stubbornly, snapping his briefcase shut without looking up.
“Honey, why—” I stopped. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say about her, and I wished I hadn’t seen their nasty exchange. I preferred to remember the feel of her breath on my cheek.
“It’s not because she’s gay, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Keith answered, looking at me coldly, and shifting back into Dr. Redfield mode. “And I would never condone discrimination of any sort.”
“Yes, I know that—”
“But, you’ve never had to be in meetings with people like Cait Getty, for God sakes.” His voice had risen and he was grinding the toe of his loafer into the tile floor. “Comparing our Civil Rights to their sexual rights.”
“Keith, you sound like Bull Connor.”
“Angela, every time I hear gays whine about being discriminated against and appropriating the language of the Civil Rights Movement, I want to vomit.”
“Okay, I think you made your point,” I answered quietly, taking his arm and steering him toward the door.
“No, I haven’t,” he said with a note of finality. Grudgingly, he allowed himself to be pulled. “It is blasphemous to compare the rights of homosexuals with the struggles of our people. They were never kidnapped from their homeland, forced into chattel slavery, their women raped, their men hung from trees, babies slaughtered. Period. Let’s go.”
Now that the lynching and chattel slavery cards had been pulled from the race deck, there was nothing more to say. As I followed Keith out of the room, I remembered the dangerous feeling of touching Caitlin’s hand. Slipping my hand into my bag I lightly fingered the fold of the flyer.
Chapter 2
The next afternoon, I wound my way through the brightly lit tables, keeping my head down to avoid eye contact with any of the other magazine editors, flitting like sparrows through the Brice-Castle Publishing cafeteria. I found a table and put down my tray, looking impatiently for Mae to join me. I hated sitting alone, and I was beyond starving. I pulled a tube of lipstick in a shade called Dubonnet from my jacket pocket and applied it as best I could without looking. I didn’t really want Mae to give me a hard time about “fixing up.”
Appraising myself realistically, I had some nice features—smooth, even skin; brown, slightly slanted eyes; straight, white teeth thanks to braces and a retainer; thick, curly hair. My legs were long and, I thought, cute, and I had a pretty good-looking butt. The package was almost beautiful, though I lacked the bearings, style or attitude of a beautiful person. Despite the intense pressure to look good, beaten into anyone who worked at a fashion magazine and had the guts to sashay through this cafeteria, I never quite pulled it together. I didn’t understand makeup, so I avoided all but lipstick. My clothes, despite Mae’s constant coaching and cajoling, were never hooked up correctly. I was always a couple of seasons behind. I generally thought people who were fashion forward were simply strange, until I found myself—and the rest of the planet—wearing their previously avant garde pieces a year later. My hair was a disorganized tangle of thick curls, springy and random.
Mae had paused for a moment, buttonholed by a woman whose black dress hung off her, like a garment slipping from a hanger. She and Mae were actually wearing the same Calvin Klein dresses, size 2 and 16, respectively. Mae’s dress was orange since she had given up wearing black, because it was now “tired.” The hanger stood on her tiptoes and whispered something conspiratorially into Mae’s ear. “I heard that,” she said, clapping the hanger on the back heartily, nearly knocking the dress off her thin shoulders, before moving on.
Mae was my best friend, my only real friend, at work. She was an associate features writer at Vicarious, a celebrity fashion magazine. I was an associate editor at Désire, another publication in the Brice-Castle stable. We had started at the company the same week and had been seated next to each other at Brice-Castle’s mandatory new employees’ welcome lunch.
“Oh no, they put me at the black table,” she had said loudly as she sat down next to me.
“Welcome, my sistah,” I had replied, smiling at her and ignoring the uncomfortable looks of the other three women and the man seated with us.
Mae had thrown back her head and answered with a raucous, full-on laugh. Right away, her gummy, gap-toothed smile and crinkly eyes felt like home.
Everyone liked Mae. She had created a kind of universal “you-go-girl” black woman persona. She was a magnet to the wispy women and gay men who peopled our company: they were drawn by the confidence and good cheer that clung lightly to her like a misting of cologne. Many felt close to her, though she managed to keep the more textured aspects of her persona secreted away, like an intricately folded dollar stuffed into her brassiere.
Mae had grown up in Iuka, Mississippi, and no amount of New York sophistication could drive out her Southern roots. She was definitely country fried Prada. Two weeks after we’d met, on our way to getting bent on vodka martinis neither of us could afford at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel, Mae had revealed to me that just before her fifth birthday, she had announced to her mother that once she was eighteen, she was “outta Dodge.” She vowed to someday live in New York City in an apartment high in the sky, all by herself.
“The first time I said it, Mama wiped her hands on her apron and said ‘uh-huh,’” Mae had confided in me, dragging out the uhs and huhs for five full seconds. “By the second time I said it, she told me to ‘stop the foolishness.’ But when I was still saying it two years later, she said that ‘if you see yourself there, you’re as good as there.’”
The day she graduated from Barnard, her family was there. Ten of them had piled out of an Amtrak sleeper car, greasy shoe boxes of fried chicken and deviled eggs in tow. They spread themselves out on the Lehman Lawn, screaming and holding up signs and banging on noisemakers when Mae walked up to get her diploma. Ignoring the chilly stares of her classmates and their parents, she waved and flashed her gummy smile and shouted “I love y’all,” as she tottered past the podium on itty bitty high-heeled shoes.
“They were so fucking country, but I loved having them there.” Her eyes had gotten round and watery as she told the story, and mine did, too.
After several years in publishing, Mae had finally grown tired of trying to explain her accent, tone down her loud laugh, and justify how some ’Bama had crashed her way into the ranks of Manhattan publishing. Rather than reinvent herself—again—she began to simply withhold parts of herself. Several years ago, she had limited her vocabulary around our co-workers to three phrases: “I heard that,” “I know you’re right,” and “I’m scared of you.” People found her wise and a little mysterious.
“Hey you,” she said, her tray clattering onto the table. The four plates of overpriced haute cuisine must’ve cost her close to thirty dollars. I loved to eat but hated to pay, so the small, expensive portions the cafeteria served were a source of irritation. I secretly believed that the editors at the company’s magazines suffered from disordered eating, so bigger portions made them nervous. They actually preferred to pay more for smaller portions. The few who weren’t anorexic were bulimic, ordering double portions, then sneaking off to a bathroom on another floor—oh God, not their own—to throw up in the afternoon. Until last year, they had favored the fifth floor, inhabited by the company’s accounting department. After several numbers crunchers complained about the smell, HR issued a clumsily worded memo and the problem ceased.
“I got you the salmon Nicoise with extra potatoes and the balsamic chicken and mango stir-fry,” Mae said. She reached into her orange and yellow Pucci tote and pulled out a large bubble-wrapped package. Carefully, she uncovered two pieces of china, delicately painted with green leaves; two sets of silverware; two checkered green napkins and two cocktail glasses splashed with white magnolias, Mississippi’s state flower. She insisted that the “insulting plastic mess” would ruin our meals. I had long ago decided not to be embarrassed by this over-the-top display of decorum.
“Hey, what’s up with you, today,