Hardly Working. Betsy Burke
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since Jake had been promoting the Mudpuddle model to our international counterparts, the office had gone crazy. We’d moved to bigger premises. They were still shabby as hell but bigger. Communications with the other Green World offices, in Moscow, Barcelona, Rome and Tokyo, had been flying back and forth.
And the best part of all? We’d finally found Tod Villiers, the superdonor we’d been seeking. The government was going to match his donation one hundred per cent and it was a sum that ran close to half a million.
Tod was a venture capitalist in his late forties. He was fat, sleek, bald, olive-skinned, and had the most unfortunate acne-scarred skin and bulging pale-brown eyes. But the bottom line was that he loved the project, recognized its worth, and wanted to invest. He’d written a check that amounted to a teaser. So lately, I had to keep his interest inflated until the second and largest part of his donation was processed and his contribution awarded at the fund-raiser in the spring. Because although we’d also received the final check, it was post-dated. I wasn’t worried though.
It did mean that all of a sudden, the spotlight was on us in a way it never had been before. We had begun paying fanatically close attention to anything that had to do with H2O. National Bog Days and World Water Forums were suddenly big on our agenda. Never again would we take a long deep bath, use the dishwasher, jump into a swimming pool, or run the water too long while brushing our teeth, without feeling horribly guilty.
Green World was experiencing a huge growth spurt and this, according to head office, was why Trutch was being sent in. To do a little strategic pruning before the branches went wild.
“Listen, Jake,” I said, “when this Trutch guy arrives on Monday morning, send somebody else out to get the coffee and donuts. Weren’t we going to be democratic about the Joe jobs? Send Penelope.”
Jake perked up and asked, “How are things working out with Penelope anyway?”
A deep, languid female voice broke into our conversation. “Jake, darling, the next time you decide to hire someone who’s good at languages, make sure they’re old enough to drink alcohol and get legally laid first.”
It was Cleo Jardine, GWI’s Eco-Links Officer, and social co-conspirator to yours truly. Cleo is part Barbadian and part Montrealer, a wild-haired woman with coloring that makes you think of a maraschino cherry dipped in bitter chocolate.
She draped a slim dark arm around Jake’s neck and half whispered in his ear, “Little Penelope has a trunk full of brand-new pretty little white things for her wedding night, Jake. She’s got it all figured out. The perfect pristine little life. In any other situation I might find it charming.”
“Huh?” Jake looked slightly startled. Then he laughed. “I know she’s young, but she’s very talented.”
It wasn’t the young and talented part that bothered us.
Well.
Maybe it did.
Just a tiny bit.
“The kind of talent we need in this office,” said Cleo, “pees standing up. And if you had to hire another female, Jake, why couldn’t you have hired somebody with a face like a pit bull but a nice disposition?”
“I couldn’t find a pit bull with her qualifications,” said Jake.
The new talent, Penelope Longhurst, was a very smart twenty-two-year-old. She’d graduated from Bennington College, summa cum laude, at the age of twenty. She was very pretty, too. She had big green eyes and shiny honey-blond hair. But if her necklines got any higher they were going to choke her. She was a self-proclaimed virgin and proponent of the New Modesty and Moralism Movement.
Every office should have one.
Since Penelope had come to work at GWI three months ago, we could sense her getting more superior by the minute, filling up with smugness. Any day, she was going to burst, and purity and self-righteousness would fly all over the office.
“It’s fear,” Cleo observed. “Penelope’s just afraid. She’s sensitive. You can tell she is. She just needs to get over that hump. No pun intended.”
So it was sheer synchronicity that when I left Jake and Cleo and went down the hall to the ladies’ room to splash cold water on my face and fix my makeup in the mirror, that Penelope, Miss Virgin Islands herself, happened to burst out of one of the cubicles in that moment.
She moved with maniacally nervous energy. I couldn’t help thinking that a few orgasm-induced endorphins would have done her good.
For crying out loud.
They would have done all of us good.
She planted herself in front of the mirror next to me and fiddled with her buttons and hair and the lace at the top of her collar. Her fingers wouldn’t stay still. They skittered all over her clothes like policeman’s hands performing a search.
“Hey, Penny. Something wrong?”
She shook her head and huffed.
“So how’s it going?” Bathroom mirror etiquette requires that one must at least make an attempt at friendly chitchat with fellow colleagues. I popped the cap off my new tube of cinnamon burgundy lipstick.
Penelope’s expression was strange. She looked at me as if I were applying cyanide to my lips.
“Like this color?” I asked.
She stared at my mirror image and remained motionless.
I kept it up. “I figure you never know when some gorgeous specimen might come into the office, right?”
Her mouth became small and brittle.
I’m not a person who gives up easily. “Have to be prepared for any eventuality, I always say.”
Now you would think, with Penelope being younger than everyone else, and new to the job, that she might try to get along?
Be nice?
Speak when spoken to?
Even suck up a little?
But do you know what she said? She fixed me, one superior eyebrow still raised, and said, “You know what you are, Dinah? You’re a man-eater.”
I stared at her.
A man-eater?
A man-eater was something out of a forties movie.
An extinct animal.
And furthermore, Penelope knew nothing about me.
There was nothing to know.
Well, almost nothing.
In some ways my life was so narrow you could have shoved it through a mail slot. I was just plain old Dinah Nichols who three years ago had left her ex-fiancé, Mike, over on Vancouver Island, and exchanged her cozy and familiar little homespun angst for the big cold new angst in the city of Vancouver. I had been badly in love with Mike. Sloppily, sweetly, desperately, wetly, thrillingly, forever in love with Mike. And then I had one of those revelations about him. It came as a lightning flash from the overworked heavens. In twenty-four hours I had my bags packed and was ready to leave for Vancouver. I didn’t even give Mike the satisfaction of a fight.
During my last three years in the city, I’d been operating on a tight budget, both financially and emotionally. I had a pared-down existence of work, home, home, work, apart from my occasional clubbing forays with Cleo and my next-door neighbor, Joey Sessna. Joey was the only man in my life. I’d spotted him at one of the GWI fund-raisers a few weeks after I started working there. He was the one guest who didn’t fit the profile for that occasion (millionaire and over ninety). Joey was in his late twenties and remorselessly gay (he’s quite appetizing in the smoldering Eastern European overgrown schoolboy sort of way, with his straight dirty-blond hair, his pale blue eyes, and his pearly but crooked teeth). The day I first set eyes on him, he had snuck into the event through a side door and was shoveling hors d’oeuvres onto his plate with the kind of style and abandon you only