About Face (12 page)

Was it the same with her work? Did she need to
like
Mimosa more before she could love
Violins & Wine
? Was it that her revolutionary idea was only good in the context of Mimosa because the cold hard truth was that it was just less phony than its surroundings?

Or maybe that wasn't it. Maybe middle age is just the time when it's not reasonable to expect that kind of passion from work. Is it time to give up and grow up?

CHAPTER 11

Old Is New

 

 

RUTH AWOKE SUDDENLY, with pounding heart and sweaty body. Since the start of her hormonal seesaw, she'd sometimes awakened like this three or four times a night. Falling asleep afterwards was always an ordeal; thank goodness it was morning.

She sat up in bed, listening. The hum of the furnace reminded her of the sound of rushing water in her dream. She pieced it together.

The dam had burst at its base, with a hole like a seven-year old's missing tooth. The hoarded water crashed through the gap to the other side, where the red clay gladly soaked it up. No longer two of the four elements, dry earth plus water, they became a new element, a different kind of earth. It was moist, redolent, contented.

Miraculously, the walkway above the dam remained intact. Ruth walked across from south to north, chatting with her mother Helen about all the things they'd never really discussed while Helen was alive. They strolled arm-in-arm, speaking fluidly. Her mother, a child of the depression, told how she'd learned to grit her teeth and do what needed to be done. Ruth, a child of the sixties, had tried to feel comfortable with herself. They could barely hear each other over the roar of crashing water on their right, but the spray on their faces, the sunlight, the joy of emotional connection more than made up for whatever fragments they missed. Helen brought out a scrapbook of Ruth's childhood artwork that neither had seen for many years. They oohed and aahed; they were struck by its freedom and artistry.

The dream images evoked nameless feelings that flitted around her head and shoulders like a persistent mosquito while she tried in vain to catch them. They were there as she showered, dressed, inhaled coffee, kissed David good-bye, and headed to the bus station in her workhorse of a commuter's car.

The most unsettling dream element was the conversation. It kept drawing her attention against her will, like a car accident along the road. In real life, their conversations had always been transactional, centering on recipes or travel schedules or Josh's grades. Through them all, Ruth would try, usually unsuccessfully, to stifle her bratty annoyance.

“Ruth, darling, is Josh happy about getting into Cornell?”

“Of course, mom. Why else would he have applied.”

“Harry's niece went there too, you know.”

“I know. Because you've told me 100 times.”

She wondered if the dream related to her mysterious emotional distance from her product line idea. She stowed the dream images on her growing list of things to think about later, and began her daily trek via the bus to the Port Authority Terminal, the cross-town subway to the East Side, and the five-block walk uptown.

 

SHE'D RESERVED the eighteenth floor conference room, alerted her team to devote the entire day to a meeting about a new project, arranged for lunch to be brought in, asked Terry to join them at two o'clock and Roger at three o'clock. Her objective—at least the one for public consumption—was to make substantive progress; what she
really
wanted was to pump herself up or, at least, prime the pump.

Gathering the things she needed from her office, she saw a group of people had closed off half the width of forty-seventh street between Lexington and Third. They erected tables, tents, signs and assorted booths on the now-pedestrian-only street. They must be setting up for a street fair. A mini-street fair, she thought. Lucky them; unusual for mid-town; unusual for mid-week. Inexplicably, she thought of the dam.

In the conference room, everything was ready. Colleen would hold everyone's calls. It almost felt like summer-camp. This was exciting. Finally, she thought.

Ruth announced they'd be starting the meeting with a game. They needed to approach today's subject with a fresh point of view and the game was a kind of warm-up.

Each person had to say three things about herself or himself that no one else in the room knew. Two of the details should be true, one a lie. The others had to guess the lie.

“But Tom has quite a significant advantage over us.” Pat's voice was close to a whine. “His tenure here has been rather short, so we don't know much about him.”

“Hey, Pat, it's only a game. Besides,” Tom added, “I may have an advantage in terms of
my
lie, but I'm at a disadvantage for yours.”

“We'll do this quickly,” Ruth said. “I'll go first.” She rattled off her details. In fourth grade, she'd purposely hung out with stupid kids so she'd feel smart. In high school, she was the third runner-up in the Miss Bronx Teenager contest. She'd once slept in the same bed Tom Cruise had slept in.

“Who's next?”

“I'll go,” Judy said, who was more dressed up than usual in a black suit. She hooked the metal clip of her pen on the cardboard back of her pad, then balanced it on her lap as she slipped one hand under each thigh. Leaning forward, she listed her details, a bit more slowly than Ruth had.

“One, the woman I call my mother is really my aunt.” She brought her hands out of their hiding places and used them to hook her dark brown hair behind her ears, then folded them on her pad.

“Two, yesterday on the subway home I saw Woody Allen. Three, I broke the same bone in my body two times, about a year apart.” She swayed from side to side in her seat with pleasure. “I'm done.”

Tom brushed back the hair that had fallen in his eyes and avoided eye contact, focusing on the center of the circle. He used to stutter. He was dating his older brother's ex-girlfriend. He was the anchor on his university's four-man one-mile relay. “Next?”

Pat pulled her expensive brown silk sleeves down to her wrists and said, in a monotone, with no introduction, “Once on a vacation in Indonesia, I came close to marrying someone to help him in his quest for an American green card. Yesterday I was in Saks and I paid with a twenty-dollar bill but received change for a hundred. When I was a youngster, I had a pet boa constrictor.”

They wrote their guesses, then secrets were revealed—Ruth never entered the Miss Bronx Teenager contest, Tom never stuttered, Judy didn't spot Woody Allen, and Pat never almost-married anyone. Points were scored for correct guessing and also for fooling the others.

“Nice going, Tom. Lunch on me, anywhere you want within ten blocks. We're all warmed up now, able to look at familiar things with fresh eyes, so let's get started. Today we're going to brainstorm the word “old.” What it means, what it evokes, what it implies, anything at all.” She turned to a page on the flip chart with the single word “old.”

Ruth had allotted forty minutes for brainstorming. Wanting to get at the thoughts that were deeply buried, she reminded the team not to comment on or criticize any of the ideas until the end, and to wait out the silences.

Sure enough, the words, as well as the ideas they reflected, had gone from the predictable—”granny,” “wrinkled,” “prune,” “dry,” “boring,” “weak,” “sick,” “death”—to realms that surprised even those from whose mouths the words came. Like “pearl,” “pinnacle,” “accepting,” “diamond,” “sparkling,” “Aunt Sylvia,” “valuable,” “loving,” “perspective,” and even “beautiful.”

At the end, breathless with mental exertion and discovery, Tom said he was amazed to find the ideas, or maybe values, he'd always carried without his knowing they were there. Judy agreed.

“Now let's take it a little further,” Ruth said.

For the next two hours, the group delved into some of the ideas they'd generated. They wrote stories about imaginary older women, some beautiful, some not. They clipped pictures from magazines, sorted them into categories and compared results with each other. They tried to match the others' verbal descriptions with their clipped pictures.

Then they broke for lunch. Colleen brought in the caterers who'd been waiting outside, and Ruth took down the flip chart sheets containing the brainstorming results, the pictures and the descriptions. She rolled them together, rubber-banded them, and stashed them in the corner.

While putting together their salads and sandwiches, they returned to the game they'd played, diving into the details of the “truths” and “lies” as Ruth had hoped they would. She revealed that David's cousin was a movie director and, when they'd once stayed in his guesthouse in Hollywood, they'd found out afterwards who had preceded them. Tom was somewhat reticent about his juiciest tidbit, the older brother's ex-girlfriend, saying only that she was someone he'd known a long time and that his brother wasn't upset by the new constellation.

Judy spoke of her aunt-mother and uncle-father matter-of-factly. “It's no big deal, really. My mom died in childbirth and my father couldn't handle it, so he ‘gave' me to my mother's sister and her husband, who had been unable to have their own children. My father died about a year afterwards, in a car accident. But Diane and Arthur have always been “mom” and “dad” to me, even though they always told me the truth. She asked Pat about Saks.

Pat fussed with her salad fixings, adjusted her ham three times so it was lined up perfectly on the rye bread, and determined that three was the perfect number of ice cubes required by her ginger ale before she finally admitted that she hadn't returned the excess change to the cashier at Saks. “Don't be silly. It's Saks we're talking about, not a shoe-shine guy. Saks doesn't need the eighty bucks.”

“But neither do you,” Tom said.

“Don't pretend you'd have done it any differently,” Pat said, as she changed the subject to the boa constrictor. She was just confessing that it had lasted only one day in the house before her parents made her return it to the pet store, her consolation prize being a horse, when Colleen poked her head in the door.

“I know you said to hold your calls, but Roger said it was really important and you would really, like,
want
me to disturb you. But then it's not disturbing, is it? Or is it?”

Ruth heard the gloom in Roger's gravelly voice immediately. “Look, I hate to break in on your planning session, but we got a problem that won't wait.”

“What?”

“You know those new high-density plastic bottles we ordered for the ‘Mauve Magic' Buy-and-Get-a-Bonus samples for the holiday promotion? The ones with the mini-pump?”

“Mm-hmm. New vendor, sexy color, fast delivery, good price.”

“Right. Well, it looks like there ain't no free lunch after all. We just got a MayDay call from Packaging. The formula is breaking the seal on the pumps. More times than Quality Control allows. They say they could change the pump, but that would mean a different bottle, which means ordering from a whole other vendor, and that means time tick-tockin' away. Or we could change the formula, and that might do the trick, but the testing would mean great big monster delays. And the posse has to figure out what to do right away, like yesterday. I know if there are delays, yours is one of the asses that will be bit, so I just thought … ”

“When are we meeting?”

“Twenty minutes. Twenty-sixth floor conference room.”

She'd been crazy to think she'd get through the day without an interruption. But it was a good first go-around, she reassured herself, and would provide material for creative thinking about marketing.

She asked Colleen to coordinate everyone's schedules and reserve a conference room to continue today's work. As everyone left, she overheard Pat stage-whisper to no one in particular, “Sheesh, I sure hope we don't have to start with more fun and games.”

CHAPTER 12

Running Into Herself

 

 

WHAT A DAY it had been. The dream, the meeting, the pow-wow with Roger. And then, as if that weren't enough, just before she left for the day, Colleen told her about a disturbing conversation with Jeremy. He'd been slumming on the eighteenth floor while Ruth had been up with Roger. He'd said one of the ways new management would be cutting costs was through secretary-sharing.

“He said he was sure I must have, like, heard about it through the secretary grapevine. He made like it was no big deal.”

Then he gave her a list of five people she could choose to work for, in addition to Ruth. Because of Ruth's seniority, he was giving her first choice. And he'd try to limit her to two people instead of the usual three, but he couldn't guarantee it.

She needed to tell him her preferences within two weeks, though the changes wouldn't go into effect immediately.

“The thing of it is, I've asked some of the other girls, you know, my friends, and no one's heard anything like this from Jeremy. Or anyone else, neither. So it's not really a company-wide policy, right? Is he punishing me? Or, did you … you know … like, complain about me? It's not about my messy desk, right?”

Ruth was so tired, her anger could only energize the major bones in her body, though she breathed a little faster and shallower at the audacious power-play. A school-yard bully ploy. He didn't even try to disguise it by doing the same with some of the other secretaries. She explained that it wasn't about Colleen at all, it was about her. He was trying to squeeze her. First he eliminated the charity events, now he was trying to eliminate half of Colleen.

“But what should I do? Maybe I should change companies because these big daddies are so really annoying and part of me so wouldn't mind. I'd miss you like crazy, but still. But would that hurt your, you know, prestige-stuff more? If I left?”

Ruth said she'd think about what would be the best move and get back to her. She knew that right now, though, thinking about anything having to do with work was what she was trying
not
to do.

When she finally left, she forced herself not to march or stride, tried to stroll. Half-way down forty-seventh street a mime from the street fair appeared beside her. She hated mimes and the way they imitated you with annoyingly relentless cheer; they were like a piece of toilet paper you couldn't unstick from your shoe.

This one didn't have a white-painted face or a suspendered black jumpsuit and she didn't do rubbery-body mime routines. She was dressed like a French café-singer with black beret, dark red lipstick, and dangling cigarette. She played Edith Piaf's “Je Ne Regrette Rien” on her accordion as she shadowed Ruth.

The mime removed her hands from her accordion and dramatically adjusted her beret, tucking in a wisp of dark black hair and ensuring the angle was just right. But the accordion's bellows kept opening and closing, the keys depressed themselves, the music continued.

Even Ruth was impressed. I've heard of player-pianos, she thought, but never a player-accordion. As others gathered to watch, Ruth saw the mime's face mirror the surprise on her own. Finding herself publicly mimicked, she shifted her face into neutral, or so she thought. The mime's face changed, too, with prominently contracted eyebrows creating a washboard in her forehead and a tight stern mouth holding her cigarette. A child commented to his mother on how “the lady was making the same face as the other lady.”

Is that me, she thought? Fierce? Angry?

Her surprise appeared on her face, then on the mime's, so she tried even harder for facial neutrality, and saw another angry-lady imitation. They became like a pair of face-to-face mirrors generating an endless series of reflections. Ruth finally escaped by dumping a few coins in the mime's basket.

As if to spite someone—herself or the mime?—she marched over to the fair, determined to be carefree. Tonight was the meeting at which David was submitting his official request for early retirement. The thirty days weren't even up, but he thought it wasn't fair to the administration to make them wait since he knew he'd be taking the deal. She was in no hurry to get home and talk about it. Unless he'd changed his mind.

She meandered over to a “Do It Yourself Mask” table sponsored by the mid-town homeless shelter and did it herself, painting and decorating a mask that covered the top half of her face. She chose a hot dog and ear of corn from a vendor and congratulated herself on making a spontaneous choice. No pros and cons.

It came to her that she would choose a new bottle and pump from her ace-in-the-hole vendor—reliable, speedy, expensive—for the leaky seals. Time was, as Roger put it, “tick-tocking away” and she'd take budget flak instead of schedule flak. Mauve Magic would be only a little late and more than a little expensive but totally safe. She'd make up some of the budget bulge with her other Buy-and-Get-a-Bonus program, the “Color Me Beautiful” line.

The Colleen situation would take a little longer to figure out.

She moved on to the booths selling handicrafts. A dark, round-faced woman explained her “worry dolls” in halting English. If you took the six tiny dolls out of their yellow oval box and put them under your pillow at night, they'd absorb all your worries for you.

Ruth was drawn to the woman as much as the business: make the dolls, get a booth, sell them. No Buy and Get a Bonus, no office politics, no dress for success. She bought one set for herself and one for Josh.

She couldn't put it off any longer. On the trip home, she'd focus on setting up the Violins & Wine focus groups and, maybe, the meaning of her dream. And Colleen.

 

“HELLO?” SHE EXHALED into the phone as she ran into the house, fearing it was David worrying about her.

“Hi, Ruth, it's me.”

“Vivian, how are you?” Ruth took off her coat and deposited it on the floor. “I really had fun on Sunday, and I've been meaning to get back to you, but it's been—”

“No problem, you don't have to worry about the polite thank-yous, I know you had fun, I did too. It was so great to see you guys together after all these years. And Carlos … well Carlos may not have seemed to you to have a good time, but you have to understand he never does anything that isn't political. That was a lot of progress, and he enjoyed it. Believe me, he did.”

“Okay, if you say so.” She took off her sneakers and dropped them on her coat.

“I'm calling to ask a favor. It's funny that you're really the perfect one to help me out with this, and if I hadn't bumped into you last week, I don't know what I'd do. Because, really, I need help and there's no one else I could ask.”

Ruth took the bait. “What could I possibly do that nobody else could?” Her suit jacket landed on top of the sneakers, then, with some one-handed acrobatics, the pantyhose.

Vivian explained that she and Carlos were going to another of Ida's concerts in a couple of weeks. She just found out that Ida's boyfriend would be there and he was bringing his parents.

“Who's the boyfriend? Do we like him?” She threw her legs over the arm of the chair.

Vivian painted a verbal picture of Ida's boyfriend, his good values—meaning the same values as hers—and the fact that he made Ida happy. She wasn't so thrilled about his being a lawyer for a big corporate firm, but was dedicated to getting him to switch to litigation so he could do pro bono work. The problem was his parents.

They were investment bankers and, according to Vivian, the kind of people who think the poor are responsible for their own hard luck, who think anyone who wanted two BMWs could just roll up their sleeves and work hard for them.

“These people have no patience for people with a hair out of place. Like me.”

Ruth remembered meeting David's parents for the first time, when they came to visit him in Africa. They were conspicuously white, even compared to white people. Colorless. His mother carried a leather purse that smelled brand new, and she carried it with the strap at her elbow so her arm was folded in front of her, as if she were at a cotillion. And David's father kept leading her around with his hand on the small of her back, calling her “Mother.”

“Oops,” Ruth said. “So how do you four manage to be civil in front of the kids?”

It turned out Vivian and Carlos hadn't met them yet. But she knew exactly what they'd be like.

“So, the favor?” Ruth asked.

Ida had asked them, just this once, if they'd wear clothes like everyone else wore. “Not your hippy clothes,” she'd said.

She knew it was a lot to ask. But she thought that, the first time they were meeting the Danforths, it would be easier on everyone if they could tone it down, just a little, maybe help things go a little more smoothly.

Carlos, of course, refused immediately. Vivian mimicked his Spanish accent as she told of the interchange:

“You didn't think we were so terrible when you were arrested for demonstrating outside the student union and we were the only parents who were on your side. Then it was all right to be alternative, right? But now that you're hooking up with Mr. Country Club, we embarrass you? You want us to change who we are? Not on your life. If he loves you, he just has to live with who we are. And so do his parents, chiquita.”

Vivian agreed it shouldn't matter what they looked like, they were who they were. But she also wanted to help Ida out. She succumbed to Ida's argument that it wasn't the same as pretending to be someone else. They'd just be trying not to ignite knee-jerk prejudices with their clothing. They had plenty of time to ignite the prejudices later. Her attempt to placate Carlos was a refusal to change her hair.

“Of course, I wouldn't know how to calm down my hair, anyway.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Ruth said. “Some parents have to work two jobs for their kids, sweating and slaving and not getting any sleep. Others have to dress up. We all make sacrifices.”

“Very funny.”

“The favor?”

Vivian told Ruth that she sewed her own clothes. She had trouble finding things she liked that fit her and, besides, she enjoyed the freedom to visualize herself the way she wanted and turn the vision into reality. She'd been doing it for so long, though, she didn't know where or how to shop for clothing anymore. And she certainly didn't know how to shop for “regular” clothing.

“And I think you probably do, right?”

“You're asking me to go shopping with you?”

As if she were confessing her crimes to a judge, she said, “Yes, I'm asking you to help me shop for something to wear to Ida's concert so I can look like one of the regular people.”

Ruth laughed.

“You can just say ‘no,' you know, you don't need to make fun of me. God, I can't believe I actually built up my courage to ask you and—”

“No, Viv, that's not why I'm laughing.”

Meanwhile, David had gotten home. He held the tea kettle up with a raised-eyebrow question on his face. Ruth nodded as she continued. “It's because I always feel like
I'm
the one who doesn't know what to wear to these things.”

“I'm sure you know better than me.”

David held up three kinds of herb tea. She pointed to Apple Cinnamon.

“Why don't you sew something?”

“It's a lot of work to sew something I'm only going to wear once, at least I hope it's only going to be once.”

“I'm happy to help you. Want to go on Saturday?”

“This Saturday?”

“Day after tomorrow. Before you change your mind. And before Carlos talks you out of it.”

“It's a date.”

“Write it down.”

She joined David at the kitchen table. They blew into their cups and sipped, silently at first. After a day at work and then a phone conversation with Vivian, Ruth drank in the silence as much as the tea.

David spoke first. He had indeed notified the district of his retirement plans. She didn't like it, but was mostly reconciled to it. Even so, when he told her he'd done it, she sucked in her breath and blinked back tears.

“Hey, come on, honey. We talked about this, you knew I was going to do it. Right?”

“You're right, no problem. It's just so final. The end of something.”

David opened his mouth to speak but Ruth jumped in.

“I know, I know, it's the beginning of something, too, the glass is also half full. Let me just wallow for a second. I'll be fine.”

“That's not what I was going to say. If you're going to finish my sentences for me, finish them correctly.”

“Sorry.”

“I was going to say that I know what you mean about it being the end of … ”

“What do you mean?”

“When I left the meeting, I started looking at people and seeing the ones I'd miss and the ones I'd be glad to be rid of. I sort of jumped into the future and saw it all in the past tense even though I'm still in the present. Kind of spooky.”