Pink Slip Party Read Free Page B

items like olives and salad dressing and brand name cereal that comes in a box. I buy organic vegetables and double-ply toilet paper and quilted paper towels. I feel like skipping down the street and handing out fives.
    Of course, this is willfully ignoring the fact that after paying off my minimum credit card balances for the month, and my utility bills (including my $480 gas bill for the record-breaking freeze in February), I will not quite have enough for the rent. Still, I allow myself to feel a little optimism. My mom always encouraged me to use my imagination. She never dreamed it would pave the way for my huge capacity for denial.

To: [email protected]
From: Headhunters Central
Date: March 4, 2002, 10:30 A.M.
Subject: RE: Your Resume
Dear Jane,
We have received multiple copies of your resume today via email and fax and feel compelled to tell you that changing your middle initial in no way disguises your resume.
We will contact you should we find anything suitable for your needs. And we do not appreciate you asking, even in jest, if we include escort services in our job placement list.
Please stop faxing us.
Sincerely,
Lucas Cohen
Headhunters Central

2

    L ike all ill-fated work relationships, Mike and I got together at the company holiday party. The party, normally held in November, was moved up to early September because we were celebrating a good fiscal year. The party was at Blackbird, one of those upscale places that serves a single prawn on a plate of baby greens and calls it an entrée. Everyone was celebrating bonuses. Even I’d gotten an extra $300 in my paycheck that week, and my salary wasn’t usually tied to profits.
    I was sitting at the bar smoking a cigarette, because even if you quit like I had, company functions of any kind are exceptions. Everyone knows this.
    I was watching Dave Nedles from accounting swig down two cranberry martinis in succession, while he tried pathetically to pick up the cute, leggy cocktail waitress. Dave was smacking his lips, puckering them up like a big, wet fish. I hated Dave. He was the sort of guy who took off his wedding ring when he went out to bars. He thought nobody knew this about him. He thought he was sly.
    It was about this time that my boss’s boss, Mike, emerged from the smoke and shadows. Mike, boyishly handsome, was noticed by every woman in the office. The secretaries had fights over which one would take him his mail.
    He said, “You don’t look like you’re having much fun.”
    And I said, “I didn’t think it was possible to have fun at these things.”
    He’d laughed, and leaned in. He had that way of making you feel like every conversation was a shared private joke.
    “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I will because I’ve had four drinks to work up the courage to do it,” he said. “I think you’re incredibly sexy. But I’m sure you have a boyfriend, right? Girls like you always have boyfriends.”
    That was all it took, really. I was that easy to pick up.
    We had drunk sex, blurry, would-be-embarrassing, clumsy sex, the kind you pretend didn’t happen. But he called me two days later and asked me out on a proper date. For the next seven months, we hardly ever separated. He said he loved me. I said I loved him. Then he fired me. That’s the short version.
    I feel like I have single-handedly pushed the feminist movement back thirty years. When a vice president had the hots for a secretary in 1972, she got promoted. In 2002, she gets fired. It’s about that simple. You can’t advance when you’re a liability.
    Mike left four things at my apartment: a toothbrush, a disposable razor, a pair of Halloween boxers, and a Gap T-shirt. This is all that’s left of a seven-month relationship. It’s all the proof that he was ever here at all.
    I lay out his things, one by one, across my living room floor and study them. I smoke several cigarettes in succession, stubbing out the last one into one of the jack-o’-lanterns on his