White Collar Girl Read Free

called the last girl Robin, too, and her name was Sharon. Robin was two girls before that.”
    â€œWhat happened to them? Did they move on to the city desk?”
    She looked at me in surprise and then laughed. “You young girls are all the same. You come in here, fresh out of school, thinking you’re going to be the next Nellie Bly.” She shook her head. “I train you all, and what happens? You get disillusioned, get married, and then you quit.”
    â€œThat’s not my plan.” It wasn’t. I didn’t even have a boyfriend. And yes, I was going to be the next Nellie Bly.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    A fter Mrs. Angelo assigned me to a desk, she called over to a voluptuous platinum blonde seated next to me. “Hey, M—M, finish taking Jordan here around. I have to get ready for a meeting. In the meantime”—Mrs. Angelo handed me a stack of forms—“fill these out when you have a chance.”
    Mrs. Angelo went back to her desk across the room and M took over. She introduced herself as Madeline Miller but said everyone called her M. She was stylish, wore one of those double-breasted shirtwaist dresses that accentuated her cone-shaped breasts. She was in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, and bore a striking resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. Judging by the penciled-in beauty mark on her cheek, I realized this was no accident. She also wore enough perfume to rival the cigarette, cigar and pipe smoke in the room.
    â€œPeter,” M called to a man a few desks over who was wearinga green eyeshade, “this is Jordan. She’s starting today on society news. Peter’s a crime reporter.”
    Peter adjusted his visor and said, “Excellent,” only his voice had a squeaky-door quality to it, so it came out sounding more like, “
Ehhhx-
cellent.”
    â€œAnd this is Randy,” said M, turning the other direction. “He’s one of the staff artists.”
    Randy was a good-looking fellow with a long face and one of those dimples at the tip of his chin. I stole a peek at the editorial cartoon he was working on as I said hello, but he didn’t bother to respond. He didn’t even open his mouth other than to sing along with a jingle playing over his radio:
“Winston tastes good like a”—BANG-BANG
—he tapped his pencil on the desk—“
cigarette should. . . .”
    The floor began to shake and a rumbling came up from the bowels of the building. I watched the coffee in Randy’s cup ripple like a calm lake that someone had thrown a pebble into. The quaking seemed to coincide with Randy’s
BANG-BANG
but was completely unrelated. No one seemed concerned and that’s when I realized they were used to this.
Of course.
It was only the printing presses in the basement starting to roll.
    M continued with the introductions, walking me to some nearby desks. Walter Harris was a pipe-smoking, fast-talking political reporter with a jet-black flattop who grunted a hello. He sat opposite Henry Oberlin, who stopped typing long enough to stuff a handful of Frosted Flakes in his mouth while an unattended cigarette smoldered in his ashtray. He had a ring of pale blond hair around an otherwise balding head. He gazed at me and mumbled what I took to be a “hey” and went back to his story.
    With each introduction I felt a little smaller. It was clear that these new colleagues had no interest in who I was, where I came from or what I was there to do. They were also all men, and frankly, Iwas surprised that M had bothered taking me around in the first place.
    Although when she walked me over to the next desk, no introduction was needed. I recognized him right away. Marty Sinclair was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who had a weekly column and whose byline frequently appeared on page one. My father knew him, but I’d never met him before and I was rapt. To me Marty Sinclair was