The Meeting

The Meeting

In: Silvia open vulnerable naive waiting for X
Out: Silvia walking around confused going to all the food stores, not able to figure out what to eat

The five seated around the long redwood veneer conference table had little to talk about and waiting for x to show up could be awhile. They knew better than to not be on time. She enjoyed firing people for "time and leave" problems, but she was never on time. Her Program Accountability department and Solly's Professional Development Department almost never came together unless Xiomara called a core staff meeting. Those were supposed to happen every quarter but always got away from her, unless she wanted to take on time clock violations, or set policy around refrigerator space. She always started with an icebreaker to build community. Last meeting they'd had to tell three things about themselves and one of them had to be a lie, and then everybody had to guess...Accountability believed professional development was useless window dressing, what did those people ever actually do? Professional development resented the hegemony of accountability, how their existence proved and benefited from the truth that the program, although window dressed as an education program for the City's poor on public relief, was in essence, more about managing the poor than educating them. And yet, this new contract, for political reasons beyond the sphere of Project EDGE (Education Development Gainful Employment), had once again switched the order of the acronym's Es...First the first E was for education, employment the last; last contract Employment was on first; and now, again Education.). X couldn't get over that. Her authority to churn out wheelbarrows of paperwork allowed her to rule, and now education assessment was pre eminent, and some key papers were beyond her control. Erol sat studying papers in a folder. He never said much. Marcus first tried to get them going teasing Erol. One of his truths at the last meeting had been that he was a member of MENSA, but almost everyone had guessed that was his lie. Nobody else was about to tease Erol, he was seen too often laughing w X through the window of her corner office that faced the inner cubicles. So Marcus tried baseball and Erol shot back, "I think you mistook us for people who cared." Marcus then said, "Did you have thunderstorms by your way last night?" Lucha shook her head. "The flood by my house was either the beginning of our underwater City or of the apocalypse." Silvia spoke for the first time. "Yeah, Marcus, now talking about the weather is the same thing as talking about politics or religion. Finally Lucha helped him out. "Have you gone to the new sushi place around the corner?" Marcus gladly took her pitch. "Across from the park?" Erol looked up from his busy work. He was Japanese on his father's side. "I made him come with me for lunch last week." Marcus moaned. "I can't say I know what raw fish tastes like, but I know how to clear my sinuses." Nobody was about to say anything about X being late. But the later she was the more nervous they got. Silvia wrote a note on her yellow pad and tilted it toward Lucha. "Hope she doesn't come in hungry." Just then X walked in, on her six inch heels, in a red two piece suit with a man cut jacket with thin lapels. "Lucha wrote on her pad where Silvia could see, "Bad sign. No food." When she came in late X was grumpy, and rushed into the agenda without even saying good morning...now that it was closer to noon. She was just that busy, had just that many important things to do. In theory she and Solly were of equal rank, but in X alpha bitch mind, she ruled. You didn't want to be around when she was hungry. God help them all if she was doing one of her cleanses, or fasts, when she mortified her flesh to make up for the feasts and binges that made her big. It was tricky for her as a perfect being she should be thin but so much of her power came from her bigness, that huge rectangle sheathed in corporate chic suits and weaponized high heels, approached and all the calm submissives held their breaths just a little bit waiting to see, was she in charming mode or office terrorist mode?
This morning it was instantly clear she was the terror so everyone saved breath, bodies in burocratic fight or flight. X was in a bad mood today, she relished her bad moods and flaunted them either demonstrating her power as a warning, or deploying it to make the others quake. She was Y's best friend and everybody knew it. Each had the other's photograph among the family photos on their desks. Their offices flanked the others' situated at each corner, Y's the big one with a separate conference room, Xs considerably smaller but still bigger than the other directors', the only one with a separate round little table where she could have meetings and big delivered meals.
Silvia shuddered although she didn't yet know, hadn't yet guessed, that she was to be the target today.
They were discussing the education assessment system, a wrong headed portfolio assessment system Silvia and Lucha designed, wrong headed because although it might make sense in a rational educational system, here it was not fully yet approved and already was becoming another weight on the the battered teachers. Silvia and Lucha had dreamed the process would support good teaching and support teachers...But X and her accountability unit had gotten their hands on it, or were trying to get their hands on it. Pushing to make all the forms prescriptive and the process identical at every site, even though by definition a portfolio process had to be as different site by site as the teachers and the students and the lessons and the goals. Silvia couldn't tell how much of x effort to highjack this process was her ignorance, how much her being an alpha dog, how much the perfect way her patterns interlocked with the other burocratic gears. If she hadn't turned up would EDGE have hatched her?
X hated everybody who wasn't black and almost everyone who was. She had no peers, only subordinates and one superior, Y, whom she believed she secretly ruled.
Being asked to explain the assessment process was the set up and as Silvia opened her mouth to utter her second sentence, X charged. She was unintelligible at first because she was yelling so loud. "Can you take the word DRAFT off this thing? How long is it going to be a draft?" Silvia's mind flashed back to an early run in with X, before Silvia even knew they were enemies, that she had been cast by x as her enemy. She had towered over Silvia, standing on the other side of her desk, looking down, flaring her nostrils, screaming.."Sometimes people just need to be told what to do." That summarized X's philosophy of everything. People did and God had put her on earth to do it.
She continued to scream, finding many ways to say the same thing..."When are you going to tell them what to do?" Silvia vanished, went under, went to the place she'd discovered in herself to escape her mother's beatings. Like her mother X flared her nostrils and bugged out her eyes and looked electrified, almost sexually charged, when giving in to the impulse to rage. Silvia felt herself hurtling through time, facing the hatred, rage, and birthed supremacy of Mr. X, the slavemaster in X distant familial past. She was face to face with x slavemaster and he must have been a scary, scary man.
She didn't find a way to make X stop. The meeting dragged on with S explaining as best she could in calm submissive mode, how the assessment system worked: the work folders, the self assessment circles and teacher conferences that transformed the work into portfolios. Being professional was the best defense.
The meeting ended and S walked through the conference room double doors, too quickly for Lucha who was shuffling papers into a folder, to catch up with her, not looking at X or Erol or Marcus, all of them mute throughout X screaming harangue. Nobody helped you. What could Erol and Marcus think of her? She shook from rage and humiliation. She found herself standing at the health food store refrigerator, looking uncomprehendingly at the packages of bread made from sprouted bread. She did not remember walking to the supermarket but now found herself standing at the dairy bin, looking down at tubs of yogurt and cottage cheese. She couldn't imagine negotiating a cashier's line, and noticed she'd walked outside without her purse. She began to just walk telling herself to notice the pavement, the way the light his the concrete, always disappointing, never bright enough. The pressure on her eyeballs made her guess she needed to cry, but who was there to cry with? Nobody helped you. Please God forgive me began running through her mind. Now she found that she'd sat down on a park bench facing a flower bed with tall willowy plants topped by pink blooms. She wished she knew the names of plants. Please God forgive me please god forgive me. She remebered lieing on her bed as a little girl plotting her revenged on her mother, picturing the time when she would be big enough to hit her back and hit her hard. Over and over she hit her, always just the two of them standing in a bare room with green walls. All along her mother had simply been preparing her for x, and for all the other abusers that kept capitalism running smoothly.
She stared at the pink bloom and now she cried. Perhaps the bloom was company enough. But she cried not thinking of her defeat byby Cheito, confrontations she lost where a life was at stake. Was the same thing that kept her from saying to X. Shut up. Or from saying to her, I am leaving this meeting if you don't lower your voice, what kept her from being able to say to her son. "Stop drinking. Drinking is hurting you. You know how. You've stopped before. Go to AA."
The time in the green room was now. This was the time to fight. But she didn't know how.