Why couldn’t anyone understand?
Outside, a biting wind hurled itself up First Avenue. Miranda pulled the collar of her coat up as she strode to the subway. She thought about going back to the flat for an hour, just to calm her nerves, but couldn’t face it. She’d been staying in a friend’s guest room, and now that the friend was married, the place was filled with matching coasters and dishwasher brochures. Last night heralded even worse news: the friend was pregnant, the guest room to be vacated for a nursery. As the years inched by, the gap between Miranda and her friends had been widening. Instead of swapping gossip and work stories, Miranda found herself spending more and more time alone.
When she reached the office, she stopped for a coffee in the diner below, sliding into a blue Formica booth. Around the jukebox, a loud young group swayed to ‘Lawdy, Miss Clawdy’, a girl in a tight red sweater distorted by one of the new conical bras.
Distractedly, Miranda reached into her bag and pulled out a letter that had arrived as she was leaving for work. She hadn’t opened it, recognizing her father’s scrawl. Since he’d remarried, home felt more distant. She’d stopped going back for Thanksgiving and the holidays, and now she rarely heard from him at all.
Dearest Miranda,
Did you move again? You always have a room here, you know. We’re fine here. You know me, either working or playing golf.
That made Miranda smile. He’d always liked the quiet life, while her mother organized everything, filling the house with fun, music and her never-ending chatter. Originally from Connecticut, her father had met her mother in London at the end of the First World War, he a GI heading home across the Atlantic, she a British nurse about to return to civilian life. That is, until he lured her away to be his bride.
Everything was perfect until her mother was injured in a car accident when Miranda was ten. Bedridden, her mother had never recovered, and she died when Miranda was still in high school. After years of caring for her mother, Miranda had struggled with her death; the boy next door, Jack Miller, filled the breach.
Miranda’s fingers twisted the wedding ring around and around, sometimes so hard that it broke the skin.
She read on.
I’m writing because I had a letter from your Aunt Betty in London. She’s still working in Buckingham Palace – a housekeeper now. Apparently, there’s to be a grand coronation in June, and she says she could get you a job there, helping to organize it. Who knows, you might enjoy a change.
I’ll leave it there for now. Rae sends her love. Write soon if you want me to get in touch with Betty.
Love, Dad
Miranda folded the paper and slid it back into its envelope. Just like Dad to think she’d be interested in batty Aunt Betty’s coronation. For a moment, she pondered about the articles she could write, being an insider in the palace, but then she balked, standing up to leave. Howcould she, a cutting-edge journalist, bring life to a fluffy, pointless event like a coronation?
TheGazette’s office was a clutter of ramshackle desks and rooms on the fourth floor, the cacophony of voices, typewriters and telephones punctuated only by a guffaw of laughter from the sports desk.
‘Showing off about last night’s conquests,’ Miranda hissed under her breath as she sat down beside the paper’s only other woman reporter. ‘Like gorillas vying for the best females.’
‘Vying to keep their jobs, more like,’ Beth-Anne whispered. ‘O’Hara’s on the warpath. He’s been told to axe a quarter of the staff by the end of the day.’
A flicker of annoyance seared through Miranda as she took in Beth-Anne’s low-cut dress and high-heeled shoes.
Is this what it had come to? Intelligent women using their sexuality to keep their jobs?
As Miranda pulled out her notebook, the letter from Connecticut slithered out and onto the desk.
‘Another letter from home?’ Beth-Anne grinned. Every New York woman with career aspirations had parents in another state anxious lest their offspring were missing out on finding the right man.
‘It’s from my father, and he knows better than to pester me about marriage,’ Miranda mused. ‘If you’re widowed, no one expects you to remarry. I like to see it as the gift that set me free. No more marriage mart for me – I have escaped that degrading little game.’
A runner poked his head around the desk. ‘O’Hara wants to see you, Miranda, and you’re to bring the article, the one about the triplets.’
With a grimace at Beth-Anne, Miranda rose to her feet and picked up her notebook, the closest thing to an article that she had.
In his mid-thirties, Mr O’Hara was plump and slovenly dressed. ‘Did you finish it?’ he demanded as she sat down.
‘I’m just back from the interview, and I’ll have it written up in no time,’ she said with a professional smile. He couldn’t argue with that, could he?
But he sat forward, leaning on the desk. ‘I’m going to get to the point, Miranda. We’re going to have to let you go. The paper needs a shake-up, and that means getting rid of excess reporters.’
Fear pricked like icicles under her skin, but she knew better than to let it show. ‘Is it because I’m a woman?’
He paused uneasily. It wasn’t the type of thing that female employees should bring up. That was the unspoken rule. ‘It’s those kinds of statements that make the management feel that your focus isn’t on the job. What’s more, you’re always late, the reports ramshackle, the interviews brisk and incomplete. You didn’t even finish the last piece.’ He got up and went to the dusty window, looking out to the scrubby street below, the questionable hotel opposite with its regular traffic of seedy men.
‘Do you mean the piece about the baby boom in New Jersey, “Fertility Valley: The Rabbit Hutch of the States”?’ She huffed. ‘Why can’t I cover the main news?’
