1 / COMMERCE WORLD

Her name was Wendy Warner, but we called her the Angel of Death.
      When the beleaguered crowd of pink-slipped losers packed up their boxes, it was Wendy who escorted them on that long and final walk down those plush, overpriced hallways. And when the ax was about to fall, Wendy heralded the event in a grim foreshadow: she appeared, dressed in a suit and grasping her clipboard and folders full of documents that still managed to read cheerily yet legally: Regretfully, due to business needs, you’re gone. Smile! You are now eligible for unemployment.
      When we, the ones who’d dodged the bullet, stood like proud flags waving after a nuclear meltdown and realized our narrow escapes, I can’t lie: a bit of excitement coursed through us, even as we hugged our fallen comrades goodbye. The tears and pandemonium allowed at least an hour break from our cubicles.
      If Commerce World had spent as much time trying to run a business as it did laying people off, it might not have needed to give out the pink slips at all.
      The place was certifiably crazy. The only bright spot about it was that I met my best friend, Regan, there: instant soul-sister, cynic and comedienne-in-arms (in our own minds, of course). We never had much work to do since, frankly, a monkey could have aptly handled our jobs, so we spent our days surfing the net with an intensity and focus that bordered on professional. The web was our friend during the long and empty hours. It enabled us to shop ferociously with one click of a button, and caused us to engage in discussions of world affairs, domestic politics, and arts and entertainment that would put Crossfire to shame. (“Martha Stewart’s on Larry King Live tonight… I’ve gotta watch her, she’s such a bitch!” “Oh my God. If Gary Condit didn’t kill Chandra, he’s the unluckiest bastard in the world.” “Look at these Nine West shoes on eBay—I really need a tenth pair of black mules.”) We shopped at the mall across the street (using our plastic was not limited to click-and-mortar ordering), stole gallons of Diet Pepsi from the caterer’s refrig in Building Three, and verbally defiled Commerce World’s business practices and its uptight, Acura-driving employees with scathing tongues. When yet a third company-wide email, on the exact same topic as the first two (that had been instantly deleted with a “Yada, yada, yada”) arrived in our inboxes, and then a fourth message with an “Ooops! :-)” subject line popped in a few minutes later, we would snap our fingers and strike up the Adams Family theme: “Da-da-da-dum; da-da-da-dum; The crazy and the kooky, and altogether spooky…” Sometimes, being connoisseurs of children’s programming—having cherubic rugrats of our own at home—we’d keep it short and just warble squeakily, “Here at Com-merce Woooorld!” to the tune of “Elmo’s World.” We were like the people in the Twilight Zone, trapped in some bizarre land and only we could see its insanity.
      But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t meet Regan until I’d already been at Commerce World for a full year.

* * *

Commerce World wasn’t like that when I was hired. It was all that is desirable and disgusting about corporate excess. In fact, I pinched myself at my good fortune and pride coursed through me when I passed through those gleaming doors with a swipe of my scary/ugly photo ID badge. Commerce World consisted of a luminous quartet of tall, glass buildings thrusting imposingly into the sky. Inside, everything was offered: free gourmet coffee, free tampons and pads (too slim and Junior-sized for my taste, but good in a pinch), trips to Aruba and Jamaica and Vegas for “training.” On my first day, it may as well have been Butterfly McQueen (except white and uptight) standing in front of me squeaking: “Flair or medium-point pens, Miz Heather?”
      Three months after I got hired for an entry-level-but-still-overpaid marketing position (getting in through an insider’s tip: my friend Greg’s wife worked there—but more on him later), the company rented an entire airfield and had “Family Fun Day ’'00”—complete with airplane rides, Ferris wheels, pony rides, food, a band—no expense was spared.
      Then, in July, things changed. Commerce World was brutally taken over by a giant telecom company—that politely called it a merger. This cartel (which shan’t be named, but it is known by three initials that begin with S) probably took a look at the books after the merger and shit its collective pants. The buck stopped then and there. Commerce World instantly became a frugal, tight-lipped crone, a shadow of the flamboyant, extravagant alcoholic it had been. If human, it would have gone from Chris Farley to Hillary Clinton. Or, really, from Bill to Hillary. No more supplies rained down on me; I now had to fill out a request form and cross my fingers. Authoritative emails commanded us to be aware of our new Commerce World image; specifically, we were to cease and desist wearing the unprofessional and slutty-looking “Open Toed Shoes.” The other worker bees quickly complied and dressed in nun-like pumps, but I continued to flaunt my toes; I had spent about a thousand dollars a year on impertinent shoes and I was not about to let my spirit be crushed
by this newly-imposed fashion glumness.
      It was around this time that Wendy Warner, whose official title was Employee Relations Manager, began showing up. Nobody was really aware of her at first; she did her job with quiet and deadly stealth.
      And then one day my cubicle mate and friend, Amanda, was crying and boxing her things up. The first big one had hit.
      “What’s going on?” I asked.
      She shrugged, wiping her eyes. “I’m gone.”
      “What do you mean? You quit?”
      “I was laid off. My boss too. My whole department.”
      Ahhh, I was such a babe in the woods! I had heard the word layoff, but had never seen it applied. Amanda kept her chin up with a few brave words about the place sucking anyway. Wendy swooped in with a small, empathetic smile—she either practiced at home in the mirror or it just happened naturally after a certain point, I’m sure—and helped walk her to her car. I sat, stunned and alone and, for the first time, relieved. The hairs stood up coolly on my head where the bullet had grazed.

Weeks later, a strange thing happened. A free-for-all. A job scramble. In a nutshell: Hey, you lucky survivors! Due to some company restructuring, we want you to apply for any darn job at Commerce World you want! We humble employees were suddenly faced with the unbridled luxury of mulling over any position within the company that appealed to us. We were to number these possible new jobs in terms of desirability: 1, 2, 3. I had no clue what I might want, since I barely knew what my current department did, let alone the whole complex organism of Commerce World, an ever-shifting, ax-dropping, restructuring beast. New departments like “Integrated Modular Platforms Product Manager,” “Asia-Pacific Strategic Operational Controls” (called in trite acronymic Commerce-speak AP-SOC, I believe), and “Network Effective Resources and Development” (NERD?) were being formed and taken away. Commerce World didn’t know what it wanted to be when it grew up.
      I flipped through the org charts and PowerPoint presentations that had been shoved down our throats regarding the “NEW” COMMERCE WORLD! I picked a couple of jobs that sounded cool, or that—if not three words or less—could be easily understood by a first-grader. Marketing Liaison. Educational Services Rep. Account Rep. I wrote them down, 1, 2, 3, then “Why I want to be a Marketing Liaison,” an Educational Services Rep, or an Account Rep. Meanwhile, I sat at my desk doing a half-assed and half-hearted job in my current role up to that point: “Inquiry Management Specialist”—three words.

2 / NEW BEGINNINGS

I got a call at my desk that showed: EMILY STEWART 6788. I picked up. “Hello?”
      “Heather?”
      “Yes. Hi, Emily.” I didn’t know Emily, but using an unknown’s name puts you in a good spot immediately. Kind of like, I’m onto you. It lets them think you’re brimming with confidence. Not to mention, I have an innate sixth sense or gut instinct, or whatever you want to call it; it rarely fails me, and I sensed that this Emily Stewart person had to do with the new job postings.
      “I’m the manager of Educational Services. I got your application. Want to go to the Bistro and chat?”
      Commerce World had an on-site café, of course. Excited, I agreed to meet her there.
      One thing about the indestructible Heather Hall: Excitement seizes me at any new opportunity—even just somebody wanting me. It doesn’t matter if I am happy where I am, I am instantly swayed and seduced by something new, and the current situation
begins to look bland and stale.
      I met Emily in the Bistro (a corporately glamorous, arrogant little space with a cappuccino machine and a case of scones), and was instantly repulsed by her looks. I tried to get past it, but I couldn’t. I know I sound horrid. How shallow! you say. But she truly could have haunted a house. I couldn’t stop looking, fascinated at the display of homeliness. I watched her pale, fleshy lips blab away about the Educational Services division—no Revlon there! The bubbly curve of a double chin rested gently on her collar. I could see her whitish pink scalp glistening through a frizzy orange brillo pad of hair. But the main atrocity was her fashion sense. Cracked, red flats, circa 1987, and a velour, puffy red shirt with high collar—not even the same shade of red! I was puzzled at the out and out defiance—or perhaps, pure ignorance?—of Commerce World’s fashion code. It was widely known through our fair city, the capital of Ohio, that Commerce World was where the beautiful people worked. If you didn’t have a pair of Fendis strapped securely on (with your toes covered, of course) you wouldn’t even get through the first round of interviews! But I couldn’t grasp the ignorance theory either. There seemed no excuse! Unless she was blind. Perhaps that was it? Her bleary, muddy eyes didn’t see what was right in front of her. Because if she wasn’t blind, what did that say about her attention to detail? Her surroundings? Her emotional IQ? (My mother always says I am highly irritable due to my higher-than-normal powers of observation. Dogs hear things that we don’t; I see things that normal humans don’t, and I expect everyone to notice the same things I do.)
      Still, I decided to switch jobs. Perhaps I won’t have to look at her that much, I told myself. It was summer, and change was breezing in on the slowly warming air. I didn’t particularly skip to work as it was, and I met Regan because of it—Regan, the other person Emily picked to be on her new team.

Regan had worked under “Fraulein” Michelle Weaver, the biggest biiiatch ever to darken Commerce World’s doorstep. Her underlings trembled in her wake. In fact, in our second conversation Regan described what had transpired in Michelle Weaver’s group, that now resulted in Regan sitting there across from me: During the wild job scramble, where employees jostled to cherry-pick the best jobs, Michelle was on vacation in the Bahamas, and her entire fearful, passive-aggressive team of
employees jumped ship—rats fleeing Titanic. When the tanned Fraulein returned, she had not a soul in her department. Priceless.

“And,” added Regan, “last year she kept talking about her surgery, ‘Oh my God, when I had my painful surgery… even when I had my surgery I still worked from home…’ And guess what we found out? It was a tummy tuck! And lipo!”
      “Get out!”
      “I’m serious.”
      From then on, we deemed Michelle Weaver The Best Booty in the Land. “Well, you know, I must have the best booty in the land!” we would say when we saw her striding importantly across the impeccably-manicured Commerce World grounds. Or, sometimes we would simply sigh longingly, “There it is.”
      I say that was our second conversation because I remember our first too. The first day I reported to my new area in Building Three, I saw a fair, thin, youthful-looking girl about my age. (Girl? I was thirty!) We introduced ourselves and haven’t stopped
talking since. The topic: toxic friends. All the freaks we’d cut from our lives out of sheer exhaustion.
      “Women are lame,” she said. “You don’t call them back two seconds later or devote 100% of your time to them, you get a huge guilt trip. I don’t have time for that.”
      “Cut ’em!” I agreed. I liked this chick.
      “I mean, why, if I just say, ‘I’m really sorry, I’m busy. I’ll call you when I get a chance,’ is that a problem?”
      “Amen. I had this psycho friend call me at 3am and want me to drive a half hour to Grove City because she wanted me to escort her to an all-night Kinko’s, and she didn’t trust her night vision! And my little girl was a baby then, sick as a dog and throwing up everywhere. She ripped me a new one! Like I’m her freakin’ bodyguard. I wrote her off. She started writing me letters then when I wouldn’t call her.”
      “Kooky!”
      “Yep. She still tries to call me, five years later. She doesn’t know we broke up, I guess.”
      “Like Stacy on Wayne’s World,” we both finished—and that was it. Regan Gallagher was my girl!
      She had had a baby just a year before, a pumpkin-headed doll-face named Sophie, and she had lived with her “sperm” (as she called him) for over ten years.
      “What’s he do?” I asked later.
      She fluttered her eyelashes and said in a breathy, proud voice, “He’s a brewer!”
      That cracked me up too. Like a ’50s actress saying, “He’s so dreamy!”
      The sperm, Toby, worked at the Anhauser Busch plant. She also referred to him as Homer Simpson, since he was in charge of safety standards.
      Thus, our relationship began.
      We quickly realized three things:
      1—Josephine Fleming, the person in charge of billing procedures in our department, was born without a brain,
      2—When we had sufficiently self-taught ourselves enough of our new job functions to achieve a level of comfort, we realized the degree of difficulty ranged somewhere near the baboon level, so we had time to kill, and,
      3—Emily Stewart should never have had children.

3 / SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS

We realized the intellectual deficiency in Josephine right off the bat when we asked about the stacks and towers of email printouts piled on her desk, falling onto her chair, and wafting onto the floor.
      “Oh, those are registrations,” she said.
      “You print them all out beforehand?”
      “Yeth.” (She had a slight lisp.)
      “Do you need to keep them all?”
      “Uhhh, no.” She busily shuffled through the papers. “I just haven’t put them in the thystem yet.”
      I persisted. “Then, do we have to print them all out?”
      She peered at me dimly. “Ahh, well, thith way, I keep a record.”
      “But why don’t you just enter them in the system right when the registration comes in?”
      She looked at me, her brow furrowing in confusion and scratching her head like Columbo. Then she chirped brightly, “Ahhh… so, Regan, I hear you have twins?”
      “No, Heather has twins.”
      “I’m Heather,” I added. (Later we realized it didn’t matter; she would never get our names straight.)
      Her phone rang. “Excuse me.” Then she turned away from us, hunching her plump shoulders, and lowered her voice in such a whisper that Regan and I looked at each other uncomfortably. This, only the day after we’d met!
      Snippets came to us: “Well… yeth… I told him if he hot-wired the car… trouble… her tutor said she said the F-word… juvenile hall…”
      “Jeez,” I muttered.

Regan and I didn’t even have desks yet, due to the ongoing job shifting. Instead, we shared a desk that was still occasionally inhabited by Amy, one of the women who had done this job before and posted out. Amy still came by occasionally to check her email, get things from her desk, and check her voicemail.
      We worked like that for a month, sharing a desk that wasn’t even ours. Much of that time was devoted to teaching Josephine simple tasks, though she had been in the department for three years. One day we saw her looking with crossed and disoriented eyes at a standard Excel worksheet.
      “Girltths, would you mind coming here?”
      Obediently, Regan and I stood up from our shared desk and stepped over to Josephine’s desk like a two-headed monster.
      “Look at this. I just can’t figure it out. If I take this whole chunk of numbers in these little boxes, and highlight them, and then press this E button up here, it adds them together for you.”
      “Yes, Josephine,” I said quietly. “That’s the beauty of Excel. It adds things for you. That’s why it was invented.”
      “Well, honestly. That is quite tricky! Now can you show me how to start a whole new row?” She made vertical sweeping motions, indicating a column.
      “Certainly. Excel is exciting, isn’t it?”
      “I just never knew,” she murmured.

Finally, when Regan and I were moved to our own desks, we were in two separate buildings; Regan was put in Building Two and my new home was in Building Four. Nobody knew why. Nobody in our group sat together. Emily’s office was in Building Three. Like a Charlie Brown special, we only heard her voice on the phone: “Wah- wah-wah-wah…” which really suited me fine.
      So Regan and I began our practice of taking three-hour lunches and going on shopping sprees, undetected. Once I even bought a grandfather clock and we carried it through the mall and loaded it into my car, where stuck it out a window, drove to my house, dropped it off, and drove back to work. Nobody knew, of course. Another time we purchased tanning packages and spent hours wedged in the ultraviolet capsule. We took long walks. We got our hair cut. Once, she notarized my will. We had rum and Diet Cokes at one o’clock at Uno’s across the street (the bartender knew us by name). (Monkeys don’t need to be sober.)
      Regan and I even attended one of Jacqueline’s school field trips together on a crisp and glorious October day, a leaf-identifying expedition at one of the metro-parks. “I want to go,” I had whined, hating the thought of sitting uselessly at my monkey-esque job while my little Jacqueline was chaperoned by other, better, mothers. “We could probably go,” Regan had answered; I mulled it over for about twenty seconds. We disappeared, undetected, from Commerce World and drove the fifteen minutes to Highbanks Park.
      We soon were walking with the crowd of second-graders through the woods and causing a bit of a ruckus. I am embarrassed to admit we were chastised by Jacqueline’s teacher, who interrupted the game of Granny Races we were playing with the children (a game Regan invented that all of the children immediately joined: it was simply who could run the fastest and most like an old lady). The girls in Jacqueline’s clique were wobbling quickly with shaky legs down the trails and cackling, “Ohhhh, my back…” “Ohhhh, I’m a hundred years old…”
      “Ohhhh, where’s my Metamucil?” I chimed in, croaking. We were so absorbed in adopting the persona of an octogenarian that we stopped looking for leaves, and suddenly I heard Mrs. Gables saying, “Ahhh… you guys in the back… moms too… pay attention!” I stopped quickly, unable to restrain the girls who were now carried away in the game. “Shhhh… shhhh,” I said to Jacqueline and her friends as Mrs. Gables raised an eyebrow at me and said, “It’s no fun being the heavy all the time.”
      “You’re Jacqueline’s mom, right?” a little wispy-haired blonde girl, Heidi, asked me while leaning on a stick she was using as a cane.
      “I am.”
      “Then who are you?” Heidi asked Regan.
      “I’m Jacqueline’s mommy’s friend.”
      “But why are you here?”
      “I don’t really know.”
      “We have a boring job, and hiking through the woods with second graders is more
fun,” I explained.
      Jacqueline hugged me. “My mommy is fun,” she said.
      We got back to work at 3:30, and each had just two voicemails to return. We called the customers back, and were caught up by 4:00.
      Technically, but without boring you to tears, our jobs were this: Commerce World sold software (E-Business integration solutions, to be precise). The customers that bought the software—the IT managers, MIS directors, EDI coordinators, computer geeks—couldn’t figure out how to operate the software. Thus (Commerce World’s master plan), these poor saps had to pay thousands to get trained to use it, and Commerce World provided the state-of-the-art training facility. That’s where Educational Services came in. Regan and I logged in the classroom training registrations that came to us by email and phone calls. Crazed customers called, sobbing, “Is there a class tomorrow?” or, conversely, called in August to ask hysterically about a January class. (We referred to these as “Software Emergencies.”) We also served as travel agents, food critics, and hotel liaisons (“Which hotel by your facility has a hot tub?” “Where will I eat?” “Do you have vegetarian meals?” “Can you cut me a deal?” I was surprised that none of them asked me to recommend the most conveniently-located brothel). Occasionally we even served as international bankers when the poor, panicked Canadians with no dollar value would call, discover that the prices were in American dollars (go figure…), and then pout, “Well then, if the doe-llars aren’t in Cun-adien, then I won’t be abul to efford it then, eh?” If they got really nasty, I would slam the phone down and bestow the most venomous insult of all: “What country do you think this is, you Canadian?”
      There were also the many issues and questions of how the students were to be billed. Any garden-variety Big, Blonde and Busty website could figure out how to accept credit cards over the web, but the multi-million dollar company that was Commerce World could not. Regan and I had to follow up on the checks and money orders that the students had mailed.
      It was amazing how the majority of these supposed computer gurus, responsible for operating their company’s entire back-end integration systems, couldn’t navigate a website to even get through the registration process. It got to the point, mere weeks
into the job, that after the fifth question of “How do I get there?” I would simply snap, “MAPQUEST!” (Of course, it didn’t matter that directions and links were clearly posted on the TRAINING REGISTRATION page of our website. The customers still didn’t get it. Or, I suspect, they were illiterate.)
      Around that time, Regan and I began our practice of watching movies. It all began in the Giant Eagle video section one lazy afternoon after lunch.
      “They have some good stuff here,” I pointed out. “Something About Mary… Blazing Saddles… pretty good selection for a grocery store!”
      “The Breakfast Club!” Regan picked the box up. “Talk about a blast from the past!” We both silently reflected, prayer-like, on the coolest scene any self-respecting child of the ’80s had ever witnessed on celluloid: Judd Nelson with his fist in the air.
      “Let’s get one,” I suggested.
      “Where would we watch it?”
      “They have VCRs in the conference rooms.”
      “Why not?”
      We got a movie card, decided on Something About Mary (simply because it deserved to be watched together), and proudly rushed back to work.
      We scoped out our areas… All clear. We went down to the first floor conference room in my building, the luxurious chamber with the long curved table, plump leather chairs, and the huge TV monitor hanging on one wall with the VCR cart conveniently next to it. We popped the movie in and sat down in the chairs at the head of the table as if we were handling the company’s business.
      About a half-hour into it, we paused the movie and checked our respective voicemails.
      “Just an idiot canceling a class,” Regan reported, hanging up.
      “Just an idiot lost and trying to find his hotel,” I said. We pressed PLAY.
      Moments later, the door cracked open. The Building Four receptionist peeked in. Panicked, we stared at her.
      “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, as the wounded Ben Stiller’s paramedic bellowed, “We’ve got a bleeder!”
      The receptionist quickly shut the door. Regan and I settled back in our chairs, keeping an eye out for someone heading for the door. We were safe.
      Like potheads moving on to crack, we wanted to cross the line even further, so we started heading out to matinees from that point on.
      We had to find a way to keep ourselves busy, even if the things we chose to occupy our time would have been frowned upon. It was too mentally draining to sit and decipher Josephine’s illegible and completely pointless emails all day. (The only emails we understood were the one or two a week that we received that said:

RE: Out of Office. Hello—I will be out of the office tomorrow becos of personal family emergensies. Regards, Josephine Fleming, Billing Operations Supervisor, Commerce World.)

She always began her emails with “RE:” in the subject line. A typical email that Regan and I would receive from her was:

RE: A CUSTOMER MAY BE COMING TO THE NT MAPPING CLASS.

Then the body of the email repeated the same thing:

Hello Girls! A customer may be signing up.

“Huh?” I muttered at a particular one. “Who gives a shit?” What was I supposed to do without a name or any contact information? So I forwarded it to Regan and simply put in the subject line:

RE: TARDED. CUSTOMER MAY SHOW UP FOR A CLASS!

Josephine’s emails weren’t any more idiotic than the company-wide messages sent by the faceless management. In fact, what made the mass company emails humorous was the fact that they were written with complete seriousness. One day we received an email from the Facilities department that announced in 24-point bold Arial:

BEWARE OF NESTING GEESE IN THE PARKING LOT. THEY ARE PROTECTING THEIR EGGS AND DON’T WANT TO BE DISTURBED. THEY WILL ATTACK! WALK SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY PAST THEM.

This caused a mock panic; I sent an email to Regan saying:

DID YOU MAKE IT THROUGH THE PARKING LOT OF DOOM? PLEASE… PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SAY SOMETHING!!!!! OHHHHHH… THE HUMANITY!!

Regan and I were apart, in two separate buildings, but called each other five times an hour. We shouldn’t have feared: another layoff happened, and we were moved again. This time, Emily put us next to each other in Building Two. It was a rare occasion when she called us to her office, but she did when she told us the news, and we made the trek to her building.
      “I think you girls would benefit sitting next to each other,” she said, eating like a man. She always did, scarfing down chunks of roast beef with her fingers, spewing Doritos wildly across her office, spastically cracking open cans of Coke. “That’s fine with us.” I nodded.
      “The movers will be by on Tuesday. Have your stuff packed up by Monday at five.” She looked at me, squinting. “Hey, if I remember from your resume, you have a drama background?”
      “Theatre, yeah.” (How I ended up at Commerce World is beyond me. Columbus isn’t exactly Broadway.)
      “Would you teach at my kid’s Bible camp? It’s next month. It’s real easy. You just teach them these Jesus songs.” She pushed up her filmy glasses and crossed her plump legs. Today she was in her “hip” outfit: khakis with pleats, a kelly green polo
shirt and worn boat shoes with white anklets.
      “Uhhhh…”
      “You might like it. Gads, I could never be around those kids. I’m here until seven every night just because I can’t deal with my own. It doesn’t matter what age they’re at, it’s just crazy, and my work is important. I mean, Josh is eight now… no, nine. No, shit, he’s seven, GOING on eight…” She shook her head, laughing at herself without a bit of shame. “In fact, I sure as hell can’t remember which one’s going to this camp, Josh or Jenny.”
      “Do you have pictures?” Regan asked.
      “No.” Emily shook her head, and chunks of her frizzy orange hair, which she had attempted to restrain with a pink bow clip, escaped and bounced off her pallid and flaky cheeks. “I like to keep things separate, you know. I think kids’ pictures in offices are cheesy.”
      “Ahhhh…” Regan and I mumbled, each thinking of our own cubicles adorned with offspring photos and artwork. I even had a note pinned up from Jacqueline that had cracked me up. I had found it on the kitchen counter before we served dinner one night and it said in large, scrawled letters, directed at Christopher, the family chef:

DAD I DO NOT LIKE PORK CHOPS
DO I HAVE TO EAT IT

“Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that you were moving, guys. Heather, let me know about Bible camp.”
      We said our goodbyes and walked to the elevator. Outside, we stared at each other until I finally said, “Why, a cat’s a better mother than you, Miz Scarlett.”
      “No kidding!” Regan said, still scrambling to put her thoughts into words. “I think she’s a lesbian trapped in a married woman’s body.”
      “Did you see the lovely ensemble she wore today?”
      “Ummm, yes. Is she touring with the LPGA?”
      This set us off in loud gusts of laughter.
      “Weeeelll,” I said slowly, “We’re outside…”
      “Why go back in so soon?”
      “Shall we shop?”
      “I don’t see why not. I need diapers.”
      “Please do not talk about your children, or anything that relates to a child.”
      “Oh, yes, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, they’re for me. Ooops, I crapped my pants.”
      We struck out on foot for the Wal-Mart across the street.
      Wal-Mart is the black hole of shopping. You can’t escape its pull. Wal-Mart laughs evilly at the silly mortal who thinks she can walk into its force field and buy only a pack of diapers. It is a Venus flytrap of merchandise that seduces you with the sweet nectar of Faded Glory, then shuts you in and bleeds you dry. You are glazed-eyed and mind-zapped once you enter the Dimension of Wal-Mart, yanking things into your cart that had never crossed your mind until you entered that realm, like a garlic press or a water filter. We went for a pack of diapers; we were returned to reality by the startling ching of the cash register as if it were the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers. I looked down at my cart. Ten blue bags with the Wal-Mart smiley face grinned up at me. The register read $122.75 in satisfied green numbers. The entity of Wal-Mart threw back its head and roared with victory.
      Regan read her register receipt too. “An eighty-dollar pack of diapers. Damn!”
      “Well, I’m not putting all this stuff back.” The line behind us was growing and impatient.
      We pushed our carts into the parking lot and regrouped.
      “We’re just going to have to push the carts across the street,” I said.
      Embarrassed, we steered our carts and dashed across the congested four-lane parkway that separated Commerce World from Wal-Mart and pushed our carts up through the hill of grass that sloped against the edge of the parking lot. We continued transporting our goods through the parking lot and finally reached my car.
      “Damn!” I said. I didn’t have my keys; we had left so suddenly I hadn’t gone back to my desk. There was no way I could carry ten bags of supplies from Wal-Mart to my desk without raising eyebrows. (A good gambler knows when to stop.)
      “Should I run up and get my keys?” Regan offered.
      “No… it’s okay. I’ll just keep my stuff here, under my car.”
      “Are you sure?”
      “Who’s even going to notice?”
      I strategically tucked the bags behind the front wheels of my car. Doritos, deodorant, kitty litter, toothpaste, a meat tenderizer, sandals, a rifle, a gravestone… that’s what it seemed like, anyway, and that’s practically the breadth of Wal-Mart’s merchandise.
      Regan was emboldened at my willingness to risk my bounty and so we headed off to her car next, placing her bags of soap, diapers, an air filter, a meat thermometer, a blender, a set of T-Fal cookware, and a futon (again, embellishment) behind her front wheels as well.
      We pushed the empty carts to the far edge of the parking lot, then separated and headed back to our different buildings. My possessions remained intact, and in fact, hiding Wal-Mart bags under our cars became standard operating procedure.

The Bible camp happened. I decided to start out on a good foot with Emily; how do you say no to your new boss? It was from nine to noon for a whole week, and Emily let me come in around 12:30 on those days. The odd thing is, the second day I was gone (“Red, yellow, black or white, we are precious in His sight”), Regan informed me that during my absence Emily had called her and said in her breezy, fast-talking Power Executive voice, “Hey, conference Heather in.”
      Regan had said slowly, “Umm, she’s not here.”
      “Well, where is she?”
      “She’s… at your daughter’s Bible camp, teaching music and drama.”
      “Oh, yeah, that’s right. Anyway, can you send me a report for the June numbers?”