In her new position as a Marketing Manager for the Department of Stodge, Winona is supervising two staff. One of them, a sonsy, mild-mannered woman, is half-time doing desktop publishing and suchlike. Winona had lunch with her Tuesday and found her pleasant, if opaque. Today she is having lunch with her other staffer, who is also part-time.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh my God! It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so great that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve hired you!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Jennifer half-shouts. At least, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how it sounds to Winona\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sensitive Kiwi ears. Because, awh may Gahd<\/em>, Jennifer is an American living in Wellington.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been here five years. We moved here to get away from the Bush regime.\u00c2\u00a0 My son Ryan \u00e2\u20ac\u201c here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s his picture \u00e2\u20ac\u201c he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s twelve and he loves it here. I hope you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unprofessional of me to just want to be part time but half of it is that this Department needs a real Kiwi touch, y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122know? And I just don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have it. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m from Pittsburgh! I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not even Native American \u00e2\u20ac\u201c half Polish, half Jewish. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how I wound up working here, I ran into Nervberg at synagogue right after that whole scandal. And half of it is that Ryan is really important to me because since I had serious uterine fibroid surgery, obviously, no more kids, Ryan was four at the time so that wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t what we planned. I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t expecting to nearly get divorced over it but Abe and I are fine again now. The move was what we need, it really freshened us up.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Abe?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153My husband!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Another picture.\u00c2\u00a0 A big beaky man. Jennifer seems to reach into Winona\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mind and strip away layers of politeness. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s huge by Kiwi standards, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t he? We both are! My hips! Look at you, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re tiny!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh, but you have a lovely figure,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Winona breathes, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true enough: Jennifer is busty, curved, with a bouncing mop of bronze curls. Her fingers flash with rings. Her charm is capped by her dazzling white smile, which makes you forget that her face is a plain cameo for such an opulent setting.<\/p>\n By the time they get back to the office, Winona is recovering from Jennifer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s torrent of personal information. For Winona has somehow managed to return to Wellington without encountering last decade\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s influx of American migrants. If she had met a few more of them, she would know that Yankees often have deeply personal conversations with people they sit next to on the bus, and then blithely move on.<\/p>\n As it is, Winona decides that Jennifer is adorable, but she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to be a handful to manage. Especially if she goes to the same church \u00e2\u20ac\u201c wait, Jewish\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6place \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as the Department\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s second in command.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In her new position as a Marketing Manager for the Department of Stodge, Winona is supervising two staff. One of them, a sonsy, mild-mannered woman, is half-time doing desktop publishing and suchlike. Winona had lunch with her Tuesday and found her pleasant, if opaque. Today she is having lunch with her other staffer, who is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[56,22,15],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shortfic","tag-immigrants","tag-jobs","tag-winona"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itsawellingtonlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}