“Drink this,” he said.
Elinor nodded. She took the glass in two hands and she drank the water. It was probably a dirty glass. It had a thumbprint on it. A depression settled over her.
“Mike, I really want this job,” said Elinor.
“E,” said Mike.
“And I just don’t think I’m going to get it,” said Elinor. “I’m so worried. I felt like I didn’t even say anything good during the interview.”
“It’s going to be fine,” said Mike. He got up from the pad. Elinor watched him put on a black T-shirt that read “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” and red, thin, plaid pajama pants. Then he lay down on the foam pad.
“I mean, maybe it wasn’t that bad. I don’t know.” Elinor took off all of her clothes, quickly and with her back to Mike even though he wasn’t looking at her. Then she crumpled next to him on the foam pad. She hugged his back. It was so bony, not much bigger than her own back. It might have been smaller.
“I remember,” said Mike in a sleepy voice, “how worried I was during this whole interview process. And look, I got the job. And now I have these great friends. Weren’t they so nice?”
“Yeah,” said Elinor.
* * *
· · ·
Weeks later, Elinor was sitting with Ramona and Fraunces in their Park Slope apartment. They were all in the living room, playing. Ramona had these blocklike Swedish dolls she was obsessed with, and she was lining up all of the dolls’ shoes in a row. The shoes were tiny and unstable, and Ramona wanted them very close together in a very straight line. It was an impossible task. Every time one of the shoes fell over from some inadvertent knock, Ramona would get extremely mad, and put the shoe back with unnecessary vigor. Then the whole line of shoes would fall down. Then Ramona would cry and make Elinor put all the shoes in a line again.
Elinor had a splitting headache. Today, Mike had gone to his first day of work at Memo Points Daily. He’d left two and a half hours early that morning because he “wanted to get an early start.”
“You didn’t put the shoes in the right line,” said Ramona.
“Yes, I did. Which one didn’t I?”
“This one.” Ramona pointed to a shoe that was slightly crooked.
“Okay,” said Elinor. “But this is the last time I’m going to put these shoes in a line. They always fall over.”
“Do it,” said Ramona in a dead voice, moving aside so that Elinor could have full access to the line of shoes, which were standing precariously, just waiting to be brutally knocked over.
Elinor was putting a green Mary Jane next to a red Mary Jane when her telephone rang. It was an unknown 212 number. Elinor’s stomach seized up.
“Why is your phone ring the sound of a dog barking?” asked Ramona in an accusatory way.
“Woof woof,” said Fraunces. He took his pacifier out of his mouth. He looked at Ramona in a prideful way.
“Fraunces, you have to stop barking because I have to answer the phone.” She tried to make some obliquely quieting motions with her hands. Fraunces barked even louder.
“Ramona,” said Elinor, watching her phone light up again with the ghostly visage of an unknown 212 number. “Can you play with him?”
Ramona gave a nod of acknowledgment and went over to Fraunces’s Legos and stood above them in a detached way. Fraunces stopped barking, put his pacifier in his mouth, and showed Ramona a Lego. Elinor picked up the phone.
“Hi, Elinor,” the phone said. Elinor recognized the voice on the other end as J.W. She barely breathed.
“I just wanted to congratulate you. You got the job at the Journalism.ly, congratulations.”
“Oh my god! Thank you!” said Elinor. “That is so amazing. Wow, thank you so much.”
“Yeah,” said J.W. “Anyway, you start on Monday. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” said Elinor. “Of course it’s okay.”
“Good,” said J.W. “See you soon then. Welcome to the team.”
“Goodbye!” said Elinor. A job! A job in journalism! Elinor looked at Ramona and Fraunces. Ramona was putting one Lego on top of another in a desultory fashion.
“Who was that?” asked Ramona. She looked at Elinor shrewdly.
“My new boss,” said Elinor, with glee. “I’m getting a new job. Can I play Legos with you guys?”
“You still have to do my shoe line,” said Ramona.
“Oh,” said Elinor. “I forgot about that. Thank you, Ramona.”
Ramona nodded. Fraunces was hitting two Legos together, as if they were tambourines. They were making a very loud noise. Elinor started to take Ramona’s shoes and put them in the line. Ramona came over and watched her, like a factory manager in Soviet Russia. About two minutes later, Elinor knocked the entire line of shoes down accidentally with her elbow. Ramona cried piteously.
Chapter 4
Facebook: 1 post: “I have a really exciting announcement! Next week, I start work at Journalism.ly [hyperlinked]! I’m so lucky and grateful for this opportunity and I can’t wait to start working at such an exciting place. From the time I was a little girl, I have dreamed of becoming a journalist, and now it is all coming true! #grateful #lucky #journalism #proud #goals.” 123 likes, from almost everyone, even strangers.
Twitter: 21 tweets. A lot of Journalism.ly articles. Perhaps she is bragging as well, slightly? Sample: “Such a meaningful amazing essay. Wow.” (Link to something called “What Reading Harry Potter Taught Me About the Middle East.”)
Instagram: 2 pictures of Mike. One of the top of his head, crouching over his legal pads with his back to the camera. Caption: “Hard at work! I hate to pull him away, but I must! We’re celebrating my new job! #proud #memopointsdaily #journalismly.”
The second, a picture of Mike’s eyes and forehead. He is wearing glasses. His hair is askew, as if he just woke up. The light is dim as if it is the morning, but it is in fact the afternoon and the light is dim because of the prison bars. Caption: “#bae.”
· · ·
That night, Elinor got home earlier than usual. Generally, Ramona and Fraunces’s mother wanted her to stay for dinner, but tonight she and her husband were going out and taking the kids with them to visit their friends from Sweden at a Swedish restaurant, so they didn’t need her to stay. It really couldn’t have been more convenient. Elinor had texted Mike about the new job, and he had texted back “Congrats!!!!!!!!!” but nothing much more than that. She hoped they could go out to dinner tonight or something and talk about it.
The apartment was dark when she entered it. The one light source in the room was Mike’s laptop, which seemed to be open on a Word document (she had never caught him being distracted or looking at websites). She could hear Mike’s voice. He was talking on the phone. Elinor put her bag down in the hall next to the door.
“No, Mom, I didn’t,” said Mike to the phone. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about.” There was a pause. “I don’t think she’s like that. I think that’s incredibly unfair.” The pause was longer.
“Mike?” said Elinor. “Is that your mom?”
“One second,” said Mike.
“Did you tell her I got the job at Journalism.ly?”
“Oh, Mom? Elinor just came in. Yes. So shut up. She wanted me to tell you she got the job at Journalism.ly. The one you set her up with? Yeah, yeah. Elinor, my mom says that’s great.”
“Can you hand me the phone? I just want to thank her myself?”
“Okay,” said Mike. He handed Elinor his iPhone. She heard some scuffling on the other end, and a silence.
“Pam?” said Elinor. “I just wanted to say thank you so much about the job.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“I’m so excited. Thank you so much!”
“I’m very happy for you,” said Mike’s mother.
Elinor tried to think of something to say. She rubbed her forehead with the hairs of her forearm and the hairs stood up. “Well, uh, I should probably give you back to Mike?”
“No, no, it’s okay. I’ve got to go anyway. But we’ll see you at our Memorial Day party? I was just going over the lists for all my parties this year.”
“Oh yes!” said Elinor. Mike’s mother gave a Memorial Day party every year. Elinor was really excited about it. It seemed like a good networking opportunity, which was an important part of being a journalist, which she soon was going to be. Last year, a columnist for the Metro section of The New York Times came!
“Great, great,” said Mike’s mother. “Bye!”
“Bye!” said Elinor.
Elinor turned toward Mike and gave him his phone back. It was not the most satisfying conversation, perhaps, but that was how talking to adults was—full of pauses.
“Your mom is so nice,” said Elinor. “It was so nice of her to help me. And like, look how it all turned out!”
“Yeah, you got the job,” said Mike, who turned and looked at his computer again. He even looked like he was going to start typing.
“How’s your story?” asked Elinor.
“It’s whatever,” said Mike. “I’m not done, but I can’t keep working on it tonight.”
“Want to go out to get some dinner?”
“I already ate.”
“You did? But I texted you I was leaving early.”
“I didn’t get a text. Maybe you thought you sent it, but you actually didn’t.”
“Check your phone,” said Elinor.
Mike sighed. He took out his phone and scrolled through the messages with his thumb. “Oh, okay, I see it. I didn’t see it because my mom called, I’m sorry.”
“I guess I’ll just get Seamless.”
Mike didn’t say anything.
Elinor went over to the minifridge and poured herself a glass of water from the Brita. The water was warm and tasted of iodine. The Brita had only recently been refilled. She felt a swell of self-pity.
“It’s okay about tonight,” said Elinor, in an injured voice, crouched near the refrigerator. “We can get dinner or something this weekend?”
“Actually, El, I think I might pitch that story to Kevin I was writing about the waste management plant in Queens, so I should probably go out there this weekend.” Kevin was Mike’s boss, who was one year older than Mike, and Mike seemed already to regard him as a surrogate father.
“So you’re going to be gone all weekend?”
“No,” said Mike, in an abrupt way. “I’m not.”
“But, are we even going to celebrate the fact that I got a new job?”
“Elinor, come on! Give me a fucking break, okay? I just started a new job.” Mike sighed. “I’m really happy for you. But I’m just working my ass off, and like, who knows what your job will be like?”
“Well, I think it’s going to be an intense job. It’s not going to be this lame thing. I think I’ll probably have to work pretty hard.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to work that hard, El. Which is good! But we’ll see. I mean, congrats, hon. I’m proud of you.”
Elinor was silent.
“Are you mad or something?”
“I’m not mad,” said Elinor.
“I’m congratulating you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t get it,” Mike yelled. “I don’t get what the fuck I did. You always take offense to every single fucking thing.”
“I just think this job is going to be really hard, okay?” said Elinor. “I’m probably just stressed.”
“God.” Mike looked at what Elinor could now see was a blank Word document. “I feel like we’re always fighting.”
“We’re not fighting,” said Elinor. “I don’t think we’re always fighting.”
“I just feel like you’re always mad at me.”
“I’m not,” said Elinor. “I’m really not.”
Elinor felt like crying. Why was she mad? What had he even said? She walked over to Mike’s desk, and placed her hand next to his computer. “I’m sorry. I have just been so stressed for so long about this job thing and being unemployed and stuff. I’ve been waiting so long for a job.”
“It’s fine.”
“We should do something fun this week,” said Elinor brightly. “I’m serious. Do you want to go to Sheila’s party? She’s having some people over for drinks.”
“In Murray Hill?” said Mike. He wrinkled his nose. “Ugh. I actually can’t anyway. The office is having this networking thing, or I guess more of a drinks thing, from six to eight p.m. Especially because I just started I feel like I really have to go. It’s really good networking.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Maybe we could meet up after?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Elinor. She wasn’t really surprised. Although Sheila had always liked Mike, Mike had never liked Sheila. Mike didn’t like any of her friends. They never talked about anything he liked to talk about, he said. They just talked about boys. Sometimes Elinor became embarrassed for them if they talked at all while Mike was around, because that was true.
“I’m going to order Seamless,” said Elinor. She took out her computer and sat down on the foam pad and proceeded to do what she said she was going to do.
* * *
· · ·
On Monday, Elinor got to the Journalism.ly at 9:00 a.m., when J.W. had told her to arrive. The lights were off in the stairwell. When she finally climbed all the stairs, there was no one stationed at the reception desk in the lobby. The doors to the main office were locked. After a short interval of jangling the doorknob of the Journalism.ly to no avail, she sat on the chair near the reception desk. She tried to read current events on her phone. She was reading an article called “We Could Solve Congress by Employing This Swedish Technique” on Memo Points Daily when a man came up the stairs.
This man had long brown hair and was wearing tweed trousers and yellow suspenders, but in a way that seemed purposeful. Without saying anything to Elinor, he opened the door with several keys from a huge key ring. The Journalism.ly office had five different locks.
“Hi! I’m Elinor,” said Elinor, while the man in the suspenders was unlocking the third lock, seemingly unaware of her presence. “I’m a new employee? Today’s my first day.”
“Oh,” said the guy. He had a low, bored voice. He stared at her, neither friendly nor unfriendly. “Why’re you here so early?”
“I was told to be here at nine a.m.”
“Nobody gets here until eleven at least. I get here the earliest of everyone and that’s literally to unlock the door. Most people work from home in the morning. Come in,” he said. Elinor walked behind him into the office, abashed.
“I was gonna make some coffee if you want any,” said the guy, rapidly turning on the lights all over the room with one switch, like in a gymnasium. He darted toward the kitchen.
“Sure.”
Elinor wasn’t sure if she should follow him so she just stayed in the main newsroom, looking at everything. The whole setup seemed roughly the same as what she remembered—but bereft of people, more fleeting and amateur. The tables seemed flimsier. The floor had black marks on it, like it had never been cleaned since some heavy machinery had been removed.
“So what do you do here?”
“What?” the guy yelled from the kitchen. Elinor walked closer to the kitchen entrance and hovered around it. Inside, the man was making coffee.
“So what’s your job here?” asked Elinor in a quieter voice.
“I do the office shit. And I open the office,” he said, scooping the coffee into the top of the coffeemaker with a rotund metal spoon.
“Do you like it?” asked Elinor.
“Yeah,” said the guy. He fastened the lid on the top of the coffeemaker. “The coffee will be ready soon. I have to go open up Sean’s office.”
“Okay,” said Elinor. Then the man walked out of the newsroom, and presumably into Sean’s office. Elinor sat down at a table near the window.
For the next hour, Elinor sat at the table. Someone had penciled “WTF?” on the corner o
f the table in very small gray letters. The suspenders guy never came back. Occasionally, she helped herself to cups of coffee in the kitchen, to give herself something to do. There was something wrong with the coffee. It still had grounds floating in it.
At around 11:00 a.m. people started trickling into the office, all carrying laptop bags under their arms. Everyone who worked at the Journalism.ly was pretty young and seemed visibly depressed to be at work. On entering the newsroom, they immediately helped themselves to the coffee and sat at tables where Elinor wasn’t sitting. Elinor didn’t see anyone she knew or who had hired her. A part of her wondered if she should go around asking people what she was supposed to do, but a larger part of her thought that would be annoying and that it was appropriate to wait.
At 12:00 p.m., right when Elinor was wondering whether she should get lunch and what it would be, J.W. walked through the door. He was carrying a fake leather briefcase. He was wearing a light blue shirt open at the neck. Elinor stumbled up from her seat and lunged toward him.
“J.W.!” she said. J.W. looked at her as if she had roused him out of a trance. He blinked slowly.
“Hello?” he said.
“It’s me, Elinor. It’s my first day.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Do you have your computer?”
“No one told me to bring one?” said Elinor.
“Yeah, you have to bring your computer from home,” said J.W., who started walking quickly across the room. Elinor followed him, not quite knowing where he was going. He stopped next to a table where five other people were sitting.
“Sit here,” said J.W. “I’ll get you a computer. But you can’t keep it. It’s our spare computer.”
“Okay,” said Elinor. She sat down at her new table, and J.W. walked away, presumably in search of a computer. All the people at her table were typing furiously. Elinor looked over the shoulder of the girl sitting next to her and realized she had four chat boxes open and they were all blinking maniacally.
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