Bond Girl

As soon as I started educating myself on the differences among the top ten brokerage firms, I realized that Cromwell Pierce was where I wanted to be. My father worked at Sterling Price, Cromwell’s fiercest competitor. Sterling is a more uptight, old-school firm. Cromwell had a reputation for being younger, hipper, and a more fun place to work. The headquarters were located downtown, away from the tourist mecca that was Midtown Manhattan (where some of the banks had migrated over the years), and was close to the waterfront. I decided I wanted to apply to the sales and trading program and not the investment banking division. One thing I didn’t like about my father’s profession was that he worked obscenely long hours most of the time, and he told me that starting out I would be expected to work sixteen-hour days and weekends. Not something I had any interest in doing. Salespeople and traders worked much more humane hours, and weekends were rarely required. It was an easy enough decision to make. My mother sent me a black skirt suit that made me look like Working Girl Barbie, but was a necessary evil if I wanted to impress the people conducting the interview. More than one hundred students were interviewing for just three spots, and while we all sat in the campus business center waiting for our names to be called, the tension was palpable. I had done my due diligence: read the Wall Street Journal every day for two weeks, watched CNBC during the day to bone up on industry lingo and jargon, some of which I already knew from my dad, and learned as much about Cromwell as I could. I felt prepared; at least, I thought I was.

When my name was called and I was escorted to a small windowless room, my knees were weak with fear and anticipation. At a large mahogany desk sat two middle-aged men, waiting for me. I took my seat facing them and exhaled one last deep breath before flashing a smile and folding my hands demurely in my lap.

The man on the right, a broad-shouldered blond guy named Ted something or other, wearing a pink tie with yellow starfish on it, spoke first.

“So, Alex, it says here that you’re a finance major. Do you think that makes you adequately prepared for a job on the Street?”

“Well, no, the short answer is, I don’t. I think a solid understanding of the fundamentals will help, but from what I’ve been told, there isn’t a course in the world that can prepare you for a career on Wall Street. You have no idea what it’s really about until you actually do it.”

They both nodded slightly. Ted’s sidekick, a slightly older man who was graying at the temples and had leathery skin that suggested a lot of time spent outdoors, was next to ask a question.

“What’s the square root of two?”

The square root of two? Does two even have a square root? The square root of a number is the number that you squared to get the first number. So the square root of sixteen was four and the square root of four was two. What the hell was the square root of two? It couldn’t be one, because one times one is still one. So it had to be some number greater than one but less than two. Fractions. Shit. Leatherface smirked. Then it hit me.

“The square root of two is the number that you multiply times itself to get two. I don’t know what the exact number is but the square root times itself will equal two.”

Leatherface leaned back in his chair and smiled approvingly, while Ted straightened his starfish tie.

“Interesting answer. You have a unique way of thinking, Ms. Garrett. We like that in the Business. Thinking outside the box is an important ability, and it can’t be taught. You either have it or you don’t.”

“Thank you.” I breathed a sigh of relief, crossed my legs, and noticed a slight tear in my nylons by my left anklebone. Swell.

Starfish Ted looked at me intently. “Do you squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom or the top?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. What the hell did that have to do with anything?

“Do I what?” I asked him, confused.

“Do you squeeze the toothpaste tube from the top or the bottom?”

Okay, seriously what kind of screwed-up interview was this? I figured the best way to answer the question was honestly, because trying to figure out what these guys were up to seemed futile. “I umm, I don’t. I use one of those toothpaste pumps.”

Leatherface laughed. “You’re the first person that didn’t try to figure out what we wanted you to say.”

“Is there a correct answer?”

“Yes,” Starfish answered. “It’s moot now though, Pump Girl.”

Pump Girl? I didn’t think I liked being called that.

The rest of the interview was easy. We discussed my résumé and my family background. I think having an investment banker for a father scored me a few points. When I left the business center, I felt pretty good about my meeting with Leatherface and Starfish Ted. Two weeks later, I received a letter in the mail, offering me a position in the 2006 analyst program. I was assigned to the government bond desk in the fixed-income division, starting in July. My lifelong dream had been realized. Watch out Wall Street, I thought. Here I come.

SINCE MY NEW JOB STARTED in July, and there was no way in hell I was going to get up at 5:00 A.M. every morning to catch the train into the city from Connecticut, I quickly set about the brutal task of finding an apartment in the city. Thankfully, my best friend, Liv, was looking to move right away also, so the two of us ran around Manhattan for two weeks after graduation, looking for a non-rat-infested building we could afford. We finally found a place suitable for two people and moved in June 15. We divided our tiny one-bedroom Murray Hill apartment into two bedrooms by erecting a fake wall in the living room. I had the real bedroom, and Liv had the fake one, no larger than a prison cell, but with better flooring. The living room could barely accommodate one sofa, a tiny coffee table, and four people comfortably. Our combined income was more than $100,000—a lot by normal standards—and yet neither of us could afford her own place. Of all the things that are great about New York, rent isn’t one of them. Liv had a job at another investment bank, but in Human Resources, and so we both needed a Manhattan address to spare us the horror of commuting.

We lugged all our belongings, which wasn’t much, into the service elevator and up to the twelfth floor with the help of my friend Annie. Annie and I had become friends the first week of freshman year at UVA. We lived on the same floor in the same dorm. One night, when our resident adviser was locked in her room with her boyfriend, we stole the sofa from the lounge and moved it into Annie’s room at the end of the hall. When she was caught a week later, she was forced to sort mail at the university post office for a month as punishment. But she never told the RA that the great couch caper of 2002 was orchestrated by yours truly. For that, I will love her forever.

Annie had decided to prolong school as long as possible by attending NYU to get a master’s in psychology. After discovering how early Liv and I had to get up now that we were part of the working world, she was pretty sure she didn’t want to enter it.

“How on earth are you going to get up at 5:30 and not be a zombie by 3:00?” Annie asked. “That’s just unholy.” She looked at me the same way I look at people over forty who aren’t married: with unabashed pity. She sat on the living room floor and pushed her curly blond hair behind her ears. Annie had done gymnastics as a kid and possessed a flexible, toned physique I wouldn’t have even if I lived on carrot sticks. I know this for a fact. I tried for most of freshman year.

“I’m sure I’ll get used to it,” I said as I jammed sweaters in my closet.

“I’d rather die,” she added.

“Are you excited?” Liv asked as she broke down boxes with a razor and laid them flat against the wall next to a bookshelf. She picked dust bunnies off her black spandex shorts with a perfectly manicured nail and ran her sleeve across her forehead. “I don’t start until next week, and I’m kind of dreading it.”

“I’m excited. I guess a little nervous, too. It’s like the first day of school all over again. New people, new places. I hope I don’t screw up anything too badly.”

“You’ll be fine,” Annie assured me as she stood to leave for her own apartment on the Upper West Side. And by “her own apartment” I mean the one her parents kept in the city for the two times a year they came to Manhattan to see a show. She gave me a quick hug and waved goodbye to Liv as she headed for the elevators. “Call me tomorrow and let me know how it goes,” she yelled over her shoulder.

I helped Liv lug boxes to the refuse room down the hall, and we spent the next few hours unpacking, cleaning, hanging, ironing, scrubbing, organizing, and discussing how excited we both were to have our very own apartment in Manhattan. I went to bed at 9:30, still leaving a lot of boxes untouched, and prayed that my first week of work would be merciful. I’m sure it won’t be too bad, I assured myself. It’s just a job. How bad could it possibly be?

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