Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

  “Burn this bush,” one god said, and so she did.

  “Now put the bush back the way it was,” another god said, and so she learned the drudgery of tasks done and undone, the brutal makings and unmakings of the earth.

  “Create an animal so rare it barely exists,” the gods said. The First Temp cobbled together something extraordinary, irreplaceable.

  “Someone,” she corrected them.

  “Now watch it go extinct,” they said, and so she held its wing and watched it glimmer, fade, disappear.

  MEMORY WORK

  When I was very young, I performed chores instead of jobs. I mopped the square footage and dusted the ledges but not in that order. Mind you, I was not so young as to let muck fall free and stick to soapy floors. I put away my toys and put away my dolls, and took them out and put them back again. The taking out and the putting away. I learned to cook brisket with sauce, and I learned to eat it. My mother held my hand and helped me slice the meat against the grain. “Small bites, or else you’ll choke,” she said.

  The apartment smelled like a holiday. I cleared the dishes for my mother and her different boyfriends on different nights, and I washed the plates in warm water and stacked them by the sink. “A really good girl,” she called me.

  She tucked me into bed, and she told me bedtime stories. “There was the keeper of the donor list,” she said. “There was the shredder of the master list. There was the marketing and the fundraising and also the development. There was late for work, and there was early. There was even right on time. The box of stamps and the corkboard calendar and the pink book of message sheets to tell you what happened exactly, specifically, in detail, While You Were Out.”

  She said the last four words in syncopation while taking exaggerated steps backward from my bed, through the door, and down the hall, turning away. She left the door open a crack so a slice of light slipped across my face while I slept.

  My mother and her boyfriends played cards late into the night, different games, different boyfriends for different nights of the week, their open arms spreading toward Sunday like a royal flush. I loved the way their voices carried up and over and into my unpillowed ear. Safe laughter, safe sleep. When it got too quiet, I drifted off, then startled myself awake, searching for their sounds, for proof of their happiness, like breath against a mirror.

  In the mornings, I put the cards away and made coffee, stacked the pillows on the couch in the manner my mother liked them, two small pillows propped against a large decorative rectangle stitched with an old-fashioned phrase in elegant, swirly letters: There Is Nothing More Personal Than Doing Your Job.

  My mother’s pilot boyfriend promised us tickets around the world, but he only ever took us around the block. “It doesn’t count if you make airplane arms,” she said, sauntering behind us as we sailed down the street. My mother’s cobbler boyfriend spiffed her shoes, then spiffed mine. My mother’s tallest boyfriend was only five foot seven, but he lifted me onto his shoulders all the same, spun me through the living room in circles, and I feared my head would knock the ceiling.

  “There used to be a taller boyfriend, but now this one’s the tallest,” my mother said. “Before he was the tallest, he was a baker.”

  Her baker still brought us fresh, warm baguettes every day, despite his new tall title.

  “What happened to the very tallest boyfriend?” I asked.

  “He’s gone,” she said, and she looked away, so I knew the subject was closed for business.

  The academic boyfriend was my best friend. He presented me with stacks of books, leather bound and paper flapped, and we read them together, stretched out on the rug. He taught me about pirates, about buried treasure, about multiplication. He moved away to teach at a university. I cried into various fabrics, into blankets, into pillows, into scarves, and when I couldn’t find any more fabrics, I cried into my mother’s skirt. I slipped my hand into her pocket and stole her inky pens.

  “Sometimes boyfriends leave,” my mother said. “Your grandmother’s boyfriends were all drafted into the same battalion. Every last one left, not one left over.” She spun a glass between her hands like a potter at a wheel. “And your great-grandmother,” she said, “had girlfriends.”

  Sundays we went to the park. My mother’s beatnik boyfriend played bongos under a tree. Weekends with her hippie boyfriend, assembling crowns of thistle and dandelion for my brow. The street vendor boyfriend always made sure to save us something salty and, for later, something sweet. A pretzel, perhaps, followed by a bag of honeyed cashews. The pilot told stories about air travel, seat belts, small bottles of liquor (this small!), the space between the plane and the earth (this big!). Long distances. We would lay splat, flat on our backs and watch the jets like toys overhead, tiny novelties tinkering with a distance as bold as the sky.

  “I’m going to marry the International Space Station,” I said.

  And my mother said, “Not us. That’s not what we do.” She meant the part about getting married.

  Some days, our home was full to bursting. Three people: six arms, six legs, thirty toes, infinite hairs, infinite pores, infinite dreams. But I also liked the quiet days, just my mother and me. I liked when the boyfriends took a break. “We’re taking a break,” my mother would say, unprompted and unanswered. I liked when my mother had ideas about eating at the coffee table. Us, sitting at the dining table, and she would pick up her plate and walk across the room. I would pick up my plate and follow her. We would put our plates on the coffee table and pull it closer, close enough to touch our knees. There was a little shelf below the table, a kind of undertable, and that was where we placed our tall, cool drinks. This was the way we ate dinner, just the two of us, creating rings of condensation, wet little galaxies where there had been none.

  “Much better,” my mother said.

  On warm nights, she kept the windows open, and bright leaves danced through the kitchen. Sometimes we cleaned the plates but forgot our drinks, hidden as they were under the table. Cups accumulated for days.

  Just us. The dining table, vacated, was where we put our stuff. I stacked my paper-flapped books in the far corner. I wrote and drew with inky pens in my reserved spot, with my legs tucked up and crossed over the seat. In the colder half of autumn, I would hang my coat on the back of the cobbler’s chair, and in the winter, I’d hang my scarf there too. Mom put her purse on the back of the beatnik’s chair, and she strung the garbage bag on the back of another. We didn’t use the trash bin during times like these. We didn’t even mop or sweep. Chores disappeared into the vacuum, and we never vacuumed the three hundred square feet shared by us and only us. We took a large garbage bag and tied one flap to the arm of the pilot’s chair. When it was full, almost too full to carry, we dragged it down the stairs and out onto the street.

  Just us on Saturdays, and we didn’t get dressed. We stayed in our sleepwear until it was time to go back to sleep. The window-sills were thick with slices of snow and ice, and I imagined our building as a tiny ship wedged in an ocean that had frozen solid, turned to land. Then the bustle renewed, the melting snow and the noise and the space filled with bodies, with people, with a boyfriend sitting at the table, with another boyfriend on the phone, with lives together and separate from our own, waxing and waning and crossing and connecting and swerving and departing. And then the chores returned, and the tasks, and the work of living in the world.

  My mother was filling in for the Statue of Liberty. My mother was filling in for Lady Justice at the courthouse. My mother was filling in for the Mayor, and she stumped for the rights of temporaries across the boroughs. My mother was filling in for her mother. My mother was filling in for her mother’s mother. For her mother’s mother’s mother. My mother was checking facts, and what she found was mostly poetry. My mother was filling in for the Funicular. She stretched herself from mountain to shore, stretched her skirt into a bindle to carry a skirtload of tourists, or so she said.

  What I mean to say is that my mother wa
s larger than life. My mother was very tired at the end of the day, when she turned out my lights and told me stories.

  “And the pink book of messages explaining what happened exactly, specifically, While You Were Out.”

  She stepped backward and away and pulled the door until it clicked behind her, no seam of light lingering along the edge.

  She took me away to start my jobs.

  Events cluttered calendars, then got crossed off.

  Events cluttered my leather-bound planner, but events were never annual.

  My leather-bound planner fit in a leather bag I bought with my first paycheck. I strapped the bag across my chest like a song, and grabbed it with two hands where it belted my lungs.

  One weekend, while visiting my mother, I found the academic boyfriend sitting on the rug reading a periodical. He had returned at last, without tenure. He was complaining to my mother about tenure. “Tenure!” he said. I was complaining about the world, about which I had brand new ideas, ideas that were brand new only to me. It was very important that I acted unimpressed. It was very important that I found his ideas particularly unfascinating. It was important, of course, that I seemed fascinating. I loosened my gait and looked anywhere but his face, his books, my dear old friend.

  “I have ideas about the world!” I said.

  “Tell me!” he said.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” I said, and I went to my room and shut the door. I fell asleep on top of my blanket. When I woke up forty minutes later, spit dried on my cheek, the tenure of his visit had ended. He had left me a new stack of books.

  I bought a futon for my new apartment and carried it upstairs. I met my very first boyfriend, my favorite boyfriend. He was at the grocery store in a halo of fluorescent light, pushing a cart full of foods that indicated an intermediate ability in the kitchen. He swiped his items for purchase against the self-serve register, and the register produced a series of beeps in affirmation, validation, a little song of beeps, some music for our meeting, some Morse code for warning. We carried our groceries side by side until I had traveled all the way to his place instead of mine.

  Another weekend of visiting my mother, and we were trying to secure her benefits. She asked her employer for benefits, but the benefits went to the person she was temporarily replacing. My mother was replacing a skyscraper.

  “Like, a building?” I asked, skeptical.

  “You used to believe I could do anything,” she said.

  My mother was replacing the person who operated the elevators in the skyscraper. She deserved a single, shiny benefit.

  “It would benefit us both,” she wrote to her employer, at my suggestion. Her cobbler had made her a pair of shoes for the job. They sparkled like a skyline, but my mother’s feet were useless all the same. The shoes she filled were constantly switching in size. Just imagine what that does to your feet.

  Her employer sent her a plan for benefits, brand new benefits, a gleaming set of benefits, set to start at the end of her placement.

  “Next time,” he said.

  “Next life,” my mother said.

  My mother had stopped hoping for steadiness long ago.

  When the pilot boyfriend’s plane went missing, we pretended it wasn’t so. We stood on the skyscrapers my mother had temporarily replaced. We looked up. We looked for him. We were thankful for our tickets around the world, the tickets that never arrived, that could still exist in our imagination. We were thankful for the dream of the trip, which no doubt exceeded any trip we could’ve taken. We were thankful for the memory of his arms like the wings of a plane, swooping down our block in a single, sturdy line of flight.

  I cancelled an interview with Farren. I cancelled a job grooming the canopy of a forest. I cancelled my marriage to the International Space Station.

  One night, I accidentally left my leather bag on the train, and in the bag I left my leather planner. Gone. I bought a new planner at the planner store. The leather was stiff and sad and still smelled too much of animal.

  I cut a weekend with my boyfriends short.

  A weekend of visiting my mother, and she was feeling just OK. I put her in a spot of sunshine by the window, and she leaned into the warmth like a plant.

  A weekend of visiting my mother, and I wanted to ask her advice. My newest job involved a woman and a closet full of shoes.

  “So many shoes,” she said, impressed.

  “I guess it’s because she’s lonely.”

  “Nothing more personal than that,” she said, falling asleep against the arm of the couch.

  My boyfriends multiplied by twos and threes, a response to forthcoming pain, perhaps, a bracing for an injury. We went on dates to our favorite bar, and I was happy. I could be happy and sad. It’s the way I can multitask, it’s the way two feelings can be the same feeling. It’s the way a rash and a willow can both weep.

  A weekend of visiting my mother, and she was very sick. The hospital room was crowded. Hands, legs, fingers, hairs, infinite pores, infinite dreams, infinite worlds, infinite tubes. I saw the beatnik, now more of a yuppie. I saw the hippie, now more of a hipster. I could see the boyfriends’ many faces buried under current, somber faces. The street vendor went to the vending machine and brought me an ice-cold soda. The baker put a warm hand on my back. I remembered sitting on his shoulders as a child; now, his shoulders hunched, his nose measured just above my chin.

  The very tallest boyfriend had also returned. I knew him only by his height, having never met him. Towering over the rest of us, slender and in a suit, like a crane in formal wear, leaning down next to the hospital bed, the better to do construction on my mother’s health. When he was there, she laughed and spoke in her biggest voice. He hovered over the other boyfriends and covered her hand with his, a tarp for her tubes and needles. She seemed as if she were getting better. His head hit the ceiling when he walked through the door.

  When a temp dies before the steadiness, it’s said she’s doomed to perform administrative work for the gods in perpetuity.

  Weekends visiting my mother at her grave, I lay splat, flat on my back. I sometimes bring a picnic. I always go alone. I sometimes write things down. To tell her what happens exactly, specifically, in detail, While She Is Out.

  SKY WORK

  The Agency for Fugitive Temps. Engaged when necessary to assist in damage control. Temps gone astray and jobs gone awry. With office outposts around the world, the AFT handles the paperwork, the protocol, the swishy cleanup of dark matters, derelict deeds, criminal materials. I take my place on the conveyor belt, at the back of the line for delinquent temps. All of us are carried along through a series of AFT interviews and questionnaires, fingerprinting and background checking, the belt delivering us past windows for stamping forms, cubbies for additional form distribution, and slots for the forms’ eventual deposit.

  “And who is your standard agency contact?” the clerk asks me.

  “Farren,” I say.

  “They’re all Farrens! Which one is yours?”

  “Farren, comma, City.”

  “City Farren. Right. And who’s your family contact?”

  “Also Farren?”

  “And who’s your emergency contact?”

  “I don’t know. Farren, I guess?”

  “Oh, I see, I see.” The clerk murmurs something to another clerk, then they murmur in harmony. “And you were employed by a client named … Carl?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Oh gosh, don’t you just love that guy?”

  “I guess.”

  “But don’t you just really love him? Like, real soulmate love?”

  “Maybe. Maybe I really did love him.” It hurts to think about it, but think about it I must. It’s part of the questionnaire.

  “But not too much, right? Like real, nonsexy, soulmate love? Like he was your soulmate employer?”

  “Is that a thing?”

  “Oh, you! You’re funny.” The clerk laughs so hard she snorts. “Anyway. Eh. Nee. Way. Suc
h a great boss, that Carl. We hear such great things! Such a shame about the whole prison situation, right?” the clerk asks with a conspiratorial tilt of the head.

  “A real shame.” I look around and wonder, Are these other temps in quite as much trouble as I am? Or maybe their trouble is worse.

  The conveyor belt dumps us in a waiting room where we sit and stew over our forthcoming placements.

  “Temp Number Five! Number Five, come to the front for your placement!”

  “Temp Number Fourteen! Oh no, I’m sorry. Temp Number Fifteen! Come to the front and bring your ticket.”

  “The idea,” Temp Fourteen says with a nasal whisper, “is to keep us hidden, keep us repentant.” She reclaims her seat, ticket clutched in her hand.

  “Are any of the fugitive placements desirable?” I ask.

  “Oh no,” she says, conferring with some of the other women, dealing out sticks of gum like aces and queens. “But they’re a necessary beat on the path back to the steadiness. This is my third time through the AFT.”

  This temp is twice my age, and her feet are now resting, elevated on a stool. She massages her ankles and curses the whole system. She’s been on this road long enough to know she should’ve already arrived. “When can a woman get a break?” this temp asks. No one answers. She waits for someone to answer; it wasn’t rhetorical. But we just chew our gum and look away. Long after my number is called, I imagine she waits there still.

  I report for work at the designated location and am met by a blimp the size of the moon, hovering in the sky and lowering a ladder.

  “Climb on up!” an amplified voice calls down.

  I climb the dangling ropes and take my position in the clouds.

  Aboard the blimp, the fugitive temps push buttons. The supervisor tells us when to push which button and where, and how, but not why. I’m still in training, so daily I observe the process.

  “Push the fourth button from the left,” she says. “Push it twice, then hold it down a third time for twenty seconds. On my count.”