Page 15 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

wall of the party room. You would think they were
at a middle school dance. Joanna sits on one of the chairs to take the weight off her feet. The liquid in her glass is non-alcoholic, fake wine, which she sips feebly as if it were communion wine and she were
a true believer in the company, in teamwork and sustainability. She fidgets with her scarf, ducking
her head. From across the room her boss, Anastasia, advances toward her. An escape to the lady’s room
is still possible, so Joanna stands up, clumsily non- chalant, tipping over and spilling her glass on the company’s wall-to-wall carpet. Anastasia approaches while Joanna is still blotting up the spill with a cock- tail napkin.
“Can I help with that?” The voice is breathy, fruity. Joanna doesn’t look up. “No need,” she says, watching her hand blot out the spill. She pictures in her mind the vixen face of her boss, that lank teenage hair, the shapely breasts paired with circus legs. Anastasia’s mother had been a gymnast— a trapeze artist. Her story was known to everyone in the department. Poverty and beauty, a romantic escape from Roma- nia through a Reader’s Digest type of love affair in a National Geographic type of terrain. The mother had fled the country with Anastasia in her womb, and they had lived hand to mouth until reunited with Anastasia’s father. In most circumstances, Joanna would admire Anastasia and her story. She admires survivors, people who rise above their situations, and Anastasia is clearly one of these. Rising in the company had come naturally to her, too, as it hadn’t to Joanna, who knows it is because of her unimpres- sive looks, a tendency to tell it as she sees it; much more than likely, her age. She had turned fifty-seven in September.
Joanna blots the company’s mud-green carpet more conscientiously than she would her own cream-col- ored one, recently installed in her living room. It’s an excuse not to look at Anastasia, who has seated herself and crossed her circus legs and begun talking. Her manner of speech reminds Joanna of bumper cars, one thought colliding with the next, spinning and ricochet- ing, with a hard stop on words that end in “ing.”
How is your father? Anastasia wants to know. What are you doing-g with him over the holidays? Joanna blots and thinks, what do you expect me to do with him, stuff him in a closet? She says politely that she is doing what she normally does, having her father to dinner and taking him to a local production of The Nutcracker.
“You really need to try coloring-g books,” says Anas-
tasia. “Although I think you should definitely try puzzles, too, except those can be a challenge, but I think they’re also very relaxing-g. There are puzzles out now that help with memory problems, or even certain people who, you know, get upset over every little thing-g. You can go on the Internet, but they’re in all the department stores.”
“My father used to sketch, but he can’t anymore. He can’t even tie his own—“
Anastasia talks over Joanna. It’s useless to argue. Anastasia is her boss after all, so Joanna says noth- ing, letting Anastasia advise her. She has heard about and tried it all. Gingko biloba. Fish oil. Puzzles. Color- ing books. Digital photo albums and calendars. How about adult diapers? Anastasia says nothing about those. With each passing year, Joanna is broader of understanding if narrower of opinion, but this only hampers her ability to make the right moves across the corporate chessboard. It had led to the shame of being subordinate to this, a chatterbox half her age doling out advice about her father.
Joanna has been with the company for fifteen years, starting out as an assistant and gradually climbing
to a directorship. The company sells financial instru- ments, abstractions and intangibles that Joanna still doesn’t fully understand. It hadn’t mattered. Her job was to convince brokers to sell the company’s instru- ments to their clients, or to help the company launch new instruments. This she did with ideas and meta- phors, cleverly worded promotions. It demanded ten- hour days in a room without privacy among people who talked and behaved like TV sitcom characters.
It often meant traveling to convention centers in Las Vegas, Reno, Colorado Springs, where she was unable to sleep because life in such places was a business, which went on and on, beneath buzzing lights. Her ideas had sold and launched instruments successfully, but in the past few years, the company had made a wide-angle turn. Individual achievement took a step down. What mattered most was teamwork and the behaviors supporting it. A lone star by nature, Joanna failed in these, more often than not. A politically cor- rect lexicon supplanted stolid business English. There were words one should no longer say, emails one simply shouldn’t send. In the interest of being accu- rate and efficient, Joanna had said and sent them. And she had paid. Despite a very good year of promotional sales, her accomplishments had not been recognized. She hadn’t been recognized, passed over for a pro- motion again. Last week, she had received a written
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