NINETEEN #2
I ran halfway up the block before I worked up the courage to look behind me.
I paused, bent over slightly, with my hands on my thighs, trying to catch my breath.
I half-expected to see Yoga Pants storming up the block, accompanied by an NYPD officer and an angry mob of Upper East Side nannies, pointing me out.
There she is! That’s the impostor! Stop her!
I started running again, heading east. Up ahead, I spotted a bank of anonymous, old-fashioned pay phones—one of the few that still existed in this part of Manhattan.
I slowed to a walk. I looked around cautiously—not sure exactly who I expected might stop me—and then stepped toward the first booth.
I didn’t know that I was going to do it.
It was automatic. My fingers didn’t need to be told what to do.
I dialed my old work number.
Morbid curiosity had gotten the better of me.
The line rang three times, but instead of clicking over to my own familiar recorded greeting, I heard Margo’s voice: Hello.
You have reached the voice mailbox of Ingrid Yung.
Please be aware that, effective immediately, Ms. Yung is no longer associated with the law firm of Parsons Valentine and Hunt, and any personal messages left on this line will not be retrieved.
If you are calling with a business-related inquiry, please dial zero for Reception, and your call will be redirected to another attorney.
Only someone who knew Margo as well as I did would be able to detect the sad little hiccup in her voice that revealed itself at the very end of the message. Good old Margo. I missed her.
Back home, in the relative safety of my apartment, whose mortgage I would soon not be able to afford, I tossed my newspaper and bagel onto the polished marble counter, sank down at my kitchen table, and held my head in both hands.
My God, I was losing it, I was really losing it.
I had just pretended to be the guardian of a strange child. I had just dialed my own voice mail.
I had the sudden, wrenching thought that I had become the kind of person that other people felt sorry for. Me. Ingrid Sabrina Yung. That was, after all, why Yoga Pants was trying to help me, right? Because she thought I was someone who needed a job?
Well, I admonished myself, you do need a job! What, was being a nanny really so beneath me? Hadn’t Rachel always said that I was great with Isabel and Jacob? Maybe, just maybe, I could do worse than to call Yoga Pants back.
In all the books and movies, wasn’t that exactly what happened to career girls like me?
Weren’t we forever coming to some work epiphany or other, cursing out our domineering bosses once and for all, finally speaking our minds and telling them what for, then flouncing dramatically out of our midtown glass towers to discover an amazing untapped aptitude for cupcake baking, or handbag sewing, or dog walking, or some such?
Isn’t that how we were all expected to start over and save ourselves, if all those stories were to be believed?
Either that, or meet and marry Mr. Right and hope that he had a decent place to live?
Well, I couldn’t bake, for one. I’d never been big on sewing, either. And I’d recently tried what I thought was the Mr. Right route and had found myself painfully, tragically, mistaken.
Oh God. I suddenly felt very, very tired. I folded my arms and laid my head down on the table.
So this was what it all came down to. After all my hard work, I would not be making history after all. I would be calling Yoga Pants to be placed with a family who wanted an Asian-speaking nanny.
I sat there with my head on my kitchen table for a long, long time. I breathed in and out, steadily, listening to the muffled sounds of midday traffic drifting up from nineteen stories below, and thinking.
I was shocked by just how swiftly and completely I’d been shorn of the identifying, qualifying marks—briefcase, BlackBerry, business section of the Times—that had inoculated me for all of these years.
I realized, with something very close to guilt, that I’d spent the better part of my life diligently accumulating, and then jealously guarding, my private trove of these Inoculating Marks.
We all hoarded them—all of us Minority Darlings who had made it this far.
We collected something else, too, unbeknownst to the other colleagues we shared laughs and drinks with after work.
We kept a meticulous tally of all of the slights and slurs collected over the years—each look of surprise on a new client’s face upon first meeting, every hushed, broken-off conversation when we entered a room.
On rare occasions, in trusted company, we aired them out, dusted them off, and tossed them around like war stories.
Rolled up our sleeves and revealed them to each other, like battle scars.
Did I ever tell you about the time a woman handed me her dry cleaning as I stood behind her in line?
That’s nothing. Did I tell you about the client who used the N-word on the phone before finding out I was black?
How about the time Professor Cahill asked if I’d been to Stanford on an athletic scholarship?
Please. I’ve been asked if both my parents are legal.
And so on.
I saw now that I’d spent the better part of my life trying to insulate myself from all kinds of hurt.
And it had almost worked. All those years, it had almost become possible for me to live my day-to-day life ignoring the differences that existed between me and any other Times-reading, dark-suited, smartphone-toting business commuter in the city. Until now.
Making partner, I’d somehow thought, would make me whole.
I would become immune to the little humiliations I had collected over all these years.
But it hadn’t worked. It would never work.
It had been doomed from the start. I knew that now.
I also knew exactly what that made me—just another dropout, just another Minority Darling who had come really, really close.