quietly and quickly as possible—two-one-two-five-five-five-three-six-nine-four—I hang up the phone. One interview scheduled. A good start.
“Sunny?” Liza asks. Her hands leap to her rounded stomach. She does this often, as though she’s checking to ensure she’s still pregnant.
Maybe she thinks I’m getting coffee. Not a ridiculous assumption. Office coffee is like the hot dog of the java industry. They get the leftover beans that don’t quite make the cut at Starbucks. Two-one-two-five-five-five-six-three-nine-four.
Liza isn’t a horrible boss. Besides the fact that I do all her work and she takes all the credit. And that on staff birthdays she refuses to order “terribly fattening” chocolate cake and instead insists on serving celery sticks and low-fat tzatziki. And since she’s gotten pregnant, she’s become a walking bitch machine.
But the workload isn’t atrocious and she always writes me nice reviews and pays me fat bonuses.
She glares at my cupless hands. “Is there a reason you snuck out of the office to use the phone here?”
A first-rate question. “My grandmother is sick, Liza. I needed to talk to her in private.” It’s a good thing both my grandmothers are already dead.
She looks doubtful.
“What did you get, Liza?” I ask, motioning to her small plastic cup. There was an article in the Miami Herald that said that people respond more positively to you if you frequently use their names in conversation. It hasn’t worked for me yet.
Her face flushes a shit-you-caught-me red. “Hot chocolate.”
Funny, it doesn’t smell like hot chocolate. Smells like good old will-deform-your-baby caffeine. That’s terrible. Doesn’t she know that she’s risking her baby’s health?
She slides into a metal chair. “I’m going to stay here for a while and look over some notes.”
Should I insist on sitting with her to make sure she doesn’t try to sneak a smoke, too? Maybe I should get a better sniff of what’s in that water bottle. Or maybe I’ve got to get somewhere and write down this number. “See you later, Liza.”
Two-one-two-five-five-five-three…three times twelve…twelve? Damn.
During my leftover pineapple pizza lunch, I respond to the first of two of my friend Millie’s e-mails:
To: Millie
Subject: Re: Where The Hell Are You?
I just got back last night. He asked me to move in with him. I’m going. It’s insane.
Her second e-mail, tagged with Fw: Purity Tampons Cause Cancer, is one of those health forwards. Millie, one of my closest friends, knows that I love spreading these millions-of-women-die-needlessly warnings. You never know, one day one of these e-mails could save someone’s life.
I received this from a friend—please read and pass along. Have you heard that Purity includes asbestos in their tampons? Why? Because asbestos makes you bleed more, and if you bleed more, you are going to use more…
I tried a Purity tampon once, but it felt as if I was trying to shove a cement brick up my vagina. I forward the e-mail to Liza because she loves chain letters, especially those feel-good chain letters that promise you instant death if you don’t forward immediately. I forward the Purity Tampons Cause Cancer e-mail to my older sister Dana, too. This way she knows that the reason I didn’t call her when I got home late night was not because my plane crashed, or was hijacked by terrorists, but because I am an extremely busy career woman who is also very concerned with women’s health. And who knows? Maybe she’ll get a story idea out of it. Dana does the nine o’clock news for the radio station WCMG Miami. She’s desperately trying to move to TV. She also sells feature articles to newspapers all over the country in an attempt to build up her portfolio.
Six seconds after I hit Send, my extension rings.
As always, I contemplate answering the phone with, “What?” But I don’t. “Sunny Langstein speaking.”
“Why didn’t you call me when you got in? You know I worry about you.”
“Sorry, Dana. I got in late and I didn’t want to wake you.”
My sister snorts. “I told you to wake me. Did I not tell you to wake me? Did you have a good trip?”
“Very nice trip, thanks.” Do I tell her? I have to tell her. “Hold on one sec,” I say. I put the phone on the desk and close my office door. I sit down in my swivel chair and take a deep breath. Liza hates when her staff’s doors are closed, always asks us to please leave them open so that the other departments don’t get the impression we’re unfriendly.
Her door has been closed for about six months now.
“He asked me to move in with him.”
Silence.
“Hello? You still there?”
“I’m here,” she says. “He wants you to move to New York?”
“Yes. What do you think?”
“Do you care what I think?”
“Maybe.”
“Are you going to go?”
“Yes.”
“You’re just going to quit your job and leave everything behind? Isn’t that a bit irrational?”
And the guilt begins. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her. Maybe I should have moved and called her from New York. “What’s new?” I could have asked. She would have rambled on for hours, and when she finally stopped for breath, I could have interjected, “Call me at this new number, ’kay?” And that would have been it. I should have banked on Dana’s tunnel vision—her ability to only see and hear what she wants to see and hear. It would have taken her months, maybe even years, before she realized that 212 wasn’t Fort Lauderdale’s area code.
Case in point: after I graduated from college, she admitted she didn’t know that I had studied business at University of Florida.
“What did you think I was studying?”
She shrugged, straightening the neck of my gown. “Communications.”
I laughed. “Why? Because you studied communications?”
“No,” she answered, sounding insulted. “I thought that’s what you said. That you wanted to study communications.”
I did. When I was eleven. When Dana wanted to be a star reporter like Barbara Walters and decided to major in communications, I said I wanted to be Barbara Walters and study communications. What do they teach you in communications anyway? How to talk? But then I decided that business was a little more practical. That’s what my father told me.
And journalism isn’t the only way to make a difference in this world. I’m going to change the structure from within.
One
