Car Pool (3 page)

The forty or so people on the Groundwater Protection Grip Project squished together for the weekly safety meeting, with at least a dozen standing around the perimeter. This week’s discussion was on what to do in the case of a hydrogen-sulfide gas leak. Right, Shay thought. I’ll cover my mouth and nose with something and be dead in eight seconds instead of five, like everyone else. The discussion was brief, which Shay took as a sign that everyone understood that a leak of that nature was deadly and protecting yourself was futile.

She started to get up but the head of the project cleared his throat and stood up. Shay stifled a yawn and settled onto the hard seat again.

After a couple of sentences about management policy, leaving Shay sleepier than ever — would she ever be awake in the morning again, she wondered — he jabbed a thumb in the direction of a woman sitting behind him.

The woman stood up … damn, she’d missed her name. Shay guessed her blue-green suit had cost the price of a month’s rent and then some. She noticed cynically that the woman held herself away from everything around her, as if she were afraid that the inevitable grime of a working field trailer would rub off on her pristine clothes or muss the French braid of her gold-reddish hair.

” —so don’t shoot the messenger,” the woman was saying. She smiled with a certain amount of charm, Shay admitted grudgingly. “What I’m passing out are time survey sheets. For a period of four weeks starting today, you’ll need to keep track of everything you do in twenty-minute increments.”

Shay, along with almost everyone else, groaned loudly. French Braid smiled again. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it. And you should be thankful… not too many years ago, efficiency specialists insisted that constant, endless recordkeeping was the only accurate way to measure performance and calculate costs. A time survey like this one is still accurate at a much lower expense to the company. And of course it’s much easier on you.”

“What do you mean by ‘performance’?” The project head, who had been espousing the management line, suddenly looked concerned.

French Braid’s charming smile didn’t fade. Shay thought her smile was too rehearsed. Obviously, she’d answered the question a hundred times. “Performance in a costing sense is not the same thing as performance in our annual reviews. To us in product costing, performance is the completion of a task — we don’t have a good or bad judgment to place on anything. Our sole concern is what tasks were completed, how long they took, and what product they contributed to.”

“But we’re environmental cleanup, not a product,” someone said.

“Groundwater Protection Grid, I know. You’re an overhead item. But your costs have to be transferred to products. In a way, your unit is like legal, or marketing, or like my unit, product costing.” Again, the perfect lips curved in a charming smile. Shay got the picture now. Their unit was going to be added up, a cost assigned and then management would start screaming at the regulators about how much was being spent to comply with their petty directives, like finding out why the xylene toxicity level was increasing in one of the testing wells.

Sure, this project wasn’t cheap, but there was a ton of dead weight that could be cut — at least that’s how she saw it after a quick review of the organizational chart. Shay heard herself ask, “Why now?”

French Braid shrugged slightly. “Good a time as any. I understand you’re fully staffed and you’re just beginning the first major phase of this project. We survey the whole refinery over a course of two years. You came up in the rotation.”

Maybe it was the lack of coffee, but Shay found

herself really disliking this woman. She was so… poised. A consummate professional. Shay glanced down at her wrinkled jeans and no-brand tennis shoes, consciously setting aside a feeling of dowdiness. She was too tired to make an effort with her clothes, even if she thought it was important, which she didn’t. Fancy clothes were only required if visiting the Exec Building, a place Shay had no intention of going. And she didn’t believe the timing was random… they had just reached full staffing and now management wanted numbers to wave at the Water Quality Board. She’d been in plenty of meetings where it had happened. This woman was an accessory before the fact.

She took her time sheet — the NOCCU logo neatly imprinted at the top in blue as it was on every piece of paper in the place — and attempted to look interested as French Braid explained how to fill it in. They practiced by filling in the time already spent this morning at the safety meeting. She was disliking working for a large corporation even more than she had thought she would.

When the meeting was over she filled up her mug and wandered back toward the cubicle she shared with Harold. She had a mountain of data to enter and she should look sharp about it.

“Hey, Sumoto.” She jerked her head in the direction of her immediate supervisor’s voice. Scott beckoned her to join him and French Braid.

“Andy needs a lift back to the Exec Building. Could you take her over? Just pick up a car key from the office.” Scott walked away without waiting for Shay’s response.

“Let me put my coffee down and get a vehicle key,” Shay said.

“I’ll be right here,” Andy said, with another of those charming, brittle smiles. Shay decided Andy really hated being in the field … tension was written all over her and her eyes, now that Shay was close enough to see that they were gray, were rimmed in red. Andy — what could that possibly be short for? Andrea maybe. Andy’s only detectable makeup had been applied to camouflage heavy circles — twins to the ones under Shay’s own eyes. Shay didn’t bother to cover them. She didn’t have time to spend on makeup, though it looked as if French Braid spent hours every morning. Her complexion was so flawless it had to come out of a bottle. A very expensive bottle.

Without analyzing why, Shay chose the key to the oldest of the field trucks. Andy followed her to the parking lot and waited as Shay made a show of spreading a clean towel over the less than clean bench seat. Andy perched on the towel, but didn’t say anything or suggest taking one of the cars that also sat in the parking lot. In the enclosed space, Shay could immediately tell that Andy smoked. After watching her father die, the smell of cigarettes turned her stomach.

Neither of them said anything during the brief ride to the Exec Building. Shay rolled down the window to let in cold, but fresh air. The faint smell of chemicals and gasoline was preferable to cigarettes. Shay made a great show of obeying the refinery driving laws … five miles an hour, complete stops at all signs. They wound through the overhead

piping, flare points and container tracks, at one point stopping for another truck, filled to the top with dirt from a site. A group of workers — all Hispanic, as far as Shay could tell — leaned on shovels next to a wide, shallow excavation while their supervisor, a white male and the only person wearing a hard hat, spoke into a field phone. What on earth were they digging up, she wondered. From the color of the soil, she would have thought the lot of them should be wearing filter masks.

When their path was clear again, Shay turned into the only landscaped area on the refinery. Andy slid out of the truck as Shay pulled up at the Exec Building North entrance.

“Thanks for the lift,” Andy said, her smile completely faded. Shay gave her a mocking salute and pulled away as soon as Andy closed the door. She had a lot of data to enter and now, thanks to French Braid, a time survey to fill out.

Anthea barely made it through the rest of her day. When she called Lois to suggest having lunch together, Lois had said she was too busy… for the fourth time in a row. For two weeks she had been trying to make extra efforts — romantic dinners prepared that Lois said she was too tired to eat. She’d made physical overtures, only to find Lois beset with a series of ailments… headache, indigestion, backache. If it hadn’t been happening to her, Anthea would have advised herself to read the handwriting on the wall. She didn’t want to let three years go so easily. Not that Lois showed any

signs of wanting to go. She likes it just the way it is — sex on the outside and me to turn on the electric blanket at night.

Anthea knew her self-esteem was in the basement. She’d let that technician shove her into a filthy truck, for God’s sake, and treat her like a piece of furniture. She hadn’t cared enough at the time to suggest using one of the cars and now, every time she spotted the grimy stain on the side of her skirt, it made her angry. She was tired of letting people walk all over her. Adrian didn’t believe she could take control of her life. Because it’s true, she thought.

It didn’t help that it was Ruben’s last day. He said he understood the trap Anthea was in, but she could feel the hurt and sense of injustice from him. Especially when Reed had just refused to take over any of Ruben’s work, which was typical, but he had plenty of time to handle the United Way drive and organize the floor’s Christmas party. She had tried to work with Reed, but he just went to Martin and the two of them had a good ol’ chat and then Martin told her that Reed seemed to have plenty of work. It made Anthea want to scream.

She did the only thing she could under her discretion — she gave Ruben the small performance bonus she could authorize on her own. She also had the Christmas bonus coupons ready to hand out to her staff. Since Ruben’s last day fell before the day she was supposed to hand them out, she hadn’t been given a set for him. Silently cursing NOC-U’s cheapness — lots of paper doll heads were rolling — she gave him the set she’d been given for herself. At least his kids would have a tree to decorate and

they could get a ten-pound ham for free. She also pretended that the coupon book normally included a hundred-dollar gift certificate at the local grocery store. It wasn’t much in the way of blood money, but Ruben was proud and smart… he wouldn’t believe it was coming from the company if she tried to give him more.

She felt as if she were standing at the bottom of the mountain watching an avalanche made up of all the failures of her life head straight for her. It got bigger when she said goodbye to Ruben. It gathered speed as she watched Lois and Celia interact during the ride home.

Eight times Celia managed to find excuses to touch Lois … there, that was nine. Can’t she think of something more subtle than “there’s a piece of lint on your shoulder”? Who did they think they are fooling, she stormed to herself. Me, obviously. Anthea tried to impel herself to act. To do something. She’d tried to connect with Lois in subtle ways, and they weren’t working.

She closed her eyes against her anger and abruptly fell asleep, another restless night of cigarettes catching up all at once. Anthea was disoriented when she got out of Celia’s car, and didn’t join Lois’s wave as Celia drove away. She had crossed the kitchen by the time Lois was closing the front door. The futility of pretending nothing was wrong washed over her. She didn’t turn to face Lois as she said, “Why are you sleeping with Celia?”

Lois didn’t say anything and Anthea slowly turned to face her. Irrelevant thoughts occurred to her… the kitchen floor needed washing. She looked at Lois and met an expression of defiance.

“It was better than nothing,” Lois finally said, all in a rush, from across the kitchen. “When you finally do want to have sex… it’s like having sex with a computer. Boring.”

She didn’t even bother to deny it, not like last time. Anthea widened her eyes to hide a shimmer of tears. She wasn’t going to let Lois hurt her. She wasn’t going to wimp out this time and forgive her. “You don’t think she’s going to leave her husband and child for you, do you? You can’t be that stupid.”

Lois’s fingers clenched around the keys she still held. “You might be surprised. Celia is in love with me.”

Anthea allowed herself an unbelieving laugh. “I suppose she told you this during that class you both have been taking for the last three months.”

Lois’s lips curved in a vicious smile as she crossed her arms over her chest. “What class?”

Anthea thought, I’m not hurt yet, I can head it off. “Why couldn’t you just tell me you didn’t love me anymore? Why let me find out like this?”

“Who said I didn’t love you anymore?”

I haven’t heard you say you do! “You have a funny way of showing it. A very painful way of showing it.”

“I still have feelings for you — “

“So it seems,” Anthea said. “Like boredom. I don’t think that’s the kind of feeling that makes for a good relationship. And lying to me about a class so you can have an affair, that doesn’t help things either.”

“What do you expect from me? We’re suffering from lesbian bed death.”

Anthea steadied herself with a deep breath. “You

don’t seem to have any problems being sexual. You just don’t want to be sexual with me. So call it what you like. Give it a clinical name. I’m sure somewhere you’ve found some self-help book that says having an affair is the best way to cure it.”

“I’m supposed to go without sex?”

“You promised you’d talk to me if you felt this way.”

“If I told you I was having an affair, you’d go off the deep end like last time.”

The deep end? In Anthea’s opinion, she’d behaved in a very civilized manner last time. Couples counseling, long talks, a romantic vacation. “You promised,” she said again, her voice failing her. She was going to cry. Her throat seized up and it hurt to breathe. I won’t let her make me cry.

Lois stared sullenly across the kitchen at her. Anthea met her gaze as steadily as she could manage. She fought down the tears and found some inner core of strength. “Well, that’s that. Since you were so sure I’d go off the deep end, I guess I will. This is my house, so I think you’d better start packing.”

Lois dropped her jaw. “You don’t think I’m going to move out at a moment’s notice, do you? It will be impossible to find an apartment in Berkeley.”

Anthea straightened her shoulders. “You should have thought of that before you started screwing around with Celia. What did you think I’d do, invite you two to use the guest room? I’d like you out of here now, if not sooner.”

Lois made a sound of disbelief. “I think you have a lot of possessiveness issues. You’re just trying to hurt me by throwing me out.”