Part 3 — Six Lines in Blue
I turned the card over and laid it face up on the tablecloth beside the ham, where everyone could see the six lines in blue ink. Roger read them without moving his lips, and then he read them again. His brother Glenn leaned over and read them out loud, slowly, the way you read a street sign in a strange city.
“Annette, I need an office manager for the Grand Rapids headquarters, starting January second. Seventy-four thousand dollars, benefits, a corner of the building with a window. I do not hire people because they are married to my staff. I hire them because they remembered the name of my assistant, asked about my mother, and hung up forty jackets without once being thanked. Call me. Dana.”
Nobody said anything. The reading glasses of Edna slid down her nose. The mouth of Roger opened and closed like a fish on a dock. The seventy-four thousand dollars was more than he had said he made in his first year at the company, a figure he repeated at every party. I do not take pleasure in the discomfort of a man, but I will not pretend I did not feel the floor beneath me firm up.
“You talked to my boss at the check room,” Roger said hoarsely. “You were supposed to be helping me.” “I was helping you,” I said. “I was holding your jacket. I was also standing there in a green dress I had bought for myself, being introduced as the help. Dana saw it. She asked me one question, in a quiet voice: Do you like being called that? And I said no, I did not.”
He tried to say that I did not have the experience. Glenn laughed once, shortly. “She ran the front desk of a dental office for thirty-one years, Roger. She has handled more difficult people before nine in the morning than you will meet all year.” Edna said, in a small voice, “Annette, honey, I did not know,” and I realized that she had never once asked.
I had thought about this for nine days. I had sat in the car in the driveway, with the engine off, turning the card between my fingers. What kept me from calling was not fear of Dana. It was thirty-one years of habit: of putting myself behind the counter of my own life. I do not believe I am the only woman who has done that. I believe I had simply never been offered a better counter.
That Monday morning, Roger went to the office at eight, as the note instructed. I do not know all that was said. I know that Dana did not shout. I know that she spoke for forty minutes, that she listed in a flat voice the complaints from three staff members about the way he spoke to people, and that she placed him on a performance plan with written conditions, to be reviewed in ninety days. A man who sells for a living can recover from many things. He cannot recover from a pattern.
I called Dana on Tuesday. She answered on the second ring. I told her I would like to accept, and that I wanted to begin in the new year, and that I had one condition. She asked what it was. I said, “I would like to be introduced by my name.” She was quiet for a moment. “Annette,” she said, “that was going to be the first thing I did.”
Roger moved into the guest room for a season. He learned to cook two dishes. He sat in the car with me on the way to a counselor, and he held the door when we got there, a thing he had not done in years. I did not forgive him quickly. I let him earn the small things first: the dishes, the apology that did not include the word but, the question he asked me one evening, “How was your day?” and then the silence he left for the answer.
A woman who is called the help can decide, one morning, to help herself.
On the second of January I walked into the building downtown in a navy suit I had bought on sale, with a lanyard around my neck and a coffee in my hand. The receptionist said good morning and used my name. Dana met me at the elevator. “Corner office,” she said. “With a window. I have a feeling you will enjoy watching people come and go.”
At the holiday party the following December, I stood at the check room door with Edna, who had asked to come, and I watched the salesmen of Roger hand their jackets to a young man in a bow tie and thank him by name. Roger came over and offered me his arm. I took it. I said, “You may hold my wrap.” He did, carefully, with both hands, and he laughed at himself before I had to.