Revenge of the Cube Dweller (6 page)
Read Revenge of the Cube Dweller Online
Authors: Joanne Fox Phillips
While there had been many previous infidelities on Winston’s part, I was blissfully unaware of this affair that would change my life so profoundly a year later. I didn’t get the inference underlying Mason’s comments until many months afterward. Looking back, I think plenty of people did know, but that is how country club friendships work, sometimes. They tend to be superficial and husband-centered. The women are your friends while you’re married and involved in the club, but since the man is the member and the woman a “spouse,” a divorce means that you are no longer welcome on the premises. No Wednesday morning golf,
no ladies association lunches, no bridge or book club. Promises to meet outside the club evaporate over time, and pretty soon you lose all contact.
Still, my friendship with Beth and Alice was anything but superficial, and we remained close even through the awkward months as the divorce finalized. I promised to keep in touch after moving to Tulsa but instead retreated inward. I can’t pinpoint the emotion that made me distance myself from my closest friends. Alice suggested I join Facebook, but I didn’t. She and Beth left messages on my machine and sent e-mail that I didn’t return. I fell into a funk after moving, and reminders of my old life only made me more depressed.
And the whole process had started right then—June 1, 2007, my fiftieth birthday. I stare at the date, right there on my computer clock.
Moe and Hal stop by on their way out the door, interrupting my thoughts. “Just so you know,” Moe begins, “I called around about the security breach over the weekend. The guy they used was new because of the holiday. They don’t think that will happen again.”
“Okay,” I reply. “I am really sorry if I went too far. Are you sure there isn’t anything I can help you with on your audit, Moe?”
“Maybe. I’ll let you know,” he says coldly.
Hal leans in. “Tanzie, could you put together a data request for this construction audit before you go home tonight? See if we can get the contracts by the end of the week. Think you can do that?”
“Of course, I’ll send the requests by e-mail tonight. I’ll copy you so you can make sure I did it correctly,” I say, trying not to sound angry.
I get busy putting together a schedule and figuring out who has the needed information as the clock reaches five and keeps going.
Ironic
, I think,
I had nothing to do all day but will end up leaving late because of this assignment. I feel sure this isn’t accidental
. I click
send
and pack up for the day.
A
fter I finish my dinner, I pour another glass of wine and head out to my balcony for my evening smoke, taking the landline with me. It has been an exhausting day and I want to talk to someone. I think about calling Alice or Beth, but that feels funny after blowing them off for the last six months. Instead, I decide to talk to my sister again.
Lucy and I are Irish twins, just eleven months apart. Looking at us, though, it’s hard to believe we’re related, let alone sisters. Lucy is tall and delicate with red hair, and I am sturdy, dark, and athletic—good peasant stock, my brother Charlie used to tease. Lucy and I are the youngest in our family of seven girls and one boy, with an immigrant Irish dad and Greek mother. We grew up in the Richmond District in San Francisco, the set of avenues just north of Golden Gate Park and east of the Pacific. The O’Learys were not dirt poor but more on the “barely scraping
by” rung of the economic ladder. Often the recipients of charity donations, we volunteered our time at church projects to compensate for our inability to make monetary contributions; our ultimate donation was my oldest sister, Honey, to the convent, which allowed the rest of us to receive a subsidized education at Catholic schools.
Growing up, I never knew what loneliness was. But tonight, on my balcony looking at Utica Square below full of people shopping and meeting friends for drinks or dinner, I feel completely isolated and long to be back home. I close my eyes for a moment trying to remember the smells and sounds of my childhood.
“Tanzie. Tanzie. Are you awake?” Lucy raised my eyelid with her finger.
I swatted her hand away and opened my eyes on my own, groaning as I stared up at the nearly twenty years’ worth of petrified chewing gum stuck to the underside of our dining room table, placed there pre-dinner by my siblings. I had seen it before. As the two youngest, Lucy and I were the most portable, so even though we fell asleep in our own bed, there was no guarantee we would awaken there the next morning. Our bed was routinely reassigned to accommodate the many visitors to the O’Leary home.
As immigrants, my parents felt a responsibility to help not just their own family members coming to America but also people in general coming to San Francisco. At any given time, entire families of cousins, friends of cousins, and other nonrelatives crammed into our home. When couch space filled
up, the children were redistributed to unconventional sleeping spaces.
Lucy and I crawled out from our makeshift bed in hand-me-down flannel nightgowns and headed through the kitchen and onto the enclosed back porch that functioned as our laundry room.
“Here’s your uniform.” Lucy handed me a wrinkled blue plaid jumper from the pile of clothes that had been dumped out of the dryer onto the floor, and I got busy hunting for a blouse, underwear, and socks. Our mother always made sure our clothes were clean, but the final steps of the laundry process were rarely completed in time to be of any use.
“Want me to iron your stuff?” I asked Lucy.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind the wrinkles,” she replied, stripping down and throwing on her clothes in almost a single motion.
“Lucy! You can’t go to school like that. Your socks don’t even match.” She gave a shrug and left me on the porch standing on a box at the ironing board. Even at six years old, I understood the value of good presentation. So, even though my jumper was two versions behind the current uniform worn at St. Geronimo’s Catholic School and had been worn by six previous sisters, it would be starched and crisp when I arrived on the playground that morning.
In the time it took me to get dressed on the porch, the downstairs had transformed from total quiet to complete chaos. Every chair at the Formica dining room table was now occupied. Uncle Agamemnon was
arguing with a distant cousin from County Cork about whether Richard Nixon was finished politically, and my brother and two of our older sisters were retelling jokes from last night’s
Ed Sullivan Show
. My mother had two coffee pots percolating on the kitchen stove, and a line of visitors waited with coffee mugs in hand. Some strange old man in a black suit was smoking and sitting off by himself on a kitchen stool, holding the yellow clay ashtray I’d made in art class on his lap. I found Lucy sitting Indian style under the table with a bowl of cereal between her legs and a book in her hand. I joined her.
“Greek myths,” she answered without me asking.
“Read it to me,” I pleaded.
As a second grader, Lucy was reading at a high school level and always seemed to have her nose in a book. I, too, was an avid reader, but since there was only one book and two of us, it would be better for her to narrate rather than have me read over her shoulder.
The story was about Hermes and the Cattle of Apollo, and I ate her cereal as she read.
“Time for school,” Mama shouted. “The bell rings in ten minutes!”
Lucy and I emerged from under the table leaving the book and bowl, which I was certain would still be there when we returned home.
Lucy answers on the second ring and I begin to cry as I recount my horrible day.
“Just quit, Tanzie. Come out here and live with me.”
“Thanks, but living in a trailer might be the final straw.”
“What was I thinking? There probably isn’t enough room for all your shoes and purses, anyway.”
“Hey, Lucy, I just want my career back.”
“I know what you mean.”
I was taken aback by the remark. With all my focus on my own career woes, I’d completely forgotten about my sister’s failed business. Back in the ’90s Lucy gained considerable fame and fortune by inventing cotton that grew naturally in colors. Inventing seems like the wrong word, because she actually patented her seeds after painstakingly crossbreeding season after season, extracting the genetic properties of most value to her. She had started with some brown wild cotton that was thought to be pest resistant but too short-stapled to be spun commercially.
As she selectively bred for length she discovered quite unexpectedly that the brown hue contained a spectrum of other colors that could be extracted through selective breeding techniques. This is not genetic engineering, mind you, which shortcuts the process and can result in dangerous and unanticipated results. Lucy’s technique, while arguably slow, partnered with nature so that all her results were in keeping with her environmental and scientific ethics. It was along the lines of utilizing a wise and experienced matchmaker versus cloning human beings.
Her business prospered for a while until she received some bad advice from Winston, of all people. Though Lucy had not liked what my ex-husband stood for environmentally, she had respected his Rice MBA and business acumen. Prior to his interference, Lucy had planned a season in advance, gotten contracts
with her buyers, and grown to order. No risk. Winston advised her to speculate by planting crops and building an inventory so that the accelerated turnaround could be used to bring in buyers who did not want to wait a season or be exposed to crop failures or other delays. The advice made sense on paper but was a disaster once implemented. Poor Lucy got caught in a global cotton glut and had not been able to cover the cost of growing or storing her product.
In exactly two years from the day she began to implement Winston’s strategy, her business had gone bankrupt, and she bought a little farm in Northern California with what little she had left. Now, she grows a little cotton on the side to sell to craftsmen and hand spinners, but any dreams she had of being a global presence in the world of agriculture and textiles are gone. Retired to her farm and without capital or the energy to restart her business, Lucy has poured herself into environmental causes, raising sheep and chickens, and volunteering at her organic co-op. To her credit, Lucy has never taken her aggravation out on me, although I could not help but feel somewhat responsible.
“Looks like Winston screwed us both out of careers,” Lucy concludes, and I start to laugh. I can hear her chuckling on the other end.
“Why don’t you come to Tulsa, Lucy? Come visit me,” I plead.
“I really can’t leave the farm. It’s so hard to find anyone to take over. Besides, you’ll be just fine, Tanzie. Don’t you remember your babysitting empire? You’re so driven. Just give it some time.”
“Oh God, Lucy. Yes, climbing a corporate ladder is exactly like cultivating babysitting clients.” The sarcasm makes Lucy pause at the other end and I can tell I’ve hurt her feelings a little.
“You know what I mean, Tanzie,” Lucy resumes. As the youngest of the seven girls, I inherited a babysitting dynasty whose client list had been refined over the years to include the who’s who of San Francisco. For fifty cents an hour, an O’Leary girl would watch the children, feed, bathe, and put them to bed, plus clean the house. Lucy hated taking care of children. Money was not a motivator for her, but it had been for me, so I happily absorbed her client base, working just about every night, spending my evenings in the orderly and quiet homes of my wealthy clients. After I put the children to bed and cleaned up, I could have privacy, something that was impossible at my house. As a teenager, when I had envisioned my future, it was not sitting at a Formica table drinking coffee and listening to a distant relative snore on the couch.
“Maybe I should go back to babysitting. It’s not too far from what I’m doing at Bishop. And it pays about the same.”
“What do you do, exactly? Break into buildings?” Lucy is not a corporate person and her only exposure to auditors is via the IRS.
“Well, in most public companies, Internal Audit is an independent group that reports directly to the board of directors. It’s charged with identifying unknown risks, processes that need improvement, and disconnects between what the board thinks is happening and what really is happening.”
“Like the company fuzz? You must be popular.” Lucy laughs.
“Yes, it is quite the social repellant. But it’s project based and we get to do a lot of different things. I think it’s interesting.”
“Right.” Her sarcastic tone comes through loud and clear.
I continue to describe my job in greater detail than Lucy wants to hear. I tell her that since Bishop is not a public
company, the department is less independent than what I have been describing.
“Hal reports to the Chief Compliance Officer, an attorney pretty far down in the organization. We look mainly at policy compliance: Have people fudged their expense reports or used their company credit cards for personal benefit? We also look at field operations for safety violations as well as construction contracts to make sure our contractors are billing us properly and have adequate insurance. We’re not necessarily encouraged to look very hard.”
The consensus is that Bishop has miserable controls. The brothers pride themselves on being low-cost providers to the industry, and that means no unnecessary administrative personnel. Accounting departments are thinly staffed and capable of performing only the most critical functions. Engineering staff, responsible for reviewing bills charged to capital construction projects, work late nights just making sure the pipelines are being laid or the plants are getting built on schedule. Cost analysis takes a backseat and is cursory at best. Bishop is making plenty of money, so there’s no perceived need to burn up resources chasing problems that don’t exist.
“Hey, do you remember what tomorrow is?” I guess Lucy must have had enough of my lecture.
“April 6th? Oh, Mama’s birthday.”
“She’d have been ninety-two. I’ve been so sad today. I still miss her.”
