Today a lawyer spewed her venom at me and my secretary.
I sat telling a friend about it on the phone, wondering about times in the past when I might have talked that way. I wanted to call the woman and ask, What happened to you that you need to be so foul? I thought of all the ways she could have expressed her point without vomiting her bile in unpunctuated lower-case letters with the fires of her wrath licking at the sides.
She could say, “You’ve caused prejudiced to my client; I’ve no choice but to file a motion.” She could advise me, “I feel your actions are deficient as follows. . . and request an immediate remediation.” She did not. Instead she threatened, rattled her sabers, and used hostile rhetoric. Will that approach work? It might. I met each wrathful e-mail with an attempt to be professional. I tried not to meet her violent language with anything but courtesy.
I did ask her not to talk to my secretary in the way that she did. Needless to say, her answer was that if my secretary did not wish to correspond with her, she should not have sent her an e-mail, even though all my secretary did was send her the missing page of a document which had been inadvertently omitted.
My body sinks into the quagmire of that woman’s behavior. I wrap my arms around myself and shudder, her stink permeating my pores.
In the darkened living room, I remember a lawyer, long dead, who’d puff on his cigars, standing a foot above me calling me “little girl” and blowing smoke in my face. I don’t know what’s worse, that man’s chauvinism or this woman’s bitchiness. I felt close to tears tonight. I closed my eyes and willed myself to summon the faces of any lawyers whom I treated as this woman treated me and Miranda today.
Forgive me, I whisper. Forgive me.
I’ll meet the legal allegations of her motion as well as I can. But I will not stoop to conquer her. If foulness can only be bested by a mirror of itself, then lose I shall. I cannot wallow in her vile tirades and come away whole and clean.
It’s the fifth day of the thirty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.
