Expiration Dates (Excerpt)

On Gina’s first day at White Starr, the one question forbid her interrogators during her months-long hiring ordeal hit her like a hail of machine gun fire:

“Do you have children? Do you have children? Do you have children? Do you have...”

She felt like a hostage-taker stepping out of hiding, finally facing the waiting sniper team. Only now, after protracted negotiations, would she release the information held captive until her conditions were met:

“No, I don’t have children.” Pause. “But I hope to soon.”

“Well, this is the place for it.”

She had this exchange with twelve or twenty women whose names, faces and titles didn’t stick.

Glancing around the windowless, florescent-lit conference room filled with her new colleagues, Gina realized she had begun to be old. It wasn’t that there were no other people in the room over thirty -- there was hardly anyone under it. It was more that when she had left another such full time job at another giant financial firm, vowing never to return, she had been just turning twenty-six. Still “one of the girls.” Now she was looking down the gun barrel of thirty-six – thirty-six! And what had she done in between?

Gotten married, almost got divorced, got sick, gotten well -- or at least better. Earned another degree, founded, run and dissolved a nonprofit foundation, built up and wound down a freelance business, saved and lost a small fortune – which is what a down payment for a small co-op or condo in the New York area amounted to – buried a brother and a father, in rather too-quick succession, just this past spring. This was something she felt she had to conceal here, even now. To lose one family member was sad; to lose two in the space of a month looked suspicious. The last decade had been nothing if not eventful. But there was one thing she had failed to do, though not for lack of trying. She had not reproduced …

Read the rest of Expiration Dates, Chapters 1 and 2 [Password required]