Some years ago, I was a project manager for a regional real
estate company in Houston. I was mostly managing Internet projects, which I
really enjoyed because at the time it was kind of edgy and creative. The
company decided that they wanted to build an intranet. Since they didn’t have
one and didn’t really know where to start, they decided to send me and my
product manager, Sandra, to an educational event in California. It wasn’t
really a conference nor yet a class. Some tech companies that wanted to improve
their street cred hosted a “tour” of their intranets presented on-site by their
web teams. Ah, those heady 90's when employers thought nothing of paying for
such fluffy junkets in the search for the elusive “new media” magic.
Since Sandra’s parents lived in the Bay Area, she proposed
that we stay at her family home to save on travel expenses. I’m always down for
getting to know people better so I agreed. She waxed poetic about her old
neighborhood and jogging in the California hills. Our company travel agent booked
our plane tickets. I packed the usual khakis and blouses and shoved running
shoes into the corner of my bag.
Flying was uneventful then. TSA hadn’t been invented yet. We
arrived, grabbed our bags, got a rental car, and headed for her family
bungalow. It was a typical middle-class California neighborhood with long, low
houses trimmed in pink or green or blue, eucalyptus trees and bougainvillea and
irrigated lawns. In those days they were probably about a quarter million
dollars each.
Her parents were gracious but unobtrusive hosts. Her mom
showed me to my room, chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, and then left us to
our own devices. As the long summer evening faded to night, we popped the cork
on a bottle of chilled California wine and curled up on the couch to flip
through all the cable channels, mocking the bad cable porn, and telling tales
about boyfriends and husbands, childbirth and jobs, heartbreak and loss.
After the second glass of wine she casually confided “When I was about 10, we went to visit my grandparents. My
uncle came into my bedroom and felt me up. I told my mother about it, and after
that she stayed in the room with me until we left. She told me not to tell my
dad about it because it would upset him.”
In these unguarded private moments, women share their pain
just like this. Every woman carries the weight of her friends’ grief as well as
her own, and every story that has ever been shared with us is as sharp in our
memory as the moment we heard it. In my mind, that cheerful California living
room, that white leather couch, Sandra, tall and confident with her hair
perfectly straightened and her dark red fingernails, successful career woman
and wife of an astronaut, one bare foot tucked under the opposite leg as she
sipped her wine and casually shared the darkest moment of her childhood, will
live forever frozen in time. And that is how we tell our stories; we deliver
them, without drama or fanfare, because our stories have to be told, but
lightly lest our shared burden become too heavy to bear.
We spent the next day at Cisco and Silicon Graphics, ate a
catered lunch and admired the latest whiz-bang technology and listened to
enthusiastic presentations and met teams of women who were paid a lot more than
we were to do the same job we were doing. I don’t remember much about it really.
I thought Cisco had a weird vibe and their conference room looked like it had
been furnished from the second-hand store, but Silicon Graphics was all glass and chrome and rotating holograms and excitement. At the end of the
tour, we had a better understanding of how far we had to go than how we were
going to get there. We did go home to Houston and built a fledgling intranet
and collaborated on several other successful projects, but after a couple of
years I moved on to another job and we lost touch.
In the years since, I’ve left Houston, become an activist,
met many women, and heard many stories, some far more horrific. I’ve become
stronger and sadder. And I want to let you know, dear Sandra, wherever life has
taken you in the intervening years, that I still hold space for you in my
heart. What happened to you was a crime, and you deserved justice far more than
your father deserved to have his peace of mind preserved. I’ll keep working for
the day when no child experiences what you endured.
