Sweet Bye-Bye (7 page)

Finally I got to the soap aisle and put a box of dishwashing powder in my basket. I needed to find the pet food area. I looked up at the signs that hung overhead. Three aisles down, 6B, pet food, pet collars, kitty litter. I thought about Mina Everett. I couldn’t stand her. I walked down the row and looked for pet cleanup products. The store had everything for animals. There were baby-powder-scented cleanup gloves and flea-repellent cat collars with colorful beads in them. There were special odor-neutralizing sprays and compounds. For $9.99 I found a poop-scooping gadget that looked like two claws coming together. I put it in my basket.

My cell phone rang. I answered, “Hello, it’s Chantell Meyers.”

“Hey, it’s me, Eric.”

“Eric, what do you want?”

“What are you doing?”

“None of your business. Why don’t you go and call your little friend from the ship.” I hung up the phone. Did he really think that the world was supposed to cater to him? Be at his beck and call whenever he felt like playing cat and mouse? Put up with him even when he was blatantly misbehaving? All because he was beautiful. He thought wrong. If we were going to get back together, then he was going to have to learn this before we got married. That way I wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of stuff later.

I remembered I needed more Apple Jacks, and oatmeal, and pushed my cart into the coffee and cereal aisle. My phone rang again. There were people standing around scanning the aisle. I walked past them, turned the phone on, put my hand over the receiver, and spoke quietly but sternly.

“Hello!”

“Chantell. Talk to me. How long are you going to stay mad at me?”

I thought of how he disrespected me, and the hurt and anger resurfaced. No tears, Chantell, I told myself.

“You know what? You need to get it together, Eric. I don’t have to deal with your mess, and I am not going to. Why don’t you stop calling me?”

I hung up again and turned off the phone. I was trying to manage a lot. My head felt tingly and dizzy, and there was pressure behind my right eye. Between trying to keep an eye on my dad, work stressing me out, and Eric giving me the blues, I felt weak. I used to be anemic, really badly, and I remembered feeling this way. I wondered whether my iron count was low again. I held on to the cart and walked slowly.

Last week I’d gotten my annual exam at my ob-gyn and they’d taken my blood at the lab. I could find out what was going on with me very easily. I reached in my purse and called the doctor’s number on the receipt in the envelope.

“Hello, Dr. Lun’s and Dr. Parta’s office.”

“Hi. My name is Chantell Meyers, and I was there last week.”

“Yes, hello.”

“I’m feeling dizzy, tingly, and having headaches, and I was wondering if my blood work came back.”

“Blood work. Oh, sure. Hold on, please.”

I put a box of granola bars in my cart.

“Hi, are you calling about test results?” said a new voice on the other end.

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Chantell Meyers. I want to know if the results showed that I was anemic again, or if my blood pressure is up or something. I was anemic as a child . . .”

“Oh. Right here. Oo-kay, let’s see, Meyers. Okay, we tested you for gonorrhea, chlamydia, TB, HIV, and hepatitis B and C. And they’re all good . . . And your iron levels are good too.”

“What did you say you tested me for?”

She repeated the list. “Gonorrhea, chlamydia, TB, HIV, and hepatitis. They are all fine.”

“I didn’t ask for an HIV test,” I said, though truthfully that was a big relief to hear.

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, sorry, but it’s a good thing it’s negative? Right?”

Being the control freak that I was, I told her, “Well, I didn’t ask for it, and you can’t just do anything to me without my say-so.”

“Ma’am, all of your testing went well!” she proclaimed.

“Whatever!” I said. “That’s illegal.” I was going to take the test when
I
got ready.

“Huh?”

“You’re testing me without my permission. That’s illegal.”

“Umm . . . You gave us permission!”

“No, I did not!”

The people in the aisle started staring. I wouldn’t have really sued my doctor, but what if it had been bad news? Stranger things had been known to happen. I didn’t like surprises. I didn’t want to hear anything else. It was a frustrating day, but at least the HIV testing that I often thought about was done; that was one less thing that I needed to worry about. I paid for my groceries and left the store.

9

Operation: Tiffany Drop

W
hen I got up in the morning, I was wide awake and ready to follow through with my plan to teach Mina a lesson. I would have gotten the Australian heifer too, except I didn’t know where to find her. One of Tia’s students had just braided my hair, so I pulled the back of my new braids into a ponytail and put on some sweatpants and a sweatshirt and went into the kitchen. I looked under my kitchen cabinet and took out a pair of yellow rubber dishwashing gloves and a plastic grocery bag, and put them in my pants pocket. I laced up my old Nike running shoes and left the house through the back door. On the way out the back gate I grabbed the poop-scooping contraption and ran with its rake-like handles at my side. I jogged around the block, and when I got to the park I started to walk.

The grass was really green and it seemed that each little blade had at least a drop of water on it. The sunrays from above hit the water sprinkles so that they looked like diamond chips sitting on the ground. It was a cold morning, and except for a few people running and a couple walking their dog, the park was empty.

I walked around some more. A breeze of cold morning air rushed past me, raising the loose braids on the side of my hair, and I thought I probably looked like a flying chicken.

“Good morning,” I said to the couple with the little dog.

“Good morning to you,” said the husband.

The wife just smiled and gave me a nod.

I kept walking around and soon spotted a pile of dog pooh that sat in the grass waiting for someone to come along and to clean it up. Some owners were so irresponsible. I put on the yellow rubber dishwashing gloves that I’d stuffed in my pocket, opened the handles of the scooper, and locked the fork-like jaws around the pooh. Then I took out the bag, placed the poop securely in it, and headed for home.

In the top of my closet was the Tiffany box that my tennis bracelet had come in. I took down the pretty aqua blue box with black letters and a white satin ribbon around it. I’d splurged one day and bought it for myself after Eric kept promising to get it for me, only to let last year’s birthday pass. Instead he’d given me a Reebok sweatshirt.

I removed the blue pouch from the box and took it outside into the backyard. I put the yellow dishwashing gloves back on and retrieved the bag of poop. Tearing it open, I dropped its contents into the pouch. I placed the pouch in the box, put the top on, wiped it all down really well, and slipped the ribbon back on.

I placed the Tiffany box inside some bubble wrap and another box, then mailed it to Mina at the office that afternoon. Mina Everett was full of crap, just like her present.

10

Big Payback

M
y job was sending me away for two days to an “Effective Presentation Seminar” in Sacramento. It was hosted by Les Brown, and some of the country’s most influential motivational speakers would be speaking. The two days promised to be entertaining and the food was bound to be good. I was trying to get ready to leave the office, but by chance I was still there for the mail run.

I heard people saying, “Mina . . . Tiffany box . . . Propose.” And people started getting up and heading over to the other side of the room where Mina sat.

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” the front receptionist came to our area and asked.

“Mina got a Tiffany box . . . Her boyfriend’s proposing through the mail!”

“C’mon, I’m on my way over there now!” The women giggled and walked across our floor.

I looked down at my desk and cleaned it off real good. I opened my drawer and took out my keys to lock up the drawers.

The women came back past my area walking really fast. Their hands were on their chests and they were frowning. Some people giggled. Others laughed out loud.

I picked up my things to leave. Gary, the guy who sat next to me, raced back to his seat and sat down.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Trust me, Chantell,” he said with his palm extended outward like he was directing traffic. “You don’t want to know.”

I grabbed my briefcase, my cell phone, my DKNY watch. I asked Gary to water my plant and fought to hold a straight face; I was out of there.

11

Canun Does Chantell

T
he two-day seminar had been great, but when I returned, it seemed my entire office had gone berserk.

Both my phone and Canun’s were ringing off the hook with calls from upper management in New York. They were calling every hour, it seemed, to see if Canun had gotten Skyway Modems to sign off on the deal yet. Canun Ramsey was stuttering and pacing the floor, and voilà! Enter Chantell into the scenario.

I didn’t know the details of the deal, but was being congratulated by my coworkers. Canun was sweating as he gave me the full scoop: “Your account has agreed to do this large test, but I’ve got a meeting, and I’m on my way out the door.” I nodded. He said, “Call your account. We need to get the creative elements from them to get it started right away.”

Skyway Modems, it seemed, had agreed to spend $100,000 to let us test out the effectiveness of our new product soon to launch, called the “Sunday Disk Drive edition.” This new product was simple, but a novel concept really. My understanding of it was this: We, the newspaper, would be willing to put a cardboard disk onto the front of our Sunday edition of the newspaper to promote a business. This sounded like a win/win deal. It gave the business, in this case Skyway Modems, an opportunity to put an attention-grabbing message right there in the highly sought-after consumer’s face, and it made us at the newspaper innovators, pioneers even, of an effective and exciting new way to disseminate information. Management said it would be way more effective than a local TV commercial or radio station spot, and better than any billboard could do! Yep, the pressure was on, but the potential was there. Whichever newspaper office could pull this off, and be the first in the country to get this new product sold, would look like a superstar!

Canun grabbed his coat and wrote a couple of things on a yellow notepad on his desk. “Chantell, our CEO himself thought of and created this new product and he’s super anxious to get it tested. They’re ringing my phones every three minutes for the contract.” He swallowed. “I got all of the major legwork done, Chantell. This will be a nice little bonus for you. So make sure you get the contract signed and everything turned in as quickly as you can.”

I nodded as I took in his words. Canun was bidding on making VP soon and wanted to look good in the eyes of the top executives. He took a tissue, patted the back of his neck, and left.

I headed back to my desk happy. Canun was not a strong salesperson, yet he’d gotten my account, Skyway Modems, to agree to pay to test it out. This was major! I was impressed.

Although it was believed the disk drive product would be super effective, it was also very expensive to produce. Once we could prove its effectiveness, other advertisers were sure to pay top dollar for the Disk Drive edition without hesitation, at all the papers across the country. Now that Canun had sold it, I knew what I needed to do: I needed to get over to Skyway, get the artwork, get the contract signed, and get this deal all wrapped up.

The excitement was contagious. We were talking about an additional $7,000 on my next commission check, and though I hadn’t been the seller, when your account agrees to do something like this, you shine too. After all, if it weren’t for all of the relationship-building that I’d done with the account, then they would not have agreed to run with this in the first place. Right?

I called the CEO at Skyway, Mr. Strautimeyer. He was a ball-breaker. You had to have all of your ducks in a row when you approached him. Last year, I’d seen him make another sales rep cry. Well, I certainly had a newfound respect for my boss, Canun. I guess he wasn’t the “coattail rider” that my coworkers had nicknamed him after all.

Mr. Strautimeyer’s assistant put me right through to him.

“Hello, Mr. Strautimeyer, it’s Chantell Meyers from the
San Francisco Daily News.
How are you today?”

“Well, I am fine, Chantell. How are you?”

“I am just great.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Well, I know that you’ve decided to promote your new modems via our new Sunday Disk Drive edition, and I wanted to swing by this afternoon to pick up the creative. What would be a good time for you?”

There was a silence. Then Mr. Strautimeyer cleared his throat. “I didn’t agree to that, Chantell. Your manager, Canun, mentioned something or another, but I was not even totally clear on what it was. And well, to be quite frank with you, Chantell, you already know that I’ve allocated my entire budget for this year.”

“Oh, yes,” I said and rubbed my forehead. The deal wasn’t closed at all. It was a little hot in there.

Already, Mr. Strautimeyer had spent over a million dollars with me this year promoting his new wireless modems. I held the phone to my ear and contemplated. Think fast. Maybe I should try to give him a tiny push. Maybe that would get him to give it a try. However, I was reluctant to risk the working rapport that we had built. I didn’t want to push him too far. But Canun had already opened the door, it was my job to try. So here goes . . .

“Okay,” I said. “Well, why don’t I stop by and show you the prototype, and perhaps you can—”

“That won’t be necessary. I am extremely busy.” And he hung up without so much as a good-bye.

That was finicky Mr. Strautimeyer. In the time we’d worked together, I’d learned a few things about him. One, he never said good-bye. Two, he didn’t ever want to feel like he was “sold” or pushed into anything. And three, he’d just stopped this supposed big Sunday disk deal dead in its tracks. I exhaled and sat back in my chair.