk management, operations) in every kind of industry (automotive, health care, energy, retail), but not every consultant is best suited for every project. I juggle a lot of balls—expensive, fragile, heavy, irreplaceable balls. And just when I think I’ve got as many in the air as I could possibly handle, one of the partners will throw me another. Like some highly competitive Cirque du Soleil clown, I never admit to having too many. I’m one of the only women playing at this level, and I don’t ever want to see that look in one of the partners’ eyes. There it is. She just banged her head on the ceiling. We’ve maxed her out. Go see if Carson or Joe can handle this one. So they toss me more and more responsibilities, and I catch each one with a smile, practically killing myself at times to make it all look easy. My job is very far from easy. It is, in fact, very, very hard. Which is exactly why I love it.

But even with all my years of training and experience, my determined work ethic, and the ability to simultaneously eat, type, and talk, the hardness of it all does sometimes get overwhelming. There are days when there is no room for error, no time for lunch or to pee, no extra minutes to squeeze one more of anything out of me. On those days, I feel like a balloon blown to capacity, ready to burst. And then Richard will add another case to my pile with a Post-it stuck to the top page. Your input is needed ASAP. A big puff of air. Jessica will email me with a new meeting scheduled into the only unscheduled hour of the day. Puff. I feel transparent, uncomfortably taut. Abby will call. Linus has a rash and a fever, and she can’t find the Tylenol. The final puff.

When I feel like I’m about to explode, I lock my office door, sit in my chair, spin to face the window overlooking Boylston Street in case someone should look in, and let myself cry for five minutes. No more. Five minutes of silent crying to release the pressure, and then I’m back. That’s usually all I need to reset. I remember the first time I let myself cry at work. It was in my third month here. I felt weak and ashamed and as soon as I dried my eyes, I swore to myself that I’d never do it again. So naïve. The stress at Berkley, like at all consulting firms of its caliber, is off the charts and gets to everyone. Some people drink martinis at Legal Sea Foods during lunch. Some smoke cigarettes outside the revolving doors on Huntington Avenue. I cry for five minutes at my desk. I try to limit my teary vice to twice a month.

It’s now 3:50. I’m off the phone and drinking the coffee Jessica delivered. I needed it. The caffeine hurries my sluggish blood and splashes cold water on my sleepy brain. I have ten unclaimed minutes. How should I fill them? I look at my calendar.


4:00, phone conference, General Electric project.



4:15, Lucy piano lesson.



4:30, Charlie’s soccer game. LAST ONE.




I always list the kids’ activities in my calendar so, like an air traffic controller, I know where everyone is at any given time. I hadn’t considered actually going to Charlie’s game until just now. Bob said he didn’t think he could make it again this week, and Abby won’t be able to stay and watch after dropping Charlie off at the field because she’ll have to loop back to the other side of town to pick up Lucy from her piano lesson. It’s his last game of the season. I picture the end of the game and all the other kids running off the field and into the celebrating arms of their moms and dads. I picture Charlie’s fallen face when he realizes his mom’s and dad’s arms aren’t there to receive him. I can’t stand the image.

Fueled by three shots of espresso and two additional shots of guilt and compassion, I check my watch one last time, then grab my cell phone, the GE folder, my bag and coat and leave the office.

“Jessica, tell the four o’clock meeting I’ll be phoning in from my cell.”

No reason why I can’t do it all.



I’M TALKING ON MY CELL phone, about forty minutes into the 4:00 meeting, when I arrive at the Welmont town fields. A baseball diamond is situated adjacent to the parking lot, and the soccer field is beyond that. From my car, I can see the kids in the distance already playing. I’ve been talking for a long stretch now about who our rising experts are in green technology. As I’m walking across the baseball field, I suddenly realize a lack of throat clearing, pen clicking, and general background conference room noise.

“Hello?”

No response. I look at my phone. No Service. Crap. How long have I been delivering that soliloquy?

I’m at the soccer field now but not at my meeting. I’m supposed to be at both. I look down at my phone. Still no service. This is not good.

“Hey, you’re here!” says Bob.

I’m thinking the exact same thing in my head but with an entirely different inflection.

“I thought you couldn’t come,” I say.

“I snuck out. I saw Abby when she dropped Charlie off and told her I’d take him home.”

“We don’t both need to be here.”

I check my phone. No bars.

“Can I use your cell?”

“It’s a dead zone here. Who you calling?”

“I need to be in a meeting. Crap, what am I doing here?”

He puts his arm around me and squeezes.

“You’re watching your son play soccer.”

But I’m supposed to be staffing the GE case right now. My shoulders start chasing the tops of my ears. Bob recognizes my telltale sign of building tension and tries rubbing them into submission, but I resist. I don’t want to relax. This isn’t relaxing.

“Can you stay?” he asks.

My brain races through the consequences of missing the last half of the GE meeting. The truth is, whatever I’ve missed, I’ve already missed it. I might as well stay.

“Let me just see if I can pick up a signal somewhere.”

I wander the perimeter of the field, trying to find a coordinate that might catch a bar on my phone. I’m not having any luck. Meanwhile, first-grade soccer is hilarious. It shouldn’t really even be called soccer. From what I see, there are no positions. Most of the kids are chasing and kicking at the ball all the time, as if the ball were a powerful magnet and the kids were helplessly pulled toward it wherever it goes. About a dozen kids are now gathered around it, kicking feet and shins and occasionally the ball. Then the ball is aimlessly knocked free of the mob, and they’re all chasing it again.

A few of the kids can’t be bothered. One girl is doing cartwheels. Another girl is simply sitting on the ground, ripping up the grass with her hands. Charlie is spinning. He spins in circles until he falls. Then he gets up, staggers, falls again, gets up, and spins.

“Charlie, get the ball!” encourages Bob from the sidelines.

He spins.

The other parents are cheering their kids on, too.

“Go, Julia, go!”

“Come on, Cameron!”

“Kick it!”

I missed an important meeting for this madness. I make my way back over to Bob.

“Any luck?”

“No.”

It has just started to snow, and now most of the kids have abandoned any thoughts of the ball or why they’re here in favor of trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues. I can’t help checking my watch more than once a minute. This game, or whatever it should be called, is going on forever.

“When is this over?” I ask Bob.

“I think they go forty-five minutes. You coming home after this?”

“I need to go see what I missed.”

“You can’t do that from home?”

“I shouldn’t even be here.”

“See you at bedtime?”

“If I’m lucky.”

Bob and I don’t often get home in time to have dinner with the kids. Their little bellies start growling at around 5:00, and Abby feeds them macaroni and cheese or chicken nuggets then. But we both try to be home to eat dessert together at around 6:30. The kids eat ice cream or cookies while Bob and I typically have cheese and crackers and wine, our dessert being more of an appetizer for the dinner we eat after the kids go to bed at 7:30.

The referee, a high school boy, finally blows the whistle, and the game is over. As Charlie walks off the field, he still hasn’t noticed that we’re here. He’s so cute I can barely stand it. His mop of wavy brown hair always seems a little too long, no matter how often he gets it cut. He has blue eyes like Bob’s and the longest black eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a boy. Girls are going to go crazy someday over those eyes. He’s suddenly so old and yet so young all at once. Old enough to have homework and two adult teeth and be on a soccer team. Young enough to want to play outside every day, to still have baby teeth and missing teeth, and to care more about spinning and catching snowflakes than winning the game.

He sees us now, and his eyes light up. His whole face stretches wide with his goofy jack-o’-lantern grin, and he runs straight into our legs. I shove my phone into my pocket so I can hug him with both hands. This is why I came.

“Great job, buddy!” says Bob.

“Did we win?” asks Charlie.

They lost 10–3.

“I don’t think so. Did you have fun?” I ask.

“Yup!”

“How about pizza tonight?” asks Bob.

“Yeah!”

We begin walking to the parking lot.

“Mom, are you coming for pizza?”

“No, honey, I have to go back to work.”

“Okay, bud, race you to the car. Ready? Set? Go!” yells Bob.

They tear across the baseball infield kicking up clouds of dusty dirt. Bob lets Charlie beat him and hams it up. I can hear him saying, “I can’t believe it! I almost had you! You’re a speed demon!”

I smile. In my car, I check my phone. Three bars and seven new voice messages. I sigh, brace myself, and hit Play. As I wind and inch my way out of the parking lot, I end up right behind Bob and Charlie. I beep and wave and watch them turn left toward pizza and home. Then I turn right and head in the opposite direction.