More Like Me
"If everyone were more like me, the world would be a much better place to live in," Leigh Markham declared whenever she became annoyed or frustrated by those of lesser intelligence, which was most of the time.
There was no denying that Leigh was more gifted than the majority of her contemporaries. Even at an early age, she was able to comprehend her lessons much quicker than her peers did. Things came so easily to her, however, that as a small child she failed to understand why her fellow kindergarteners could not color neatly within the lines, recite the entire alphabet without error, spell their own names, remember their addresses and telephone numbers or count to one hundred. Throughout her school years, she was often exasperated when teachers had to waste valuable time explaining to other students what to Leigh were simple, self-explanatory concepts. Why, she wondered, did so many of her classmates have difficulty comprehending the Pythagorean Theorem, understanding Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution, grasping the concept of checks and balances in the federal government, memorizing all twenty-seven amendments to the U.S. Constitution or distinguishing between the subjective and objective cases of a pronoun?
Somehow, despite her frustration, she managed to make it through elementary, middle and high school without displaying too much animosity toward the slower students, hoping things would be different when she went on to college. Unfortunately, however, things in the so-called halls of higher learning were not much better than they were in high school. True, an applicant usually had to have good grades and score well on a standardized entrance test in order to be accepted into college, but once enrolled, many freshmen failed to live up to their potential. A good number of young men and women devoted the majority of their time to the pursuit of pleasure rather than an education. Leigh, on the other hand, was a model student who strived for and achieved a 4.0 grade point average. She made the dean's list every semester and graduated valedictorian of her class.
With not one but two master's degrees to her credit, Leigh landed a high-paying job with an old and established corporation that was a permanent fixture on the list of Fortune 100 companies. At last she would be among people who were her intellectual equals—or so she thought.
* * *
Leigh walked into the lobby of the company's corporate headquarters, her head held high, proud that in less than ten years she had worked her way up to the position of vice president of marketing, the youngest person and only female in the company's long history to do so. As she headed in the direction of the bank of elevators in the rear of the lobby, she nodded perfunctorily at the attractive young woman who manned the receptionist desk.
The dumb blonde only got that job because of her face and figure, she thought uncharitably as she waited for the elevator door to open. She certainly didn't get it because of her ability. The girl can't even keep phone messages straight.
The young woman in question was actually a very capable receptionist. In six years with the company she only once gave Leigh the wrong message, but the exacting vice president never forgot the incident.
Leigh tapped her foot impatiently as the elevator made its slow climb to the twelfth floor. When the doors finally opened and she got out, she spied her secretary drinking coffee and chatting with the young heartthrob from the mailroom.
"Those reports aren't going to type themselves," the vice president said without as much as a good morning to either of her underlings.
"Yes, Miss Markham," the rattled secretary said. "I'll get on it right away."
Leigh then entered her highly coveted corner office and tossed her briefcase onto one of the visitor's chairs.
"Why can't I ever get a decent secretary?" she grumbled to herself—not for the first time. "I've had eleven girls in the past nine years, and not a one of them was fit for the job."
After hanging her jacket on a hook on the coat rack, Leigh sat at her mahogany desk and turned on her computer.
"Here are your mail and your messages," the secretary announced with forced cheerfulness.
"I'll take a cup of coffee, too. Large, milk, no sugar."
The secretary's smile froze on her face.
Why can't the witch get her own coffee for once? she wondered but verbally replied, "Yes, Miss Markham."
What followed was a typical day for the young vice president: phone conversations with mental pygmies, meetings with morons and correspondence from barely literate businessmen.
"How did any of these idiots get where they are?" she cried with irritation. "Are they all examples of nepotism? Surely they all didn't sleep with someone to the get their position!"
Leigh was frankly amazed that the company stayed in business for more than a century much less made a considerable profit every year. There was not one person—herself excluded—from the chairman of the board and CEO down to the lowly janitorial staff who met her high expectations. If it were up to her, she would fire everyone and rebuild from the bottom up. Luckily for the company, such personnel decisions were not left up to her.
* * *
After an eleven-hour day at the office, Leigh returned to her luxury high-rise condominium where she lived alone. There was no tail-wagging dog to welcome her home and no purring cat to rub against her leg, demanding to be fed. There was no embroidered sampler identifying the place as Home Sweet Home. And most importantly there was no significant other to ask about her day.
It was no wonder that there was no man (or woman) to share Leigh's life. Paragons, after all, are extremely rare in our world, and nothing less would suit her. Should she ever find a man who looked like George Clooney, had the brains of Albert Einstein and displayed the business acumen of Bill Gates, she would gladly make a commitment, but she was not about to sell herself short by settling for a partner whom she considered beneath her.
While most people unwind after leaving work and enter their homes with a feeling of contentment and relaxation, Leigh was still plagued by the same deep sense of dissatisfaction she had experienced at the office.
"What moron made this sandwich?" she exclaimed after biting into the Italian sub she had picked up at the corner deli. "There are too many onions and not nearly enough oil and vinegar. And the lettuce is wilted, too. It was probably some pimple-faced teenager listening to his iPod instead of concentrating on what he was doing."
Then, while reading her newspaper, she found three typographical errors on the first page and flew into a tirade about the qualifications of the paper's copy editors and typesetters.
The final hours of her evening were spent in front of the television set. Leigh could almost feel an ulcer forming as she listened to the newscasters stumble over their words on the nightly news, watched three contestants miss relatively easy questions on Jeopardy, endured a documentary on PBS that contained a number of glaring grammatical errors and suffered through a host of inane commercials.
"That's what's wrong with this country," she complained. "You can't pick up a book, magazine or newspaper that's error free. And forget about what's being shown on television these days! No wonder kids can't get a decent score on the SAT. If only teachers, writers and editors were more like me, there wouldn't be any more grammar mistakes in the world. For that matter, there wouldn't be mistakes of any kind. We would all live in a Utopia, a perfect society where intelligence is valued about all else."
Sadly, however, she thought with a sigh, not everyone is like me.
* * *
When the alarm went off at 5:30, Leigh groaned, reached over and hit the clock's OFF button. Morning was her Achilles heel. Eyes barely open, she stumbled out of bed, walked to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of strong, hot coffee. The first cup was followed by a second and a third. It was only then that she was awake enough to turn on her television to the all-news network.
The lead story concerned a liberal politician who was proposing government-funded health insurance for all Americans under the age of eighteen. Such a program, Leigh believed, would be the first step toward socialized medicine: a concept that made her conservative Republican blood boil. She considered welfare, food stamps, WIC checks, Medicare, disability, social security benefits, unemployment compensation and other take-from-the-rich-and-give-to-the-poor practices appalling.
"I work hard for my money," she cried as she angrily turned off her plasma TV and tossed the remote control onto the coffee table. "I don't see why I have to pay for medical care for illegal immigrants or for welfare cases who are too lazy to go out and get a job."
With her day already off to a bad start, Leigh rinsed out her coffee cup, took a quick shower, dressed and drove to work. When she walked into the lobby of her office building, she was already twenty minutes late. As she headed toward the bank of elevators in the rear of the lobby, she spied the receptionist in her peripheral vision and came to an abrupt halt. Was it a new girl or a temp?
"There you are, Miss Markham," the receptionist barked—yes, barked would be an appropriate verb to describe the woman's sharp tone. "Only twenty minutes late today. That's early for you."
Leigh was speechless. How dare a simple receptionist speak to her in such a rude, insubordinate manner?
The young woman then turned and faced Leigh, looking her directly in the eye, and the vice president felt her knees go weak with astonishment. It was as though she were looking into a mirror. From the shoulder-length, mousy brown hair and the freckles across the bridge of the nose to the blue-gray eyes and the thin-lipped mouth, the two women looked so alike that they might have been twins.
Reminiscent of a shell-shocked soldier, Leigh made her way across the empty lobby and into the elevator. When the doors opened on the twelfth floor, she remained in the car, staring open-mouthed at her secretary, who, like the receptionist, might be a Leigh Markham facsimile.
What in hell is going on? she wondered.
Were the two women playing some cruel joke on her?
"It's about time you got here," the secretary snapped—again, an appropriate verb. "Mr. Steiner has already called three times this morning to speak to you."
Under normal circumstances, Leigh would have fired her secretary on the spot for such gross disrespect, but these were not normal circumstances since she had never found herself surrounded by clones before.
"Th-thank you. I'll call him back right now," she stammered as she headed toward the sanctuary of her corner office.
"Don't forget your messages," the annoyed secretary said as her boss walked past her desk. "You never remember to pick them up, and then I always have to stop what I'm doing and bring them into you. You're not the only one around here who has responsibilities, you know."
Leigh flopped into her leather chair, too upset to dial her phone or turn on her computer.
This can't be happening! Perhaps I'm dreaming, and this is all just a bizarre nightmare. If so, please, PLEASE let me wake up soon before I go stark raving mad!
Ten minutes later she was still sitting in her chair, staring at the framed Georgia O'Keeffe print on her wall, praying to wake up, when Mr. Maximillian Steiner, the president and CEO of the company, barged into her office.
"Why in hell didn't you return my calls?" he shouted.
Leigh looked at the mousy brown hair and the familiar feminine features, identical to her own, and began to tremble.
"I ... I ...."
"I phoned you three times this morning, but you weren't in yet. And when you do come in—late as usual, I might add—you don't even have the decency to return my call."
"I'm ... I'm sorry ...."
"I'm sorry doesn't cut it. I'm not going to pay a good salary to a mediocre employee."
"But I'm not mediocre. I'm the most qualified vice president of marketing this company has ever had," she managed to say in her own defense.
"You were the best. You no longer work for this company. I want you packed up and out of here by the end of the day. Is that clear?"
When the president turned and stormed out of the highly coveted corner office, Leigh found the strength to rise from her leather chair and follow.
"Please, Mr. Steiner," she pleaded. "Give me another chance. I won't ...."
She stopped when she saw a number of employees gathered around her secretary's desk: the young heartthrob from the mailroom, a typist from the word processing center and a bookkeeper from accounts receivables. All of them had been listening to Mr. Steiner's tongue-lashing, all were witness to her humiliating dismissal and, worst of all, every one of them looked identical to Leigh.
"What is going on?" she screamed. "Why do you all look like me?"
The secretary shook her head with disgust and told the bookkeeper, "She must have known someone to get her job in the first place.
"I always suspected she slept with someone to get the vice president title," the typist added.
"No! You're all just like me," Leigh screamed.
Desperate to get away from the faces that mocked her, she ran down the hall and into a large, open area where more than fifty employees were seated at desks and computer terminals. All of them had faces that replicated Leigh's own, and all had the same expression of impatience mixed with intolerance.
There was nowhere to go. Everywhere she turned, Leigh was surrounded by carbon copies of herself, and the weird situation drove her insane. With a shriek of madness, she raced down the hall and then leaped through the glass wall of the building, falling twelve stories onto the neatly landscaped lawn below.
As the company's youngest and only female vice president lay broken and bleeding on the freshly mowed green grass, she could see horrified employees staring at her from all floors of the office building. Their faces represented an assortment of ethnicities and a varied range of facial features, hair colors and hairstyles. They were young and old, male and female, short and tall, thin and heavy.
And no one looks like me, Leigh Markham thought as she closed her eyes and died with a smile of relief on her face.
This sampler hangs in the foyer of my saltbox. (Bet you can't guess who gave it to me.)
