Opening Belle (5 page)

“You see, when I called the head of research to finalize the offer to Sook and to come by his office for a handshake, I wasn't prepared for the response I got.”

“So what was the response?” asked Violette, visibly annoyed by Alice's buildup.

Here, Alice physically imitates answering a phone, looking over our heads, pushing her thick glasses closer to her eyes. “I got a phone call from a research director asking me if I had actually
met
Sook.”

Alice sits back in her chair, thoughtfully choosing her next words.

“So I said to him, ‘Of course I've met Sook, he's interviewed here six times, he's terrific with the models',” she says, referring to the earnings predictions he would be responsible for creating.

“ ‘Alice, he's Or-i-en-tal,' Mr. Director told me.”

Alice holds an imaginary phone away from her, staring at the receiver quizzically. Her focus came back to the women at the table.

“Ladies, I swear, I thought I was being set up.”

She puts the phone back to her ear, pretending again to speak with the assistant director. “ ‘I believe the term is
Asian American
,' ” she says softly.

“ ‘They're different from us,' I was then told.”

“ ‘Different how?' ”

“ ‘Well, he'll drink tea and stuff, and keep food in his desk,' ” the director told me.

“ ‘Sook is the most talented person I interviewed and I'm hiring him,' I said. Then just as I was hanging up he said, ‘Between the fags and chinks in this place, how do I make any progress in the
Institutional Investor
research rankings?' Then, ladies, he hung up.”

We all pause, hanging midmovement while the music in the background seems to get louder.

The other research member at our table is a Julia Roberts look-alike: Nancy Hogan, who was begged to join Feagin with an enormous contract. Her drive and natural intelligence were Street-famous. Nancy gave her boss days and nights for two years, tirelessly completing tasks that she'd drop everything for. One day, however, she shared too much information with her boss, Thomas Toff.

She had a boyfriend and then she didn't. The fact that she was in New York and he was in London had prolonged what should have been a two-week fling into a six-month relationship. But due to some Russian roulette version of birth control, she was expecting his child. When she could no longer walk around with her skirts open in the back, her blouses hanging over them to camouflage her new girth, she went into Toff's office.

“I went in there expecting to be congratulated. I mean, he's a family guy and loves kids. Instead he said to me,” and here she took an enormous swallow of beer, “ ‘I know a place where you can get that taken care of.' ”

“Take care of what?” asked Alice, someone I knew was desperate to have a baby.

“Have an abortion.”

“Wait. You were six months pregnant,” Amy said.

“Thomas was upset at the potential disruption of his own work. He started openly complaining about me, telling people that I kept running off for sonograms.”

I remember Toff telling me Nancy's timing couldn't be worse, so I asked him if his own wife got sonograms with their children. “My wife had a husband with a job,” Toff had told me.

Nancy now tells the table something I knew was coming.

“I'm leaving right after bonuses this year,” she says.

Another very educated talent will walk out the door, leaving no record anywhere of what went on. Nancy, like many before her, will simply evaporate.

“I want to go home to Minnesota,” she tells the table. “Minds are more open there.”

It was Amy's idea to get us together tonight but it is Amanda Mandelbaum who makes things happen. Amanda is like the aunt who remembers everyone's birthday, who always has something in the refrigerator, who gets truly concerned if you're sick, who says the things you think but would never dare say out loud. She has an ambitious side that enabled her to claw her way from sales assistant status to some purgatorial state of almost vice president. She's made the numbers yet hasn't gotten the title due to her rough exterior. Simon, my boss, told me to “get her to quit acting like a dude.” She's five feet two inches of dynamic energy that gets easily irritated.

“So my career is going nowhere if the culture doesn't change, and we're the only ones who can do something about that,” Amanda says.

“What exactly do you have in mind?” Alice says, pursing her lips together.

“We meet regularly. We do some things to change the culture. Not with lawsuits but with words. We use the right words at the right moments along with purposeful acts that draw attention to men behaving badly.”

This all sounds almost sweet to me. Sweet and naïve. Still, if I were to bet on any change coming our way, Amanda would be the one to make something happen.

“We should meet once a month,” she says.

“At least,” someone responds.

“I'll send out meeting notifications by email, with ‘GCC' under the subject line. They will be from an unknown ISP so look in your spam frequently.”

Heads nod. Mine does not.

“Meetings will rotate from restaurant to restaurant and not be in Midtown. It would look strange for us all to be seen together.”

I finally speak. “What's with the ‘GCC'?” A harmless enough question.

“I've just named our group,” Amanda says. “The Glass Ceiling Club, the club for women who cannot see what in the hell is invisibly blocking them from moving up. We will work to change this entrenched culture and we're going to do it with manners, without lawsuits or headlines in newspapers.”

“Fitting enough,” I say, feeling slightly energized, high school–ish, and even a little hopeful before I remember that I shouldn't take part in any of this stuff. I can't afford the financial punishments of hanging with the rebels. I tell myself I'll stay on the sidelines.

The Glass Ceiling Club vows not to be catty or spiteful. They promise to be forward-looking and not gripe about the past. They promise to help nurture and maintain the young women who recycle through our ranks like yesterday's newspaper, and swear to no longer ignore the locker room environment we work in. Without lawsuits or media, we aim to work like grown-ups in breaking up—as a former CEO described it—“the last culturally pure environment in America.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I'm in a steamy outdoor shower on some tropical island. Not really. I'm home. My head is hurting as if that party were some off-the-hook night to remember, as if that meeting at the Ear Inn were some beer pong, Jell-O shot throwback, but the pain in my head is really just from sleep deprivation. My kids are hollering on the other side of the door, and it smells like fruit on steroids in here. Magic Marjorie's Mango Shampoo, Dumbo's Sweet Strawberry Soap, Slime Lime Body Wash, Power Rangers He-Man Grape-Scented Conditioner. These are the smells of a shower ruled by children. I'm not sure when my salon-worthy soaps, shampoos, and conditioners got taken over by the marketing division of Nick Jr., but the smell is so sweet I can bite it. I used to have face creams from Chanel, plumping gels from La Mer, but at some point, my supply of $90-per-ounce stuff got used as diaper rash cream, and was never replaced. Most days I smell like I will on this one: like a human Scratch 'n Sniff.

Outside the bathroom door, my seven- and four-year-old bounce on the bed. One jumps on either side of the lump in the middle that is their father. Sometimes Bruce does this fake-sleep thing to avoid our programmed conversations of late:

“Who was Kevin's playdate with?” I ask.

“Ya know, that brat from Australia, what's his name?” He lifts the bedcovers up just enough to let himself be heard.

“Digby?”

“Sounds right.”

I want to scream that Digby is forbidden here, that he's out of control, a future drug dealer and leader of organized crime, but instead I swallow the screams and say in a chirpy voice, “Isn't it great? The baby slept through the night.” When I finally came back home last night Bruce was back in our bed and Owen was in his crib.

“Hmph,” the lump replies. “He's not really a baby. He's almost three.” With that he lets the covers fall again and I swallow the urge to tear them off and shake him. Is this really the guy I married?

“Owen has had dry Pull-Ups for two weeks now,” I say, as if this really excites me. What I really want to say is
I love you so please get up and get a regular job in the world. Please stop being the depressed house daddy because it makes me feel like I'm all alone in this and I'm cracking.

But even fake, pleasant bathroom talk isn't getting a rise out of him this morning. It'd be so easy to turn into a whistle-blowing drill sergeant commanding the ship that I'm not aboard during the day, but I try hard not to. Still, there's only a few minutes before I head out into the world, and I need to be sure we've both got the information to get us to the next day.

I do it all in my head: Who drops the kids at school? (Bruce.) Who needs what supplies? (Me/Internet.) Order groceries? (Me/online.) Who will wait for the never-on-time nanny until she enters squawking a myriad of excuses? (Bruce.) I'm trying hard not to succumb to the instinct to holler the orders that sit like exploding Pop Rocks in my mouth, waiting to be spat out.

Baby Owen is still asleep, which selfishly thrills me. By this hour, he's usually clawing at my neck, panic rising from his pores. He knows his mother's time of departure draws near and he hates it when I leave. I tell myself his behavior is age-related. My other two kids did the same until they eventually accepted that I leave each morning, regardless of their efforts, and that I always come back. The fact that Bruce hangs out with them is my comfort. I mean, they have one parent for most of their mornings, and that's as good as it gets. But Baby Owen can sure emit projectile tears better than his siblings ever did, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't break my heart. Everything in his body language screams of mother-abandonment issues. I do hate those days when he's asleep in the morning when I leave, and asleep when I come home at night. I imagine that he'll simply think it's been one long day when he finally sets his eyes on me tomorrow.

I pick out the three outfits the children will wear for the day. This used to be Bruce's job until the teacher of our four-year-old called me to ask why Brigid never wears panties to school, and why on that particular February morning, she was wearing open-toed sandals with no socks. “It's what she chooses,” was Bruce's defense. “And I don't wear socks with loafers in February either.”

“But she's FOUR!”

“And I'm thirty-nine!” he had screamed back. From that day forward, I have always been the one to leave out their clothes.

When I finally get clothes on myself, Brigid plops her shoe choice for me on the bed. This is our deal: I choose for her and she chooses for me. Today it will be the three-inch stilettos complete with rhinestones across the toes. I put them on and stand back to take it all in.

“Match good,” she says, satisfied with her choice.

“Nice and flashy,” I reply.

“Snazzy,” she continues.

Brigid is having a good time trying out new words. I have no idea where
snazzy
has come from.

“Snazzy,” I agree, admiring her blue eyes that seem largest in the morning.

The lump in the bed groans. My newish auto-alert goes off, that one about trying to remain sexy despite my role as the mother ship. As much as I don't want to, it's time to reignite this morning's inner babe. I head to the lump.

“Do you like Brigid's choice?” I ask him, seductively putting one bent leg up on the bed.

I lift the duvet off his head so he can take in the view. My skirt has hiked up just enough for him to catch the top of my thigh-high hose. Brigid sees them too. “Big socks,” she says bluntly, pointing at my thighs. His sandy-blond hair is revealed. While it's moplike, I refrain from suggesting a haircut today. In fact I find myself wondering how he still looks so good. There isn't a line on his sleep-deprived face and even with the sun directly on his head, not one gray hair reveals itself. He opens one green eye and arches his eyebrow.

“The stripper shoes really make the outfit,” he says, reaching a bare arm out of the covers. He grabs my calf and purrs. Brigid thinks this is fantastic.

“Daddy's a big cat,” she shrieks.

“Daddy's a lion,” he answers. “He's gonna eat Mommy up.”

Brigid runs screaming down the hall and I return my foot to the floor.

“Good day, Big Lion,” I say in a fake English accent. Because the thing we do when we're uncomfortable with each other is break out in random foreign accents. I have no idea why.

“Au revoir, Mademoiselle Big Tease,” he returns in some Pepé Le Pew voice.

He's right. Nothing can actually occur between us right now and even if we were alone at this exact second, my biggest desire would be to take the damn big socks off and go back to sleep. Bruce pulls the covers back over his head.

Before I leave I try and reach out to each kid, to make eye contact at least once in every twenty-four-hour period. I turn to my eldest, Kevin, who's still standing on the bed.

“I saw a Blue-Eyes White Dragon on a kid's backpack the other day,” I say.

Kevin's latest obsession is
Yu-Gi-Oh!
cards.

“Cool,” he says, clearly not interested. He has found the remote and is trying to get our childproof television on.

I bend forward to peck his cheek but kiss mostly air because he's started bouncing again. Brigid has returned but no longer jumps simultaneously with him; instead they go one up, one down, and are probably making Bruce nuts. I sweep my wet hair back into a slick bun; I kiss the jumpers, and the lump, and head to the door. I'm not even fully in the elevator when I hear the Cartoon Network come on the television. Bruce's sudden alertness is not lost on me.