Gemma
I had a boyfriend, I guess you'd call him that, long gone. He read this book called The Shock Doctrine, maybe the only book the guy ever read ... he talked about it, like endlessly. His take from the book, and I have no idea if it's accurate, is that big events cause a shock that create excuses for people, or more likely corporations, to take advantage of the ensuing turmoil to change things ... so they can profit from the shock. His big example was the Katrina flood in New Orleans but, like a conspiracy theorist, he saw these shocks everywhere, even in his own life. I thought he was full of shit.
But.
Full of shit pretty much describes the way my life is going and I couldn't see how I could change it. I'm 25, I have a BA but so what, I'm a glorified secretary on the bottom wrung of a vertical ladder up a huge corporation that doesn't know I exist. And my personal life is crap, too. I'm fed up, so fed up I thought of that goddam boyfriend and his fucking shock doctrine — how do I get my own personal shock so I can radically kick-start a major change in my crappy fucking life?
And then it was handed to me. The EA to the Vice President of Acquisitions got a promotion; her job became open; there were six of us in the running for it — it would be a huge jump for me; I had about a 17% chance of getting it, trouble was, I didn't want it; none of us wanted any part of it ... we all knew her reputation; we all knew what an maniacally determined, demanding bitch the Vice President of Corporate Acquisitions could be — life is too short.
I was telling my girl friend about this. We were nibbling a nearly inedible curry while drinking cheap red in the seediest, grungiest restaurant I've ever been in.
"You were looking for a shock. There it is. Take it, see if you can get a major change out of it ... anything is better than what you've got going." She threw her fork down in surrender and finished off her wine in a committed gulp: she was as tired of me as she was of the food. Stop fucking complaining about everything and just do something ... that's what she was saying. And that's why I took the job, not that I was first choice, I wasn't but, as it turned out, I was the only choice.
Gloria Walker's reputation was that she is the very woman she appears to be: thin, sinewy, tough = suspicious, focussed, humourless. Oh, sure, you don't make executives out of those kind of attributes so there had to be some mitigating factors to her doom and gloom. And there were: she is quasi-pretty, nicely built, has an aura of elegance and polish, but that was all lipstick on a pig. The woman by all accounts is driven, keeping up to her, I was told, is a near impossibility; wanting to keep up to her, well, that would take utter commitment. And that's what she told me at our one and only meeting, that and I would be on probation ... for a year: "I can't afford to have someone who can't keep up and I don't get along with."
That old boyfriend also had this cliche he used a lot to describe impossible situations: Horatio at the Bridge. I never looked it up but he said it was a major event in the Peloponnesian War, when one guy, Horatio, standing on a narrow bridge stopped an entire army of Spartans from crossing it. Anyway, sitting at my desk outside her office on the 34th floor made me feel like Horatio; the Spartans I was supposed to be holding off was the mountain of material I was supposed to read ... and remember as I mastered my job as aide de camp to the Field General of my Shock Doctrine.
Great.
Gloria
When I reached into the drawer for the bra I flinched from the pain. When I'd hit him last night, struck him, actually struck him so hard on his collar bone that I had to shake the sting out of my fist, I'd had enough. I was done with him. Did I care he was cheating? No. Did I care he was drinking away his life? No. Did I care he was now dabbling in drugs? No. Did I care about the fucking empty Scotch glass he always leaves beside his fucking chair? You bet I did. This was the last time for me. I had long known he was never going to take that fucking glass to the sink and wash it himself. Tonight was the last time. As he stood there rocking unsteadily on his feet I opened the window and chucked the fucking glass as far as I could, then I hit him hard before I threw him out, slamming the goddam door behind him.
I ignored the pain and picked out the light red bra, the one with the little white rose with the tiny green leaves that sprouted between the two ungainly cups, ungainly because they now had to deal with two heavy, fallen udders that once had so much promise but, because of his failed seeds, never had a chance to nourish anything. Just as well.
There are no mirrors in my bedroom, in his ... in what was once his, there were two. I didn't need them. What little makeup I apply I apply from memory; the clothes I wear are a blue or black uniform — blue for home, black for away, I don't know why. But I did look in the bathroom mirror this morning; I wanted to see my eyes, to read them for whatever they could tell me. I could see I was tired and weary, weary of it all. My plan has long been to last until 55, 12 more years — why 55? I couldn't remember. It was probably just a target, I needed targets like the 112 pounds, like the 1100 daily calories, like the 50,000 steps a week, like improving my record of 137 out of 152 closings — a record unmatched in the company, a record that has given me carte blanch to do whatever I want to accomplish more of the same.
I didn't look for any laugh lines around my eyes; there weren't any. And no curiosity looked back at me, either — I hadn't had any of that for years, decades. There was a little sadness but not much and it didn't hinder my focus, that is still penetrating, still locked on the bottom line, still locked on a distant horizon although what was on that horizon has never been discernible — the rewards for all the effort, I hoped ... they had to be there, but what they are has never come into focus.
What is new in my eyes is fear, flickering like a warning sign: I am alone now, no warm body in another bedroom, alone, alone, the literal reality of it. I am now the only one in my universe, the single soul in my society.
I grinned. It has always been me against the world, now I had no baggage, no excuses. I stepped back to get a fuller view of myself but all I could see is a red-rose bra that clings to my sagging breasts, not the look I wanted now. I reached behind and unsnapped then went looking for a more assertive bodice, something more fitting for hand-to-hand combat.
Before I left I made a call to the movers and the locksmith then I threw out every ounce of liquor I could find, knowing some of it was worth a small fortune.
I searched into my new-found emptiness as I joined the 40 minute crawl to work. My mother had told me countless times that her job as a mother was to get me to 18 sound of mind and sound of body, then her job would be over and it would be all up to me. She was successful, with relentless and focussed determination ... and the constant insistence on my own relentless and focussed determination. I had to eat healthily, study constantly, work when I could and be accountable for all my actions. Oh, her discipline served me well ... unless you measure your life in excitement and fun. I never had any of that and nor did Harold, that's probably why I married him at a city hall ceremony at 19, a ceremony my mother wouldn't attend: she hated the guy, another reason I married him. And she heard my father would attend, a man I had literally never consciously met before and would never see again.
He was a beater, maybe that's where I got my violence from, my emerging violence; I have pushed my husband before and slapped him but never punched him — I felt a phantom sting on my right hand resting on the steering wheel and promptly erased the memory; I can do that, erase memories, this time of the punch ... and of him, all 24 years of him, years I would never get back.
A strange shape was now at the desk once occupied for at least five years by the quiet, competent, angular Andrea whom I thought of as The Shadow, ever present but only if I looked and I never had to: whatever I needed I got, no fuss, no muss, no talk — as efficient as the finest automaton and about as personable.
