Islamadora

ISLAMADORA/L/ssfl Franz THE WOMEN OF THE OFFICE gather around Pilar's desk to play Who Has the Worst Children. The higher up they are in the office hierarchy, the more offensive and shocking their offspring. Allison, Pilar's boss and the CFO of the company, has four-year-old twin boys who dump Hershey's syrup on the couch and call each other "shithead ." Janet, in-house legal counsel, has three moody girls, six, eight and ten, who torment their bus driver and are up all night with lucid dreams. May, from accounting, has a twelve-year-old son who recently became a vegetarian and won't even eat chicken broth when it is baked into things. Pilar is the secretary. Herjob requires knowing whose child is calling when a teary voice says, "Can I talk to my mom," sorting the mail and ordering supplies. Her daughter, Thea, is sixteen. She is six foot two and plays the flute with a timidity that makes people look away while she performs. Pilar's office mates fawn over Thea when she visits the office. They have a lurid fascination with Pilar, who had her daughter at eighteen, the age when they were applying to colleges and weighing things like "best party school" against "lowest teacher-student ratio." Pilar is their link to a world where people clean their own houses and don't have college degrees and live in rentals that back up to the highway. The women in the office call her "honey" or, if they are very high up like Allison, "love." Couldyou get thatfor me, love? The men in the office call her Pilar and glance at their watches while speaking to her. The women don't allow Pilar to participate in Who Has the Worst Children. Whenever she moves to speak, they pat her on the back and tell her that Thea is perfect. Pilar allows the implicit condescension because she enjoys having the women gather spontaneously around her desk in the middle of the day; she lures them with industrial-sized tubs of cheap chocolate. These women wear black suits and Chanel shoes; they attended Yale and Northwestern. She loves to hear their problems with their lawn services and their summer houses. They stress that Pilar's life has just followed a different path, as if her life is an entity they have separated from Pilar herself. They make a big show with their flattery. "We don't know how you did it, honey. Imagine having a baby at eighteen1. God, I was cracking up my father's cars one by one, the big ones and then the little ones." This was Allison, who 40 · The Missouri Review went to Harvard. In these women's lives Harvard/Yale/Northwestern is where you go to get some education and jump-start the all-important networking that will stay with you for the rest of your life. It is not where you meet a husband; you meet the husband much later on, post-graduate school and the first job, where you work eighty-hour weeks. These women find love when they are at the pinnacle of their exhaustion, in their early thirties, and are beginning to feel some need for a biological diversion. If Pilar were allowed to play, this is the winning worst-child story she would like to tell: yesterday she caught Thea having sex with her boyfriend, Robbie, a senior planning to be a theater major at NYU in the fall. She caught them in Thea's bed making small, restrained burps of noise, sandwiched and rolling. With great deliberation Pilar went back outside, reentered the house and spent some time banging around the kitchen, in part to relieve her anger. They had often discussed how Thea would go on the pill if she was contemplating sex, and Pilar had assumed her own lighthearted permissiveness would lead her daughter to be level-headed and responsible. "We didn't expect you back so soon, Mrs. Kenning," Rob had joked when they arrived in the kitchen, insinuating a mature relationship with his levity. Usually he was deathly serious, and for the first time Pilar pictured him...