The story below is a work of fiction.
The lady kept eyeing her on the train, like yesterday. What is this intruder doing here again, she was probably thinking. Another working woman to contend for her Queen Bee perch, overlooking the morning commute. The paranoid thought life of older working ladies: muggers, ex-husbands, rapists, and younger, skinnier women around every corner, in broad daylight. It was on the news. Barbara Walters’ feathers got ruffled about it the other night on 20/20. She overheard the lady’s celebrity status amongst the hens in the front car. The lady gave a testimonial in a local plastic surgeon’s commercial. Her face was still melty, kind of. Decades of slouching, looking down at paper files, frowning at the upper management men who looked past her.
The lady is probably the nicest person, she thought. Watches the grandkids without complaining. Doesn’t compete with the daughter-in-law. Doesn’t badger the son about his 401k. I can’t fuck up the names of those two Asian girls in the morning meeting. Call one of them the other’s name. Doesn’t matter how much I apologize. Calls to HR, uncomfortable arbitration meetings, mandatory diversity training. Couldn’t they help me out and not have the same hair, same clothing style, same phone case. Why didn’t they—can’t they just upload a goddamn selfie to Slack like everyone else on the team. No, those are too small. I’d have to bother Mark to show me do the right-click thing and get the larger version. I know what: without looking up I’ll just say one of their names to give their update, then one of them will talk. Hell yeah, I’m the best manager. They’re different kinds of Asian, right, so they probably hate each other. It could be like in one of their movies where an entire class of schoolkids have to kill each other in a Hobbesian battle royale to appease one of their amoral nature gods. The losers get their souls sucked up in a straw and reincarnated as a rock or a dead fish. Then I’d only have to deal with one of them. I just want to make it to 5 o’clock again.