Chapter 3
3
I’d delayed it as long as I could but it was time to start work. At my desk in the spare room, before I’d even clicked on my new emails, my heart rate increased.
—
“Honey?” Behind me, Angelo put a calming hand on my shoulder. “You need anything?”
Gratefully, I reached up to grasp his wrist. “Thank you. Can I—”
“The usual? Got it.” He kissed the top of my head, grabbed a mask and left the apartment to buy a decaf latte and a muffin. I exhaled. He was an angel—the kindest, the most supportive man. My earlier burst of irritation shamed me. I could hardly complain about Angelo’s spiritual capers; they made him the amazing person he was.
Proof—he’d gone down to the outside world to buy me hot, calming things even though he was busier than I was. He worked as an art dealer, a job title I automatically translated to “con man,” at least before I knew him.
He’d come into my life via my sister Rachel, who moved in the same Personal Growth circles as him. (They’d first met at Finding Inner Peace While Your World Burns. Just leaving that there.)
Rachel, an addict in recovery, was on an open-ended quest for enlightenment. All Angelo had was a commitment to being “The best version of himself.” To use my best friend Jacqui’s phrase, he was a full-blown Feathery Stroker.
The concept of a Feathery Stroker dated back to the early aughts when Jacqui had spent a disappointing night with a man who’d done nothing but stroke her in a gentle “feathery” fashion. She’d have preferred to be flung about the bed, perhaps even to have an inexpensive item of clothing torn from her body.
Describing a drama-free, drippy man, the phrase was an instant hit. But as time passed, it widened to encompass men who noticed you’d had your hair cut, men who were good to their mothers, men who ordered a dessert that wasn’t cheese and men who changed their sheets more than once a year. It was a damning diagnosis.
Time passed, though. Life happened, sensibilities softened and by the time I met Angelo, a Feathery Stroker was just the ticket—and he was peak Feathery Stroker.
Mind you, with his long hair, gaunt face, dark clothing and multiplicity of tats, he looked like trouble. But he was light-hearted, always interesting and gave me space.
And here was my favorite Feathery Stroker, back with my latte and muffin.
After the calming effects of hot milk and sugary carbs took effect, finally I opened the emails. For years, each day used to begin with me lunging for my iPad, diving head first into a pool of stress. Now I deferred anything daunting for as long as possible.
And it didn’t get more daunting than this, the time around the launch of a new brand.
What happened was, over a year ago, my most important client, a heritage cosmetic brand (beloved by bony white ladies—I’ll say no more) decided they wanted in on the lucrative BIPOC market. Although they had several diffusion lines, this was the first to cross color lines. The result, conjured up in a marketing meeting, was Yemoja, a fake “street” brand aimed at black women. All the formulations had been appropriated from actual street brands, then repackaged and presented.
The unfairness had made me deeply sad. Unfortunately I was paid to be manically enthusiastic, usually something I managed even if it was as fake as my eyelashes. This time it was almost impossible. The phrase burnout had been floating in my head for a while. But whenever I tried it on for size, a voice in my head yelled, “Poor Anna, oh, poor, poor Anna.” I wasn’t a nurse working in ER, I wasn’t a shelf-stacker on a part-time contract, I had the best job, with unlimited access to liquid exfoliators.
When the pandemic first hit I felt certain that a nation under lockdown was hardly going to buy beauty products—which meant I’d be fired. While the US is not a great place to be without an income, I was calm. Even hopeful. Perhaps I could move to a farm and grow strawberries?
Except…sales of beauty products increased. It made no sense. None! We were trapped in our homes: who were we wearing it for? The only physical humans we clapped eyes on were the drivers dropping off our plentiful online orders. So…were they delivering cosmetics for us to wear to open the door to them, dropping off the boxes of beauty stuff?
…Had I stumbled on some essential truth about the self-perpetuating nature of capitalism? I meditated on it for a good four or five minutes, then felt as if my brain had tilted to one side and things were falling out.
Suddenly I had more work than ever but each day was a joyless grind of Zoom meetings where motivating my staff was impossible because of the strange pouch of skin which had appeared between my chin and the top of my neck. I looked like a pelican! When had this happened? And how come it didn’t show up in mirrors or photos?
Even more demoralizing than the Pouch was knowing I should never have been in charge of Yemoja. Two of my colleagues, Kamilah and Monifa, were brilliant publicists and, unlike me, were African American. Before the project began, I pleaded with the grown-ups (Ariella and Franklin, both white) to reallocate the account.
Instead, they seconded Kamilah and Monifa to my team. Suddenly, two women who, like me, were Account Presidents became my juniors. Obviously it humiliated them but it was also some kind of weird slap down of me. Knock it off, Anna, you and your woke bullshit.
(Like many women, I had imposter syndrome. But not just the usual one, where I felt I didn’t deserve my job. I also felt as if a cynical, money-mad person colonized my body for eleven hours a day, living a life the real me despised.)
Right away with Yemoja, there was just so much cultural nuance I missed. Without Kamilah and Monifa I’d have gone under. Quickly, they identified the foundation as the hero product. It was the obvious choice to launch the campaign.
Yesterday, samples had been couriered to four hundred hand-selected beauty influencers across the USA. Waiting for their verdict was always an anxious time. It was probably too soon yet to have heard anything, but you never knew.
As soon as I logged on, the enormous volume of new emails in my inbox indicated something was afoot. My heart pounding, my mouth dry, I powered up my cell; immediately it began beeping and binging with countless notifications and missed calls.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Ariella had left a voice message, yelling at me to pick up my calls and, oh yeah, the samples of Yemoja foundation contained a skin-lightening agent—one of the vloggers had made the discovery and had put us on blast. A second voice message followed, in which Ariella yelled that it was in all of the samples.
Sitting at my desk, I almost vomited: makeup formulated specifically for black skin contained bleach.
Bleach doesn’t just accidentally pour itself into bottles of foundation, this had to be sabotage. Maybe someone protesting the land grab the bony white company had made in an African-American marketplace? Who could blame them? But sorting that out was someone else’s job. Mine was to protect the entire company—not just Yemoja but the bony one and their other diffusion lines—from the mother of all backlashes. Specifically a catastrophic drop in their share price.
Fixing the unfixable was what I did but, oh my God, the horror. I called an emergency Zoom meeting, my heart pounding in my ears, my breath coming in shallow sips.
Here was Ariella, big-haired and breathing fire. And Franklin, twitching away goodo, a nervous breakdown barely contained by a Dior suit. And three, four—no, five —senior staff from the client, including their CEO Mr Vogt. Whenever I saw the man, I heard the three violin shrieks from Psycho .
Everyone was freaking out and demanding to know my plan. I was adamant that our only option was sincere remorse.
“We personally speak to each influencer, doing everything to persuade them the company isn’t racist.”
Mr Vogt didn’t like that. “Makes us look weak.”
“How can we style this out? There’s literal bleach in the product.”
Everyone seemed startled by my belligerence including, I must admit, myself.
“We need a fund.” I named a large sum of money. “Donations to African-American charities. The influencers get to choose.”
“Ariella?” Mr Vogt asked. “You trust her?”
“Sure.” But Ariella’s shrug was an exercise in hedging her bets.
Vogt leant nearer his camera and narrowed his eyes. “Anna, if this doesn’t work, it’s on you. Hear this, the share price is down sixteen points, those shareholders are pissed . You have to fix it.”
Briefly I considered the impact of a class action taken against me by the bony shareholders. I’d be bankrupted for a thousand lifetimes.
As everyone logged off, I had a moment of deep calm: I can’t do this anymore. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it, but it was the first time I knew it was true.