The Tax Returns and the Limo

I thought I was just doing a temp job. Years later, I understand what room I had been sent into.

.When I moved in with Kara, I had a job at a pretty big company about thirty minutes from our apartment. It was in HR, which I was very interested in at the time. As time went on, it became cumbersome and annoying, mostly because HR sounds like a place where people go to help people, but often it is where people go to protect companies from people.

Most people would not look at me and say, “You know where you’d be great? Human Resources.” Although, weirdly enough, the last job I was offered before taking my current one was in HR. At the same time, I also received an offer in Risk & Compliance, which seemed much more aligned with my personality. Apparently, my soul was less “employee engagement” and more “where exactly is the violation?”

Anyhoo, the company I worked for had a major downsizing. I want to say it was something like five thousand people. I was new, I was an admin, and I was absolutely on the chopping block. But this was the early nineties, when companies still at least pretended to feel bad about ruining your life.

We had about two months’ notice. There were resume workshops, job fairs, career counseling sessions, and a steady stream of people telling us how terrible they felt. They probably took me to enough lunches and dinners to pay my salary for another year, but it was a different time. They were still laying us off, but they gave us appetizers first.

So, as I had for most of my adult life, I signed up with temporary placement agencies. They paid good money for people who had actual skills, which I did. I could type, organize, answer phones, make travel arrangements, keep secrets, read a room, and people-please my way into making everyone think I was exactly who they needed me to be.

One of my assignments was at an elite accounting firm that leased space in the Hess building. I had to be somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-five. I had no idea that I was attractive, desirable, or intelligent. I needed a job, and I had already learned that being useful and agreeable was the fastest way to survive.

I was placed there in January, right as tax season was kicking off. The woman whose job I was filling had been promoted. I think her name was Michelle. She was very happy I was there, because she had been an executive assistant, and her boss, also named Kate, was needy.

Boss Kate was one of those women who seemed like she had been built for a different life. She wanted to be a glamorous housewife, which was before that was even a show, but she was working because she had gotten divorced. It was not clear whether she was divorced because she was dating Jeff, the CFO, or dating Jeff because she was divorced.

Either way, there was a CFO, there was a divorce, and there was a lot of perfume in the air.

There was also Marty, the CEO, who was married and apparently very, very jealous of whatever was going on between Jeff and Boss Kate. I did not understand office politics then. I barely understood regular politics. But even I understood there was something strange about the way everyone seemed to know things no one was saying out loud.

Boss Kate was probably around forty. To me, at twenty-something, that seemed impossibly adult. She was beautiful, thin, polished, highlighted, and always dressed to the nines. She looked important, and I was still young enough to confuse looking important with being important.

But Boss Kate was needy. She could not do her job unless you got her special coffee, then her special lunch, then another coffee, then maybe some fruit. She was friendly and kind on the surface, and at first I looked up to her. I thought, wow, look how important she is. Look how people move around her.

What I did not understand was that she hated me.

I was young, pretty, naïve, and completely unaware of all of it. She was forty and divorced and still beautiful, but she was not twenty. I do not say that with judgment now. I say it with the strange, uncomfortable clarity of being an older woman myself and finally understanding how rooms like that worked.

The clothes were part of it too, although I did not understand that then either.

They were walking around in Armani, or whatever rich people wore to look like they had never once checked a bank balance before buying lunch. I was wearing the cheapest professional clothes I could find. Rainbow Shops professional. Stretchy pants, polyester blouses, discount shoes, whatever I could afford that made me look like I belonged in an office.

I was trying to look respectable. That was all. I was young, thin, and could pull off almost anything, but I did not know that was power. I thought I looked like a broke kid trying to pass.

The men were not looking at the labels.

They were looking at me.

The men noticed youth. The women noticed the men noticing youth. And the young women, at least young women like me, had no idea they were standing in the middle of a transaction.

On my first day, Michelle and another EA took me to lunch. Apparently, Boss Kate had encouraged it. They wanted to go to Sizzler. That probably tells you most of what you need to know.

They pretty much ignored me and enjoyed their on-the-company meal. I sat there trying to be pleasant, because that was my entire personality at the time. Pleasant, grateful, low-maintenance, and silently terrified of doing anything wrong.

There was another lunch thing too, because apparently lunch was a whole political ecosystem in that place.

At least once, maybe more than once, Boss Kate asked me to order lunch for her and Jeff. Jeff was always polite to me. Almost noticeably polite. When I ordered their lunch, he told me to get whatever I wanted for myself and put it on the company tab.

Boss Kate had a scowl on her face.

When I brought the food back, Jeff asked me if I wanted to join them. I am sure my face looked horrified, because joining them was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. Also, even in my clueless twenties, I understood enough to know that sitting down to lunch with the CFO and his girlfriend, while the jealous CEO was somewhere nearby, sounded like a terrible idea.

Before I could answer, Boss Kate jumped in.

“Oh, she has stuff to do for Marty,” she said. “There’s no way she has time. Right, Kate?”

I just nodded, took my lunch, and left.

The funny thing is, she probably thought she was putting me in my place. Maybe she was. But she was also saving me from a lunch I absolutely did not want to attend.

Lunch was not important to me then. Not really. I was completely addicted to cigarettes at that point, and I felt shameful about it, the way I felt shameful about almost everything that made me need something.

What I needed was to get to my car. I needed to smoke a few cigarettes, maybe drive around the block, and come back looking like a normal, functioning person. If I got two bites of lunch on the way back in, that was enough to sustain me until the next cigarette.

So while Boss Kate may have seen some young assistant being invited into a room where she did not belong, I was mostly thinking about escape. I did not want her lunch. I did not want her CFO. I wanted twenty minutes alone in my car and enough nicotine to make it through the rest of the day.

Somehow, I managed not to piss off Boss Kate too much, and I kept the temporary assignment through April 15. Tax day. The big finish.

On April 15, I was assigned to go with the CFO’s driver to deliver tax returns to their most important clients. So basically, my job that day was riding around in the back seat of a limo, hand-delivering tax returns to CEOs and other powerful men at other companies.

Everyone loved this plan. Even Boss Kate loved this plan. A pretty little friendly, people-pleasing temporary assistant hand-delivering tax returns to their biggest clients, most of whom were men. What could possibly be more charming?

I was scared.

The driver had a reputation as a misogynist, and at first, I was nervous around him. He was older, gruff, and clearly knew things. But the longer we drove around together, the more I realized he was not interested in me that way. He was in it for the money. He needed the job. He did not want to flirt with the twenty-something assistant they had stuck in the back seat of the limo like some kind of corporate party favor.

Once I trusted that, we actually hit it off. I am pretty sure his name was Rob. He talked to me about his divorce, his daughter, his job, and his relationship with the CFO. He knew what was going on between Jeff and Boss Kate. He knew who was using whom. He knew which smiles were real and which ones were strategy.

And then he warned me.

He told me Boss Kate was jealous of me. Not in a vague, dramatic, office-gossip way. He said she was jealous because Jeff liked me, or at least because Jeff was polite enough to me for her to notice. He told me she would try to get rid of me, and that I needed to get out of there.

At the time, I probably did not know what to do with a warning like that. I was still young enough to believe that if people were nice to me, they liked me. I did not yet understand that people can be friendly and still be dangerous. They can take you to lunch and still resent you. They can compliment you while deciding where you fit in the food chain.

Rob was being kind to me in a way I did not fully understand then. He never hit on me. He never made me uncomfortable once I understood him. In a strange way, he treated me like he was my father, which is funny now because he was probably in his forties too. At twenty-something, everyone over thirty-five seemed like they had survived a war and come back with opinions.

Patrick saw it too.

I was dating him at the time, and he did not like the whole situation. He thought the older driver sounded creepy, which, honestly, was not an unreasonable reaction from the outside. A young temporary assistant riding around in a limo with an older man, delivering tax returns to powerful men, does not exactly sound like the beginning of a Hallmark movie.

But Patrick was not only worried about Rob. He was worried about the whole thing. He kept telling me I needed to get out of there.

And I remember thinking, do you understand how much money they pay me?

Because they did. For a temp job, it was ridiculous money. In today’s terms, it was probably the equivalent of $75 an hour, and when I delivered tax returns, I got overtime. Time and a half to sit in the back of a limo, walk into important buildings, hand envelopes to important men, and try not to look as scared as I felt.

Kara and I had no money. None. So when Patrick warned me, I heard concern, but I also heard a man who did not understand the math. I needed the paycheck. I needed the overtime. I needed the validation. I needed to believe that if they were paying me that much, it meant I was doing something right.

I understand now that Patrick saw what I couldn’t. He saw that I was young and pretty and broke and eager to prove I deserved to be there. He saw that people like Jeff and Boss Kate could make attention feel like an opportunity, even when it was really a trap. He did not say it that way, because how do you say that to someone in her twenties without sounding controlling? So he said the driver was creepy. He said I needed to get out.

At the time, I probably thought he was being overprotective. I did not yet understand that sometimes overprotective is just what concern looks like when the person can see the cliff and you are still admiring the view.

Eventually, I moved away from that job. I do not remember whether I quit or whether I pissed off Boss Kate and she got rid of me. That feels important, but memory is funny that way. Sometimes it keeps the limo and loses the exit interview.

What I do remember is how little I understood.

I did not realize how threatened Kate was by me, or how relieved Michelle might have been to hand me the problem and escape. I did not realize the driver, the supposed misogynist, might be the only person in the whole place willing to tell me the truth.

I also did not realize that youth enters a room before the woman does. I did not know friendliness could be mistaken for availability, or that being pleasant and low-maintenance could make you useful in ways no one would ever say out loud.

In my twenties, I had no idea. None. I thought I was trying to keep a job. I thought I was being helpful. I thought I was lucky to be included, lucky to be trusted, lucky to be sitting in the back of a limo delivering tax returns to powerful men.

I was old enough to be sent into those rooms, but not old enough to understand why I had been chosen.

I did not understand yet that sometimes the job is not the job.

Sometimes the job is being young, agreeable, harmless, pretty enough to send into rooms full of powerful men, and naïve enough not to know what that means.

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