sat in the back row who had arguably the worst hair I had ever seen. (Someone had once quipped that it looked like a wet baby possum crawled on his head and died there, and it stuck.) They all wore khakis, various patterned blue shirts, brown belts, and their egos on their sleeves. They laughed loudly and made fun of one another, and I found it virtually impossible to tell them apart. Just addressing someone was a panic-inducing event, because I learned the hard way calling someone Barney because you think that’s his real name and not an insulting nickname assigned to him because he looked like Barney Rubble wasn’t a good idea. At least Jarrett was pretty mad about it.
Every female on the floor had a name that the men used to reference her, and it was never her real name. Of course, there were only forty or so women, excluding the administrative assistants, among four hundred men, but still, that was a lot of code names to remember. There was “Magda,” so called because she had clearly spent too much time in the sun when she was younger, and “Pepper,” a Brazilian girl with an olive complexion. There was “Busted Britney Spears,” named for her resemblance to the pop star if you looked at her after consuming ten beers, and “Raggedy Ann,” a redhead who looked disheveled more often than not. Darth Vader’s assistant, Hannah, was qualified to do absolutely nothing, and the guys ripped on her mercilessly. The men in my group called her “Baby Gap” because they figured that was where she bought her shirts. Her wiry frame was thin enough to get lost behind a parking meter if not for the fact that she had an enormous set of fake boobs of which she was clearly proud. And then there was the other woman in my group, the one I had thought would be a friend of mine because we women should stick together. The desk at the end of the front row was occupied by Kate Katz, otherwise known as “Cruella,” “The Puppy Skinner,” and/or “The Black Widow.”
Before I met Cruella, Drew and a few of the Bobs and Joes told me her story. She had been in the Business for twenty-five years. She was very smart, very driven, and very tough. In her younger days she was the cause of many a broken marriage, before finally settling down and having children in her late thirties. Her husband was a wildly successful equity trader who worked at another firm, so she wasn’t in this business for the money anymore. From what the group could gather, the only reason that she worked from 6:30 A.M. until 6:00 P.M., traveling to and from Westchester on either end, was because she hated her husband and kids or, more likely, they hated her. Once upon a time I was sure she’d been beautiful, but she had suffered under the strain of the Business and its endless demands. Her middle-aged metabolism and sedentary lifestyle resulted in excess padding in her hips and thighs, no matter how many hours she may have logged with her personal trainer. But she appeared harmless, so I found it very hard to believe that the stories I heard were true.
“Wassup, sugar?” Reese asked, as he playfully kicked the legs of my chair. “Do you want to come hang with me today?”
“Thanks, Reese, but I was actually thinking of sitting with Kate today. You know, girl bonding.”
“Are you insane? Have you not been paying attention? Don’t do it.” Reese pretended to shudder with fear.
“Listen to the man, Girlie. She’s evil. Stay as far away from her as possible,” Drew interjected.
“I’ve been here for four months now. I’m not as clueless as I used to be. I think it will be fine. Besides, Chick told me to sit with everyone. That includes Kate.”
“Suit yourself, sugar. If you want to ignore my advice, you go right ahead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Reese said as he folded his arms across his chest.
“You’re going to be sorry,” Drew sang as I made my way down the row.
I unfolded my chair next to her without an ounce of fear. “Excuse me, Kate? I was wondering if I could sit with you this morning,” I said in my most cheerful voice.
This was the closest I had ever been to her, and for the first time I noticed she had a diamond on her left hand that the Rangers could use as a practice rink. She wore very little makeup, and the dark blue circles under her eyes made her look older than her fifty years. It was like she had given up. For a second, I felt bad for her. Maybe she was overwhelmed with the pressure of balancing a successful career with a husband and children; or maybe she was exhausted from too much stress and too little sleep. She turned her chair to face me slowly, staring at my outstretched hand while hers remained tightly clasped in her lap.
Then she spoke. “I’m sorry, what was it about me sitting down here ignoring you that signaled you to come over and whine in my ear?”
Or maybe she was the true incarnation of evil and was too busy breaking kids’ crayons in half to care about what she looked like. I waited for her to laugh and say she was kidding. She didn’t.
“Let me tell you something, little girl. I don’t get paid the money I do to educate the youth of America. If I wanted to educate the youth of America, I would have been a fucking nursery school teacher. Now, since you have been here for all of what, two days?”—correcting her didn’t seem like a good idea—“I suggest you learn a few things before you attempt to talk to me again and waste my time with what I’m sure are questions that my twelve-year-old could answer. That being said, maybe the cluster fuck over there”—she waved her hand dismissively at Drew and Reese, who pretended they weren’t listening to our conversation—“could have done you some good by actually giving you something to read, instead of trying to look down your shirt all day. Oh, and maybe I should be more specific. I mean read something that doesn’t have big color pictures of Tom Cruise or shiny tubes of lip gloss. Those types of books actually exist and could probably help you since it is blatantly obvious you don’t know the first fucking thing about the bond business.”
She spun around and opened the bottom drawer of a large file cabinet positioned behind her desk, and one by one removed a massive collection of hardcover books and photocopied packets. She shoved them at me, piling them up in my arms one after the other until I could barely see over the top of the stack.
“Let’s start with the basics. Inside the Yield Curve, Mortgage Bond Basics, Modeling the Swap Curve, The Treasury Bond Basis, The Fabozzi Fixed Income Handbook, The Handbook of Economic Indicators, Understanding Option Market Volatility. Read all of these. And when you’re done, you can come back to me, and maybe I’ll talk to you. From the looks of you, that should probably take you a good eight to ten years, so let’s plan to chat again then. And do yourself a favor. If you want to work here, if you want to graduate off your pathetic little chair and into a big girl’s desk, then other than these books, you shouldn’t so much as glance at any other publication of any kind unless it’s thrown at your front door every morning by a kid on a bicycle.” (Again, probably not the best time to point out that I lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment building.) “Now, go bother someone else. I’ve reached my painful-conversations-with-idiots quota for the day.”
My arms were starting to ache under the strain of the library she had just thrown into them. I had hoped that Cruella would take me under her wing, guide me through the testosterone maze that we both worked in. She had been in the Business forever, so obviously she had to be tough, but she was way more than tough; she was wicked. I caught myself wondering if maybe once upon a time she had been like me, ignorant, unsure of how to act like a lady when you spent your days surrounded by men. What if she had been, and the years on the trading floor had hardened her into something else, something vicious, vile, and well, scary? What if that was what happened to all women after a few years in this environment? Maybe that was what needed to happen to you if you were going to have a successful career on the Street. I made a silent promise to quit before I’d allow myself to follow in her angry, unattractive footsteps. I carried my library back to Drew’s desk, Cruella’s insults still ringing in my ears.
“I tried to warn you,” Drew said
