style.
“You know that anything I can do to help I will.”
“Thanks.” I glanced at my watch. “I’d better get back to the office. Lizbeth’s having one of her famous late afternoon meetings to make sure none of us tries to sneak out early. But hey, at least I’m getting one task accomplished today.” I held up my ice-cream cone in the gesture of a toast. “Number thirteen: Eat ice cream in public.”
“About this one, I don’ t get it. What’s the big deal about eating ice cream?”
“Fat people aren’t allowed to eat in public.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, a bit snobbily in my opinion. “I notice them eating all the time.”
“Exactly.”
“You lost me.”
“It’s hard to enjoy the eating experience when you feel everyone’s staring at you, thinking, No wonder she’s such a fat cow. Look how she eats.”
“I don’t think that!”
“Sure.” Although I’d never carried the sort of weight Marissa had, I was no stranger to how feeling fat can affect things. I’ve gone up and down the same ten or twenty pounds my whole life. I have one of those body types that lean in that direction: all curves and boobs and butt. Currently, thanks to being too miserable to eat after the accident, I was the lowest weight I’ve been in a long time-a diet strategy, by the way, that I don’t recommend. Logically I know that I’m not overweight, but I fear that one wrong move-one taco or burrito too many-and I could burst into fat without a moment’s notice.
Susan tipped her chin toward my cone. I’d worked my way through the rocky road and was well into the cookie dough. “Are you enjoying that?”
“To be honest, I’m not a big fan of ice cream.”
“How can anybody not like ice cream?”
“Too big a commitment.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Think about it. Once you buy ice cream, you have to finish it right then and there. Either eat it or lose it forever. I mean, look at this. It’s already drippy. You can’t tuck it away to finish later like you can, say, a cookie.”
“Oh, come on! Have you ever once in your life put a cookie away to finish later?”
“That’s not the point. It’s that I could if I wanted to.”
“Seems to me that if you’re going to do this task justice, you need to enjoy that ice cream. No guilt. No worries. Let yourself get into the moment.” When I looked at her skeptically, she said, “That’s what Marissa would have done.”
She was right, of course, darn it. So I closed my eyes and slid my tongue over the ice cream. I let its cool sweetness wash over me. Let myself taste it. Feel it. When I finally let down my guard, I had to say it was incredible. Soft and creamy. I enthusiastically licked it down to the cone, sighing and letting out an mmmm of pure pleasure.
And then I opened my eyes.
Peter from the accounting department stood at the edge of my table, breathing heavily with a big grin on his face. “Hey, I hear there are Krispy Kremes in the break room. Any chance you’ll let me know if you decide to eat one? I want to be there if you do.” His eyes moved longingly between Susan and me. “Even better, maybe the two of you could share one.”
“HI GUYS,” I said, grabbing a chair at a gleaming conference table that could accommodate a family of twelve for Thanksgiving dinner. It was almost the size of my entire cubicle. I set down my Diet Coke and watched happily as it formed a fat wet ring.
Lizbeth Austin Adams’s office reminded me more of a living room than a place of business. She’d brought in plants and lamps and other homey touches-each new addition a knife in my heart, as it meant she was setting down roots.
“Her Majesty will be here in a few,” Lizbeth’s assistant, Brie, informed me, barely glancing up from her issue of Us magazine. “Dang, I can’t believe that Beyonce acts like she invented the whole bootylicious thing.” She crossed an ample thigh, exposing the control-top line of her panty hose. “I had a booty when that girl was still running around in diapers.”
“Wait a minute-you can’t be any older than she is,” I countered. “Wouldn’t that mean you were in diapers, too?”
“Yeah, but I had a booty.”
It was three o’clock on the dot, and the marketing department, such as we were, was assembled. Gazing around at my co-workers, I almost had to feel sorry for Lizbeth. After she’d joined as director of marketing for L.A. Rideshare two years ago, unexpected budget cuts brought a wave of layoffs. The empire she’d moved from Texas to lead dwindled to the four of us. Like strangers thrown together in a lifeboat, we seemed to have only one thing in common: an instinct for survival. Besides Brie and me, there was Greg, the designer, and Dominic Martucci, known only as Martucci, whose job it was to drive the Rideshare Mobile. Martucci had a thin-lipped smile and a habit of fondling the tiny braided rattail that he’d let grow like a hairy tadpole from the nape of his neck. Sometimes I shuddered to think he had his hands all over my brochures.
“Good afternoon,” Lizbeth said as she breezed in. Martucci and Greg straightened in their seats. She had that effect on men. I half expected them to chant like schoolboys, “Good afternoon, Miss Austin Adams.”
She tossed a manila folder in front of me. “Nice work on this brochure. I made a few comments.” I thumbed through the draft copy I’d given her to review. There was so much red ink, I thought perhaps she’d opened a vein over it. As if I’d be so lucky. “Overall I’d prefer that you make it less”-she gave me a patronizing smile-“Jane Fonda.”
“Jane Fonda?”
“You know,” she said, wrinkling her nose and whispering as if saying a dirty word, “strident.”
“All it says is that cars cause pollution.”
“Right.”
“But isn’t that the-“
“All right, people, we’ve got quite a bit to cover today,” she said, ignoring me as she always did and addressing the group instead. “Let’s get started.”
I tucked the brochure away. I’d make the changes she wanted-what was the point in arguing?
As at every department meeting, Lizbeth went around the table having each of us report the status of the projects we were working on. When it was my turn, I mentioned a brochure on carpool lanes I was writing and a press release announcing a new bus pass. I bored even myself as I talked about it.
When people discover I work as a writer, I’m quick to point out that I’m not a real writer. I see their eyes light up-ooh, a writer?!-so I try to squelch it before it goes any further. While I’m not exactly ashamed, let’s face it: My job lacks glamour on a level almost impossible to comprehend. Carpooling isn’t exactly sexy stuff.
That’s why it baffles me how someone like Lizbeth Austin Adams wound up working here. Well& besides the fact that Lou Bigwood, our agency president, discovered her at a conference she’d put together-a tale passed around the office with the same reverence as the one about Lana Turner getting discovered at Schwab’s. That was Lizbeth’s forte: event planning. At our first department meeting two years ago, she’d boasted that she’d planned the Bush twins’ coming-out party, to which Brie had slapped her ever exposed thigh and exclaimed, “I knew they was gay!” Bigwood, apparently impressed with Lizbeth’s credentials-or impressed with something, at any rate-had offered her a job on the spot.
Not just any job.
My job.
Granted, it wasn’t mine technically. But my old supervisor had groomed me for the position. I would have been managing a staff of twelve, in charge of ad campaigns and publications, plus running promotional events-big parties where we’d feed people hot dogs and, once their mouths were full, talk to them about how very fun sharing the ride could be.
Instead, I’d had to force a smile and applaud as Lou Bigwood had trotted Lizbeth out at a staff meeting and introduced her as the new director of marketing.
I suppose it shouldn’t have been such a shock. He was notorious for finding stunning women and-to the endless frustration of the human resources manager-offering them hefty salaries and the plum jobs at the agency without consulting with anyone else. He was a maverick that way. Lizbeth, blond and in her late thirties, was conventionally
