“Felípe? He’s, like, amazing.”
“Is he ‘like’ amazing, or is he in fact amazing?”
She cocks her head. “Like, amazing.” We both laugh.
Elizabeth pours the three kids bubbly water in real and breakable stemware. Owen is in my lap but not touching or banging anything. It’s like she mesmerizes kids by ignoring them. I think about pulling out the bright red plastic sippy cups conveniently located on the back of the stroller and suggesting we veer toward the ingestion of BPAs, but I hesitate. The table looks too perfect. Everything is white and crisp. A single, perfect lily on a tall stem sits in the middle and no small hands grab for it. If I weren’t wearing the yoga pants and maybe took the scrunchie out of my ponytail, we could even look like some two-mommy photo shoot.
I pass the basket of croissants around and, leaving no time for niceties, dive in and tell her about the mortgage market. She nods her head and asks if there’s any part of me that’s surprised by this. She acts like I should have seen this all coming. No. I’m boring her, and the fact that she doesn’t care soothes me. If real people don’t see this as a crisis, it probably isn’t.
I move on to the Glass Ceiling Club. I can’t let this chance pass for me to share all this with someone I trust. When I delve into the Gruss lunch she again looks bored.
“Belle,” she interrupts, “you’re describing the whole tech start-up scene in this town. We have options instead of real money, we’re probably scruffier than your crew, but what’s the news here? Men need to react to threats to their superiority so they misbehave. Businesses with big money at stake become arrogant and chauvinistic. Where’s the news flash in that? Why are you so bothered?”
“I’m bothered because I work there. I have stock in the place and, well, I’m ashamed of it.”
“What makes you think the finance industry is so different from the rest of America?” she responds. “What makes you think I don’t see the same stuff just with younger guys? Am I ashamed of my company? Not really. I let the bullshit go.”
“What other industry in America keeps this behavior so secret? I mean, our contracts ensure that you will never read about this in the newspaper.”
“Maybe the paper doesn’t want to print these stories. Maybe this is the oldest story ever written. Maybe it’s boring. Look, I get that you Wall Street people lose good women because they can’t handle the environment. We have the same thing, but guess what? The committed ones stay, the ones we want to stay, stay.” She points a butter knife at me when she says the word stay.
“You sound like B. Gruss II.”
“Is he still alive?”
I sigh. “Elizabeth, doesn’t it bother you to be spoken to like that?”
“Like what? Nobody speaks to me any certain way ’cause I’m their boss. They’re all, like, twenty-two. I’m the babysitter, the one the parents left in charge.”
“So that’s the difference. What if you weren’t able to be the boss? What if you know you’re better than people more senior than you but never get promoted?”
As we shoot back and forth, three little-kid heads turn in unison. What’s making my kids suddenly intrigued by adult conversation? Why are they being so good?
“Here’s how I see it.” She pushes up the sleeves on her blazer and flips her hair from one side to the other. Two men at a nearby table have their mouths almost in panting position. One even drops his phone on the floor, right at her feet. I roll my eyes at him and even though it fell to her side it’s me who snaps it up and puts it back on their table forcefully, ignoring his gracious thank-yous.
She’s used the moment to contemplate what I’ve said. “We both work in really open environments. There’s not so much as a cubicle wall in either of our lives, okay? People let their guard down when they operate like that and then they go tribal.”
“Tribal?”
“Yeah, like those orphaned elephants in Africa who find a new family in the pack of other orphaned elephants. They get wild ’cause they have no parents.”
“Elephants!” Owen squeals, and proceeds to move his head like he has the weight of a trunk swinging off his front.
“Orphaned elephants?” I repeat dully. “That’s an excuse?”