But how?
4
ALICE
Alice used to be beautiful, even first thing in the morning, waking up with her cheek creased from the pillow and her hair standing out from her head like a child’s drawing of the rays of the sun. She used to be able to sit naked in the full exposure of sunlight, stretching, yawning, her breasts full and high, her tummy sleek as a silk evening bag, every pocket of her body as glistening and fresh as a spring morning.
Knowing this had given her a kind of power that had, along with her intelligence, ambition, and intuition, carried her up the ladder of corporate success. It was important to her work that she be attractive. No one said this, but it was true: The vice president in charge of administration for the TransContinent Insurance Corporation, especially if she was an African-American female, had to look good.
And for years she’d looked
great
. All her life she’d been attractive, until a few years ago, when it began to take some amount of maintenance on her part— exercise, diet, hair color, makeup. After fifty, the effort was almost daunting, but she was determined. She looked more chic than sexy, but chic worked.
Then, suddenly, it seemed, she woke up one morning to discover she was sixty-two.
It was as if she were a tiger, powerful, sinuous, burning bright, padding majestically through the jungle of life. Pausing to look in the mirror, she discovered that somehow, overnight, she’d become a sheep. A gray, common,
creaking
sheep.
Worse, other people saw her as a sheep.
Sheep were easy prey for jackals, lions, and wolves.
She cursed as she dressed for work. Her newest suit, for which she’d paid over a thousand dollars, was too tight at the waist. She could scarcely fasten it. After lunch, she’d be in agony and, unless she was lucky, the button would fly off during a conference and hit one of the new honchos in the eye. It was the style now for younger women to wear their shirts out over the waist rather than tucked in. When Alice tried it, she felt chubby and sloppy, and she remembered all those years of telling her sons to tuck their shirts in. Still, she left her white shirt out, pulled the suit jacket on, and left it unbuttoned. Not the best of looks, but it would do.
As long as she didn’t have to raise her arms. The sleeves were suddenly too tight, pulling at her shoulders. It seemed, these days, she gained weight while simply breathing air.
Now, shoes. The pair that coordinated with the suit had cost over four hundred dollars. Black, with a boxy three-inch heel, they made her legs look fabulous. The pleasure she got from the other corporate heads stealing glimpses of her legs almost offset the sheer torture of wearing them.
God, she was vain, and she knew it! However, her vanity was not just a personal flaw, it was also a professional tool. Three months ago, TransContinent merged with Champion Insurance and became TransWorld. Its new, glittering headquarters towered in the heart of downtown Boston, only minutes from Alice’s condo on Boston Harbor. She could walk there easily, but she wasn’t going to today. Not in these shoes. She headed out to her sleek black Audi and entered the early-morning traffic.
Alice’s job was to develop and implement umbrella policies for management information procedures, employee benefit policies, and human resource plans in and among the complicated network of offices.
A lovely, fit, energetic, brilliant, cocky,
younger
woman had come from Champion to work with Alice as assistant to the vice president in charge of administration.
Alison Cummings. Thirty-two, unmarried, no children, a Harvard MBA.
It bit Alice’s ass that this young princess was named Alison. Until her arrival, everyone had called Alice by the shortened version of her name. Going by Al had endowed her with the power of masculinity in written communications and online, as well as providing a slight frisson of sexuality in face-to-face meetings, because she was so obviously female. It had
worked
for her. But Alison also went by Al, and during their first superficially pleasant and deeply cold-blooded meeting, the two women had agreed with gritted teeth that both would give up the nickname and go by their full names, to avoid confusion. Alice had thought Alison should, because of Alice’s seniority, be respectful and extend to Alice the right to go by Al, but that thought didn’t seem to cross anywhere near the younger woman’s mind. She’d been more interested in measuring Alice’s corner office with calculating eyes. Her own office down the hall was almost as large, but not as prestigious.
Alice steered her way into the TransWorld garage, parked in her reserved spot, and took the elevator to the thirtieth floor. Ruefully, she recalled that Alison Cummings had one thing working for her, literally: She’d brought her secretary with her during the merger. She had
her
guardian in place.
Alice did not. Her own loyal and circumspect secretary, Eloise, in spite of Alice’s desperate pleas, had retired, leaving Alice personally bereft and professionally endangered. Eloise had been Alice’s watchdog and secret agent; Eloise could sense an office intrigue the moment it glinted in the conspirators’ eyes. Eloise would have helped Alice figure out just how determined Alison Cummings was to undermine her.
Since Eloise’s defection, Alice was scrambling to find a new secretary, but it was tough. Enough drastic changes were taking place with the merger; Alice didn’t want to raid a junior officer’s staff and provoke someone’s resentment, but she didn’t want to have to train someone totally new to the industry, either. Right now Alice had a temp from the office secretarial pool.
It was this secretary who greeted Alice as she entered her office. Diane was competent, but she was also thirtyfive, divorced, man-hungry, and swooningly eager to work with Cummings’s secretary, a fortyish man named Barton Baker.
Though Alice knew she could expect no loyalty from Diane, she still stopped at Diane’s desk to chat a few moments, trying to build some kind of camaraderie. Briefly they discussed weather, the latest news on Stan’s health, and commiserated on the chaos the new merger and acquisitions were causing the company.
When Alice headed into the inner sanctum of her own office, Diane followed her.
“Could I bring you a cup of coffee?”
“Thanks, Diane. I’d love a cup of decaf.”
How far would it go toward engendering a close relationship, Alice wondered, if she confessed to the secretary that these days coffee gave her acid indigestion and heart palpitations? Bad idea. Diane was too young; she’d see any weaknesses on Alice’s part as signs of imminent disability and death, and she’d leak it to the rest of the secretaries, and before she knew it, the jackals would be at Alice’s heels.
Settling at her desk, Alice booted up her computer, scanned her schedule, and checked out the TransWorld interoffice daily report. As she waited for her computer to access her e-mail, she eased her feet out of her gorgeous shoes, knowing she was trading immediate comfort for the eventual necessary agony of compressing her feet back in. Diane brought her decaf. Alice stirred artificial sweetener into it and sipped as she blasted directives, responses, and suggestions off into the Internet ether. Five minutes later, the waistband of her skirt was slicing into her skin. What was up with that? Did she have some mysterious illness that made her bloat like an elephant? With the help of estrogen patches and occasional diuretics, she’d pretty much sailed through menopause, and she’d thought by now the worst was over.
The truth was, she now realized, the worst was never over. She was sixty-two, and the worst was inexorably heading her way. What had sagged would never rise again. She’d get back her twenty-two-inch waist only at her deathbed or in the grave. She couldn’t afford time off from work to have plastic surgery, and now that Eloise was gone, she couldn’t even relax her arthritic back with the little secret catnaps she’d stolen every afternoon while Eloise guarded her door.
To add indignity to infirmity, she’d been in her office only twenty minutes and already she had to pee. As senior vice president, she had her own bathroom off her office, but she was painfully aware that out at her desk, Diane would be able to hear the toilet flush. She would be, even unconsciously, alerted to the frequency with which Alice went to the john. For all she knew, Diane was at heart a kind woman, but Alice had to consider her one of the jackals. Alice dare not betray the slightest sign of weakness.
She
had
to get her own secretary. ASAP.
Among the professional e-mails were two brief blips from her sons: Alan in Houston and Steven in Oregon. She adored them and took pleasure in the knowledge of their continuing health and happiness and that of their wives and children, but she’d never been a warm-and-fuzzy woman, except perhaps the first few years when her boys were babies. She loved her work, and she was damned good at it.
She’d been with TransContinent for thirty-six years. In a way, it was her true home. She’d been a lowly receptionist when Arthur Hudson founded the company in Kansas in 1966. Her sons had been in elementary school then, and she’d been married to her high school sweetheart, Mack Flynn. Women didn’t work so much back then, but Mack had less talent and persistence for keeping jobs than for playing football, and the family needed her income. Eventually Mack got a steady job delivering Coca-Cola, but he was a handsome, good-natured womanizer, and the job provided lots of opportunities to meet women.
When Mack divorced her to go out with someone else, TransContinent provided stability and support. With her boss’s urging, Alice continued working during the day while taking classes toward a master’s in administration at night. Slowly she’d climbed the corporate ladder, becoming administrative assistant to the vice president in charge of personnel and administration. By the time her sons went off to college, she was able—
just
—to pay their tuition: good thing, too, since their father couldn’t.
When she was thirty-five, she made the mistake she most regretted: She’d had an affair with Bill Weaver, her immediate superior. He was in charge of personnel, and he taught her everything about the job. Founded on mutual respect, their relationship had deepened as the company grew and the stresses mounted. Their sexual affair seemed a natural outcome of the long hours they spent working into the night, night after night after night. But Bill had a wife he loved; he’d never misled Alice about that, and she had thought for a long while that what she had with Bill was sufficient for her life. She
had
no other life, really. During other holidays when Bill was at home, she was perfectly happy, and even sometimes relieved, to have the time to herself. Often she simply spent the time in bed alone, catching up on hours and hours of lost sleep.
After five years, Bill’s wife discovered their affair. Around the same time, the home offices of the company were moved to Boston. Bill remained, but Alice made the move with them, though it meant leaving behind her home and a scattering of old friends she seldom saw. She’d been forty-one years old.
Since then, she’d been celibate, and the truth was, that was fine. All the passion, energy, and devotion she’d given Bill she now channeled into her work, and it had paid off, finally: At fifty-one, she was made a senior vice president of the company. The only woman vice president. The only woman officer,
period
.
Alice had seen the company grow from three hundred to over five thousand employees. She’d been personally responsible for researching, targeting, and implementing the personnel programs and benefits that made TransContinent a company where everyone wanted to work. Her office walls were hung with awards presented to her from within the company and from national organizations, for her innovative work in providing all the employees of TransContinent with excellent benefit packages and superior working conditions. Because of her work, TransContinent had been one of the first corporations in the country to provide in-house day care; her system had been used as a model all over the nation.
Now she faced a new challenge: developing human resources guidelines for a multinational organization. It would be a bitch of a job.
No, she had to do the job with a bitch.
During the preliminary conference call with their immediate superior, Melvin Watertown, Alice sketched out an overview for integrating the human resources policies and employment benefit programs, including a humanitarian plan for day-care centers for the workers, and health clinics, and possible educational opportunities for the employees in the new operations.
Alison Cummings had scoffed. “Your ideas are sweet, Alice, but financially unsound.”
Alice snapped back, “The majority of our shareholders are interested in optimizing the environment for the workers.”
“No, most of our shareholders are interested in profit. We’re not a charity.”
“In the long run,” Alice argued, “employee benefits pay off.”
“Our newer shareholders don’t care about the long run,” Cummings shot back. “They’re young, they’re in a hurry, they want to see profits fast.”
Alice had thought the young were supposed to be idealistic! Obviously, this was not a quality Alison cherished, nor did she show any respect for a woman who had struggled through the early years of feminism so some sleek cookie like Alison could step into a high-ranking job.
“Why don’t you formulate an employee package you both can live with and get back to us,” Melvin had growled, and signed off.
True, Alice had rushed things. She knew that conditions and needs had to be studied and humanitarianism needed to be balanced against profit and loss. Some of their new facilities weren’t operational yet. In some project areas further exploration had to be done before the size of the necessary workforce could be estimated. She’d attempted a preemptive strike, wanting to prove she had the overview and didn’t need Alison, and Alison had struck back, hard and fast, instead of making a conciliatory gesture such as suggesting they discuss it.
Alice was glad for the warning. She’d always intended to stay at TransContinent until she was forced to retire, and just a few years ago the company got rid of its mandatory age sixty-five retirement policy. She had the acumen, knowledge, and experience the company needed. This company was her home, her family, and her friends. She planned to work here until she was carried out in her coffin.