Who You Know Read online

It was about 9:30 when Jen and I stopped talking and started pretending to work. I went back for three more cups of coffee in an attempt to caffeinate myself to the brink of functioning. Not that my new job wasn’t infinitely better than harassing strangers over the phone into answering quantitative questions about their favorite shampoo brands, but it got pretty dull all the same.

  JEN

  Office Romance: How to Royally Screw Over Your Career

  All was chaos and misery. How was I supposed to get any work done in such an environment? Jim from sales was buying a bride from overseas and my officemate Avery was trying to get herself some nookie by begging for it over the Internet. My own love life was in absolute shambles despite my heroic efforts. Where was gorgeous Tom from IT? Why hadn’t he come to heed my call for help? Did he care at all how much effort it took to think of new ways to get my computer to crash or new programs I absolutely had to have installed just to lure him up to my office? The efforts I went to for love!

  Of course I’d always thought Tom was magically delicious, but until four weeks ago I’d had to restrain my lust in the name of monogamy. No more!

  Since Dave and I broke up for the fifth, and absolutely last, time, I’d lost six pounds. There was nothing like brutal rejection to get a girl to lose her appetite. But it was the best thing; it really was. I was so over his gambling, titty-bar-going, drunken bullshit. Yeah he was hot and had a great body and was so much fun. You don’t realize how boring most guys are until you break up with your boyfriend. During the times Dave and I were separated, I went out with men who were so excruciatingly dull, Dave’s DUI’s and unpaid credit card bills and absolute avoidance of housework seemed like no big deal. Endless dinners talking about the real estate market and foot surgery would send me running back to Dave with open arms. But did Dave’s exceptional talents in oral sex make up for the fact he ravaged my credit rating? (I know, it was so stupid for me to cosign his car loan, but I was in love and what was a girl with a properly cared for clitoris to do when Dave pointed out that we were, after all, going to get married someday and our finances would essentially be combined anyway, and in any case, his gorgeous brown eyes and sexy smile were asking so sweetly?) No. Did toe-curling neck-kissing abilities make up for the fact he almost never took me out to dinner and absolutely never made me dinner at any time during the three or so years we lived together despite all the gourmet meals I spent hours planning and preparing? No. Did the way he could always make me laugh, no matter how much he was acting like an asshole, make up for all the nights he blew me off to hang out with his friends? No. But god I missed the way he made me laugh.

  Okay, of course I still loved Dave. We had our share of trouble, what couple doesn’t? We were together for five years, with stretches of separations and time-outs here and there. After I graduated from the University of Minnesota, I moved out here with him and we moved in together. Even with all the fighting and the occasional broken window, I always knew we’d work it out. We were young, we both had some oats to sow. I wasn’t worried.

  But I had to face the truth, and the truth was Dave and I were toxic together. Now I was twenty-five and the pressure was on. I didn’t want to be some old biddy when I had my kids. I needed to find a good man who would be a good father to our kids, and I needed to do it fast. Even if I met a guy soon, we’d need a year to date and a year to plan the wedding and then a year to be a young married couple without kids. Then I’d promptly get pregnant and nine months later I’d have our first kid with hardly any time to spare before I turned thirty.

  I needed a guy who could support me while I raised our kids. I used to think I wanted to be some big career woman. Then I got a job, and let me tell you, work sucks. Maybe there were some people out there who had careers that challenged their creativity and helped them learn and grow in some fulfilling sort of way. Maybe there were people who’d managed to get jobs with managers who weren’t complete idiots. I wasn’t one of them. Screw my career. I just wanted to be a good wife and mom.

  It really was the best thing that Dave and I had broken up. Dave was not the kind of guy who would be a good father to our children even though, god, they’d be soooo cute. A bartender and ski instructor who’d never finished college couldn’t afford to let me stay home with the kids.

  Speaking of men in upwardly mobile careers, where exactly was Tom? Didn’t he care about the loss of productivity? How was I supposed to get any work done if my computer crashed every time I opened Photoshop? Did he need to know I didn’t actually need to use Photoshop because Avery did all the graphics?

  How was I supposed to concentrate on work when I was in the midst of a fertility and romantic crisis? And who could work in such a managerially dysfunctional environment anyway?

  McKenna Marketing reminded me of the double-blind studies I learned about in psychology class in college. That’s when doctors prescribe patients pills, and neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is getting the placebo. That’s the way things worked around here. Absolutely no one knew what was going on. Orders were issued without the order-giver having any clue how things work in the real world. We order-takers nodded dumbly and tried to look busy, never really understanding what it was we were allegedly getting paid to do. The amount of work my manager Sharon assigned and the time we were given to get it done in was so wildly unrealistic, there seemed no point in even trying. Sharon was only another hapless cog in the McKenna Marketing machine. I understood that she took her orders from above and was not nearly as important as she thought she was, but it seemed to me that she should be the one to let the higher-ups know what could and couldn’t be accomplished in an eight-hour workday instead of always saying, “Yessah, yessah, we’ll get it all done, sah.”

  “Tom!”

  “Hi, I heard your computer crashed again.” He stood in the doorway, his thick arm muscles rippling Adonis-like from the sleeves of his T-shirt. “It may be time to get you a newer machine. You’ve been having a lot of troubles lately. What’s the latest issue?”

  “Every time I open Photoshop I crash.”

  “What on earth do you need Photoshop for?” my evil officemate Avery asked.

  I gave her a look, trying to telepathically communicate to her that just because her vagina was cobwebbed and decayed like a long-forgotten ancient artifact, she didn’t need to foil my plans. Honestly. She could really be pretty if she tried, and then she wouldn’t have to go to such extremes to find a guy. She never wore makeup for one thing, and she never did anything with her hair. She was totally skinny but hid her figure in these loose cotton pantsuits or flower-child long skirts and flowing blouses. She did have nice features—a gorgeous long neck and cheekbones to die for, to start with. And her eyes were a stunning shade of blue. If she would only wear some makeup to play them up! And right now I could count not one but two scraggily eyebrow hairs. I wanted to leap across the desk and pluck them out myself.

  “I’m adding some visuals to the Expert reports.”

  “Maybe you just need some more memory. Do you know how much memory your machine has?” Tom said.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll just take a look.” He leaned over me and typed in some things on my keyboard. I sat, immobilized, my heart racing with him so close. “Wow, that’s a lot lower than I would have thought. I wonder if your memory may have been dislodged. Has anyone moved the case recently? I’ll just check out the motherboard. Excuse me.” Tom crawled under my desk.

  I rolled my chair out a little, but only a little, to give him room, but not too much. Like all the guys in the IT department, Tom always wore jeans. But nobody made jeans look as good as Tom. The denim was drawn tight over his muscular thighs, and I had the ideal vantage point from which to enjoy them fully.

  He’d started working at McKenna Marketing five months ago. Of course I’d thought he was hot the moment I’d laid eyes on him, but I hadn’t truly lusted after him until I had a chance to talk to him at a company picnic in August. That’s when I found out th
at, before he’d gotten this boring office job, he’d worked as a firefighter, a white-water rafting guide, a blackjack dealer at a casino in Blackhawk, and a carpenter. And he was only twenty-eight! When he got sick of making crappy wages, he started going to night classes to get his associate’s degree in computer science.

  Plus, he and his girlfriend had broken up two months ago. Just enough time for him to be so over her.

  We were perfect for each other.

  “Avery,” I asked, “are you going to Rios tomorrow night after work?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “You have to come so you can buy me a drink to celebrate my breakup from Dave.”

  Avery shook her head and smiled. She kept right on working as she said, “We’ll see.”

  “How about you, Tom, are you going to come out with us tomorrow night? You can bring your girlfriend,” I said.

  Tom came out from under the desk. “I don’t have a girlfriend, thank god. I broke up with her a while ago. She was a sweet girl, but man, what a psycho.”

  “Oh really, that’s a shame. You two made such a cute couple.”

  He shrugged.

  “So what about tomorrow night?”

  “I have some plans with some buddies of mine.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Where are you going? You guys should stop by Rios if you can, it’ll be fun.”

  “We’ll see. I’m going to see about getting you some more memory. I’ll be back.”

  “Thanks so much,” I said.

  “No problem.”

  I sighed. It was far more interesting to watch Tom’s blue-jean-clad ass than it was to type up a report on features people wanted in an oven. Alas.

  RETTE

  The Interview

  Bound in my nylons, navy blue suit, and high-heeled shoes, I tried to coax my car into transporting me to my job interview.

  My sorry-looking ’87 Subaru always had to pull this shit when I had some place important to be. The engine finally turned over, but it wasn’t happy about it.

  I couldn’t complain. It was amazing that the car made it all the way from Minneapolis to Boulder. Still, I prayed it would cling to life for a few more months, at least until I could get a decent job. It was a long shot, as the Subaru had repeatedly made it clear that death was imminent.

  On the drive from Minnesota, Greg had driven behind me so he could rescue me lest my car conk out for good. The Subaru made it, but various features in the car went quietly kaput, the most troubling of which was the demise of the driver’s seat. At one moment I was driving along the interstate in a seated, upright position, and in the next instant I heard a little snap and I was suddenly supine and staring at the sky through the sunroof. It took me a long moment to understand what had happened, then I screamed and bolted upright, relieved to discover that I hadn’t drifted into oncoming traffic. It was twenty miles until the next gas station. Twenty miles of driving without any back support whatsoever is harder than it sounds. At the gas station, Greg wedged a block of wood in to get the back of the driver’s seat to be almost but not quite upright. Now when I drove I had to sit at an unnatural angle that made me feel as if I were manning a lunar space module.

  Then there was the matter of the sunroof. It wouldn’t latch. I had tied it down with a shoelace, but it still didn’t close completely. Greg used electrical tape to seal the gap, but rain always managed to drip through anyway. Because of Colorado’s frequent afternoon thunderstorms, I’d gotten used to driving smashed up against the driver’s side door to avoid getting completely drenched. At stoplights, with my face mashed up against the window, I tried desperately to avoid the gazes of the drivers who pulled up beside me and observed my contorted position with confusion or amusement.

  Today, happily, was sunny, and the fact that I wouldn’t arrive at my interview sopping wet seemed a good omen. I popped in an Indigo Girls tape and sang along with Amy and Emily.

  I had just turned onto the highway when a rock hit my windshield. For a moment I thought the popping sound was a gunshot and the glass shrapnel that whizzed by my eye was a bullet. The crack in the glass burned its way across the windshield, making it hard to get a clear view. The splintered glass changed its trajectory, fashioning a complicated web. Like I wasn’t jittery enough.

  My heart pounded furiously against my full-coverage support bra as terrifying thoughts seared through my head: What if the glass hadn’t missed my eye and I’d been blinded and then spun wildly into traffic, leaving a trail of blood and carnage, my dead body hurled from the car into a Mack truck that, upon impact, exploded into a firestorm of destruction?

  Okay, the good news: I wasn’t dead. The bad news was that, now, in addition to being forced to drive at an entirely unnatural incline because of my busted-up driver’s seat, I could only see through the bottom part of the windshield like you do in the winter when the defrost has only cleared the first couple inches.

  Oh well. The car was worth about fifty cents with or without a cracked windshield.

  I found McKenna Marketing without further hazard and the human resources director started me off with two hours’ worth of spelling and editing tests. By the time I’d handed in the battery of exams, I was more frazzled than ever. My lipstick had worn off from chewing my pencil nervously, my hair was disheveled from slapping my head in an effort to kick-start my brain into thinking, and my eyebrows were furrowed tightly with stress. As the HR director alerted the managing editor that I was ready to see her, I took deep breaths and struggled to gain a modicum of composure.

  “We’re so glad you could make it,” Eleanore, the manager of the editorial department, boomed as she stormed into the waiting area. She had wild, dyed-to-cover-the-gray blond hair and a huge, artsy medallion hanging from her neck. She wore a tremendous amount of makeup, which somehow seemed to accentuate her wrinkling, crepey skin. She was tall and perilously skinny.

  Eleanore was flanked by her assistant, Paige, for whom the effort of uttering her almost inaudible greeting seemed to make her so nervous it heightened my own already epic anxiety, and Sharon, a marketing manager who I noticed, despite my nervousness, had made some truly unfortunate fashion and hairstyle decisions. Why on earth would a pregnant woman with ponderous thighs and sallow skin think a short yellow dress with large sunflowers was a good idea?

  They led me into a conference room where the three of them sat on one side of the oblong table and I sat across from them. I cleared my throat more often than necessary.

  “As I explained over the phone, our company is growing rapidly, and we need another editor,” Eleanore began. “Paige has been putting in all kinds of overtime to get the job done. That’s what’s expected at a growing company, but even with all our hard work, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get through all the brochures and reports generated by the McKenna Marketing staff. So, tell us about your interest in editing marketing materials.”

  Ouch. “Well, I’m not an expert, but I love learning about new things.” True. “I really enjoyed editing for the business journal in Minnesota.” False. “That’s why I worked there every summer when I was in college.” False. I worked there because they paid me seven dollars an hour, which, since it had the distinction of being more than minimum wage, seemed like a lot of money at the time, plus Mom was friends with the publisher. I hoped she didn’t notice that I didn’t actually answer her question.

  “What was it that you enjoyed about the business journal?”

  “Well . . . I, uh, learned a lot. I enjoy making things clearer for the reader, cleaning up poor grammar, and checking facts.” Not entirely false.

  “You enjoyed fact checking?” Eleanore and her entourage laughed a mirthless, corporate laugh.

  “I know that sounds weird. I guess I just like taking pride in my work and making sure things are accurate. Some of the stories I worked on were pretty complicated, and I liked . . . it was kind of like putting a complex puzzle together, and I don’t know, call me weird, I think that stuff is
fun. Editors are kind of, I don’t know, not like regular folks. We can debate for hours over whether a hyphen should be put between two words. That is not most people’s idea of a good time.”

  “Why did you quit teaching?” Eleanore asked.

  “Well, my fiancé . . .”

  “You’re getting married?” Eleanore said. “Paige just got married eight months ago.”

  “Great, great,” I gushed.

  “When are you getting married?” Sharon asked.

  “August fifteenth.”

  “Congratulations,” Eleanore said.

  “Yeah, it’s exciting.” Smile, smile, enthusiasm, enthusiasm. “So, teaching was difficult, but I enjoyed it.” True, false. Oh god, did I say difficult? Shit. I meant challenging. Challenging. “But when my fiancé wanted to leave Minnesota to go to graduate school, it seemed like a good way to get out . . . to see some other parts of the country.”

  “Margarette,” Eleanore said, “where do you see yourself in ten years?”

  The question threw me. What exactly was it that I wanted to do for a living ten years from now? Did I want to move up and become a manager? Would I be editing business shit I wasn’t interested in? I cleared my throat. It was taking me too long to answer. “That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure exactly. I know I want to be working in the editorial field. I want a job where I’m always learning and growing and being challenged. It’s hard to say where I’ll be in ten years because things can change so much. I used to think I would teach English until I died, but . . . I don’t know. I think it’s important to be open to change.” I sounded like a job-hopper, an aimless Gen X slacker. “And yet, stability also is good, too. Stability and change. It’s a juggling act, sort of.” What mentally deficient imbecile was this argument going to sway? And tell me I didn’t just end a sentence with a preposition while interviewing for an editorial job. Why did they mock me by continuing to ask me questions when I was clearly an unemployable loser?