I'll Be Your Everything Read online

  Until he comes to visit again. I used to like it when he came to visit. We’re friends first and lovers every once in a blue moon, but his last few visits weren’t much fun. We had spent the day at Coney Island, and there he was on his knees on the hardwood floor in my bedroom later that night. I thought he was going to propose and effectively ruin our friendship, so as soon as he said, “Shari Nance,” I tackled him and started kissing on him. I didn’t give him a chance to finish. That was the only time the neighbors complained about the noise. I may be small, but I can shout. Bryan might have been asking me to turn off the light or to help him find his shoes. He might have been asking me to fix him a sandwich, I don’t know. But he was on his knees in my bedroom, you know? Not many men ask for a freaking sandwich when they’re on their knees and vulnerable like that in a woman’s bedroom.

  That was three months ago. Since then Bryan has been pestering me in e-mails and during phone conversations to “come home where you belong.” I blame my parents for that. They used to say that to me, too. And he keeps saying “home” as in, “Shari, it’s time for you to come home before that place makes you crazy” and “The folks back home miss you so much” and “Girl, you need you some home cooking.” This is my home now, I told him, and if you really want me, you will come to my new home. Home is where the heart is, right? So if Bryan’s heart is with me, then he should come up here and stay here with me in my home.

  I might have confused him with all that because he hung up on me.

  And I wasn’t mad.

  At all.

  I’ll bet he felt me shrugging my shoulders all the way from Brooklyn.

  He didn’t call me for a week, and when he finally did call, he told me that he was planning to visit me for the Thanksgiving holiday. To do what? I asked. “To be with you, Share.” He calls me “Share,” as if we’re still in middle school. Having a visitor would be nice to break the monotony that is my life, but the holidays are such a romantic time of year, and I’m worried he’ll drop to his knees, say, “Shari Nance” again, and I’ll be too far away from him to knock him down before he pops the question. Not that I would accept. It’s just that I don’t want to give him an answer that would ruin our friendship.

  Always keep men ignorant of your intentions. It makes them crazy, and they pay so much more attention to you, as if they’re trying to earn something.

  Speaking of ignorance ...

  If ignorance is indeed bliss, then using my earlier definition, ignorance is an uncluttered heart and an open mind. That’s kind of edgy. So that means the opposite of ignorance—knowledge—is a cluttered heart and a closed mind.

  That is so true!

  And that’s the wench I work for.

  Chapter 3

  Corrine Ross, my boss, is knowledge personified, only her knowledge comes from management seminars, hardback books, Harvard, an upper-middle-class upbringing in New Haven, Connecticut, and other out-of-touch places. “It should work,” she tells me whenever we’re working on a new ad campaign. “I have a hunch, Shari dear.”

  Her hunches are butt ugly, gristly, snaggletoothed, and always dead wrong. I gently correct her with a well-placed newspaper story or magazine article placed gently on her desk, bring her gently back to reality with the rest of us in the real world, or I simply ask her straight up, “Have you thought about doing this?”

  And then she un-gently uses my ideas as her own.

  Oh sure, we get accounts, but only her bank account prospers. She gets the glory and the ridiculous five-figure yearly bonuses, and I get little shoulder squeezes and the phrase, “Go team!”

  Life as I know it goes on slowly, like the drain in my tub that finally glug-glugs in about half an hour and ends with an audible burp and a sigh.

  I am finally off the bridge. I can’t wait till it ices up or snows so I can see if these new Chippewa boots can hack my morning commute. Look at that! I can see my breath. At least I keep my eyes up when I walk to work. The “movers and shakers” around me only look at their shoes. Wait a minute. They can’t be movers and shakers if they’re walking alongside me into lower Manhattan, lower Manhattan where people aren’t Park Avenue old money and actually have to work for a living. While this city can be so cold and while faces of every slice of the American rainbow can often look icy, most folks I’ve met in this city are survivors like me with warm, multicolored hearts.

  I stand in front of my building on William Street, looking up like a tourist. Man, this job sucks so hard. How hard? Imagine you’ve dropped your keys into the toilet. Okay, maybe not your keys. They’d fan out and get stuck in the hole, especially if you have a lot of keys. You’d probably flush a few times until the water was completely clear, and then you’d reach in and rescue them. Okay, imagine your cell phone or BlackBerry plummeting into the toilet as soon as you push or pull the lever. You want to reach into that nasty water immediately to rescue what is essentially your life, I mean, your cell phone, but you shake your head and watch as it gets sucked away in the swirl.

  That’s how bad this job sucks.

  Dreams are only one flush away.

  I may post that saying in the ladies’ room where my boss spends an inordinate amount of time primping.

  Hmm. I have to face it. I don’t just hate my boss. I loathe her. I abhor her. I abominate her. I detest her.

  One day, Corrine Ross, the honeymoon’s over. Pow. Right in the kisser.

  Just not today. Today is payday. I’d like to eat for the next two weeks. I’ll have to play nice today, and since she’s returning from a three-day business trip to LA, I’ll have to play even nicer since I have a hunch it didn’t go too well, and my hunches are usually right.

  It’s hard being nice when you’re seventeen floors up and surrounded by food you have to fetch for your boss. Bennie’s Thai Cafe is in smelling distance. Corrine usually has me get her dumplings stuffed with ground chicken and shrimp, bamboo shoots, dried mushrooms, and shallots. I get an egg roll because only chicken should be involved when it comes to dumplings. Corrine gets a burger and sweet potato fries at Zaitzeff, but I get nothing but a burger because sweet potatoes should become pies, not fries. I sometimes go to Les Halles to get Corrine eggs Benedict, which, in my humble opinion, is the luxury version of the Egg McMuffin. John Street Bar & Grill provides me with my quesadillas. I must have them. Corrine won’t touch them because they’re “too ethnic.” Sometimes I go to Pound & Pence and splurge on their baked mozzarella and onion soup with these cool ale bread croutons on top. Yoro Restaurant on Fulton Street, though, is Corrine’s brilliant idea of nutrition. It isn’t mine. Fish should be breaded, cooked, and have bones you pick out with your teeth. Sushi and I do not mix. Corrine, however, loves Yoro’s designer maki series, which includes avocado, shrimp, crab, and vegetables in sticky black rice. I don’t call that lunch. I call that a night in the bathroom. The Libertine Restaurant is where Corrine takes us for caramel cheesecake whenever we’ve “sealed the deal.” We haven’t gone there lately. Hmm. She’s on a cold streak as long as her extensions, mainly because I’ve been keeping my mouth shut and not giving her any ideas to steal lately.

  All this food is within my grasp, and it’s why I need those twice-daily power walks. The folks at MultiCorp eat a lot, at odd hours, late at night, all day, in fact. I know I would put away three thousand calories a day at least if I ate like some of them do. Instead, I sip my Honesty Tea from Soma by Nature, the nicest oasis in the building far away from the seventeenth floor, and I use no sugar or cream, just the straight stuff, because I am the antioxidant queen.

  Because I’m running late, I step into the elevator instead of taking the stairs, all two hundred and thirty-eight of them. I have toned, tight calves, thighs, and booty from climbing and descending over one million steps in the last five years. This elevator is still stank. I look around at people trying not to touch each other but most likely secretly wanting to. I used to have a crush on a tall Hispanic guy who used the stairs a lot. I called him “Tool Hombre
.” He had this huge toolbox and hands as big as my head. I’d smile, and he’d grunt. I’d smile some more, and he’d grunt some more.

  We were regular conversationalists.

  I smile all the time on any elevator, and these real New Yorkers around me think I’m crazy. While they give careful nods at people they think they know or that they think know them, I just smile. No winking at any time, though. That could lead to a sexual harassment lawsuit in the wink of an eye these days. Hands at sides, feet together, eyes front—I’m a good little MultiCorp soldier.

  The elevator doors open and ... “Welcome to MultiCorp.”

  I smile at our main receptionist, Tia Fernandez, sixty-five, widowed, fiercely Cuban, and who still salsa dances every Friday night at Cuba on Thompson Street. She thinks I’m a shorter version of Lauryn Hill, and I think she’s a younger version of Eva Mendes. Other than me, she is the nicest person here, and like me, Tia trips every day here at MultiCorp.

  “Hi, Tia,” I say. “Don’t you look sexy today.”

  Tia rolls her eyes and smiles. She has to be the prettiest woman I have ever known. I hope I look half as good as her when I’m her age. She has the smoothest brown skin, always smells of sage for some reason, and other than me, wears the loudest clothes, preferring bold oranges, vibrant yellows, and electric greens. Today, though, she’s business casual with a pair of tan slacks, old-fashioned earth shoes, and an oversized white sweater.

  “It is Friday, Shari,” she says. “Payday.”

  I smile. “You’re making me look bad with that outfit.”

  “I am not dancing later,” she says, adding a few dance steps anyway. “But you will be dancing soon, because Miss Ross is back from Los Angeles.”

  My heart falls to my stomach and instantly biodegrades. “Miss Ross is here, as in here early?” I whisper.

  Tia shakes her head. “She is due back from LA this morning.” She points behind her at a master calendar the size of Wyoming. “Her plane should have already landed, but knowing Lady Di as we do, we should not expect her anytime soon.”

  I smile. Everyone in the office has a different nickname for Corrine. Some call her “Diana Ross.” Others call her “Die, Anna.” The latest nickname floating around is “Corrine-cula” because one of her front teeth is kind of, well, pointier than the other. I secretly call her “Miss Cross” since I bear her all day and sometimes bear with her even on weekends.

  I walk behind Tia’s “edifice,” which isn’t a desk so much as a building partition the shape of a flying vee with a rolling chair behind it. I check Corrine’s mail slot and find yet another catalog from Neiman Marcus.

  Corrine and her Cinderella dresses. “It’s a Tahari,” she told me once about a brown outfit she modeled for me. As I nodded and showed my false approval by forming a little O with my mouth, I wondered why an old game-system maker would diversify into dresses. “You like my Kay Unger?” she asked one day. I’ll bet it looked better on Kay. “Paisley is the new black,” she once told me while wearing a jade-green dress. Why can’t the new black be black? Before a date with her longtime boyfriend, Tom “Terrific” Sexton, an account executive at Harrison Hersey and Boulder, Corrine changed at work from a hoochie-kootchy Gucci to a Michael Kors sheath dress, which, I found out later, cost as much as my monthly rent. The rip up the side of that dress was, to be blunt, a rip-off. They must have used the fabric they cut out at the bottom to make the rest of the dress. And Corrine routinely drops five hundred bucks for scary-looking stilettos. I’d like to see her get those spiky heels stuck in a pile of pigeon poo on the Brooklyn Bridge.

  I would pay to see that. I’d even film it and upload it to YouTube.

  But back to MultiCorp. There are wide-open spaces on this floor and no cubicles anywhere. Only our founder and CEO, Mr. Dunn, has an actual office because “we are a family with no secrets.” Thus, we have no privacy, and our phones don’t buzz or ring and only light up. As a result, everyone whispers around here, and at first it drove me crazy. I’m used to it now. Except when people have gas. I will never get used to that.

  Because of all the glass and lack of walls, I get decent views of Brooklyn and the Brooklyner, which is nice most days, but sad on cold, rainy days. It just shows me how far I have to go after I tidy up Corrine’s career, I mean, accounts and affairs by, oh, seven o’clock. I haven’t left at five since I started here five years ago. If I ever billed MultiCorp for all those extra hours, they’d owe me over $50,000.

  Hmm. Why don’t I bill them for those hours? Oh yeah. I’m on salary. Still ...

  MultiCorp is the largest minority-owned, full-service multicultural advertising agency on the planet. We do TV, web, print, radio, billboards, and whatever else you can advertise on, including T-shirts, kids’ meal toys, mugs, pens, and boxer’s backs. We reach out to the dispossessed, the tired, the hungry, and the poor. Okay, technically we reach out to clients who want to take money from African-American, Hispanic, and Asian American urban consumers.

  Thus we try to convince Grandma Millie to shop for her eggs, bread, and butter at Kmart instead of Walmart. We want Hector and Juan to join the exciting U.S. Army instead of the boring U.S. Air Force. We urge the New Dons and OYG street gangs to buy their throwaway cell phones from AT&T Wireless instead of Verizon. We want America to shed tears and act indignant about our public service announcements concerning teen pregnancy and spouse abuse. Those are always so uplifting. We want people with no disposable incomes to frequent casinos as often as they can. The U.S. Census Bureau is one of our major clients, and it makes so much sense to use MultiCorp the more multicultural this country becomes.

  We also represent Jamaica. No kidding. We represent an entire country. “Come to de islands, mon.” That’s about all we need to say because folks go to the islands. You really can’t screw up advertising paradise. Okay, hurricanes sometimes turn Jamaica into a giant mass of windblown palm trees and knee-deep mud, but essentially, keeping the Jamaica account has been a no-brainer and therefore perfect for my boss.

  Yeah, um, perfect. When Corrine and I first heard we’d be working on the Jamaica account, I said, “Come to de islands, mon.” She didn’t make the connection. I had to explain it to her five times. Corrine then told me it was a silly idea, that good advertising ideas take time to develop, and that no one would take “Come to de islands, mon” seriously. She said she would think of something “much more upscale and erudite,” yet my slogan is out there on billboards, in magazines, on the radio, on every bus in the city, and all over the TV. The Jamaican man who did the TV ad and who has lived in New Jersey his entire life (so much for realism) has even been on a few talk shows. Naturally, Corrine took full credit for my idea and got the big bonus and the free vacation to Jamaica. Mr. Dunn has been calling her his “rising star” ever since.

  I can’t afford to go to Jamaica or to live too long in my disappointing past, so I go to my desk, which is within whispering distance of Corrine’s “space,” as she calls it. I have vowed to stop whispering because I’m making her too much money. Luckily, Corrine is gloriously late this morning because of her trip. I do a happy dance, my boots spraying water on the plastic carpet protector under my rolling chair. Now I can get so much more work done because the boss isn’t around.

  Somebody has to work around here.

  Chapter 4

  And having fulfilling work was one of the reasons I left Salem, Virginia, a little over five years ago.

  I was just going through the motions after earning a business management degree from Old Dominion University in Norfolk. I was wasting my life working two jobs in nearby Roanoke, taking extra classes at Virginia Western Community College, and living in my parents’ house—and paying half of the house note and utilities because I had two “good” jobs. Mama didn’t work, and my daddy was cutting back on his hours at General Electric to concentrate on a frozen meat company that never panned out. I basically only slept in my parents’ house, but I paid half the bills. I worked as a cashier/“go get it
”/stocker at Lowe’s Home Improvement from six until twelve, was off for afternoon classes in art history and communications at Virginia Western, and then rushed to Sir Speedy Printing to run copies and prints until midnight. Though I worked sixty hours a week, I had no benefits and no desire to become an assistant manager or manager-in-training at an overgrown hardware store or a glorified copy center.

  I was nothing but a robot chasing paper.

  In my spare time, I surfed the Internet for jobs, none of which I was qualified for, but it let me dream. When I read the job description for administrative assistant at MultiCorp, it sounded exciting and exotic, I felt qualified, and I jumped, immediately submitting an online résumé. Somebody must have liked my customer service and somewhat artlike background from that one art history class I took, because they asked me to come to New York and interview.

  They hired me on the spot—sort of. “We need to give you a sort of tryout, see how you’ll do under our demanding, fast-paced working conditions,” they said. I asked, “For how long?” They shrugged. “Until we can hire you full-time.”

  MultiCorp dragged me four hundred miles north to become a glorified temp.

  They put me up in the Murray Hill Inn on East Thirtieth Street in Midtown. I had a double bed but had to share a bathroom with another potential administrative assistant from Chicago, Sylvia something. She didn’t survive the “tryout” because all she wanted to do was shop and go to shows. I had to walk three miles to and from work every day, me, the girl from Virginia, from Third Avenue to Lafayette Street to William Street.

  I loved every minute of it.

  And I even looked up at all the tall buildings like a tourist because the tallest building in Salem is the Roanoke College library, all four stories of it. I looked in every store window, hung out in Times Square, and just generally soaked up the neon and the noise.