Anne Boyar and Henry Tanner
by Adina Zidon 

8,383 words



	Somewhere, in some major east-coast city, a single mother raised her single child from scratch. The die of Peggy Bond’s life had been cast after an unfortunate collegiate inception. Rather than eventually marry and continue life, Peggy decided to blend in with the rest of the young women in her state and willingly suffer for the sake of the child to prove the strength of the female gender. This could not have been an easy time for Henry Tanner, Peggy’s little son, who bore the name of his would-be father, Craig Tanner. The boy was left to be raised by a frequently jobless mother who was schizophrenic and believed she was Joan Crawford. She raised Henry in an urban apartment, located in a quadrant that was being rebuilt. Sadly, Peggy’s building remained in its superannuated shape because its inhabitants were all as miserably poor as she. They could barely afford their monthly food stamps, let alone new linoleum for their kitchen floors. The only way for her overly-ambitious son to get out of the white ghetto in which he was raised was to make a life for himself. After years of relentless toil, he was eligible for a full scholarship to Yale (which he accepted with atypical modesty) and continued his scholastic achievements. He did so well that he was a year ahead of the rest of the kids his age, and he completed the Ivy League school in a mere three years, no summer courses necessary. 
Imagine a poor, ugly geek from the wrong side of the tracks doing something like that for himself.
The rest is history.

Cut to when Henry Tanner was pushing thirty. He had miraculously overcome the adolescent ugliness; he was a butterfly and his life up until college had been a chrysalis. No longer were his less-than-idealistic features (that is, brown hair and eyes, lack of height) considered to be a handicap. Few women could maintain their composure when they rested their eyes on his gorgeous face; even fewer could maintain it while speaking with him. He had a daughter, Myra (who inherited exactly none of her father’s attractions, as well as few of her mother’s), with his darkly beautiful wife. Her name was Cathy Argon and she was six years his senior. Age did not matter in this case, as she was the eldest daughter of a prominent family in the banking industry. Through her influence and support, Henry began his own bank and expanded it until he was the world’s most famous bank president. 

Naturally, by this point he was excruciatingly wealthy. At first, much of the money was eaten away because of taxes, unearthly extravagances, and monthly checks made out to Peggy. Time did progress, though, and these expenses were no more than nickels and dimes in comparison with the rest of his paycheck. Sadly, all this good fortune was slowly but surely transforming mild-mannered Henry into a narcissistic, tyrannical, egoistic monster. It was around this time that his marriage began to flounder, for his eye began straying from Cathy to a new worker at his bank. Anne Boyar was fresh out of college and the daughter of Yankees. She, like Cathy, was dark in coloring, and had grace, breeding, and style, right down to her knowledge of the French language. Her coy, flirtatious attitude made her popular at work as well, which led to poor job performance in comparison to everyone else. Something about her, however, won Henry over, and he found himself continually giving her raises and free lunches. These innocent, sweet little ordeals went unnoticed at first, but the years passed, and Anne was all of a sudden an extraordinarily rich woman. This had little to do with the fact that the need to buy lunch had been nullified. Delighted at the new wealth, Anne decided to ask for a promotion.
  "No." Henry’s reply was firm and straightforward.
  "But you’ve been giving me raises. Don’t you want to see me work to my potential?"
  "Potential? You’re a woman, damn it! You have no potential! You’re worthless!"
Anne was stunned. Nobody had ever quite spoken this way to her before. Henry lowered his eyes for a moment, then smothered them with his hand in apologetic disgust before continuing:
  "Besides, Anne, don’t you know that the further up you go the harder you’ll have to work to maintain your position?"
  "Sir, I’m sure I’d be able to handle all the responsibilities that go with a promotion." 
  "You can barely handle the ones you have now. You’ll stay put. Leave now, before I fire you." 
  "Yes, sir." Anne was appropriately stunned. Luckily, even in shock, she was aware that Henry's office was not a good place to remain at the moment. On the way back to her own office, she bumped into one of her friends, Dick Rockford. Dick was a nerd, but a handsome nerd, and he was closer to Anne’s age than Henry. 
  "Hey, Annie," Dick drawled.
  "Oh, hello, Dick. I thought you said you’d take today off." 
  "I was going to, but..." He paused and grabbed Anne by the shoulders to drag her behind a cubicle wall.
  "I couldn’t bear to," he continued breathlessly. "I couldn’t stay home. I need to see you, Anne. I need you. I’ve got to have you."
Anne’s eyes must have been tired from popping out of her head so many times in less than ten minutes. Before she could confess that her feelings paralleled his, Dick was on one knee and in his palm he had placed an open red velvet box with white satin lining. In an indentation in the lining sat a ring with the largest emerald-cut topaz stone that Anne had ever seen. It was embedded in a plethora of granulated diamonds, and all this sat upon an impossibly thin gold band. 
  "Will you marry me?" He asked.
  "Oh, Dick...yes! But we mustn’t let anybody know, because - "
Anne’s yes quickly proved to have been enunciated to a much greater degree than necessary. Henry heard the whole ordeal and stormed out of his office.
  "Step aside, Rockford!" He exclaimed. "Anne here is mine and mine alone! I have been pursuing this woman for nearly three years, and as the boss, I will not have some young, inexperienced playboy proposing marriage to her!"
Dick, in a rare moment of bravery, stated,
  "Listen here, Henry - "
  "You dared to call me by my first name! YOU’RE FIRED!"
Now it was Dick’s turn to be stunned. He pretended to turn away in sorrow, but when he saw Henry head towards the bathroom, he quickly slipped the ring on Anne’s finger and wrote her phone number on the inside of his wrist before leaving. 

That night, Dick called Anne at her chic, uptown apartment. At the time he called, Anne had been sitting on her toilet with her feet against the wall, wearing a $500 bathrobe on her body, curlers in her hair, guacamole on her face, and sea-green nail polish on her fingers and toes. 
  "Anne, can you go out with me tonight?" Dick asked in desperation.
  "I’d love to, but when? Right now, my nails are wet."
  "So wipe your hands."
  "No, with nail polish."
  "Oh. Well, does 8:30 sound good?"
To Dick’s astonishment, Anne’s reply was,
  "Sorry, Dick, but I promised Henry - "
  "I thought we were engaged! Forget that bastard Henry! How could you think of going out with him, after he fired me! Do you care for my feelings at all?"
  "Of course, sweetheart, but he’s so terribly sophisticated and worldly, and you’re just a nerdy MIT graduate. I can’t marry you. It’s too experimental, too risky. But you have marvelous taste in jewelry. I’ll keep the ring, so you won’t have wasted your money."
Dick stammered and babbled over the phone like a drunken idiot.
  "Relax, darling, I still love you," Anne assured him.
  "What a relief. Look, I have to go."
  "Ta-ta!" Anne gleefully hung up and removed the beautiful topaz-and-diamond engagement ring from her finger. It wouldn’t do for Henry to see her wearing it, but this was not something that could simply be discarded. The ring was easily worth at least a few hundred dollars. Anne put it away for safekeeping in the event that she would one day need a few extra bucks. 

Henry picked Anne up at her apartment in his dashing black Corvette right at the stroke of 8:30. He commented on her elegant taffeta gown and how beautifully it matched her nail polish. He also commented that the gown clashed miserably with his jeans and his woefully corny "King of Overtime" sweatshirt. 
  "Mr. Tanner," Anne replied, "I was under the impression that we were going out somewhere fancy."
  "Oh, did I say that? You must forgive me, for what I said was a miserable lie. We’re getting a couple of Big Macs to go, and then we’re off to my place. We need to discuss some, uh, work tactics."
Which brings us to the fateful question, what kind of work???
Obviously, nothing that would benefit a bank teller.

Henry made sure that his wife and daughter were out before letting Anne know she could exit the car. As fate would have it, they were home, eating a pitiful dinner of frozen pizza and tuna salad, while watching reruns of 1970’s sitcoms. 
  "Get the hell out of the house," Henry told them. From the way he said it, he may as well have said ‘Hi, I’m home.’ Cathy had long since learned that her husband was not a man whose emotions were flexible. With mechanical expertise, she calmly told her daughter to help transfer their food into Tupperware containers so they could drive off to the reservoir or some parking lot somewhere and complete their meal. When the Precambrian Dodge Caravan's stentorian engine started and the sound of a cracking axle could be heard in the distance, the two dined on their hamburgers while staring into each other’s eyes. Anne, with her deep tan and dark coloring, looked like such a little girl next to Henry, whose exceptionally gorgeous looks were beginning to fade. The hard stomach was starting to sport a slight gut, and the glorious, thick brown hair was showing some gray strands. Anne found him attractive, but too old, and not her type. She liked men like Dick, whom she could dominate. Dick was smarter than she, but Henry had power. He also knew what he wanted in life. He was too much for Anne to handle.
Unfortunately, she would have to learn to handle him. Henry wanted to marry Anne, if for no other reason than that she was years younger than Henry, which looked more attractive than Henry and his "old bag" Cathy. 
There was absolutely nothing that Anne could do about it, either.
So for the rest of the night, her brain stewed in its juices, inventing possible exits from her inevitable fate. None of them were satisfactory enough for Anne to consider actually using. Like most people who had been in enviable positions before her, she was doomed.

The following morning, Henry awoke to find himself in the bathtub. He found Anne’s still-asleep body strewn on three dining room chairs. It took a couple of hearty stomach-scratches and big, masculine yawns before he was awake and the pleasant reverie of the previous night had ended. Awakened, he checked his messages on the answering machine. Sure enough, there was a new one. He played it and heard the tired voice of his wife:
Hi, Henry, it’s Cathy. Myra and I didn’t want to disturb you by coming home late last night, so we stayed in a Motel 6. Please forgive me for spending forty dollars on a room, and for the fact that Myra will have to miss school today. She doesn’t have her books or anything with her, and we don’t want to intrude on whatever you may be doing this morning either. So I will probably take her to some flea market upstate. I will pay you back for all the gas that will be used for this excursion. Don’t be angry with me, and call my cell phone as soon as possible..
Henry deleted the message. That stupid wife of his. She wasted money as though her resources were boundless. Was she unaware that Henry was the breadwinner, not her? And who cared about Myra, anyway? She was just a stupid, annoying preteen who read too many magazines and wore overpriced clothes. Henry showered, shaved, and dressed before pushing Anne off the chairs and abruptly awaking her.
  "Last night was fun, wasn’t it?" She mechanically asked him. Still recovering from his hangover, Henry replied,
  "Yes, those Big Macs must have been made from actual cows."
  "That wasn’t quite the response I was looking for," Anne said quizzically.
  "Really? You impudent swine, are you sure?" Henry’s eyes blazed, spelling danger clearly enough for even the most nearsighted person to read. 
  "Oh - no, sir."
Henry’s good-natured self returned, and he smiled tightly.
  "Good. Now, since you’ve been such a good girl, I’m letting you have a day off with pay. In fact, what the hell, why don't you use up some of those sick days of yours. I’ll drive you home, and you can vegetate for a while; get your mind together, you know. You’ve been working so hard."
  "Yes..."
Henry drove Anne home, then went to work. The act of driving her home was a sign of courtesy, something which Henry had not been showing very much of in recent years. Anne didn’t live very far from the bank, but her building was rather out of the way. Still, nary a swear was uttered throughout the entire ride. Anne thanked him and went upstairs to change nail polish colors from sea-green to opaque white. How nice, she thought. Sick time. Come to think of it, I actually feel sick. Those Big Macs couldn’t have been from real cows.
Meanwhile, Henry had someone he needed to fire - fast. While Dick was helping some old man get a savings account for his grandson, Henry came in, dismissed the customers, and told Dick he was fired.
  "But what about this nice old gentleman?"
  "I’ll have Maurice finish it up. Now clean out your cubicle and leave."
  "Yes, sir."
Dick mournfully cleaned out the Lilliputian cubicle that had been his home away from home for the past eight years. All the pens that had accumulated, all the mugs and T-shirts and things with the company logo, all the mugs with permanent coffee stains. The Gateway 2000 computer, which had been shut so faithfully each night, where so many games of Solitaire and Mindsweeper had been played. Oh, the toil and drudgery! Some of the best moments of Dick’s miserable life had been spent here, and now they were as gone with the wind as an 1850’s townhouse in Atlanta. Dolefully, he left the bank for the last time and when he stepped into his Honda Civic, he burst into tears.
The old man who had come to open an account for his grandson was sent from the premises as well. Henry no longer had the patience to cater to people of a lesser class than himself. The man was reaching a mid-life crisis, the fateful age all men reach at one point or another. In addition to the normal symptoms which mainly included acting eighteen and looking eighty, Henry had the unusual desire to expand his bank so that all the others would go out of business. He already had power, but he wasn’t overpowering. "Overpowering" in this case meant muscling out Fleet Bank. Until this happened, Tanner American would remain on the same level as small-town banks. Tanner American must expand! It must reach new heights! And, Henry reasoned in his vibrantly active noggin, what better way to expand than to fire all company personnel under the age of 35 and rehire a person of the appropriate age for each person that had been let go? In this day and age, it was becoming increasingly attractive for young people to take jobs that ordinarily would go to someone old enough to be their parents. Young people had good looks, good humor, and wouldn’t mind lower pay, because after all, they all had filthy rich parents who frequently looked younger than their children. Tanner American would have a glossy, fresh, intriguing reputation. Furthermore, all the money being wasted on the odious unemployment fees would be made up with the pleasantly low salaries of the new workers.  I, Henry thought to himself while "reading on the throne" one Friday afternoon, have finally found something to do with all my surplus intelligence! 

	The gig worked out better than one could ever possibly imagine. The "aging idiots" that Henry was merrily laying off were so excited over being freed from their perpetual prison that they failed to note that nobody else was interested in hiring them. Simultaneously, temps were flooding every branch of Tanner American throughout the country, over 60% of whom were finding permanent jobs there. They were between the ages of 22 and 35, and were among the most beautiful women (and men, for that matter) that had ever walked this earth. They all could have been the younger brothers and sisters of the models you see while strolling through a department store. Their limber, tireless, exquisite bodies could handle the overloads of work with little or no problem whatsoever, and they seemed to enjoy themselves. Their lightweight perfumes and colognes added a breath of life to Tanner American, as did their easygoing laughs and blinding-white smiles. Anne, being single, was quickly becoming prey to all the godly young men who had recently been hired. Travis Kelly was the only one who really won Anne over, though. He had mahogany hair, Mediterranean blue eyes, perfect teeth, and a tan that stretched over his nearly six-foot-one inches of stature like plastic wrap on a piece of leftover chicken. He had the cultured voice, the look, the genius, and the ivy league school paraphernalia as proof that he was a real man with a real education. 
Well, Mr. Kelly wasn’t the only one. Andrew Carlisle was blonde and British, and Daniel Burns looked exactly like Tyrone Power. Anne certainly couldn’t overlook the contemporary comeliness of Patrick McLain, either. Between Travis, Andrew, Daniel, and Patrick, as well as some others, Anne was in heaven. Until, of course, Henry reminded her in a most friendly manner that she was doomed. Not quite in those words, of course.
  "You haven’t forgotten your promise, Annie?" He asked.
  "No, sir." Nobody - nobody - called her Annie except Dick, whom Anne still saw secretly.
  "You realize that though there are men your age here, they are still putrid, gangly children compared to me, don’t you?"
  "Naturally, sir."
  "And we will elope on March 15th, won’t we?"
  "That’s the Ides of March, sir."
  "I know."
  "What if something happens?"
  "Relax, we aren’t eloping in the Roman Senate...partly because it no longer exists! You childish fool! Only a child would bring up something so stupid. Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me why April 15th is a bad date, too."
  "It is, sir. Tax day."
  "Well...so what?"
  "Nothing, sir."
  "Very well."
Henry got so zealous over his upcoming marriage that Tanner American’s newest television commercial revolved around newlyweds trying to put away money for a house.
In all this zeal, Henry forgot that he had to get a divorce before remarrying. He had been separated from Cathy ever since Anne had been hired. Let’s see, Anne had been twenty-three at the time and was now twenty-seven...four years, and Henry still hadn’t been able to get a divorce. True, he needed Cathy’s signature before anything could really happen, and Cathy wasn’t 100% willing to go through with the ordeal. Since she had no money, she was constantly skating on thin ice because of her pleadings to remain living in her husband’s home. Should she agree to the divorce, she would probably never be able to afford shelter and food for herself and Myra. Of course, Henry would be obliged to send alimony every month. Still, a few hundred dollars every month, even when added to the few hundred dollars that Cathy could make working (she had no skills or experience), would not be enough to live off of. The only way that Cathy could possibly survive would be to put Myra in the care of foster parents, because her mother would not be able to afford her, and her father wasn’t interested. Myra, like most girls her age, was a major expense, what with private school, tons of clothes and cosmetics, and all that nonsense. Since she was the only real barrier to keep the divorce from proceeding, and since Henry wasn’t getting any younger, Cathy came to the tearful conclusion that Myra would be put into foster care as soon as humanely possible. 
I want to tell you something about Myra before we continue - she was nearly twelve and had wanted for nothing her whole life. The prospect of foster care at her age would, to most people, seem incredibly stupid. But there was simply no other way. The poor girl had to be literally dragged by the arms from the mansion she had called home for the past nine years, and into the car of her new foster mother, a grotesque woman whose name will not be disclosed. Cathy waved sorrowfully until the grotesque woman’s car was clean out of sight. Henry was out drinking with his new employees, in celebration of the loss of his daughter and the upcoming divorce from Cathy and marriage to Anne.

	The date of elopement, now switched to May 16, had to be pushed further still due to a bout of appendicitis that hospitalized Anne. Since she didn’t really love him, she had the doctors tell Henry that her appendix had burst and that she would need to stay for a longer period of time, with no visitors. For over a week, invalid Anne languidly stretched out on her hospital bed with a phone in one hand and a fresh bouquet of roses in the other. The phone was, of course, her beeper-sized cell phone, so she could hide it in her palm while holding disgusting conversations with one of her various beaux. The doctors dismissed this as a side effect of the surgery that would result in one talking to oneself. These were not the world’s most intelligent doctors, obviously. 
During Anne’s hospitalization, Henry had his 34th birthday. In a mere two years, he would be older than the entire staff of his bank. Within a few more years, his age would be a multiple of their ages. A careful glance in his bathroom mirror showed that his gray hairs were increasing in number, and not just on his head (a few were spotted in his eyebrows, of all places). Fearing old age, and knowing that his grueling lifestyle was accelerating its arrival, Henry decided that after Anne had been sponging off the hospital for over a month (is that even legal?), perhaps she had recovered from her burst appendix. But guess what? She hadn’t! And why? Because the explosion had been so profuse that all her innards from the ribcage down were coated in slimy, disgusting, nasty residue. Anne, being a clean freak, simply wouldn’t stand for this. So, each one of her internal organs had to be removed and treated in a special solution for a few days at a time. This meant Anne would be on life support for nearly another month and possibly more, and sorry, Henry, but that’s life.
You don’t need a Ph.D. to realize that things like that just don’t happen, but it took Henry until he saw Anne in the window of The Gap to realize that Anne was not really all that ill anymore.
To tell the truth, from the way she sashayed about in her new khaki flares like a tenth-grader, Henry was able to figure out that she wasn't really ill anymore. He stormed into the store and dragged her out and into his car, screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs, questioning her, and demanding answers "or else." What exactly was Anne supposed to say? She burst into tears, and was yelled at again for messing up the leather interior with "that squalid discharge." 
  "We’re getting married July 10, even if I have to spend the wedding night with your corpse," he barked coarsely. 
  "Yes," Anne gasped. Henry glared at her with those ever-widening brown eyes, exposing his contacts, then broke down into his devil-may-care smile as he reopened the car door.
  "I take that back. The corpse would smell pretty bad, wouldn’t it?"
  "Yes, sir."
  "Now go pay for those pants before they call the manager."
The manager was already hovering sternly over the car and frowning highly disapprovingly at Anne. Henry winked at the two of them and sped off, as he didn’t want any trouble with the cops.

	July 10 arrived and the divorce had finally been finalized. Cathy had managed to rent a tiny, rat-and-roach infested apartment in town by selling her decrepit car. The $25.00 she got for it would pay for a few months rent (it was one of those pay-as-much-as-you-can-afford facilities, but as you can see, this practice was abused by most of the residents). Henry, though devastated at the thought of alimony, knew that he could easily get away with paying as little as possible due to his celebrity status. This pleased him, as did the enlightenment that Cathy was almost completely dependent on these meager payments. Anne, to her regret, had no more lame excuses to delay the wedding further. Secretly, she sympathized with Cathy and Myra, but they already associated their new relative with perpetual hell. In their lonely, separate worlds, they (along with a good portion of the continent) witnessed the newlyweds begin their Parisian honeymoon, clad in their navy blue Armani suits with the gold, embroidered monograms. They may as well have been going to an executive meeting. 
Myra and Cathy were only mentioned in the tabloids, so little attention was paid to them.

	The next several months passed by in a dizzy whirlwind of publicity - the sort generally not granted to bank presidents. Then again, bank presidents aren’t generally thirty-four year old gods who are marrying twenty-seven year old goddesses. Therefore, their entire honeymoon was photographed and captioned as "candid photos of the Tanners." Anne reveled in it all. She loved her new wardrobe and her new jewelry (much of the latter was originally Cathy’s and had been confiscated as part of the divorce procedure). Henry loved exploiting his new wife, and he promised the press that she’d give birth to a healthy, hefty son to "carry on the Tanner name." Anne merely grinned wryly at this statement; she had always hated children for a variety of reasons, mainly that bearing them could cause her to lose her size 4 figure. Of course, such fears could never be confessed, as since she was now a celebrity, the fear that someone was listening to her very thoughts was far greater than admitting them. By contrast, Henry was dying to have a child - a son, of course. He had a daughter and hated her. Whether or not he would care more for a son was immaterial, because a son could bear the name of Henry Tanner, Jr. (or something like that), and therefore be able to carry the burden of reigning over Tanner American long after Henry Tanner, Sr.’s demise. If something happened to it then, it wouldn’t matter, because Henry would be dead and never know. Another daughter would never be able to do such a thing in a million years. Never, never, never.

	When Anne first discovered that she was pregnant, every newspaper and magazine in the nation bore at least one small photo of the couple. Henry was extremely sure that it would be a boy, and went all out when it came to buying clothes, furniture, toys, board books, diapers, mobiles, and the like - only to return it all in utter sadness when Anne miscarried. While it is rather common and possible to miscarry, Anne was instantly accused for a number of things that she did and didn’t do, including things that she didn’t do and did do. She had to take the rap and endure the public humiliation, while trying to have another child in the shadowy background. 
  "This time," Henry warned sternly, "I will hire someone to ensure that you eat nothing outside the RDA’s recommendations and those special pills. You are not to take public transportation, consume caffeine, alcohol, or drugs, and you may not exercise vigorously or excessively. Do you understand how important this child is?"
Anne had followed the same rules last time, but nodded demurely anyway. Hinting even in jest that Henry was simply incapable of producing a healthy baby boy would not be terribly smart. 
The new baby managed to live long enough to be born. Henry repeated his enthusiastic shopping spree for the infant, and again made the mistake of forgetting that there was a possibility of the baby being a girl. To his sorrow, it was a girl, and one in perfect health to boot. Anne, to her surprise, was elated at motherhood and named her daughter Elisabeth, which was unique but still pronounceable. Henry had wanted to give her a more popular, run-of-the-mill name, like Nicole or Allison, and felt that his wife’s choice of a name was stupid and ugly. Life continued, though, and Elisabeth quickly became one of America’s most famous and celebrated babies. Henry brought photos of her to work and displayed them in his office in beautiful frames, to play the role of a proud papa. 
  "She’s beautiful," an employee named Katrina Mason purred while sitting atop Henry’s desk one hectic afternoon. 
  "Thanks." Henry smiled. Katrina was his favorite employee because she was twenty-three, single, and had Lady Godiva blonde hair to her waist. Her pale skin was as flawless as an orchid petal, and her eyes were the color of dimes still hot from the mint. She wore the most expensive clothes, makeup, and perfume of any other woman at that branch, and she had a silvery voice. 
  "How come you don’t have any pictures of your other daughter, Myra?"
  "Oh, I’m respecting her wishes. Her fears of exploitation are immense."
  "It’s not exploitation to show pictures of your daughter, Sir."
  "And what would a lovely lady such as yourself know about the complexity of exploitation? Or was that just a dumb question?"
Henry smiled his most devilish smile and put his hand on Katrina’s waist. She giggled demurely.
  "Sir, you are a married man, are you not?"
  "Yes, but I’m also the president of the biggest bank in the country. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, and with whomever I want. Got it?"
  "Oh, Sir."
They smiled sheepishly at each other, then Henry pushed Katrina off his desk.
  "Someone might need your timely assistance," he explained. 
  "Timely assistance! I’d be doing half these customers a favor by shooting them dead than by giving them timely assistance. Your new ad campaign has brought in a lot of lunatics, Mr. Tanner, and that catchy little jingle in the commercials only heightens the problem."
  "When I want a new advertising manager, I’ll hire one," Henry said with spurious seriousness. Then he smiled that infamous smile again and softly sang:
  "If you want friendliness and glamour, just see your local Tanner..."
Katrina smiled bewitchingly and walked, or rather strutted, back to her cubicle, shifting her entire weight of 118 pounds from one leg to the other as she did so. Obviously, this was a practiced, "accidentally-on-purpose" type of walk. In other words, Katrina was walking like Marilyn Monroe. This didn’t bother Henry at all, so while he tried to appear the ever-chivalrous gentleman for the cameras, he was living a second life with the young lady. 
Anne did not know of this liaison yet, even when it had been going on for months and the gossip columnists were clawing each other over to get the next tidbit concerning what was to happen next. She was too busy taking care of baby Elisabeth, who was growing up very nicely. Though the baby seldom got to see her father, Anne doted on her most lavishly, as if to prove to the world that even the most wealthy children didn’t need to be locked up with nursemaids all day. That’s not to say, of course, that Elisabeth wasn’t with a nursemaid all day. After all, how could Anne postpone her weekly visits to Saks Fifth Avenue for the sake of a baby whose soul purpose was to make a dazzling housewife out of a former bank worker? I mean, come on! A wardrobe, Anne believed, was not something that should last for more than a few days in one’s closet without complete replacement. Otherwise, one day one might make the fatal error of wearing the same thing more than once. That was OK for poor saps, but not Anne Boyar. She had already made many fatal errors - not changing her last name when she married Henry, among others - and making another one wouldn’t look good on her part. 

	By the time Elisabeth had been enrolled in an exclusive private school at the age of five, she had grown into a rather pretty little girl. She looked just like her father, with the unruly (but not frizzy) brown hair that just missed being curly, and the intense brown eyes. She was very shy, because she didn’t understand her celebrity status. Still, most people found her to be delightful and charming and intelligent - just like her parents. Meanwhile, Henry was thirty-nine, Anne was thirty-two, and on the other side of town, Cathy was forty-five and Myra was almost sixteen. 
Speaking of Cathy, she died in her little apartment of a heart attack with little fanfare. Henry didn’t even know until a friend told him, but whatever his feelings were, they stayed concealed. Myra, distraught to no small degree, tried to contact her father. She hadn’t seen him in person ever since being taken to a foster home, and now had dropped out of school to work for a living. College was not in her future. Henry wasn’t the least bit interested in Elisabeth, let alone Myra, and besides, Anne was pregnant again. When Myra sent him a note, pleading that they meet sometime "to talk," Henry tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. He was too concerned about his third child to care about her needs. 
Sure enough, the baby was a boy.

	Rodney Tanner was the most pampered, beloved baby that was ever born. He had the best of everything. Elisabeth was delighted at the prospect of being a big sister, and Anne was even more delighted that she had finally had the baby boy that her husband so desperately wanted. Of course, that’s not to say that his existence was cherished for himself alone. Rodney was probably the last thread holding the marriage together.
  "Happy now?" Anne sarcastically asked Henry. 
  "Naturally. Why shouldn’t I be happy? I have a successor now."
  "I wish you’d shown half this much enthusiasm over Elisabeth when she was born."
  "She’s a stupid girl. She’ll never amount to anything. As far as I’m concerned, all she’ll end up doing is inheriting all my hard-earned money, and getting away with it because of her gender. Rodney will respect his name and live up to it, not mooch off of it."
  "You don’t know that."
  "Listen, honey, since you spend all the time with her, it’s obvious that she’ll take after her miserly mother."
  "Excuse me? Maybe if you’d spend some time with her and not cheating on your wife, she could become a fine businesswoman."
  "I never cheated on you!"
  "Yes, you did. And with a Katrina Mason, I presume."
  "You believe that bunk?"
  "Believe it? After I found about five or six pairs of underwear that wouldn’t fit a Barbie doll in my drawer, I think I have a right to - "
  "You have no rights! You have so many damned pairs of everything that you’d never be able to differentiate what’s yours and what’s someone else’s. Maybe it’s last year’s style. You were thinner then - "
  "I’d still be thin if I weren’t staying home making your stupid babies all day, and that underwear is not mine!"
They had picked a swell time to argue, because Elisabeth had been in the next room watching the nurse give Rodney his bath. Being interested at what sparked the noise next door, she innocently inquired as to why they were talking with their Outdoor Voices.
  "Daddy and I just forgot the rules for a moment, baby precious," Anne explained.
Henry violently ran his fingers through his hair. 
  "But Mommy, how come if I forget the rules, Daddy slaps me?"
  "I’ll slap you again if you don’t shut up," Henry growled. Not the best tone to use with a first-grader.
  "Henry! How dare you talk to my daughter that way!"
  "She’s my daughter too!"
  "Then no wonder she’s so worthless!"
Elisabeth burst into tears and ran wailing from the room. All this havoc caused Rodney to burst into tears as well. Two small children wailing at the top of their lungs was enough to give both the nurse and the parents of the children she cared for miserable headaches, and both Elisabeth and Rodney were dragged into yet another room to be comforted by an array of new toys.
It can be assumed that Rodney, for all his infantile marvels, was not going to be what kept Anne and Henry together. He died at the age of about eight weeks, most likely from drowning in the sink while being bathed, but the real reason was obviously never revealed. Had he lived to be eighty, the funeral couldn’t have been more elaborate. Over two-hundred people mourned the child’s death. Driving behind the casket-bearing Cadillac, there were two black stretch limousines and several cars with orange stickers on their windshields. Thousands of flowers were donated, which cost more than all of Rodney’s possessions and nearly half as much as the whole funeral. The eulogy could barely be heard due to excessive sobbing. But nobody mourned greater than Anne. She didn’t particularly care that Rodney had died (fine mother), but without him, she knew her marriage was over. Henry was not a great husband by any stretch of imagination, but wretched personality aside, he had the looks, status, and money that Anne craved. How many men had this coveted combination? Few, too few. This made personality almost entirely unimportant. Where would Anne ever find anyone like him? She wouldn’t. Now that Rodney was dead, Henry’s love for Anne was beginning to die as well. Rumors about his illegitimate daughter, Pamela, with Katrina, were just at the boiling point. Henry was home less and less, and when he was, he was unshaven and blind drunk. Anne couldn’t talk to him any more than she could talk to Elisabeth. Like any other woman who becomes a mother for the wrong reasons, Anne had no idea how to communicate with her child and finally resorted to sending her to an all-girls boarding school in Michigan. 
Meanwhile, Myra did odd jobs at a privately owned drugstore for a little over a hundred dollars a week. She was a ghetto nomad, moving from tenement to tenement because she could never afford rent. It would have been on minimal comfort to her to know that all the magazines she had been buying with articles on her father would someday be worth more than those apartments she was being forced to leave. 

	When Pamela was old enough to talk (and babies of scandal learn to talk horrifyingly fast), Henry hired the best lawyer this side of the Mississippi to teach her to testify in court by memorizing simple words and phrases. No harm could arise from this, since Pamela wasn’t even old enough to sleep in her own room without crying; none of the things she was to say would ever sink into her developing brain, and there would be no recollections. Pamela was to say that her birth was a result of her father’s wife’s inability to produce a son, and while she herself was a daughter, she had plans of changing this once she was fifteen or so. Anne heard of this nonsense and had Elisabeth learn a few things about testifying as well. She hired the best lawyer on the other side of the Mississippi to teach her how to curse adultery and how it ruins the life of simple women who are forced into marriage just because they’re pretty. Katrina, appalled at the way her daughter was being exploited, abruptly quit her job at Tanner American and moved to North Carolina. She brought Pamela with her, but Henry had hired a private eye to meet with the baby girl while her mother wasn't home. Other workers at Tanner American took all this in with a grain of salt. Rumors were rumors. People always want to make their superiors look like their inferiors, they told each other, not to mention CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and MTV.
While not hiring people to engage in illegal activity or engaging in illegal activity himself, Henry was getting ready for another divorce. Anne refused to grant him one. She wouldn’t sign anything and blatantly stated that she was keeping the marriage for spite and nothing else. Dick, whom she had been seeing all along, consoled her.
  "I think you’re being foolish, baby," he said. "Why not give him the divorce, so the two of us can get married."
  "But darling, I’ve given in to him one too many times already. I will not give in to him now. You must understand."
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Anne had also been seeing Travis. He wasn’t too bad at consolation either.
  "Oh, Travis, I do so want to leave him, but I can’t! Perhaps my scruples will one day abate, that I might marry you, my sweet love!"
  "You don’t need to talk that way with me, dearest. Although I find it most charming of you to share my love of classical literature to the extent where you talk like Milady de Winter."
  "Right."
In all actuality, Anne didn’t want to marry Dick or Travis. Neither had six-figure paychecks or national recognition. Besides, if she divorced Henry, she’d become like Cathy. Cathy had died penniless, ugly, old, and alone, neither of which were attributes Anne wanted. However, since Henry was being an unfaithful creep, Anne decided that she would have to fight fire with fire. 
Her one mistake was mimicking Henry’s alcoholism. 
In her drunken state one night, she drove Travis back to her house instead of to his. 
The following morning saw a rather sober Anne and Travis clad in bathrobes and handcuffs in the back seat of a white and blue Ford Crown Victoria which had red and blue revolving lights on the roof. Henry was in the front, making pleasant conversation with the driver, who was wearing a dashing blue uniform. Anne and Travis were arrested. Luckily, though, Dick bailed Anne out for $25,000, and Anne created a domino effect by bailing out Travis as well. That was a noble, yet stupid idea. 
  "Why’d you bail him out?" Dick stormed.
  "It was common courtesy. When you share a cell - "
  "WHY WERE YOU IN A POSITION TO BE SHARING A CELL WITH THIS MAN?"
  "Uh...I don’t really know."
  "You corrupt woman! I thought you loved me! I thought we were getting married! What happened to you all of a sudden?"
  "Oh God, you’re so gullible! All of a sudden my eye; Travis and I have been seeing each other since not long after you were fired."
  "Do you mean to tell me that..." Dick trailed off in bloodshot astonishment. Figuring that the cat was already quite far away from the bag and she was already in trouble, Anne coyly buried her finger in the hem of her shirt and murmured,
  "Don’t get too close to Andrew, Patrick, Daniel, Greg, Mike, Ted, or Leonard, either, big fella."
  "Oh my God..."
Anne fell into a fit of laughing, and Dick fell into a fit of silent rage. Unbeknownst to them, there was a tape recorder in the corner, and the record button was pressed. Once Anne had left Dick’s house and Dick had gone upstairs, another one of Henry’s reliable accomplices deftly slipped out of the hall bathroom and retrieved the tape recorder. He pressed the stop button, rewound it, and brought it to Henry’s office. They shared brandy while listening to the tape. It was barely two or three minutes long, but they sat there rewinding it and playing it, like children with a Disney movie, for hours. Finally, Henry slammed down his glass and called his lawyer. In the homes of a dozen men, phones were ringing off the hook. 
  "You’re crazy, Mr. Tanner," the lawyer said behind the bluish cloud his cigar emitted. 
  "Am I? This is the easiest, cheapest, and most legal way to get rid of thirteen people ever since public hangings. You know, I kind of wish there still were public hangings."
  "Sir, though it is far beyond my intelligence to contradict you, permit me to note that what you are doing is neither easy, cheap, or legal. But if it makes you happy, I suppose it can be done."
  "You’re upset that you won’t be getting the hefty fee that most lawyers get when working for celebrities, aren’t you?"
  "Yeah..."
  "Don’t be. I can give you a pen with the company logo on it to cheer you up."
  "Sir, I’m afraid I’d lose it."
  "Well then, perhaps you’d be interested in seeing some other valuable merchandise bearing our company’s name. I have T-shirts, mugs, key chains, mouse pads, baseball caps, lanyards, erasers, pencils, pins, tote bags, bumper stickers, magnets, and of course, autographed 8x10 glossies of yours truly."  
  "Are your prices compatible?"
  "No discount store would dare compete."
  "I’ll buy a T-shirt, then."
  "What color?"
  "Off-white."
  "Sorry, we don’t have off-white. You’ll have to settle for Cream."
  "On second thought, I’ll just have a mug."
  "Fine choice."

	On July 19, thirteen people died - Andrew, Patrick, Daniel, Greg, Mike, Ted, Dick, Leonard, Justin, Brad, Derek, Chris, and Anne. They were all in an airplane, bought by Henry and done over by a couple of plane mechanics in New Jersey. The plane was being flown by a robot which had been programmed to purposely crash into the Rocky Mountains on the way to Los Angeles, where there was to be an archetypal court case (of the sort that the obscenely rich and famous have, anyway). Henry figured it was an easy way to kill his wife, her suitors, and those whom he believed to be her suitors, without getting into trouble with the law himself. This happened nine days after their ninth wedding anniversary. Funeral services were held in Nevada, and the bodies were shipped back east for burial. 

	In life, Anne never got a full taste of what unflattering fame was really like, which was good, as she could never have handled it. In death, her life was embellished with inane details and half-truths which caused her real story to be a near mystery. After nearly a year of pathetic magazine articles and several years of really pathetic articles in the tabloids, she was forgotten, and Tanner American continued to prosper. Henry went on to date more young women. This time he turned his attentions to a plain, quiet girl named Jane Selwyn. He later married her. She bore him a son, Vincent, who lived past infancy. Jane died in childbirth however, and Henry married yet again. He was to marry two more times before dying himself. Vincent died not long after, and Tanner American was headed by none other than Elisabeth. Pamela and Katrina lived as though they had never had anything to do with the Tanners, and Myra married into a prominent New York family to compensate for her rough start in life. Anne’s memory was now faded, but as long as people remembered her at all, she haunted Tanner American branches - not just the main one, but all of them.

There were frequently problems in which the wrong amount of money came out, or the ATM cards were stuck. Tellers got violently ill on whims, and fires would break out with no known causes. It was even said that Anne’s ghost killed Henry - he died, after all, of pneumonia, and it’s hard to catch pneumonia while vacationing in the Florida Keys. On the date of her death every year, Anne’s apparition is seen as well as felt. Those who have seen it say that she is lovely, but with very faint facial features. She is in her early thirties and unusually dark in coloring. Her laugh is as brilliant as though she was a schoolgirl. And she is usually seen in either a bathrobe, evening gown, or Gap khakis. One can find her most often in areas of large cities where handsome Anglo-Saxon young men are known to hang out.
If you noticed, there are no Tanner American banks in your area. The chain was bought out by another, larger bank - Henry’s nightmare come true. Nevertheless, if your bank is run by an attractive young man, may I suggest Fleet?
 

    Source: geocities.com/tm4eva