back in the day

I was in my early 20s. At the time I felt like a fully grown adult. I'd finished college, had a couple heartbreaks, lived abroad, worked in real jobs, traveled. At 24, I'd moved back to the US and started working at a sales job. My boss was creepy. During training he had us turn off our tape recorders (tape recorders!) so that he could tell us that if we ever said anything negative about him, we would be fired because he was "in" with the bosses and we weren't. I'd like to say that's why I didn't complain but actually I only connected those dots later, how it felt to know what you might say would be meaningless. Anyway he was creepy. When I'd go into his office he'd close the blinds and ask me to pull up my skirt an inch, another inch. I was young and used to a certain amount of attention from men, which I mostly ignored because it mostly felt like being ogled in a zoo (and this "just ignore it" thing was of course heightened by having lived in Japan, which was very much like living in a zoo all the time, photographed randomly as if I were an exotic animal of some sort). Anyway so he'd be creepy and I'd ignore it. I thought it was about me. We know now that it almost never ever is but that was then. At night when I'd call in my sales reports he'd ask what I was wearing, to describe it; he'd ask me to touch myself. And I would just change the subject but I didn't tell him to stop. I remember when Anita Hill testified I had absolutely no doubt that she was telling the truth, though I also thought she seemed to be awfully upset when what she was saying just wasn't that bad, comparatively. I feel bad about that now, because my boss wasn't up for the supreme court, and any creepy from your boss is too creepy. It shouldn't be that way. Going to work shouldn't feel like hell because of the people you're working with. That you don't even get to think about the work itself because everything is poisoned. Anyway back to me, 24-year-old me, so my boss was creepy and I thought it was about me and then another salesperson, a woman, asked if he was ever inappropriate and we talked about him and that's when I learned it wasn't about me. And then when I went to train with another salesperson in a different town, she told me that one of the reasons she'd transferred there was to not work with him. And then other women told me when I hinted at the subject. And still none of us said anything. I didn't say anything. After about a year I got promoted and moved to a different region and I didn't have to talk to him anymore. At some point a woman from a completely different region came to visit and I was telling her what it had been like to work with him, and that I thought sooner or later someone would complain. And she did, she took it to the head of the company. And he called and asked and I said no it wasn't so bad it didn't bother me. I think I thought that the worst thing was to confess that I was bothered, that I would be weak if I said it wasn't okay, so I said it was fine. And so did all the other women they called to ask, the women who had told me the truth were lying, we were all lying. I can't convey to you what the fear of looking like I couldn't handle something was like. When I remember this I don't also remember that I was 24, that I was different and times were different. A few days later I called the head of the company again and said that my boss had asked me to bring him clippings of my pubic hair in an envelope, to prove that I didn't dye my hair. Carpets gotta match the drapes, he had said. In what world did I think that was tolerable? In that world, apparently. It's hilarious that 30 years later I still feel dirty, still feel guilty. That it happened. That I didn't see that it was wrong. That I thought I'd ruin everything by saying how awful things were. That I thought I was weak, and that I was.