Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman

Author:Becky Aikman [Aikman, Becky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307590459
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-21T13:00:00+00:00

chapter

FIFTEEN

it depended which Marcia showed up at the table—the one in the Politburo suit, or the one in the kick-ass cowboy boots. From what I’d seen of Marcia up to now, it was the unrelenting dealmaker who usually dominated, and I do mean dominated. I still remembered how she cowed me during our first telephone conversation. She interrupted me with brusque asides to her assistant. “Tell him I’ll call him back in five minutes,” she barked. Or: “I don’t even know who that is. Take a message.”

I tried to explain my theories about overcoming grief, and she cut me off there, too. “I heard you are starting a group. I want to join your group.” Bottom line.

She knew what she wanted, but did I? I doubted whether Marcia would fit in with what I hoped would be a merry gang. I could almost hear her saying, “Let me in the group. Cross me and I will crush you.” My resistance crumbled, and I heard myself agreeing to meet her for dinner at a plush expense-account place near her office, around nine, after she wrapped up at work. She ordered foie gras to start.

Marcia reminded me of one of those Galápagos tortoises, a thick shell protecting her from unwanted scrutiny, a blunt tenacity compelling her to thrive. She wasn’t like anybody else I knew. But as we set aside our menus and began to talk, her head poked out of that shell, just a bit, and I saw the gentle gaze of a tortoise that is visible only up close. This formidable woman had loved her husband, and for the first time in her life, she felt uncharacteristically weak. “I want to join your group” was less a command than a plea, however it sounded.

Her cryptic expression gave little away as I coaxed out her life story. “I knew that whatever I did with my life, I had to use my intellect,” she said of her childhood in New York. But I began to discern an essential dry humor as well. After law school, she briefly joined a litigation practice with her father. “We’d butt heads all the time, because he was pigheaded and I was pigheaded.” So she headed into corporate law instead, negotiating contracts. Even now, she often found herself the only woman at the conference table, but no one dared to patronize Marcia. “Even if they are inclined to in the beginning, it takes them about twenty minutes to change their minds,” she said, gratified at her power to intimidate. Her sharp mind knew its stuff, and her sharp elbows defended her turf. After a merger with another company, she and a new colleague overlapped in expertise. “They had to separate us before we killed each other.”

She never lost her temper, she assured me. “If I go after the other side, it’s very calculated. If you want respect, you have to stay in control. I’m by nature, as I’m sure is apparent, very controlled.”

Very apparent. We were halfway

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