Chapter Thirty
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Phil tells me that he can see that my heart isn’t in it lately.
He flips through my letters, to the GuideStar Grant Foundation and the Kern Family Small Business Micro Grant Organization.
I watch him searching, reciting HR talking points, about “deliverables” and “meeting performance expectations.” It’s painful.
He wants to be like a big Wall Street accounting firm.
He wants data, charts, men in black suits, file boxes already assembled in my cubicle.
Instead, he is blabbering about “peer appraisals” and “performance improvement” and threats of a “probationary agreement.” He looks like he wants to throw me out a window, if only they opened.
I don’t blame him. For two weeks, Veronica warned me that my letters were incoherent.
She’d threatened to send my executive summary haiku “up the chain” to Phil. On Monday:
Asking for money.
I drown in my cubicle.
Wishing I had more.
On Tuesday:
Down thirty-two floors,
I glimpse the rest of my life,
Tiny bugs below.
Phil’s hands are tied. There are only three women on his entire staff and one of them is Jen in accounting, who, rumor had it, blew him in the supply closet on Friday.
This made Phil late to meet his wife for an anniversary dinner at Smith all of it is so complicated, Phil.”
He looks at me. Right now, he is questioning what it means to be a boss, if he can’t even fire somebody.
Right now, he is wishing there were no HR departments, no “sensitivity training.” Right now, he is wishing he were a man when men could still get blow jobs at the office on their anniversaries.
But those are not the cards poor Phil has been dealt.
“You’ve worked here long enough to know better. Just stick to your usual script.”
That is when I feel the dampness under my bra.
I thought my milk had dried up. It had never come when I needed it.
Never come when my baby needed it. But there it was, when I needed it the most. A leaky left boob right through the cricket jersey.
Phil’s eyes widen. He tries not to look (HR crisis and all) but it is impossible.
I am the mad lady in the attic, and I am in his office.
“Do you need to…?” He can’t get the words out, and who could blame him?
I look down at my left breast. “Nah. I’m good.”
Phil’s jaw is on the floor. For six years, his eyes have undressed me by the coffee creamer.
For six years, he’s told me he enjoyed the way I looked in the Zara stretchy pencil skirt that I threw out with the orgasmic birth book.
For six years, he’s come by my desk and put a hand on my shoulder, clutching it as he pretended to read my grant letters.
But now I see it in his eyes. Phil is afraid of me.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said about taking initiative, and I had this idea for a new grant letter. May I?”
I take the legal pad off his desk, pick up a pen, and scribble down another haiku, one I think Phil will particularly appreciate. He picks up the pad and reads my poetry.
Married twenty years.
Haven’t been blown in four years.
How’s my accounting?
I smile. Phil knows that I know about Jen in accounting. His fists are clenched. “Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off? Get some rest.”
And then I lay the situation down, clearly, calmly. “Yes. Yes, Phil. I think I will take the afternoon off. You know what? Why don’t I just take the rest of the week off? Or, I know! I can just work remotely and never come back to the office.”
Phil is speechless. No, I will not rest, Phil. I will not sleep when my baby sleeps. I will go to see Holden and Daisy, and the Juju Bean moms, who have taken over a vacant luxury tower. “So, Phil. What do you think? Does never work for you?”
I sense Veronica and Ted and all the temps, staring at me. I grab my diaper bag and leave for the day, maybe forever. It is eleven thirty in the morning.
Good night, good night, soul-crushing office job.