Back to novel page | Back to author page
About Face by Carole Howard
CHAPTER 1
Under the Table
RUTH TALBOT LOOKED DOWN and winced. She couldn’t believe today, of all days, she’d forgotten to change out of her commuter’s red high-top sneakers into the pumps that would complete her corporate camouflage. From the knees up, she fit right in at the big meeting with the new CEO in the ultra-elegant conference room with small oil paintings in ornate frames. But her feet belonged in the playground.
“I want that list of criteria to go out to all our vendors right away. Right away. So they’ll know exactly how Mimosa Inc. will decide whether they’re in or out,” Jeremy said.
The guy from Purchasing—was his name Ralph?—answered, his voice dissolving around the edges like a milk-dunked Oreo. “We use quite a lot of vendors, actually. We always have. And some of the criteria we use for them are difficult to quantify. They’re intangible, really. We’ve always—”
“Intangible won’t do. No, no. Won’t do at all. We need to know exactly, precisely, how to decide who we’ll do business with. Right away. Criteria on my desk by close-of-business tomorrow. Then out to the vendors next week.”
Poor Purchasing-Guy. “Intangible” turned out to be a poor word-choice.
“Next, the splashy launch of ‘Lipsticks & Scarves,’” Jeremy said as he looked at Ruth with raised brows. “The results are … shall we say … very disappointing.”
Disappointing? What’s he talking about? Ruth cleared her throat and spoke a little louder than was necessary. “These results are well within our standard for pilot programs. We can make them better, yes, you’re right about that. But that’s why we pilot, so we can tinker with the variables. Price, size, packaging. Meanwhile, they’re quite decent.”
“Decent? Dee-cent, you say?”
Uh oh, she thought. Looks like “decent” goes in the garbage heap with “intangible.”
“Maybe they are what you call … decent … but no more than that. Maybe under previous management, that was good enough.” He looked around, making eye contact with everyone at the table, one by one, as if they didn’t already know he was the new management. “But not now. There’s a new sheriff in town, and now we need better than decent. We need a grand slam.”
“I agree, that’s the goal, a grand slam, but pilots are almost never grand slams. They’re usually singles. This one, I think, was even a double.”
I’m using baseball metaphors? How low can I go? Her disappointment in herself triggered the day’s first hot flash, a bit earlier than usual. The fire started somewhere in her chest and galloped through her neck, up to her head, while also traveling south. She felt every thread of her clothing against the sweat-sheen on her skin. To her amazement, people had said they didn’t notice anything, even when she thought she was ablaze.
“I was referring to a grand slam in bridge. All the tricks. Doubled and re-doubled. Lots and lots of points.” Jeremy smiled a quick, minimal smile, managing to move only the muscles at the edge of his lips but not engage his cheeks or eyes. With his dry skin, sharp nose, and darting tongue, he looked like a snake. Or maybe he just needed moisturizer.
“What do you plan to do about this, Ruth?”
Rather than walking around as she spoke and revealing her feet of canvas, she stood in place and grabbed the edge of the table. Richly grained walnut, highly polished, the color of dark rye toast with honey, it was the centerpiece of this room of beauty and good taste. Being here stimulated and calmed her senses at the same time, like walking along the beach.
The first few times at the table, she’d thought she could only say very important things. Now she knew the setting itself made anything sound very important. She concentrated on the rare pleasure of towering over people as she reviewed the figures that backed up their decision to launch the innovative packaging of lipsticks with matching scarves.
“The data told us loud and clear this was an idea worth pursuing. And the data were right, of course, based on our preliminary results. People didn’t mind buying a lipstick to match one scarf if the set was appealing and the price was right.” She looked over at Jeremy.
Disappointing? Don’t be ridiculous.
“Just out of cur-i-o-s-it-y…,” Jeremy dragged out each syllable with a deep, slow cadence to his voice, and Ruth could almost hear mournful cello music as accompaniment, “… who came up with this idea? Marketing? R&D? Perhaps even … even Dean himself?”
After forty years at the helm, Dean had sold Mimosa to B&D, a conglomerate looking to “feminize their offerings,” as it said in the press releases. Jeremy had been B&D’s Senior VP of Operations and was chosen to transform Mimosa from a small touchy-feely family-owned business to a rootin’-tootin’ buttoned-down operation.
“You know, I honestly don’t remember,” Ruth said, catching a glimpse of Judy staring down at the table to avoid giving away her authorship. “Anyway, we work as a team, so it doesn’t really matter.”
She shuffled her papers for a second. “But you’re right, we can make our results better. Why don’t we turn our attention to how to do that.”
Disappointing, indeed.
The rest of the meeting was no more boring than usual, and they did come up with a plan to redesign the Lipsticks & Scarves campaign. Ruth hoped she and her sneakers could be the last to leave.
Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have cared so much—she was senior management, after all, and had been at Mimosa for twenty-five years, so people paid more attention to her track record than her track shoes. But Jeremy had gotten rid of a bunch of people soon after he took over, quietly, no muss no fuss. Certainly, sneakers were not grounds for dismissal, but she didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. So to speak.
She took as long as she could to put her papers together and enter notes into her organizer/planner. Red for meetings, green for phone calls, blue for To-Do List entries. Pat Givens, Ruth’s Assistant Product Specialist, made nice to Jeremy on her way out. Did she actually say she enjoyed the meeting?
But Jeremy out-waited Ruth. “I’ll see you at the benefit tonight,” he said to her.
Facing Jeremy in his perfectly-tailored suit, conservative tie, and bookish horn-rimmed glasses, she was glad she’d dressed the part for today’s meeting, invoking her standard rationalization for eschewing her normal less-than-formal garb: “It’s not phony, it’s effective packaging, as if I’m one of our products, sitting on the shelf to be seen and evaluated.”
She knew she undercut the gray suit and pearls by gelling a few spikes—the kind of spikes usually seen on 20-year-olds with multiple pierces—in her short, dark hair. Oh well, her whole life was a mixed message anyway. There was the normal middle-aged middle-class corporate executive who lived in the suburbs, and then there was the overgrown hippy. Trying to integrate the two parts of her identity felt like juggling three live chickens. On an inclined plane. In high heels.
“I’m glad you’ll be there,” she said. “It’s clear we disagree about the status of the Lipsticks & Scarves results, but I’m sure we’ll agree about raising lots of money for a worthy cause. I think we’ll set a record tonight. And we’ll get great publicity in the process.”
“I love opera. Turandot is one of my favorites.”
Then Jeremy told Ruth he wanted to follow the re-design of the Lipsticks & Scarves campaign very closely. It was his way of delving into the actual work at Mimosa. He was in high guy-talk mode as he said he wanted to penetrate, wanted to get his hands dirty. Especially the Marketing Department, which he called the heart and soul of any company. He told her to let him know about everything connected to the campaign. Everything.
This is not good, she thought. Yes, the Marketing Department is important. Yes, he needs to understand the work of the company. No, looking over her shoulder is not the way to do it. She wasn’t some entry-level newbie who needed close supervision. That second “everything” put her on alert.
“How about if I—”
“Just send me the relevant material as it comes up.” He looked at the antique clock on the wall, then at the expensive watch on his slim wrist. “I’ve got to go.” He looked down at her feet. “And I guess you’ve got to jog back to your office.”
On the way back to her own little piece of Mimosa real estate on the other side of the eighteenth floor, Ruth thought it was going to be hard to break in this new CEO. It was clear he wasn’t going to be the “I want to be your friend” type of boss. More like the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” kind. Or maybe “Control Freak.” Two control-freaks battling it out, she thought. Not a pretty sight.
And someone was going to have to teach him the value of intangibles. She hoped it wouldn’t have to be her.
Once, as a Peace Corps volunteer, she’d tried to convince a villager to incorporate vegetables into the traditional fish-and-rice diet because of good things called vitamins. The woman shifted the baby on her back, reached into her basket for a lumpy whitish tuberous yam, and held it close to her eyes.
“You can’t see them, they’re very small,” Ruth had said. “But they’re there.”
Thankfully, she was more successful than Purchasing-Guy had just been. She wondered what that twenty-three-year-old version of herself would have thought of this fifty-three-year-old version, the Marketing Director of a cosmetics company. Actually, she didn’t really wonder, she knew.
Back then, she lived in a hut with one orange crate for clothes and one for books. She was saving the world, or at least making a difference to the people in her village. Every moment of every day was, if not giddy—she did experience homesickness and doubt, not to mention diarrhea—at least related to every other moment, directed either at her worthy goals or physical needs. The individual cells in her body felt more than just alive, they fairly vibrated. A far cry from talking about selling cosmetics.
Had it been thirty years or thirty light-years? Why can’t her past and present finally learn to shake hands and play nice?
Rather than explaining to her imaginary younger self that the compromises she’d made in her life were justified—“I had to earn enough to send Josh to college; besides it’s not just makeup, it’s skin care, too”—she strong-armed the thought from her consciousness with an audible “Oh well.”
Her staff had gotten to her office before she did. When she joined them, they were ready to pounce. “Lordie, lordie, Ruth, that was … well … it wasn’t great, you know? Don’t you agree? I mean….” Judy somehow managed to wring her hands and bite her thumbnail at the same time.
“It was abundantly clear that Jeremy didn’t like our results,” Pat said. “But I wouldn’t disagree with his priorities. Profits are the name of the game.” Her deep voice, always surprising from such a small body, made crankiness and anxiety difficult to distinguish.
“Profits certainly are important, Trish,” Ruth said. Pat flinched and start to tap the toe of one tasteful navy-blue pump like a metronome. Ruth knew that using Pat’s childhood nickname was a low blow. But so was disloyalty.
Tom interrupted his choppy, disconnected gait. “What did you think of the meeting?”
“It was the first launch under Jeremy’s watch, so let’s assume he’s being a little defensive. He did pretty well at B&D, so he must know something. And he clearly has his own style,” she said with as straight a face as she could muster, “but that’s the way it goes. He’s the boss. We have to get used to it.”
No need to worry them yet.
Turning to the Lipsticks & Scarves redesign, they constructed an action plan and divided the tasks to be done, from manufacture to packaging to advertising. Later, when their work started to bear fruit, she’d think about “keeping Jeremy informed,” whatever that meant.
For the moment, though, the few last-minute details for tonight’s benefit were numero uno on her prioritized To-Do list. She’d take care of them and then, she hoped, be able to leave early. It probably didn’t even pay to change out of her sneakers.
CHAPTER 2
David’s Bombshell
SHE STARTED SHEDDING HER WORK CLOTHES the instant she was inside her house. David, a teacher at the local high school, had gotten home even earlier than she and started an early dinner by inspecting the fridge contents and giving his creativity free rein. Tonight’s palette had consisted of chicken thighs, left-over Brussels sprouts, peas, rice, and beets. Had it been her turn to cook, she’d have looked for a recipe.
Over dinner, she filled David in on Jeremy’s interpretation of the Lipsticks & Scarves campaign and his “I want to get my hands dirty” speech.
“Dirty hands are bad?”
“No one needed to look over my shoulder on ‘Glamorous Glimmer.’ A big success. Same with ‘Red, Red, More Red.’ Hundreds of others. I’m good at this stuff, I have a great record.”
“Maybe he’s not doing it to check up on you, but, like he said, to get to know the business. It doesn’t seem—”
“It may not seem so bad to you. Believe me, you had to be there.”
She speculated that maybe Jeremy wasn’t happy about being sent from a mega-corporation to a little bitty company. But then why micro-manage? Maybe he just didn’t like her because she wasn’t cut out with the standard corporate cookie-cutter. Didn’t worship at the altar of buzz-words, didn’t like professional associations, didn’t dress like a store-dummy. He’d probably even call her a “women’s libber.” Maybe he was planning to put a B&D guy, a Big Daddy, in her job. Then why hadn’t he done it yet?
“It feels like he’s marking his territory, pissing on the hydrant.”
“Why don’t you think about—”
“There’s got to be more to him than meets the eye. Because, really, not much meets the eye. Judy said she has a friend who used to work for the Big Daddies so maybe she can get some gossip.”
David had cooked, so she insisted on cleaning up, even though it was the night of the benefit. “Fair’s fair. I have time.”
Just before leaving the kitchen and switching off the light, she adjusted a plate in the dishrack. It was the one they’d had made from Josh’s drawing, years ago, with a face whose eyes were V-shaped blue birds and the big smiling mouth was a series of red flowers. When the face was right-side-up, she smiled back at it.
“I can’t put it off any longer.” She walked over to David and stood between him and the TV. “Time to get dressed up.”
He picked up the newspaper. “It’s still early. I only need fifteen minutes to put on my tuxedo, and, really, seven of those minutes are spent putting on my tuxedo frame-of-mind.” He peeked over the top of the newspaper.
“Yes, but I need your help. As usual.” She pulled him out of his chair.
He saluted and started towards the bedroom. She took the paper from the chair, folded it and put it on the side table.
They headed down the corridor, plushly-carpeted in forest green, past walls that could barely contain the jumble of photos. Ruth thought she must be the only person she knew whose favorite room in her own house wasn’t a room at all, but a hallway.
Pictures of Josh dominated, sprinkled throughout the display: Josh being breast-fed by a tousle-haired Ruth, Josh in his SpiderMan Halloween costume at the day care center, David and Josh in orange life vests on a canoe trip, Josh doing magic tricks in middle school, Josh being comforted by his parents after a disastrous performance with the high school debating team, Josh and his deer-in-the-headlights prom date, Josh being suave on the college tennis team, Josh graduating from college.
Interspersed among the Josh-growing-up series were vacation shots of them with friends from one part of their life or another: on a barge trip through France, in a rented house in Italy, at a health spa, and assorted skiing, biking, hiking, and beach trips. There were family pictures, too: Ruth and her sister Marge, Ruth and her diminutive mother just a year before she died, David and his blond Midwestern parents. A wedding picture had all the family members from both sides looking as if they actually came from the same friendly planet.
At the far end of the corridor, closest to the bedroom, were three shots, side by side. There was one of each of them in front of the huts they lived in as Peace Corps volunteers—young, filthy, happy. And there was one of a six-year old Josh in Ruth’s village, surrounded by village kids, when they’d all gone back for a visit.
Looking at a picture or two when she passed through the hallway was her version of stopping to smell the flowers. The pleasure was mingled with the recognition that the moment captured in each photo was over. This photo gallery was the place where happiness and sadness intersected, leading her to observe, on one of her many trips through it, that she thought the hallway could be her obituary.
In the bedroom, she started ruffling through the hangers in the “dress-up outfits” section of her closet. “Tonight’s event is something Jeremy would probably call a ‘do-gooder kind of thing,’ so part of me wants to stick it to him with something outrageous.”
David made a move towards his favorite, the cherry-red dress with the deep-V neckline that made her blush the first twenty minutes she wore it.
“Wait. I’m thinking maybe I’d do better to look powerful, especially after today’s meeting. Maybe tonight I need to look like ‘one of them.’ A real corporate suck-up. With an outfit that says,” and she placed both hands on her hips and dropped her voice, “‘Jeremy, what in the world are you thinking, I’m a bottom line girl, a powerful bottom line girl.’”
“This is a lot of message for one outfit.” David’s eyes were unblinking, his mouth horizontally neutral, but she was fluent in his body language and knew he was struggling to stay on topic.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. And there’s actually one more thing. There’s Pat. Young Pat, thin Pat, cranky Pat who’s sprinting to get on Jeremy’s good side.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t won her over or gotten rid of her.”
“She’s too good at what she does to get rid of. And I’m too good at relationships to give up on her. Soon she’ll realize I’m not the enemy. And I’m not her mother. Meanwhile, I want to look like a middle-aged knockout.”
“Sounds like a night for …” He reached into the closet and pulled out, with a flourish, a sparkling black sequined top. “… sequins.”
“Sequins. I could wear that top with the long swishy skirt, which hides my tummy bulge nicely. Or maybe the plum dress”—she reached into the closet to pull it out—which shows off my legs, but it’s a little tight right here in the danger area.” She put her hand across her abdomen. “What do you think? And then I’ll let you go.”
“I think the skirt and top are beautiful and dignified, but the dress is beautiful and powerful and says ‘Watch out, Pat.’”
“What about the tummy?
“Ruth, I swear, it seems to be all you can see, but the rest of us don’t notice it. Especially with those legs. And I think I officially can’t take any more of this.”
As they finished dressing, Ruth provided an overview of tonight’s likely cast of characters, including those who needed buttering up and those who could use some therapeutic snubbing. They took a final side-by-side look in the full-length mirror near the front door.
David’s graying hair and white neatly-trimmed beard framed sensual features he’d once feared were effeminate. He looked like he was born to wear a tuxedo with matching purple and green bow tie and cummerbund decorated with math formulas. At six feet tall, he didn’t overpower Ruth, but created the perfect counterpoint for her slight frame, especially when he put his arm around her shoulder. She fit right in. And she didn’t look too bad, either.
“Not bad,” he said. “If only Mrs. Sills could see me now. Back in third grade, she never thought I’d amount to anything.”
They headed for the door. Ruth asked about David’s day. “Wasn’t today that last-minute hush-hush faculty meeting?”
“Yep.”
“So? What gives? Is the principal resigning? Did they finally find out about all that special help, that very-special help, he gave the social studies teacher, what’s-her-name?”
“Gloria. No, not that. Not quite so juicy. But it was pretty … pretty intriguing.”
“Well? What? Tell me.”
Ruth slid in on her side of the car, her movements deliberate so she wouldn’t snag her pantyhose or dress. David hesitated for a second before he folded his body into his seat, buckled up, and started the engine. He turned to face Ruth and told her the meeting had been about saving money, especially on salaries, because of the recent defeat of the school budget.
He faced forward and eased the car into traffic.
“You weren’t laid off, were you? Even they wouldn’t lay you off to hire a younger teacher for less money. Would they? I mean, you’re their best math teacher. And besides, you’ve got more tenure than God.” Ruth’s alarm was not so much about job security as concern for David’s emotional well-being.
David adjusted the heating controls, then the position of the side view mirrors, then the radio. “No, nothing like that.”
“Well?”
He explained the one-time only, take-it-or-leave-it early-retirement deal proposed by the district with buy-in from the state: teachers between fifty-two and fifty-six could choose to retire at the end of this school year or next. They didn’t have to wait until they were fifty-eight and they didn’t have to have the requisite thirty years on the job. In terms of their pension, they’d not only get credit for the years they’d worked, they’d also get a bit of a boost.
“It’s really a….” His voice trailed off.
“It sounds to me like it’s really a scheme to replace the older teachers with ones they can get cheap. Honestly, don’t they care about the quality of the education they’re paying for?”
Traffic was heavy, but moving. David looked in his rear-view mirror and adjusted its position. He looked over his shoulder at his blind spot as he slipped into the left lane for an upcoming turn.
Ruth tried to console David for what she thought was troubling him, that some of his friends would retire. She was sure he’d still enjoy being there, being the best geometry teacher they ever saw.
At a red light, David stopped, more suddenly than necessary, and turned his whole body to face Ruth again.
It was starting to rain, and Ruth worried about getting from the car to the concert hall without getting wet. Or did they still keep that umbrella in the car?
“Ruthie, you’re not hearing what I’m saying.”
She looked over at him. The streetlight shone behind him, so his face was largely in shadow, but he looked funny. His mouth dropped off a little bit on the left. And his brows were furrowed. That wasn’t like him at all. He was turning his wedding ring around. Uh oh, a bad sign.
She folded her hands like a school-girl. “So spell it out.”
The light turned green. He faced forward and drove more smoothly as he told her about the details of the one-time offer. He needed to let them know in the next thirty days or else he’d wind up working until he was fifty-eight.
“And I want to take it. And—”
“You want to retire? You can’t be serious. Retire?”
“Retiring at fifty-four is not outlandish. Besides, you knew I’d be retiring in four years anyway.”
“What would you do? Another job? What kind?”
“No new jobs. Actually, I thought maybe … maybe we could both retire. Especially with your new boss being such a pain. And then we could play all day. It’d be fun. Don’t you think?”
“You want me to retire?” Ruth looked out the side window, the front window, over at David, then back out the side window again, her eyes bouncing like pinballs. It was really raining now. Little puddles accumulated on the roadway, though not on the streets. She noticed the reflections in the puddles, of the street lamps, the tops of the buildings and even their car. But it went by in a blur, too fast to catch a good glimpse. She didn’t like that blurriness and would have liked David to slow the car down so she could see her own reflection in her own car in one of the puddles.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before instead of springing it on me now?
David didn’t answer for two blocks.
“I didn’t spring it on you. We were busy talking about other things. Anyway, I did try. But…. And then you asked. It was….” He shook his head.
“David, we’re not old enough to retire. It’s too soon. Isn’t it? Retire? Oh God, I didn’t know you were thinking of retiring.”
“I have thirty days to tell them if I’m taking the offer. But that’s what I want to do. And it would be more fun if you did it too.”
For the next twenty minutes, David pretended to be concentrating on his driving and Ruth pretended to be calm. He’s crazy, she thought. We’re not really old enough to retire. Isn’t that for old people? Older than us, for sure. Let’s see, when my mother was fifty-four, where was I? In the Peace Corps with Vivian. We certainly did think our parents were old back then, older than we’d ever be.
Ruth insisted she couldn’t retire. She had too much to do at work. And she had to leave on a high, without looking like she was being forced out. “You wouldn’t retire without me, would you? Jeez, David, we haven’t talked about retirement at all. I like working. I don’t want to wear plaid shorts and play golf.”
“Can we be serious?”
“You’re right. You don’t wear plaid shorts. Sorry.”
“And how can you say you like working? You complain a lot. You’re tired all the time. And you’re always agonizing about being so corporate and so involved with make-up, you talk about not being who you used to be. Maybe it’s time to—”
“Oh, sure, I complain, but I really like the challenges and the problem-solving, I like the people. Enough of them anyway.”
She felt the vertical crease between her eyebrows starting to deepen into the Grand Canyon of the Forehead as the antagonists in her familiar internal battle started warming up: Why had she stayed at this job? Because she liked it. Why did she like it? For the creativity and the validation of her talent. Was that enough, and was it time to leave? Yes, and don’t be ridiculous.
David started a sentence he chose not to finish. It wasn’t distraction, she could tell, it was a self-stifle. “Go ahead,” she urged.
“I think what you like is being good at what you do, even if you don’t exactly like what you do. You’re addicted to competence, you’re an achievement junkie. You could do volunteer work, maybe, and then be competent at something you believe in.”
He looked over at her. “C’mon, don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad. Not exactly, anyway. If you were thinking about this, why didn’t you tell me? I feel kind of betrayed. You were clearly open to this idea, and I had no inkling.”
“Ruthie, you want me to tell you everything I might conceivably be open to thinking about? That’s nuts. Even I don’t know that. And even if I did….” his voice dropped off.
“I’m just trying to figure out and explain how I feel.”
“I don’t actually need precision about the ingredients and proportions of your various emotions,” David said. “I get it. Enough of it, anyway.”
“I just wanted to be clear. So you’d understand.”
“It’s time you knew. Your need to be clear is much greater than it is for your audience.”
“But it is a need for me, David. Maybe it’s because I felt so misunderstood growing up. Or because I’m short, so I feel like—”
“Ruthie!”
“What?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Oh. Okay. Let me just calm down, okay?”
“Good idea.” After a few minutes, they pulled up to the concert hall, into the designated “Big Shot” parking spaces. It had stopped raining. Ruth took a deep breath and looked at her watch.
Hoping David would come to his senses in a day or two, she said, “I need for us to talk about this later. I don’t like it at all, but I’ll think about it. Later. But right now, more than anything else, I need to glow. Okay? Glow now, think later.”
“If that’s what you need, you glow, girl. I’ll be right beside you.”