January 9

1/9

Up I got this morning. Stuffed myself into the gray tweed skirt I've had since sixth grade (and which never really fit even then). I cut off the floppy hip bow because I decided my childbearing assets made it flop a little too much.

I arrived at Teresa's apartment just on time. When the doorman saw me, he said "Jane, right?"

"Right," I said, and he let pass without calling.

"8B, if you forgot," he called as I waited for the elevator.

"I remember," I said, and went up.

Teresa opened the door with wet hair and a striped sweater and said she'd be heading out. So I was stuck unchaperoned again, but maybe because it was full daylight it wasn't as weird as last night. Christian served the same muddy coffee, but it tasted better this time. I started to write a report on bioswales.

Then an old lady showed up. Her name is Ellen and she is Teresa's aunt, but she and Christopher call her Nene. She is exactly like all the other pleasant high-class old ladies I met in the Philippines except that she knows her way around a computer better than most of them. She was there to help with the audit.

Teresa returned around ten-thirty, and about an hour after that she handed me a credit card emblazoned with "Growing Capiz" where the name should be and said I was responsible for lunch. I wasn't sure if I was ready for the responsibility.

As usual, I would have preferred to cook something than spend money. I looked in the refrigerator for idea, but there was nothing there but restaurant leftovers, some greens, a very old Tupperware of cranberry sauce, and lots of designer condiments. The rice among the leftovers was rock-hard and I thought I might cook some fresh. There was a tupperware of rice in a drawer, labeled Riviera Farms.

"Don't open that!" cried Teresa. She ran over and patted at its plastic top. I noticed that it was held on with tape spotted with elongate black specks.

"There might be bugs in it," explained Nene. So that was out.

In the end I had to sit down and think about buying food. "What is there good around here?" I asked Christopher.

"Well, there's -"

"Sh!" said Teresa. "It's her job. Do your job."

So I was on my own. Eventually, however, I managed to extract from him the name of a good Szechuan place nearby, and I used grubhub to order mapo tofu and bok choy from them. Forty minutes later the order arrived. By that time Teresa had left again. Nene and I set the table, being sure to put down stiff plastic placemats to "protect the marble". I also put out some things I found in the fridge: half a cup of very garlicky rice, some yakitori skewers, and a dish of something porky which smelled overwhelmingly of bagoong. It made quite a spread for just three of us, especially since Christopher and Nene are both such bird-eaters.

My conversation with Nene was exactly the same as the ones I had with all the donas I met in Manila, right down to her remarking that I "don't look Filipino." I tried to be charming and not awkward but it was pretty hard to focus on that when I kept noticing Christopher's presence. I especially noticed it after he dropped bagoong-scented pork grease on his pink button-down and had to go around in his undershirt for the rest of the afternoon.

Teresa reappeared around two. "Tell me when it's four-forty so we can get to the networking event in time," she said, but when four-forty came we remained in place. Then Teresa noticed Christopher in his undershirt. "You're wearing that to Goldman-Sachs?" she asked, incredulous. He collected his pink button-down from where he had hung it to dry in the shower and we examined it. Not only did the stain remain, but there was a big hole in the armpit, and it was of course several sizes stylishly overlarge. Teresa was appalled.

"We're finding some nice clothes for you," she said. No mention, good or bad, of me in my altered middle-school skirt.

They went into Teresa's bedroom and proceeded to make lots of noise undressing and redressing Christopher in first Teresa's husband's and then Teresa's clothes. There was a lot of giggling and slamming things and it was all very disconcerting.

Teresa and Christopher discovered that they wore the same size in shirts, since Teresa prefers loose fits and Christopher prefers tight and both are really skinny. He finally emerged from the bedroom wearing one of Larry's big shirts and then one of Teresa's slim sweaters to cinch it in. That sounds unflattering, but Christopher is one of those thin stylish guys who probably get approached by street-fashion magazines even when they hobble out of their apartments to buy coffee in their sweatpants, so he looked presentable.

By this time, Teresa was all in a fuss. "We're late for our own event," she said. "This had better not happen again." We rushed out, down the elevator, and onto the street, the doorman swinging the door open grandly before us as usual. As soon as she got to the sidewalk, Teresa began to sprint, and Christopher and I followed at a trot, dodging trash bags and Christmas trees until we reached 5th Ave. There Teresa stood as deep into the traffic as she could without being run over and held her arm out for a taxi. It was rush hour, so unoccupied taxis were in short order, which made her more and more frustrated - until at last one with its little light lit arrived and we got on. We all squeezed into the back, my right leg pressed chummily against Christopher's left, and the taxi slid into motion. Despite the squeeze the taxi felt luxurious. I hadn't been in once since Manila, and this government-regulated Manhattan cab was a lot nicer than any of those.

With the "networking event" looming dark and clammy in my near future, all I wanted to do was lean my forehead against the cool window and be quiet, but Teresa would have none of that. She tasked me with talking, not a conversation but an oral exam: "What do you want to get out of this event?" "How many people do you want to meet?" "How will this event improve you as a person?" Every time I managed to compose an answer she insisted that I make it bigger, better, more specific.

She hadn't quite finished examining me when we arrived at the Goldman-Sachs complex. I hadn't been there since visiting my dad at work when I was six years old, and as soon as I saw the buildings memories from those visits rose up like bubbles in a just-opened soda bottle. I tried to latch onto the memory of my six-year-old confidence so that I'd have at least a vestige of confidence for this event.

We went into the lobby and presented ourselves at the desk. When we got there the most average Caucasian in the world appeared and declared us as his guests. Introductions revealed that he was Larry Schwartz, Teresa's legendary husband (turns out both Riviera and Lo are her own names). I shook his hand warmly and firmly in the way Teresa had instructed me. I was only about an inch shorter than him in my power pumps.

We got our "Visitor" stickers and passed through the glass gates I recognized from Dad's office. I remembered the wide marble hall of elevators, too, and we went up to some floor in the dozens. Near the hall of elevators on that floor was a conference room, and in the conference room were a dozen or so people at little tables like a rescaled kindergarten. They looked much less intimidating than I expected. Teresa collected Christopher and me around a table near the coat rack outside the room and pulled some cards out of her bag, the ones Christopher had been designing and printing the past few days. She distributed them among us and told us to distribute them among the tables. I went in and gave them out with a little schpiel in my waitress voice. (I was a terrible waitress.)

Christopher went into the corner and got to work hooking up the video screens and things and I thought I would be left to fend for myself making conversation with thirty-year-old investment bankers. Just then some lady in well-tailored chiffon and tweed got up and announced that the care package assembly would start then. She suggested people assign themselves to different tasks, but what happened was more of a mad dash to whatever.

There were boxes and boxes of different kinds of supplies, pencils and notebooks and toothpaste and soap and razors and lots else, each with their own little section of the long line of tables marked with a Scotch-taped label. I set to work opening the boxes and putting out the supplies. At first it was easy work of the mindlessly menial kind I like, but before long the bankers' type-A personalities began to show and it became a race to see who could deplete their supplies fastest. The representative of World Vision, a short round man in a black suit with a black shirt, officially assigned me to supply control, so I walked the aisle again and again, restocking shampoo and crayons as fast as I could. The guy at pencils was especially agile and I had to spend a lot of time bending in front of him passionately unpacking boxes. At some point I remembered what Teresa had said about meeting at least ten people, so I tried to make conversation with him. My being out of breath didn't help with my usual awkwardness. Luckily the pencil man was also awkward, as his obsessive pencil-packing suggested, so I didn't feel too awful. I went to go restock the toothbrushes and decided not to bother too much with the assignment. The pace just got faster as the night went on, and I and my dumb shoes got quite a workout.

The event was slotted until seven-thirty, but the packages were all finished before six-thirty. Once they had all been loaded into boxes the workers milled around drinking ginger ale and eating Chex mix - the real networking part. I escaped to the bathroom and stared at myself like I used to when waitressing got too bad, and when I had returned most of the workers had tired of networking.

All that was left to do was stick the postage labels to the boxes. I started on that alongside Larry and a few of his friends. I tried to chat with one of them, a blonde lady who reminded me of one of my least favorite elementary-school friends, but when I began to speak her irises jiggled behind her glasses like she was about to go into a seizure so I stopped trying pretty quickly. Instead I worked like an automaton and listened to the group's asinine, vaguely flirtatious tape-related banter and felt disappointed with adulthood as a whole.

When the taping was done there was nowhere left to escape, so I stood up and watched the GC video which had been quietly playing on the big video screens the whole time. Christopher was standing there, watching likewise.

"Did you make this video?" I asked him, smiling. Despite all my earlier discomfort, he seemed like my only ally in this atmosphere, a beacon of solace. What I was really trying to do was draw the surrounding people into the conversation, but as soon as I said something everyone else dissipated like they thought they were intruding and I was stuck in another tete-a-tete.

Christopher told me he hadn't made it, but he had helped with it, and it had in fact been made by a young woman with some tangential connection to GC. "She's really young, almost our age - early twenties," he said.

I'm not your age, I thought, and I won't be in my early twenties for another two weeks. I felt a little less comfortable.

Finally the last few old ladies left and we could collect our coats and bags.

"How did you do?" asked Teresa. I readied my anecdotes about the pencil man and the iris-jiggler, but then Christopher took from his pocket a battered blue field book and took from that a thick stack of business cards. He fanned them out in his thin hands. "Check it out," he gloated. He had not just ten but at least a dozen definite contacts. I didn't even realize there were that many people there.

Teresa said it was okay that I hadn't got any contacts, as long as I "met people" and "had fun". I lied that I had, and we went back through the complicated security system out to the street.

"Want to come out to dinner with us?" asked Teresa. "We've got reservations at a Korean place."

That was tempting, but it was already late and the thought of any more small talk made my head hurt. So I declined with the excuse that I had to go cook for my family, and it was time for goodbyes - unfortunately the Filipino kind involving tight hugs and kissy noises, including with Christopher. I kept one hand clutched tight to my counterfeit Dooney & Burke so that I could keep it a one-hand minimal-contact hug. Then I could escape to the subway, where everyone's primary concern is touching each other as little as humanly possible.