Read Nice Girls Finish Last for Free Online

Pepsodent.
    â€œThere’s tobacco in the shredder,” Jerry was screaming at our associate producer, Tamayo Scheinman, when I walked in.
    â€œI’m quitting smoking,” Tamayo said, as she says three or four times a week. I noticed she had a nicotine patch on her arm. “I shredded my cigarettes so I couldn’t smoke them.”
    Tamayo came from Japan, where she grew up with dual citizenship, daughter of an American man and a Japanese woman. While her American father was a devoted Japanophile, Tamayo loved all things American, especially unfiltered Camels.
    Unfortunately for her, ANN and its affiliated networks under the Jackson Broadcasting umbrella, like many other companies, had become completely nonsmoking, and had banned smoking for employees even outside of work. As you can imagine, this just added to the jolly newsroom atmosphere.
    So when they transferred Tamayo from the Tokyo bureau, they made her sign a pledge that she would quit smoking by the end of her three-month probationary period. She had ten days to go.
    â€œ Guten Morgen , Robin,” Jerry said to me. He was studying German.
    â€œGood morning.”
    Tamayo handed me a message and left me to absorb Jerry’s loathsomeness singlehanded.
    â€œYou look like you put on a little weight, Robin,” Jerry said, walking around me to size me up. “You know that’s a sin in television.”
    One of Jerry’s favorite old-style sexist ways to cut a woman down to size was to criticize her physical appearance. Ever since I had begun trying to adapt and mature and behave myself, Jerry had been milking it for all he could. He knew he could say anything to me and I would say nothing nasty back to him. So I couldn’t, for example, point out to Jerry that he was pale, soft, and somewhat overweight and dressed like an aide in the Nixon White House. In fact, he looked like a Nixon White House aide who had swallowed another Nixon White House aide whole. Claire, who used to work with me in Special Reports, called Jerry a “smug, dissipated white boy” with an ego so big you could tie a rope to it and fly it in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. But Claire could talk that way. She was a rising general-assignment reporter who’d been trying out in Washington and was expected to be offered a full-time job there in the reshuffle. I, on the other hand, had to be a good girl.
    So I just smiled.
    â€œGotta watch out. Lose your looks in this business and …” He made a slashing motion across his neck.
    What an asshole. Quite honestly, losing my looks is the least of my worries. I am a five-nine, buxom, good-looking redhead, at least I think I am, and if you think you are, it’s as good as true. Not to brag about it, because believe me, beauty can be a curse. I know it’s not the sort of thing one should complain about, but you see, I’m also very clumsy. My looks draw attention to me, so that many more people are watching me when the spike heel buckles under me in a restaurant and I accidentally mow down a passing salad girl, who sends a giant bowl of iceberg lettuce flying, raining greens on a whole section of diners.
    This is not a hypothetical example. This is my karma, beauty without grace. I am Jerry Lewis’s nutty professor … in the body of Rita Hayworth.
    â€œYou need a haircut too. But that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. Come into my office,” Jerry said.
    I followed him.
    â€œHave a seat,” he said, waving me in and slamming the door so the glass walls of his cubicle shook.
    At that point, he put on his eyeglasses, a pure affectation. Tamayo and I had looked through them and found they were plain glass. Jerry wore them because he thought they made him look cerebral.
    â€œWe’re going to shelve the Congressman Dreyer story,” Jerry said and looked over his glasses at me for a response.
    No argument here, I thought, since there wasn’t any