Who You Know (20 page)

JEN

T
he monthly company meeting was, as usual, run by the M&M gang triumvirate of power: Marc, Mark, and Mary. Mark demonstrated the new features of the McKenna Marketing Web site. One new feature was an online method of running our return on investment stats, which meant we'd no longer have to bug Marc and Mark about getting us the numbers we needed for our staff meetings. At this everyone cheered. Instead of interpreting this as it should have been, a “Yahoo! We no longer have to try to get you to help us, we can do it ourselves and actually get the numbers on time and without any hassle,” he chose to interpret the applause as testimony to his gift as a Web manager, and like a peacock fanning its colorful feathers, Mark beamed under the attention.

Sharon then went through a PowerPoint presentation that lasted about eight and a half years. She overviewed the different areas of the Expert Appliance account. She showed endless slides of our findings so far, fascinating tidbits like how the majority of consumers like dryers whose doors opened down instead of to the side. “The door acts as a shelf so the clean clothes don't fall to the floor,” Sharon said, as if this were the most insightful revelation we'd ever hear.

It looked like the Web portion of the project was way behind. Mark stood up right away and said their stuff was right on schedule, they were just waiting for the copy before they could let Expert begin testing.

The graphs were really well done, which wasn't Sharon's style. I figured out why when Morgan told Sharon she'd done a great job on the presentation. Sharon smiled and said a modest thanks, and I heard Avery say under her breath, “I don't believe her.” Of course, Avery had done the presentation and Sharon was taking the credit. It was a vintage Sharon move.

 

 

A
fter work I went to a dinner party hosted by Dan and Lydia. It was some going-away party for some guy from sales. He'd gotten a new job in New York or New Jersey somewhere, and this was our big sendoff. The guy was cute but annoyingly married.

The party would probably be boring as hell, but I figured it might be a good place to meet single guys. Mike and Tom were okay, but I wanted somebody that had Dave's humor, Tom's sexiness, and Mike's sweetness. I wished I could genetically engineer my perfect mate. This dating shit was getting so old.

Actually, I didn't have much choice but to go by myself. (It was the first event I could ever remember going to stag!) Tom said he couldn't go because he didn't want the entire office to know about us, and I couldn't bring Mike in case it got around that I was seeing someone. I didn't want Tom to think I was cheating on him.

When I got to Lydia's house, my hopes for meeting the guy of my dreams were quickly dashed. Everyone there was married or coupled off. At the long dinner table, I was sitting next to Mary from marketing and her husband, Mark and his girlfriend, and Sharon and her husband.

Lydia went around the table with a bottle of wine in each hand, asking whether we wanted red or white.

“Red, please,” I said. I wanted to grab the bottle out of her hands and drink the whole thing down, straight from the bottle.

While Lydia poured wine, Dan came around with the first dish, a small salad with organic greens and warm goat cheese.

“Your china is beautiful,” Mary said to Lydia. “Is it Wedgwood?”

“Yes.”

“I thought about getting Wedgwood, but I ended up getting Lenox. Jen, what kind of china do you have?”

China? I didn't even have dishes, except for what I could steal from the dorm cafeteria in college. “I have Lenox, too.”

“You're so lucky you don't have a house, Jen. I just spend all my time and money decorating,” Mary said.

“How big is your house?” Sharon asked.

“Twenty-four hundred square feet,” Mary said.

“Ours is three thousand,” Sharon said.

“I'm finally getting around to decorating my new house,” Mark said. “I'm having my furniture shipped in from Italy. I've got thirty-seven hundred square feet to fill, so I've got to hope that the stock market holds up.” Mark chuckled.

Well, I just love my six-hundred-and-fifty square-foot apartment with a glorious view of a parking lot, thanks for asking.

I felt like I was at a party of drunk frat boys who were pulling out their dicks—why don't I just run and get the tape measure, boys? I was in yuppie hell. I couldn't wait until I had the biggest house and most expensive china and most expensive furniture to brag about.

RETTE

E
leanore's emetic voice followed me like a swarm of wasps ready to sting at any time. In my nightmares, in my car on the way to the grocery store, during sex with Greg, she was hovering, casting judgment on every move I made. My anger toward her was with me constantly; there was no reprise. In my head, I had calm, rational conversations with Eleanore in which I told her that I was working extremely hard and a little appreciation from time to time might be nice. I knew I couldn't say these things in real life, however, because when I was with her I was so guarded and tense I could barely speak at all.

Every evening I'd lie in bed and instead of escaping into sleep, I'd lie awake mentally cataloging the injustices she had perpetrated against me that day. When I did sleep, I was constantly having strange dreams with Eleanore and Paige in them, or I'd spend the night in a state of restless half-sleep reviewing over and over again what had happened at work that day and what I had to accomplish at work the next day.

This was what I'd been so desperate to attain when I'd been unemployed?

 

 

I
was unduly excited when the phone rang. A ringing phone held the possibility that someone would transform my mood and help me shake off these depressing thoughts. I leapt off the couch and jogged to the phone in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“Hi, sweetie, it's your mom.” She never said, “It's Mom,” she said “It's your mom,” as if I wouldn't recognize her voice, as if there were room for confusion.

“Hi, Mom.”

“What's up?”

“Nothing.”

“Your father and I booked a cabin for the three days after Christmas. Are you sure you don't want to come?”

“Mom, I don't ski.”

“How can you live in Colorado and not ski?”

“It is possible.”

“So Jen is going to pick us up at the airport?”

“Right. Yes.” We'd covered that like eighty times. As if we were going to leave her stranded or something.

“So what's going on with you? How is the wedding coming along?”

“I'm . . .” I noticed a stain at the counter and used my nail to chip it away. “I'm actually not that great. Greg's been kind of distant lately. I feel like he's angry with me and I don't know why.” I waited but she said nothing. “And we're so broke and my car broke down again this week. Greg had to drive me everywhere, and it was such a hassle. He's so busy.”

“What a shame. I had to put eight hundred dollars on my car. It's only three years old, but it had a leak and it needed new break pads and tires. Cars really are such a hassle. It was in the shop for four days. Your father had to cart me around. It was terrible.”

“Yeah. I'm sorry to hear that.” Neither of us said anything for a long moment. “My boss is driving me nuts. She will never say anything positive to me and she's really stuck up. I'm so depressed all the time that I can't function. I hate my life and don't know what to do.”

“That sounds just like my boss Jack. Oh that man makes me nuts. We were at a seminar and do you know what he did? He introduced me as his assistant! I've worked there longer than he has. I'm a manager. I mean I work under him but not
for
him. I'm certainly no
assistant
. It totally undermined my credibility. I felt totally belittled for the rest of the seminar. The sales associates all looked at me like some kind of secretary or something. It was humiliating. And then when we were at a meeting back at the office . . .”

Mom went on and on for nearly half an hour about all she had to suffer through at her office. I expressed outrage at the proper times. Her boss, Jack, really did seem like a jerk. He'd been promoted ahead of my mother, even though she had more experience and a longer tenure with the company. Still, today I wanted Mom to tell me something, some magic words to live by that would make me less miserable about my job and my life. Mom eventually ended her tirade and changed the subject to her sister's divorce.

“Ron is already dating someone new,” she said. “He hasn't even totally moved out yet. I'm sure he was with this new woman before the separation. Lena is beside herself as you can imagine, but I have to say I'm not surprised. I mean what does she expect? She let herself go.”

To my mother, a woman who “let herself go” didn't constantly wear makeup, didn't always wear stylish clothes, didn't get new hairstyles regularly, and did let herself get fat. Lena's big crime was having put on twenty pounds over the past fifteen years. I was already thirty pounds overweight—my mother must find it miraculous that Greg would be marrying a woman who'd “let herself go.” No wonder Jen and I had such bad relationships with food.

“Mom, nobody deserves to be cheated on and dumped. I feel terrible for her.”

I could tell Mom didn't like my little rebuke because she abruptly said she should get going. Then her tone abruptly changed again, and was suddenly buoyed with artificial cheer. “I can't wait to see you,” Mom said. “I'm so excited to look for wedding dresses! This is going to be so fun.”

“I'm looking forward to seeing you, too, Mom. Love you.”

“Love you. Say hi to Greg for me.”

“Sure. Sure.” I hung up the phone. I tried calling Avery, but she wasn't home. I couldn't think of anyone else to call or a single thing I wanted to do.

It was only eight o'clock, but I got into bed and waited to fall asleep.

 

 

For my New Year's resolutions, I vowed to eat better, work out regularly, and not let Eleanore get to me. But since New Year's was a few weeks off, I was eating with abandon, doing nary a sit-up, and despising Eleanore with everything I had.

We'd gotten behind schedule because Eleonore had done some miscalculations when she was assigning deadlines. Of course she blamed Paige for not catching the error. It was fascinating to listen to her verbal gymnastics as she assigned blame where it didn't belong.

When Eleanore stopped by my office to chat, I used nonverbal signals to let her know that I was overwhelmed with work and far too busy to chat.

“It seems like everybody is upset about the delay. Even the president of the company put in his two cents,” she whined. “He is never around to give me a pat on the back, but if anything goes wrong, he's all over me. When I first got here, the editorial department was a mess. But I turned that all around. I worked overtime, I straightened things out. Once I set my mind to something, I stick to it.”

“Eleanore,” I interjected. “I'm sorry Morgan . . .” I almost said “reprimanded,” but that would imply that she had done something wrong, and in Eleanor's mind, she was perfect.

“. . . I have a lot of work, so I . . .”

“Nobody remembers how I turned this place around. These publications used to come in over budget, over deadline, but I got this department running smoothly. It wasn't easy, but once I set my mind to something, I follow through. One time I decided that I would never let myself get overweight, and you know something? I've never been more than ten pounds overweight in my entire life.”

This was the four hundredth time she'd told this story. It hadn't been interesting even one of the other 399 times. She had a repertoire of five anecdotes that she repeated over and over again. Did she know? Did she care? Did she have any desire to be remotely interesting?

I gave up on the idea of getting back to work anytime soon. As Eleanore bragged about how she jogged five miles to work almost every day, I tried to look bored, but this, sadly, in no way discouraged her.

Eleanore finally left, and just as I was about to get back to work, Glenn, the director of marketing, stopped by my office.

Glenn was in charge of marketing McKenna Marketing, and he oversaw Pam, who managed the marketing projects we did for other companies. Glenn had worked as a consultant before getting the job here. Eleanore said that if he'd been successful as an independent consultant, he wouldn't need the job with McKenna. She said he'd gone to one seminar on the importance of branding and declared himself an expert. Usually I found Eleanore too judgmental, but in this case she pegged him straight on. Of course I had to find this out the hard way.

“I hear you're an exceptional editor,” he said.

It felt so good to get a compliment after so many months of having my efforts ignored or berated, I could barely suppress a smile. “Thanks.”

“I know you're busy, but I wondered if you could do me a big favor. I wondered if you could look over these news releases, particularly this one. This one I want to get out by tomorrow. We're sending it to hundreds of journalists at newspapers and trade magazines around the country.” He waved a sheet of paper. “I'm starting a big media campaign. The goal is to get journalists to know our name, so maybe they'll write a story or two on us. I'll be sending out a news release every week for the next few months. This is the first batch for the next month. I know how good you are as an editor, and I just wondered if you would mind looking these over.”

“Sure, I'd be happy to,” I said, feeling honored.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

W
hen I'd interned at the newspaper in college, a lot of news releases passed my way. Many of them had been extremely professional, but many were amateurish and riddled with spelling errors. The other journalists and I would make fun of the spelling and grammar errors—newsroom work wasn't always fires and crashes, there was a lot of down time and we had to entertain ourselves somehow. Mocking news releases wasn't a noble endeavor, but it did pass the time, and if an editor can't feel superior to a bad writer, there would be no joy at all in an otherwise thankless job.

I read the first of Glenn's releases, which was about how he'd recently joined McKenna Marketing and what an alleged amazing guy he was. It was the worst news release I'd ever read. His other releases were just as bad. They were sloppy, poorly written, dull, and full of grammatical errors. Journalistic writing was supposed to be brief and to the point. Glenn's releases were wordy and convoluted. His headlines, which should never be longer than a few words, were nearly a paragraph long.

As the head of the marketing department, he had to be making about three times my salary, yet he couldn't even write a grammatically correct, let alone well-written, sentence. It took me an hour to correct the first release. I took the time to write down tips such as basic rules to Associated Press style, how hyphens were used, how paragraphs should be no more than thirty words long and headlines should be just a few words. I wanted to tell him an interesting news release would probably produce better results, but I didn't know how to say that nicely. I went on to the other releases. Most of them were about how McKenna's market research had saved companies scads of money, but we couldn't use the names of the companies we helped because of client confidentiality. It was true that overworked journalists used press releases to create about 50 percent of their stories, but they were not going to write about what a good company McKenna Marketing was without an angle to make it at least appear like news. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I tried not to change what he'd written too much, but even so, by the time I was done, I'd saturated the releases with sticky notes and corrections.

Working on his releases put me way behind schedule, and I'd already been slammed with work. I was thoroughly annoyed by the time he stopped back down to check in.

“Did you get a chance to look at them?” he asked, smiling the fake, fake smile of a marketing VP who made three times my salary by faking his way to the top.

“Yeah, I made some notes.”

Glenn looked over the release. “There's an awful lot written here. I can't really even see your changes. Would you mind inputting the changes? The releases are on the shared network drive in the folder marked Releases.”

“Um, well.” I did not want to be considered a non-team player. I would already have to work overtime. That was the way to succeed. To work endless hours and forgo a life. “Sure.”

“Great, great. I need them done by tomorrow.” He left without thanking me.

I rewrote his releases entirely. I had to stay three hours late to finish up my own job. The only solace I had was that writing news releases would be one more thing I could add to my résumé.

 

 

S
oon, I was hiding not only from Eleanore, but from Glenn as well. He brought a marketing brochure down to my office for me to “edit,” which, practically speaking, meant rewriting.