The Men in My Office

Try to have a baby. Try to have breasts. Try to go a day without someone commenting on your dress, your boots, the volume of your voice. Try to hold your students accountable; notice how that translates, compared to your male colleagues. I’m so happy I could kiss you right now.

I suspect my boss is religious. There is something about the haircut. The frames of his glasses, too, are in need of an update. His shirttails always waving untucked, flapping in the wind of his walk. He is technically the chair, but I think of him as boss.

There was a day my boss pulled me into his office. He wanted me to help him out of a bind. He was desperate to solve a problem that he wasn’t being specific about. I asked questions and he kept saying, “I can’t tell you that”; he said it so many times it was funny, and he began to smile as he said it. What I didn’t know was this: A colleague of mine was about to be fired and my boss wanted me to take over this colleague’s workload. Later, the firing would ignite the department; everyone would choose sides. That day—insecure of my position, and wanting, always, to appease—I told my boss what he wanted to hear.

I said he pulled me into his office, but I need to be more precise. I was walking past his door and he saw me and stepped into the hallway. He held out his hand to stop me, but did not touch me. When I say pull, I mean that I would have walked past had he not called my name, extended his hand.

No one is free from anything. We all have motivations. We all have, at times, insignificant or murky or dumb reasons for doing the things we do. Different words trigger different reactions. Words come out unintentionally. In high school, I saw the boy I was secretly in love with walking home from football practice, soaked in sweat. The next day in the hallway I blurted, “I saw you, yesterday. Your shirt was all wet!”

Something happens in my boss’s office. Don’t let me mislead you; what happens is small. Or maybe, it isn’t small. Maybe it means something. How will I ever know? As soon as it happens I lose control of it. I lose my words. They are ignored, or they are stolen, or they are dwarfed—it is hard to decide which breach fits. I lose control. I am like my mother. I am like women everywhere, which is that I convince myself it is nothing.

I’m so happy I could kiss you right now. He says this to me. My boss. There is more to the story—of course there is—but also, this is all there is.

Try to be attractive. Try to be young. Try to change your look in an office without eyes all over your body, without anyone asking about your clothes, your hair, the jewelry on your body or in your face, without changing everything about how everyone sees you now forever.

Thirteen years ago I saw a gynecologist who felt a lump in my breast. The doctor was a woman; I chose her based on that one requirement. Also, I liked that she had friendly eyes. She asked my family history. My mother and two grandmothers, maternal and paternal, had breast cancer. Typically, a doctor will give me this pat piece of advice: You’ll need to be more vigilant in your self-exams. Ten years ago she recommended an ultrasound, then a biopsy. Another woman (this one I did not choose) pressed a probe to my breast. Then I picked a surgeon from a short list of men, all of whom accepted my insurance.

The surgeon from the list laid me on a table and didn’t speak to me before he started to cut into my breast. Halfway through, he left the room to get more gauze. He left the door open. People were walking down the hall—patients coming for their appointments, medical assistants leading them to exam rooms—and I was lying there alone, breasts exposed, a sliver of flesh, an open pit of blood in one of them. I turned my head away from the door so I didn’t have to meet anyone’s eyes.

I confide in my officemate. When I tell her about our boss, she raises her eyebrows. I think, Okay then, maybe this is something. Maybe I can be angry. She says this isn’t the only time he’s been out of line. I should talk to our colleague, Tasha, across the hallway. Tasha says the boss can’t stop looking at her breasts. “Doesn’t he stare at your breasts when he talks to you?” I hadn’t noticed it. But then, I notice it.

Be more vigilant, the doctor says.

There is a man in my office named, let’s say, Mark. He asks to speak with me. In his office. Which is to say, he comes to my (shared) office and then walks to his (unshared) office, expecting me to follow. I hate that I do. When I am standing just inside the door he asks if he can shut it. His question feels purposeful, like, “Are you okay with this? Do you feel safe? May I proceed?” It is the first clue that something has changed.

I am so happy. Full stop. I could kiss you right now.

In that surgeon’s office when I was that girl on that table, breasts exposed, I waited, lying there, door open, people walking by. I waited until the surgeon finished and left the room. The nurse pretended not to notice the look on my face. I asked her to get my boyfriend from the waiting room, but she came back looking bored and said he wasn’t there. She wanted me out of the room. I started to cry and she did not soften, so I went down the hallway myself, face wet and eyes wild, and found my boyfriend, the man I would later marry, sitting right there in the waiting room. I went home and wrote the surgeon a letter. I told him how it made me feel to lie there—only twenty-three years old with a mother and two grandmothers who had all lost breasts to cancer—the way he did not say anything, the way he left the door open, the way he left me exposed. He didn’t respond.

Mark is married, and he’s hyphenated his name. I think he wants me to be impressed—a feminist!—but something about the gesture feels wrong, like he is taking up yet more space, taking up what doesn’t belong to him. Mark’s wife recently had a job interview with a prestigious company. He told the whole office. He was so proud of her! He went around to everyone, asking us to text a special message, a few words to say good luck. “Imagine her getting all these texts out of nowhere,” he said, excited. There could have been thirty, forty, more. He had printed her number on little slips of paper. It would be romantic, was the implication. All of those slips of paper, all of those texts. Strangers! Texting her! A barrage of well wishes!

Later, when Mark had to explain to each well-wisher, quietly, delicately, “Well, no, actually, it didn’t work out,” I wondered how romantic it was then, to his new wife. “They told her they were really impressed, but the competition . . . you know how it is.”

I’m so happy [right now], I could kiss you. [Not that I would, of course. That would be completely inappropriate. I am aware of the power dynamic between us, and I did not mean for my comment to convey sexual interest. It was simply an expression of elation, of which I should have selected more carefully.]

How easy words travel in this office. Mark talks and his booming voice ricochets against the closed door, working across the tight Berber carpet. He is saying a lot of different things, but they all amount to this: He knows something has happened and he wants to hear the details. Everyone wants the details.

The boss—I am calling him that because it is how his position felt to me, but remember he is really the chair—is not well-liked. He has a habit of putting his foot in his mouth. There have been other times where he has said something uncomfortable. Once, someone referred to him as obtuse. I had to look up the meaning of the word, wondering if its definition took away from his agency, his ability to control how he spoke to me, the impact it had. In the office I am aware of my body. I hadn’t always been; I used to wear red high heels and think because I was a feminist I could handle anything.

Be more vigilant, is the advice from the doctor. Be ever vigilant with your self-exams. Find those lumps. Be familiar with yourself. She says it because it is something to control in the uncontrollable, vast territory of the body.

I remember that Mark has a beef with the boss. The chair. A position that changes to a different faculty member every three years. Mark is also very ambitious.

Be more vigilant. In college, my best friend shyly told me about hooking up with a boy in her dorm. We had talked about how cute he was. She said something else. She said she didn’t really want to. She said she didn’t say no, but she didn’t say yes either. Then he was inside of her. In that moment I stopped myself from saying this word: [rape.] I didn’t want to scare her. She found the word.

As I tell it now, I want to remember it correctly, and not in any certain way that makes me appear more wise or supportive or astute than I was then, there, in the days after, in the weeks after, even now. I was so stupid, so naïve and immature. I thought you could tell the people who were good people, that we divided that way so easily. I had thought he was one of the good ones. I hadn’t learned, yet, about being wrong. It’s possible I said to her back then, “He’s a jerk. He’s definitely a jerk, but I don’t know . . . ” I wish I remembered my words. I was still a virgin then. I knew nothing about sex. Some of the words I said could have been the wrong ones. I remember thinking, maybe it’s nothing.

All of my life I’ve watched my mother convince herself that almost everything is nothing: symptoms, lies, complicated medical procedures, when my sister asks for money, when my brother-in-law fails out of medical school but continues to wear a white coat around town, when my father reads her emails. Can you separate the good from the bad? Can you tell the something from nothing? Are you ever wrong?

Mark says he can talk to HR for me. He can do it for me, if I am too uncomfortable, he says. That would be something he could do. He has a daughter. He wants her to grow up in a world where people advocate for one another. What about a world where this doesn’t happen? What about a world where a woman can work in an office and not have to be vigilant, suspicious?

No, I say. (It was such a small thing—I’m so happy, I could kiss you right now—that it’s hardly anything. Probably nothing.)

I tell Mark no. I say it a bunch of times, because this is something (maybe nothing) I have already considered thoroughly. I tell Mark, please do not speak to someone for me.

Mark goes to HR anyway.

How many offices have I been inside? How many men have asked me to speak privately with them at work? Should I count? Does it matter?

And then, Daphne. The private investigator sent by HR. She is the perfect older feminist I have always wanted to meet, to be friends with, to have as a mentor. She has soft, wavy gray hair and glasses. She is like the Mr. Rogers of feminism. I trust her. I want her to like me. That’s not all. I want her to call me later and leave a voicemail: “Cassie, I am so proud of you. You are an impressive young woman. Perhaps you would consider coming to work with me. I think you would be good at this job. You would be good at helping people—helping women, I should stress. Please call me back.” I have this fantasy. I will admit it.

I believe she is going to look out for me. She says it will be safe. My husband says, “That’s her job. To be your friend. To get you to tell her things.”

Daphne writes on a large yellow legal pad, in a type of shorthand I can easily read, and she creates an environment where it is comfortable for me to sit there quietly, just watching her write down my words as I say them. She holds her hand and the pencil and the yellow pad in a way that I can see all the words going on the page. All I have to do is say the word and she will put down her pencil. And then, all I have to do is say another word and she will pick it back up. She lets me think I am in control. I think that maybe if I tell her everything, she’ll tell me not to be worried. I am stupid; I trust her too much.

Now there is only one man in my office who will hold a conversation with me without looking self-conscious. We are at a happy hour after a work conference where we talk about being writers. The conversation means something to me; it is raining outside and the bar is crowded and loud and we have all come from the conference and I am happy to talk about the thing I love best. Then we talk about our office. It turns out that he knows the story already. It turns out everyone knows the story, just as I feared. I’m so happy, I could kiss you right now. I drink. I drink so much that later I will have to walk past my car and keep walking. I ask, is it something, or is it nothing? He hates the boss, too. Everyone hates the boss, wants him out, wants this to be something.

I knock my wine glass to the floor and wet the woman’s shoes at the next table. My colleague smooths it over for me, buys her another drink as I sit quietly, and later, he knocks his own beer to the floor. We are dropping things all over the floor. It is clear the woman next to us finds him attractive. He buys her another drink, even though she is sitting with her husband. When we get up to leave my colleague says, “I should ask if you are driving.” I wave him off, don’t answer the question. I don’t go home. I go to another bar to see an old friend from graduate school, to continue drinking and to listen to him read from his first book of short fiction. At the bar, which is a very literary crowd, my friend introduces me to a man who is publishing his first book, who has just been accepted to the University of Iowa writing program. He speaks to me for over an hour, about himself, his book. I let him do it. I encourage him, asking questions, nodding and smiling and cooing over his accomplishments.

What I really want to say is, I’m tired, I’m drunk, I’m worried, I’m confused and hurting, I’m so happy I could kiss you right now. It is nothing. It is nothing.

The next evening I call Tasha, the woman across the hall. The one with the breasts my boss can’t stop looking at. I have regrets. I want to be reassured. Tasha tells me I shouldn’t feel guilty. She says he needs to learn. (I want to write this in capital letters—HE NEEDS TO LEARN—because this is the way she says it, so certain.) I’ve been told that her story is bad. Her story is the worst. I have to ask, I say to Tasha, you don’t have to tell me, but I have to ask.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll tell you. I didn’t go on the record with this, but I’ll tell you.”

I am immediately disappointed. I wonder at my reaction. Shouldn’t I be happy that she wasn’t harassed? Shouldn’t I be happy that a few glances at her tits was all she suffered?

She says, tellingly, “It isn’t fair. He favors the men in the office over the women.” And the other stories become one story, after all. “He came to Reese’s office and asked her to do something. She said she was busy, but he still stood there. He stood over her and talked down at her.”

Be more vigilant.

I remember Daphne telling me, “This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this story.” In the moment, I thought she meant that he had done it before. I thought she meant that it was my duty to report what had happened to me because he had done it to other women, too. That together, all of the women who had been wronged would finally make a difference. But what if she meant that it wasn’t the first time she had heard the story, because someone else, maybe Mark, had already told her?

I see my boss in the parking lot. He walks quickly to his car. He doesn’t return two emails in a row. The following week, he is asked to step down from chair. He resists. Some things are made clear to him, according to my officemate. He sends out an email, resigning his position. His office door stays closed most of the time.

I can’t stop thinking about putting myself on the record. And then, I can’t stop thinking about the other thing I told Daphne, which was, “I’m not telling you these things to get him in trouble. I didn’t feel threatened. I didn’t even feel like he really meant it. Maybe I just want him to know he should think about what he says. The appropriateness of it.”

Daphne has disappeared. I realize I don’t even have a phone number where I can reach her. I realize that when she said to watch out for retribution, she indicated that I should call Human Resources. Not her.

The office is a different place after the investigation. No one wants to look at me or speak to me. Now my body disappears completely.

Until my husband, no one had ever told me they wanted to fuck me. But then, sixteen years after graduating high school, two months after the sexual harassment investigation, I stood outside a bar in my hometown and a boy I knew from all those years ago tried to sleep with me. He was divorced. He was the same as he was in high school, but now he had a PhD and he liked to post about it on Facebook. I took a drag from his cigarette, turned my back towards him so he wouldn’t see me exhale. Perhaps we were standing closer than I realized. He said, “Being married made me feel so stuck.” I recognized immediately the subtext. I wanted him to continue, to come out and say it. I wanted to think about the words later. He leaned in and said, more quietly, “Don’t you want to be able to kiss someone? Don’t you want to be able to touch?” I admit I wanted him to say more. I didn’t want to sleep with him, but I wanted him to want me. The street lamps buzzed but there were no cars. My hometown was always quiet.

I said, “I’m not stuck.” It could have had both meanings. Take me somewhere or don’t come any closer. I wanted him to hear it that way, to wonder, something or nothing? It felt like power.

Do things improve without my boss? I don’t know. I’m not there. I work at home. I leave campus after my classes, never visit my office. I decide to get pregnant. Did I feel conscious of my body before? Ha!

I learn everything and nothing. The world blooms into a series of stories that leave me gasping, angry. A man in my office decided to advocate for me. A surgeon once cut into my breast without saying hello. A colleague confused common everyday sexism with sexual harassment and I became the star of an investigation. So many young men were never taught the nuances of consent. But there is good. Yes, there is good.

I have a daughter. However I might try to protect her, there will be a day that she learns her body doesn’t belong to her. She might think, it’s nothing, and I will tell her that it’s nothing like red high heels are nothing. It’s nothing like a lump in your breast is nothing. You’re something, my darling, believe it.