Take Amber: I spent years chasing her when we were kids, trying to catch her interest, piggybacking off her popularity. Backthen, she only ever wanted to get away from her barnacle of a baby sister, and I ended up discovering how many after-school clubs I didn’t fit into after she left. But now I’m a fixture in every part of her life, and the warm, loving sisterhood I’ve always wanted seems possible again, despite our differences. Would that have happened if I’d given up on her back then? No way.
I shove my feet into my shoes, hoping my nonanswer will trick her into backing off.
“Do youwantto see Tobin with someone else?”
I fumble my jacket zipper, winded by her sucker punch.
Imagining Tobin alone and sad is bad enough. If he wordlessly handed the smallest sand dollar on the beach to a new love, with his special secret smile? If he quit being Tobin Renner-Lewis and hyphenated his last name with someone else’s?
It burns. Especially because Amber predicted our divorce back at our wedding.
I give up on the zipper. “Eleanor! Put your socks on, it’s time to go.”
“Idon’twear socks,” she yells down the stairs.
Amber rolls her eyes and grabs Eleanor’s favorite eye-melting neon-yellow socks from a basket near the door, tucking them into a mesh pocket where the teacher can see them. “The two of you should bottle stubborn and sell it. You’d still have more than enough left over to ignore good advice.”
“I’m not six, Amber. I don’t need your advice.”
“Don’t you? You walked out on a perfectly good husband. Everyone loves him, so you justhaveto be the one who doesn’t. You should learn to recognize a good thing while you still have it.”
She pushes Eleanor’s backpack into my arms and walks away.
Primed by a school run spent singing surprisingly technical children’s songs about weather (Eleanor knows all the words; I’m adisappointment to her in this regard), I gather my courage and knock on my boss’s door as soon as he’s had a chance to settle in after his standard 9:30A.M.arrival.
Losing a marriage is one of the top five life stressors, and I need something to focus on to get me through. Between breakup-induced grief naps, I spent the weekend distracting myself with “get magic”–based research. I want to be seen as my own person, and the fastest way to break the spell of invisibility at West by North is a promotion.
And why enter an unwinnable promotion competition when all the online resources said women should just ask? This idea seemed like a slam dunk when I was reading theHarvard Business Reviewbut feels a lot dodgier now that I’m hovering in the boss’s doorway, disturbing his daily ritual of making a latte last half an hour while contemplating his stunning view of the Brookside gondola terminal, where Grey Tusk Village dissolves into the mountain itself. Outside his floor-to-ceiling windows, brightly dressed skiers and boarders swing into the sky in silver-and-red capsules that disappear one by one in swirls of low-lying cloud cover.
Craig’s a self-described “creative type” who prefers not to “run on corporate time.” This might be why he started his own company eight years ago, after his creative endeavors at Keller Outdoor Epiphanies—his former workplace—didn’t pan out. Now his singular goal in life is besting them at everything. When he made “disruption” the theme of the pitch competition, what he meant was “disrupt Keller.”
I give Craig finger guns, channeling our bro-heavy office culture. “Craig, uh, yo. Got a minute?”
“What’s up, Lizzeroni?”
I smile at his nickname, the better to make myself into what he wants.
“Craig, I feel I have a lot to offer this company. My performance reviews are spotless, and I’m ready to take on more responsibility. Develop some unique tour ideas. Polish my leadership skills. In short, I’d like to get ready for promotion.” I spent hours practicing my delivery, but somewhere in the second sentence, Liz the Leader goes unstable like a bucket of plutonium, morphing into an Old West character complete with an inexplicable drawl. “Promotion” gets seven syllables.
“Excellent initiative, Lizzeroni, but…” Craig does a head-waggling, hand-waving move. “No offense, but you’re a numbers person. A behind-the-scenes genius,” he pronounces, as if a statement starting with “no offense” could be a compliment. “Right?”
“I wouldn’t say that.” I’d say anxious introvert—potato, potahto—but I’m determined to quibble over anything that gets me closer to my goal.
Craig doesn’t look convinced. “Wasn’t it you who said spreadsheets ‘talk’ to you?”
My face burns. “Yes, but I meant that well-designed spreadsheets can illuminate both problems and solutions that aren’t otherwise—” I catch his impatient sniff and stop talking.
“Exactly. Youlovespreadsheets. Which is why I wouldn’t put you on”—he makes air quotes again, like he’s speaking a language I wouldn’t recognize—“front-of-housework. West by North needs you where you are to break out of our scrappy upstart phase.”
I’m aware of my reputation around here, but I don’t understand why being a spreadsheet person is a disqualification for every other job in a way that being, say, a marketing person isn’t.
A week ago, I would’ve slunk out of his office, added an extra layer of feelings to the scream I’m building like a geode in the center of my soul, and spent my lunch hour huddled over Microsoft Excel.
Not anymore. “I wouldlovefront-of-house work!” Old West Liz exclaims, deciding to stir up the saloon with a slight compliment hitched to a devastating neg. “I tell everyone it isn’t true you don’t support women for the top levels of the org chart.”
Something sharky winks from the teeth at the corner of Craig’s mouth. “Love your enthusiasm. But my hesitation here would be fit.”
This again. “Fit,” the silver bullet that kills me every time. It means “we don’t want you in our club.”