“Hello, Deborah,” the woman said.
“Heather,” Deborah responded, noncommittally. She moved to an adjacent basin and turned the crystal knobs on the faucet. The two women, standing side by side, eyed each other in the mirror. They looked similar, despite their difference in age, which was almost a decade.
Deborah thought she herself looked better.
“I need your help,” Heather said, breaking the silence.
Deborah, wiping her hands on a paper towel, turned to face the woman. “Oh?” she smiled.
“I understand the second chair hasn’t been filled yet for the Owens case. I’d like a shot at it.”
Deborah continued to smile.
“I would do a good job,” the woman said confidently.
“Yes, I believe you could.”
“Then you’ll recommend me?”
Deborah, finished with the towel, wadded it up. “Certainly, I will,” she said.
Heather smiled and thanked Deborah, and left the bathroom.
Deborah stared after the woman, nerves strung out as tight as pantyhose in a strangler’s hands.
“Certainly, I will,” she repeated. “Not!”
She reared back and threw the wadded-up paper towel angrily at the wastebasket. “I didn’t claw my way up this good-old-boy network just to hand you a plum position on a silver platter!”
Deborah turned back to the mirror and got lipstick out of her purse and applied the blood-red color to her collagen-injected lips.
“You’d better go home,” she warned her reflection, “before you blow it. Remember Laura.”
The thought of that woman, and what happened to her, brought a new rush of heat to Deborah’s already flushed cheeks.
It was fifteen years ago that Deborah, fresh out of law school and new to the firm, was an associate to Laura. The woman was her idol, a Harvard graduate of distinction, a talented and brilliant lawyer... and the first female certain to become a partner in this all-boys-club.
But it never came to pass. Because Laura made a fatal mistake one day: she showed some emotion.
Mr. Laroma, a senior partner in a pin-stripped suit, looked at Laura from across the conference table and smirked, “Maybe we should discuss this later... after you’ve had your period.”
Though a stunned silence hung in the air, Deborah would never forget the collective look on the men’s faces: one of masked approval. Laura fled the room, and a short time later, the company.
The incident was a turning point for Deborah; after that, she told herself, she would be a man in drag.
And now, with partnership so close she could almost reach out and touch it, she’d better not show any female weakness. Especially hormonal.
Deborah walked back to her office.
“If Mr. Laroma should need me,” Deborah informed her secretary, “he can reach me at home.”
Deborah packed up her briefcase, then took the elevator down to an underground garage where she got in her gray BMW and drove out to the street. After a few blocks, she pulled into a “No Parking” zone in front of a dry-cleaners, got out of the car and entered the store.
A thin young man with a bad case of acne stood behind the counter. She stepped up and set her purse down, then rummaged around in the bag for her dry-cleaning ticket. She stopped, realizing she’d left it at home.
“Damn,” she said irritably. “I don’t have the ticket... but it’s a white silk blouse and blue suit.”
“Sorry,” the kid said flatly, “I need the ticket.”
Deborah softened her expression and voice, “Can’t you make an exception?” she asked sweetly.
“Nope. Those are the rules.”
Deborah studied him for a moment, then sighed deeply. “And I so wanted to wear them to the AIDS benefit tonight.” For a second the kid seemed to reconsider. But then he said, again, “I need the ticket.”
Deborah slammed both fists on the counter making her purse jump. “Listen, you pimply-faced faggot,” she growled, “give me my clothes or I’ll...”
“I’ll call the cops,” he said firmly, and moved toward a nearby phone to make good his threat.
Deborah turned in a huff and stomped out to the curb where she found a different kind of ticket on the windshield of her car.
She grabbed the pink parking violation, nearly dislocating the wiper, and looked up and down the street. She spotted the policewoman who had given her the ticket.
“I was just in there a minute!” Deborah shouted at her.
The cop ignored Deborah.
So Deborah screamed, “Why don’t you get a real job!” and tore the ticket into tiny pieces, scattering them to the wind.
She got in her car and, without looking, pulled out from the curb, nearly causing an accident. Brakes squealed as the other motorist honked his horn.
She gave him the finger.
Weaving recklessly in and out of the downtown traffic, Deborah caught the north-bound expressway that would take her out to her home in the suburbs. But before long the expressway slowed, congested with commuters, and Deborah, behind the wheel, fumed, then found some classical music on the radio to calm herself down. But after a while, the violin concerto sounded like fingernails on a blackboard and Deborah shut off the radio with a click.
Now the traffic was at a near standstill, and Deborah, crawling past an exit, got off. She’d wait out the rush hour at a nearby mall, and besides, she thought, shopping always made her feel better. And she could use the time to find a present for her mother’s birthday — though it didn’t matter how carefully Deborah picked out the gift or how expensive it was... nothing ever pleased her mother.
It seemed to Deborah that she spent her entire life looking for affection; though she got it, briefly, from her father — until she was eight years old. That’s when he left her. He didn’t have the decency to wait until she had gone off to school that morning. She stood crying at the window — just a little girl — watching him get in the car with his suitcases. He didn’t even look back.
She didn’t see or hear from him again until a few years ago. He called her at the office, out of the blue... said he was sorry he had dropped out of sight. He’d like to make it up to her.
She wanted — so badly — to reach out to him, to know him, to love him. But the little girl wouldn’t let her.
She told him to go fuck himself.
Deborah pulled her car into the parking lot of the mall, which was full. She drove around and around looking for a place to park. The third time she passed the empty handicapped spaces up at the front, she complained, “How many do they need? They get all the breaks!”
Then two heavy-set women in jogging clothes — obviously on their way to use the mall as a track, a trend Deborah hated — stepped out in the cross-walk, and she had to slam on her brakes and let them pass.
She watched the women disdainfully, envisioning elephants, and rolled down her window and hollered, “It’s not working!”
Around she drove again, when suddenly, up at the front, and very close to the mall, brake lights went on.
“There is a God!” Deborah cried, and zoomed ahead, putting on her turn signal to lay claim to the spot.
Impatiently she tapped her fed nails on the steering wheel, waiting for the Chevy truck to back out, its body perched precariously up on big wheels.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered. “Show me a jacked-up truck and I’ll show you a man who wishes his dick were bigger.”