My parents were academics. They didn't understand business, and couldn't understand why I would waste my degree as a secretary. We were called secretaries back then, in the early Sixties when I started my career. Well, we were called secretaries, sometimes, and girls most of the time ("Chuck, have your girl schedule a meeting with Tom Wilson in Accounting..."), and we never, ever, ever called it a "career." Not back then.
Back then, it was a job, a way to keep a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs. A way to contribute to our families, we the unmarried working girls who chose work over husbands and babies. We wore beehive hairdos and shoes that killed our feet and nylons every day of the week. No "walking-shoes with the pumps in the handbag" for us. We were hard-core, back then.
I came to Larrabee armed with a college degree and ten years of experience. I typed one-hundred seven words a minute (on a manual typewriter), knew short-hand, took dictation at 90 words a minute, and could compose business letters with the best of them. I worked for old Mr. Larrabee for the last three years of his life, assistant to Mrs. Callahan, who had been his secretary for forty years.
Linus got me in the will, I think.
Linus is in Paris now, no doubt. He's probably walking down some rainy street, holding hands with Sabrina, dazed and unsettled by this rapid and unexpected change in his life.
I had a mobile phone before I had a microwave. My family hated Linus, hated him with a passion. Even my mother, who never hated anybody in her sixty-seven years of life, harbored a little resentment toward him. Linus became the focus of their confusion, the monster that turned their daughter from a quiet little do-bee to a workaholic who slept with one eye on the phone and one foot on the floor.
Maude and I packed his bags this morning. Was it only this morning? I teased him about it, one last shot before he started his new life. Like touching the Shroud of Turin. It was a thing we shared. Everybody was so afraid of Linus; he appreciated that I was not. I'm not intimidated easily. And he liked that I wasn't afraid to call him on his crap, without ever making him look or feel bad.
They called us girls in the Sixties, and even in the early Seventies before the feminists starting screaming about it. My brother wanted to know why I never went back to school, finished my MBA like I'd planned. My sister still says I sold out my values, and that I'm part of the problem, not the solution.
They called us girls, and made movies about it. Doris Day and Rock Hudson, or Cary Grant, or whatever bisexual stud they could place her with. Oh, the moment of truth--Miss Johnson, take off those glasses, let down your hair! My, Miss Johnson, you're beautiful!
David and Maude spoke to me after the Tyler meeting, alone and behind closed doors. They wanted to assure me that Linus's departure would not in any way endanger my place at Larrabee. They were afraid I'd leave, take this opportunity to maybe start my own business. After twenty years of being Linus's eyes, ears, and Rolodex, I suppose I can understand their concern. I'm an asset.
I was a waitress in school. I've worked every day since I was sixteen. I thought, at one point, that I'd like to open a little restaurant. Maybe a coffee shop, with lots of books and big comfy chairs where people could read or talk. But Starbucks already did that to death. Besides, I don't want to leave. Maybe a day off, a week. A vacation somewhere exotic, to use up the months of unused time off I've been accumulating forever.
Doris Day always had a sidekick, Eve Arden or Joan Blondell, maybe. I hated those women. I hated their spunk, thank you very much. Like you couldn't be a professional woman without being a joke. But more than Eve and Joan, more than even Doris herself, I hated those women in the old movies. The hard-ass secretary, old and dried-up, who had obviously been madly in love with the boss for years. She watches, in the final reel, as Cary Grant or Rock Hudson, maybe Gregory Peck, goes off into the sunset with the beautiful young thing.
A happy ending.
My cell phone is off. I haven't turned it off since I got it, except to recharge, and even then I had a backup.
My phone is unplugged.
There's nothing on television tonight. Even if there was, I wouldn't know, because I haven't seen an entire uninterrupted program in almost twenty years.
Linus is in Paris, beginning his new life.
I think I'll take a walk. The streets of New York are lovely in the rain. I think I'll get drunk. I haven't gotten drunk in years. No way was I going to answer that two a.m. call with slurred voice and blurry mind. No way was I going to show up, hung-over and regretting whatever I may or may not have done the night before.
Maybe I'll rent a man. I've got enough to afford someone young, someone smart enough not to disgust me, but stupid enough not to make me think. Someone who smiles when he looks at me, no matter what it is he thinks he sees.
The house feels strange. It feels empty, more so than ever before. I find that suddenly I can't remember when Mama died. Was it 1984 or 1985? Was it September or November? Daddy, I remember. July 14, 1963. One year before my graduation from college. Three o'clock in the afternoon, they called us from NYU to tell us he'd collapsed. They didn't even get him to the hospital in time. Ruthie and I holding hands, in hysterics, with Mama trying to find out what was going on. Eric and Lydia, quiet and pale, as we broke it to them what had happened. Daddy was dead. Daddy was gone.
I want to get drunk. I don't remember what it feels like to be out of control. I don't remember what it feels like to be spun around by life, free-falling into darkness. I want to go to a party, but I don't know anyone who has parties. Not real parties, anyway, where you wear your nicest clothes and dance to music with actual words and melodies.
"Poor Miss McArdle. All those years. What's she going to do? You know, she's probably been secretly in love with him all these years."
No imagination.
No. Fucking. Imagination.
I wasn't in love with him. I was in love with me, the woman who made things happen. The woman who knew the score, who knew who to contact, who never tripped or stumbled or missed the call.
I wasn't in love with him. I was in love with the success, the power, the feeling of control. The feeling that a single call could make the difference. Between victory and defeat. Between gain and loss. Between now, and five minutes from now.
Daddy never made it to the hospital. Five minutes longer. If he'd held out five minutes longer.
I'm staying home tonight. I have work in the morning. I have a job to do.
I just wish...the phone would ring. Then I could sleep.
End