Beyond the Point(77)
“Maybe hope is the only lasting change one human can give to another. And for the first time in my life, I have hope. You gave that to me.”
19
Spring 2006 // London, England
Dani!”
Laura Klein had the annoying, completely unnecessary habit of shouting across the office to get Dani’s attention, when, in reality, all she had to do was stand up and look outside her office door and kindly say, at a normal decibel level, that she needed something.
That woman always needed something. But at the moment, Dani didn’t want to move. She’d just read an e-mail that had stunned her into paralysis.
From: Locke Coleman <[email protected]>
Subject: booked!
Date: April 6, 2006 9:13:15 AM CST +01:00
To: Dani McNalley <[email protected]>
Booked my ticket! Coming to London May 14–21. Call me and let’s start to make some plans.
—Locke
“Dani!”
Pushing away from her desk, Dani limped from her chair to her boss’s door frame. The London office was aesthetically disappointing—dark carpet, clusters of cubicles, a tiny kitchen with a refrigerator full of other people’s forgotten lunches, stinking and spoiled. Laura Klein, it turned out, was as short and brittle as a boss as she’d been in that first interview a few years earlier. She had platinum blond hair, and wore the same dark maroon lipstick and black three-quarter-length dress, as if it were easier to wear the same thing every day than to make fashion decisions. In nearly every conversation, she found a way to mention her current separation from her husband of twenty-two years, and Dani wondered if he’d grown bored with her clothes or simply annoyed by the sound of her nagging voice. Either way, she couldn’t really blame the guy.
Dani poked her head into Laura’s office. “Yes?”
“What’s this I hear from Webb about new slides?”
“I cc’d you on that.”
“Cc,” she repeated, lowering her glasses down her nose.
“Carbon copy.”
“Right. Well I didn’t see that. And I need to see them before my presentation.”
Dani wondered if she’d heard Laura correctly—if her boss had actually put emphasis on the word my. As if Dani would forget who was giving the most important presentation in E & G history. After more than a year and a half of global research, they were finally presenting their research findings and marketing recommendations to Gelhomme. Dani had been assigned the task of building the PowerPoint deck that Laura would use to deliver the presentation, which meant that nearly every other moment, the woman was calling Dani to her side.
“I’ll send them again,” Dani promised. “But the gist of it is that I think we should add digital advertising to our recommendations.”
“Digital,” Laura repeated, as if it were a foreign word. “As in . . .”
“As in the Internet.”
Her boss laughed. “You must be joking. Everyone knows banner ads are a colossal waste. Gelhomme doesn’t need that. They have a thirteen-million-dollar budget, Dani.”
“I’m just saying that it may be worth using some of that budget to start playing online.”
“Our clients don’t want to play. They want to make a profit.”
“Sure. But you should take a look at the numbers. There’s this new website called the Facebook that’s really taking off with college kids—”
“What is it, porn?” Laura laughed at her own joke and went back to work at her computer.
“It’s a place you can chat with your friends, see what they’re up to. Share pictures. There are like, thirteen thousand new users every day and—”
“We are not advising our biggest client to throw money away at some online fad. They’ll laugh us out of the room. They hired us to create TV commercials. Not reinvent the wheel.”
“The wheel is about to be made obsolete,” Dani said with conviction.
Laura stared up at Dani, her fingers perched on the keyboard of her computer.
“I don’t think you appreciate the opportunity you’ve been given here,” Laura said, putting her glasses on her desk. “When I got my start in this industry, women were seen as secretaries, not future executives. I had to keep my head down. Learn the rules. Play the game. I suggest you do the same.” Laura picked her glasses up again and said under her breath, “Of course, you wouldn’t understand.”
Dani stared at the side of Laura’s face, which was now trained on the computer screen. “I’m sorry. Why wouldn’t I understand?”
“Well, you know. There’s such a push for diversity these days. It’s easier for you. Things didn’t get handed to us, back in the day.”
Dani’s head reared back, as if Laura’s words had hit her in the face with force.
“Easier,” Dani repeated. “You think it’s easier. For me?”
She wanted to show Laura pictures of her grandmother, picking cotton as a sharecropper on a white man’s land in North Carolina. She wanted to recite the statistics: How unemployment among black women was nearly twice as high as among white women. How even though white women earned eighty cents for every dollar white men earned, women of color earned just sixty-three cents. Dani wanted to take Laura back and show her how hard she’d worked at West Point, earning the respect of her peers and professors, only to get tossed to the curb when her body couldn’t keep up with her mind.