The Naming

by Janet Levine

The minutes of the committee meeting came via email at 10 am that Monday morning. We hadn’t gotten together for quite a while, so I was surprised by their appearance, but when I read the list of attendees, I realized I must have missed a meeting. Paul, the chair, attended, of course. As did Sally, Deb, John and Graham. And someone named Martha Lewis. I didn’t know a Martha Lewis, but the campus was large and I didn’t know everyone. I wondered what she did.
A woman named Martha Lewis would, I decided, do something substantial. Probably from the business office. Financial. I could picture here, this Martha Lewis. A large, solid-looking woman. Her no-nonsense clothes would be blocky and mostly brown. She’d have oxford-type shoes at the end of her stocky legs and her hair would tidy. Martha Lewis, I just knew, would be red faced and wear no makeup.

At first, I just skimmed the minutes. There really was no point in reading them carefully. Committee meetings were solame. Everyone talked around the issues, too afraid to take a concrete stand on anything. But then, suddenly, I found myself nodding and murmuring little sounds of assent. This Martha was taking a stand. She was saying meaningful things. Things I wish I had the gumption to say. I would, I realized, have to rethink this Martha Lewis. The woman, after all, made sense. She was reasonable but not priggish about it. There was a flair in her ideas and her sense of humor shone through.

All right. She was, yes, definitely tall, but not really large. Her clothes were comfortable, but not mannish or dull. Stylish, but not slavish. Her make-up—and I now saw that she must wear some—was tasteful, bringing out her best features. Her honey-colored hair would frame her strong face, lightly brush the high cheekbones and her un-furrowed forehead, bringing out the color of her clear, direct eyes. Martha Lewis, I was now convinced, was a woman to reckon with. A woman I wanted to know. A woman I wanted to be like. I would have to ask Paul to introduce us.

Paul, however, just laughed when I asked about Martha Lewis.
"I guess,” he said, “I can see how someone could mistype and get Lewis from Levine. But how in the hell do you get Martha out of Janet?

I almost choked on my coffee. I was Martha Lewis? I said sensible, substantive things? With a sense of humor, no less. Could I really be a woman to reckon with, just as Martha Lewis had been?

For a nanosecond I felt the power. I sat up straighter, my shoulders flung back. Then it passed and I slumped down in my chair. They were, then, my words. Words that would lack the heft and weight of what would have been spoken by a Martha Lewis.

Completely forgetting my first impression, I fixated on the final Martha Lewis of my imagination. “Martha,” I was sure, gave those words dignity. “Lewis” added an arrogance that was somehow compelling. If you googled Martha Lewis, you wouldn’t get 517,000 hits as you did with Janet Levine. People wouldn’t call you monthly to ask if you were the Martha Lewis who…like they called me.

If only my parents had given me a substantial, uncommon Martha-like name. If only my first husband hadn’t had such a common last name. If only I had had the right name then, like Stanley Kowalski, I coulda been a contender.