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 bigWall 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 & Wollensky, followed bySweeney Toddon Broadway. Earlier that day, Phil told everyone he hated musicals. It’s bad enough to cheat on your wife on your anniversary, but to also shit on Sondheim? Phil had it coming. He eyes my body, but not in a sexual way. He is checking to see if I am still breastfeeding, still mushy in the belly. He looks at my body to remind himself that I am still a potential HR crisis. He hands me a letter to redo.
“I need you to take another stab, analyze the intended audience, follow the standard format. It’s not that complicated, Emily.”
“Oh, but it is complicated; all of it issocomplicated,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 theJuju Beanmoms, 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.
Chapter Thirty-One
• • • • •
I sat in ared velour chair at the Mughlai Curry House, strewn with streamers and Christmas lights up all year. Penelope was almost an hour late. I scrolled on my phone. Brit blocked me on Instagram. Had I scared her when I warned her that posting Quinn dressed as Glinda in the playroom production ofWicked, adorable as it may have been, was a blatant violation of the NDA? Or—and I hated to admit this—maybe Molly Gibson had been onto something? What if Brit wasn’t ghosting me? What if she’d been silenced? I checked the time again. Went ahead and ordered a twelve-dollar tandoori lunch special that used to cost eight. I texted Penelope again. “Hey, should I order you samosas?…Mango lassi?…Call me?…You alive?” When the check came, Penelope finally called.
“Heeeeeey. Where are you? You have to see the new Guido Faleschini leather bed that’s currently being installed. It’s beyond. Also, these movers, kinda hot?”
