Can I Get An Amen? Read online

  “I’m sure Dana mentioned that we’ve had trouble filling this position,” he said, almost apologetically.

  “She did indicate that there were a few other candidates that didn’t work out.”

  “I’m not sure how to say this in a way that won’t sound terrible,” he said, searching for the right tone and words, “but polish and discretion are very important to me in an assistant. In some cases, you may be speaking with my clients more often than I do. And you will be privy to sensitive information.”

  “Well, I was in account management for several years, where I was often trusted with confidential client information,” I said confidently. “And the nature of that work also requires that you are detail oriented and organized.” I was in interview mode, which meant that I was pulling out all the stops. I sat up straight, smiled, and spoke with crisp enunciation. I didn’t have the luxury of being picky.

  He asked me a few more questions about my work in Boston, my schooling. “I see you went to Horton,” he said, glancing at my résumé with an inscrutable smile. “I was a Delbarton boy. I’m sure we have several mutual acquaintances.”

  I smiled and agreed.

  “Well, now that you know all about my unrealistic expectations and ridiculously high standards”—he gave a self-conscious smile—“are you still interested in the position?” He seemed more candid and prudent than unnecessarily picky.

  “Absolutely,” I said with a polite laugh. “I hope I meet your expectations.”

  He straightened a pen on his desk, placing it parallel with the edge of his notepad. “Oh, I’m sure you will.”

  I was to start the next day and would be trained by Brenda, his partner’s assistant, who had been absorbing the excess workload. “Brenda will be delighted to have you on board. I think she’s had it with me.”

  . . .

  Dana Sacco congratulated me. “I thought you might be right up Kent’s alley,” she said in a way that I found slightly disconcerting, though I ignored it. The trial period was to last two weeks, at which point I might be offered a permanent position, and the pay was better than I had hoped. However, I wasn’t ignorant of the fact that I was now utterly on my own. With Gary, I had always assumed that at some point I would no longer work; consequently I never directed my ambition toward my career, focusing it instead on the increasingly problematic task of starting a family. Without a husband, I had to make my own way, and I knew that I didn’t want to work for Philip Kent forever.

  “It’s just a bridge,” I told Luke.

  “To what?” he asked.

  “Exactly.” To what? I had no idea.

  Nevertheless, I felt optimistic about the job; it was a step forward. I would answer his phone and schedule his meetings and proof his letters, all the while riding out the recession and doing what all the books called “renewing my sense of self.”

  “Oh, praise the Lord,” said my mother when I told her that I had found a job. “That’s answered prayer!”

  And I thought that maybe it was. I felt the strongest I had in months. Maybe I really can do this, I told myself. Maybe I can start over. It was a sentiment that stayed with me all through the evening, as my parents congratulated me, as I left another message for Kat, and it continued the next day on my way into the office that bore the Kent name. It stayed with me through my cup of coffee, the introductions and handshakes, and my training with Brenda, right until the moment when I stepped behind Philip’s desk to grab a stack of file folders and got a glimpse of the beautiful wife in the framed photos. It was my high school nemesis, Parker Collins.

  Philip saw me staring. “Do you know my wife, Parker?” he asked. “She went to Horton as well.”

  “Yes,” I said. I tried to summon a smile to mask my shock as my face burned. “She and I were in the same class.” And, thanks to a cruel alphabetic coincidence, always seated right next to each other in assembly. Parker Collins and Ellen Carlisle, even then a juxtaposition.

  “I thought she might have been,” he said amicably. “Well, she comes in often, so I am sure you will have a chance to catch up.” And with that, he disappeared for the rest of the day.

  I was left to acquaint myself with the office, so I sat at my desk and stared blankly into my computer screen, all the while thinking of Parker. She had the life I was supposed to have: married to a handsome lawyer, with three beautiful children and a house in the suburbs. She attended parent-teacher conferences and scheduled doctor appointments. She planned dinner parties and booked their vacations. A few times a year, Philip would send her away for spa weekends. “Poor Parks really needs a break,” he would tell his friends. I knew her life. I knew it inside and out because it was the life I had imagined, the life that had made me keep trying, the life that I now tried desperately to dismiss as dated and bourgeois.

  My desk was outside Philip’s office. It was slightly smaller and had less prime real estate than Brenda’s, which I was glad about. Brenda was older, probably in her mid-fifties, and had an apple-shaped figure and dark brown hair that she pulled back into a tiny ponytail. Though her face showed her age, I was sure she was once considered quite a beauty. She didn’t wear a wedding ring but displayed a series of old, faded school photos of two children, a boy and a girl, at her workstation. There were no pictures of a husband, and there was something about the quiet way she ate her salad at her desk during lunch that made me think she was on her own, too. She was used to meals by herself.

  I asked about lunch protocol, if I could step out of the office. She graciously told me that lunch was usually half an hour and suggested a deli a block away, where I ordered a cup of corn chowder and ate at a small table with my back to the window. I hadn’t expected a typical new-hire all-office lunch for a temp and was relieved to find out that I was right.

  After I finished my soup, I sat back in my chair, recalling the photos of Parker. She looked much the same as she had in high school, with long, straight blond hair that she had highlighted every four weeks, a slightly upturned nose that gave even her most neutral expression an air of arrogance, and a petite frame that boasted D cups.

  Unless Parker was an entirely different person than she had been in high school, I knew that she would come sniffing around the office the minute she found out that I was in her husband’s, and by extension her, employ. And what could I do? I wasn’t going to quit. I could only hope that Parker would be too busy chasing three kids around to stop by much. But Parker had beaten me, again. I was a thirty-one-year-old divorcée with no kids and a dead-end temp job, and soon she would know it. As I listened to the street traffic outside, the rushing cars and occasional horns, for the first time I questioned whether home was really the best place to run.

  On the way back to my parents’ that night, I left a message for Kat. My voice was tired and short when I said, “I really hope you call me back this time. I need to talk to you. I found a temp job… It’s working for Parker Collins’s husband… I’m not joking.”

  Jill, of course, answered right away. “Oh my God, how was it?”

  “Philip Kent,” I said. “I’m working for Philip Kent.” I had never told Jill the name of the man I had interviewed with, saying only that it was some lawyer.

  “Noooo!!!” gasped Jill. Of course she knew he was Parker’s husband, but in all of our conversations, his name had never come up. I had known that Parker was married to a wealthy, successful man; Jill may have even mentioned that he was a lawyer. But that was it. “Oh my God, what are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean, what am I going to do?” I said, slightly antagonistically, feeling, for the first time, spiteful of Jill’s easy life. She had the luxury of not working, of being taken care of. She spent her mornings at the gym and her afternoons at the mall.

  “I mean, are you going to quit?”

  “Jill, I know that you don’t concern yourself with such things, but the economy sucks. There is double-digit unemployment and people are losing their homes.” I knew I was being overly dramatic
and more than a little mean-spirited, but I was angry and Jill happened to be at the other end of the phone. “So no, I am not going to quit. I am going to keep this job and work for Parker Fucking Collins’s husband.”

  Jill indulged me in my rant and neither defended herself nor retaliated. “All right. Well, I just hope you don’t have to see Mrs. Kent too often.” I was sure that Parker did go by Parker Kent now, but in my mind, all the legends from my Horton days would eternally carry their maiden names. Parker Collins, Elizabeth Holland, and Gretchen Daimler: they were the triumvirate.

  I remembered the first time Jill and I were invited to hang out with them. It was a slumber party at Gretchen’s house during our sophomore year. Parker convinced us all to take off our bras and shirts so we could see who had the biggest boobs, even though she was clearly the winner, shirt or no shirt.

  “It’s not a big deal, Jill,” said Parker dismissively when Jill, always painfully self-conscious about her body, expressed reticence. “We’re all girls. Why are you being so weird about it? I’m beginning to think your boobs are, like, deformed,” she said with a giggle. She instructed Jill to go first, then me; Parker had a way of dictating orders so that they were followed without question. After Jill and I were standing topless in Gretchen’s well-lit Laura Ashley bathroom, looking at Parker and Gretchen expectantly, Parker gave her cruel, sugarcoated laugh. “Oh my God, stop staring at us! You guys are, like, lesbians!” She moved behind her sidekick, as if trying to get away from us. “Gretchen, can you have them sleep in the guest room?” Jill shifted uncomfortably and crossed her arms over her chest. I reached for my shirt.

  But Jill and I always went back for more. Parker had that kind of pull, that kind of power. And Jill and I were desperate to be accepted by the popular, well-bred Parker Collins. It continued that way until senior year, when Jamie Lawrence asked me to the homecoming dance. Parker had high school’s version of a serious boyfriend and had no claim on Jamie, other than the fact that he was decidedly in her league, a male member of Horton’s elite. That was when Parker went from my sometimes friend to quite the opposite; she was with Jamie by the time we graduated in June. They both ended up going to the same just-shy-of-Ivy-League college and, from what I understood, dated throughout their freshman year.

  “Did you hear about Mr. Collins?” asked Jill, and I knew that Mr. Collins meant Parker’s father, who was the CEO of a major investment bank in New York.

  “No—what about him?” I asked, immediately sucked back into the Parker drama, almost as if she were a vortex that became more powerful with geographic proximity.

  “He retired from Fishman Bach last year and totally cashed out everything, went entirely liquid.” Jill spoke with the authority of a seasoned financier. Presenting herself as an unequivocal expert on topics she knew next to nothing about was one of her many charms. “Now the word on the street is that the firm is in serious financial trouble and might totally fold.”

  “Of course. No Collins would ever go down with the ship.”

  There was a moment of dead silence on the line before Jill said, with genuine sympathy, “Shit, Ellen. I can’t believe you have to work for Philip Kent.”

  I apologized to Jill for being so short and got off the phone, promising to call her tomorrow. “It’s just been kind of a heinous day.”

  . . .

  When I walked into the house, I expected to find my mother fluttering around the kitchen, getting dinner ready. “I made your favorite, honey, Aunt Kathy’s shrimp étouffée,” she’d say. “To celebrate your new job.” But the kitchen was empty, clean, and silent when I arrived.

  “Mom?” I called as I made my way into the living room. Though her car was in the garage, there was no sign of her. “Mom!” I shouted louder and more frantically, suddenly picturing those television commercials with elderly women lying immobilized for hours from an injury or a stroke. My mother was only in her early sixties, but she was so fragile-looking, so thin.

  I barged into my parents’ bedroom, which was at the far end of the first floor.

  “Ellen!” said my mother, startled. She was sitting in the wingback chair looking out the window.

  “I was calling you!” I scolded. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Sorry, honey,” she said distractedly, offering no explanation. “How was work?”

  I pictured Brenda alone at her desk, eating a salad, and shook my head. “This is just all really, really hard.” There was a catch in my voice.

  This was my mother’s cue to leap up and hug me, to tell me how brave I was and how proud I made her. But she just sat there and looked back toward the window. “The enemy is really attacking this family,” she said, her blue eyes looking sad and empty.

  I gave a humorless, mocking laugh. It was archaic, blaming the devil. She was like a starving, ignorant medieval peasant, believing the failing crops were the work of a witch.

  “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers in high places,” she said, paraphrasing a passage from Ephesians. My mother truly believed that the events of the world, large and small, personal and shared, could all be directly or indirectly attributed to the epic, ongoing struggle between good and evil.

  “Mom, the devil didn’t make Gary leave me. Gary made Gary leave me,” I said bitterly, always trying to inject logic and reason.

  “Your poor father,” she mumbled, shaking her head, almost as if talking to herself.

  “Dad?” I asked, alerted to a new concern. “What’s happened to Dad?”

  She snapped her head up and met my eyes, like a skilled actress who can jump instantly back into character. “Oh,” she said with a sigh, “he just has a lot on his plate with Channing Crossing.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  When my first couple of weeks passed without any sign of Parker, I began to think I had overreacted. That I had, for even a millisecond, viewed the fact that Philip Kent was her husband as grounds to give up a paycheck seemed absurd. When I saw him, Philip was professional and amicable, though more often than not he was out of the office at meetings or lunches. Since Brenda was seated just a dozen or so feet away from me, happy to answer questions and fill in any blanks left by Philip, I expected that he was very pleased with my performance so far.

  On the Wednesday of my second week, Philip announced that he would like to “formalize my employment” a few days before my trial period officially ended. “I have no doubts about your ability. I’ll contact Dana at McPharrell,” he said with a smirk. “She’ll be so pleased to be rid of me.”

  That Saturday night, Jill and I made plans to meet Luke in the city to celebrate. Kat, who had eventually returned my calls, made a weak excuse as to why she wouldn’t be able to join us, a more modern version of “I’m washing my hair.” She had made no mention of what had happened with the Arnolds and offered no explanation for the cold shoulder, but I knew better than to push my luck and question her. While I might have to endure a period of distance, I would eventually get back into her good graces. My parents were another matter entirely. Their lines of communication could remain closed indefinitely. Again.

  The situation with Kat was weighing heavily on my mother. “I have so much to pray about,” she said as she pulled a silk scarf around her neck on her way to her Thursday evening prayer meeting. “Do you want me to pray for anything for you?” she asked, pausing at the open door. She could have been asking if I needed anything from the store.

  “The usual,” I replied.

  . . .

  Luke called me Saturday morning. “I’m bringing Mitch tonight,” he said. “I want you to meet him.” Luke had only ever introduced us to a boyfriend once before and was always a little evasive about his relationships, so I knew that Mitch was important.

  Jill picked me up and we drove into Manhattan, pulling into a lot near the restaurant and paying a small fortune to have her car squeezed into a spot so tight that a piece of paper could barely have fit between the cars. We were meeting at a su
shi place that Luke swore was the best in New York. “It’s just starting to get hot,” he said ruefully. New Yorkers are always so territorial about their restaurants.

  “I thought San-Mi was supposed to have the best sushi.”

  “No, San-Mi is kind of over,” said Luke sympathetically. It was the way you’d tell a ninety-year-old with dementia that Carter was no longer president. “Once tourists from Cleveland hear that they might see Howard Stern there, you may as well be eating at Epcot.”

  Luke and Mitch were seated at the bar of the narrow, dim restaurant when we arrived, Luke drinking white wine and Mitch sipping sake. Mitch smiled warmly and followed Luke over to greet us. We went through the round of hugs and handshakes, then took our seats. Mitch seemed shy in a sweet, goofy way, and had the sort of subterranean appearance of someone who spent a lot of time in front of a computer. Together, he and Luke looked like a perfect, unlikely fit—Luke with his penchant for kitschy, touristy souvenir T-shirts that stretched over his unbuff abs, and Mitch with his milky skin that had never seen a Hamptons summer. Serving as the master of ceremonies, Luke led the conversation in directions that would foster interpersonal connections.

  “Mitch, I told you that Ellen used to do a lot of writing.” He turned to me to explain the relevance. “Elle, Mitch is an editor.” Mitch worked for an iconic metro monthly that enjoyed readership beyond its city limits.

  “Well,” I started awkwardly, “I wouldn’t say that’s true exactly. I mean, I was an English major and did some writing in college.”

  “And she was the editor of the student newspaper at Northeastern,” added Luke proudly. I shot him a look, as his hard sell of my meager experience made it seem that much more amateurish and childlike. Mitch was gracious, though, telling me he’d love to read anything I’d written.