by Libby Malin
But of course I’m not back on track. And it doesn’t take long for me to completely derail. My job sucks. Big time.
The morning of my first day starts inauspiciously with a coffee stain on my new white blouse and a spat with Henry. Hmm…maybe we are beginning to act like an old married couple, after all, jumping over the whole courtship and wedding ceremony to the annoying rows.
As I change my outfit, Henry pops his head in the door of the spare bedroom and tells me he needs to get going. I’m dropping him off at work so I can borrow his car. God knows how I’ll get to work without it since I have to drive nearly forty minutes to get to the college.
“I’m almost ready,” I say, dragging out the floral dress again. I don’t have a clean blouse to wear with the suit or the skirt. When I appear in the hallway a few seconds later, Henry looks at me funny, but he can’t put his finger on what’s wrong. I don’t tell him.
After we hit the road, he takes issue with my driving, which is a sensitive topic with me to begin with. He tells me what lane to get in and when, and he visibly cringes when I take a too-fast turn onto Charles and screech to a halt in front of his building.
He asks me to either pick him up or drop off the car by six. Then, before he gets out, he says, “You know, you should make sure this job is really worth it.”
“Look, I’m sorry I need the car,” I say, exasperated. Traffic is behind me, and I’m afraid I’ll get stuck in a jam near Tess’s and be late. “I’ll go car-shopping this weekend, okay?”
“It’s not about the car.” His hand rests on the door handle. “You shouldn’t be taking the first thing that comes along. It might not be up to your standards.”
“What standards? My standards are I’m out of work and broke!” I look in the rearview and see a minivan careening around me. “Besides, I thought you’d be happy for me.”
“I’m glad you found something so quickly. But if it turns out to be a bad fit, you’re no better off than you were before. You could be worse off, in fact. Stuck in a bad job and no time to job hunt. At least at the flower shop you had flexibility—to job hunt.”
“I have to get going.”
“So do I. See ya.” He smiles and leaves and I seethe all the way up Charles Street. Why didn’t he say something last night? Why did he wait until the first day of my new job to rain on my parade?
But last night, after our shopping spree, we celebrated my new job in a different way. Shivers compete with my white-hot seething.
By the time I make my way to Our Lady of the Air Freshener, I’m in a foul mood, and not just because there was a detour around 3900 Charles because of road work. Here I landed a job back in my old field in the space of a few days and nobody seems to be celebrating with me. Gina’s good wishes were perfunctory. Henry is skeptical. And Wendy was too tired to care. If they don’t care, why should I?
Why should I care fast becomes my theme song. After I fill out the requisite papers in the Human Resources office, I head up to the communications suite to report for duty.
When I interviewed with Karen Armstrong, it was in her office, a modest-size room with an airy view of the campus. I assumed that my office would be a nice bright little room next to hers that had seemed unoccupied when I’d come in. But I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong.
Turns out that office really belongs to the PR secretary, Irene Slayson. While she gets the great view of rolling farmland and interstate, I get a far corner of a narrow closetlike room with a thin dirty window stuck high in the wall. My work space consists of an L-shaped desk. If I roll my chair back an inch too far, I’m jammed in the neck by the edge of a drafting table. If I roll it an inch too far to the left, my elbow smacks a long table spread with mass-mailing materials that volunteers handle almost every day.
An attractive woman in her late fifties, Irene shows me to my abode and helps me boot up the computer.
“I didn’t know they were hiring anyone,” she says, eyeing me as if I’m pulling a fast one on her. “That’s a shocker.”
Irene disappears and works all day on jobs for Karen, who doesn’t put in an appearance until after lunch. She zooms past my closet with a quick glance in my direction but does not return to give me assignments. So I seek her out and suggest that I get started on the employee newsletter which I’d like to redesign. I spent all morning reading old issues and already know what I want to do to make it better. It won’t take much.
She nods and grunts out an okay, then holds up her hand for me to wait while she rummages through piles of papers until she finds a couple folders.
“Here,” she says, handing them to me. “This is information on upcoming events, things of interest. Do some press releases on them.”
I head back to my office and see that other chickens have taken up roost there. Three silver-haired women in polyester pantsuits sit at the long table. When I come in, they smile brightly. The one nearest my computer speaks up.
“Are we supposed to finish labeling these?” She holds up an alumni magazine that is about six months old.
“Uh…”
“Or should we work on the annual campaign letter?” The one in the middle holds that up as well. I notice it is more recent than the magazine—only two months old.
“Well…”
“I thought we were supposed to do something new today,” the third one says.
I plop my files down on my desk and search out Irene, but she has vanished. Irene seems to vanish fairly frequently. Karen’s gone as well, so I return to the closet that I now share with three other women who smell of Jean Naté and Prince Matchabelli, and I tell them they should just do whatever they had been doing the last time they were in.
When I sit down and start to look at the press release file, they bombard me with other questions.
“Are you new here?”
“Did you go to school at the college?”
“Are you married?”
“I have a nephew who just moved into town.”
It’s a steady stream of chatter. When they aren’t talking to me, they talk to one another. One has rheumatoid arthritis and is taking shark bone every night. Another has hemorrhoids and sticks with good ol’ Preparation H, and the third is seeing her eye doctor about cataracts the next day.
I am certifiable by the end of the day. If I thought I was nuts before, this job will seal the deal. I get nothing accomplished. My office is a cell. And no one seems to care that I’m working there.
When I pick up Henry, however, I plaster a smile on my face and tell him the work is great, my boss is a dream, and I really like working on a college campus. At least the last part’s true. We order in Chinese and I call Wendy and tell her I don’t need to borrow any clothes. I’ll make do with what I have. Hell, I might even wear the coffee-stained blouse tomorrow. No one will notice, I’m sure. I hit the sack at nine-thirty. A bad job can wear you out.
The next day is no better. But at least I start picking up a rhythm. The volunteers seem to appear in the afternoon, so I work feverishly in the morning in order to allow for the interruptions after lunch.
The work itself, by the way, is mind-numbing. At least at the flower shop, I had scads of free time to daydream and feel sorry for myself. Here, my time is occupied with tasks that sear every imaginative brain cell from my head.
I write press releases about the college’s anniversary. I write newsletter stories about how our English department chair gave a talk at her local church on “Understanding the Subjunctive.” I ghost-write speeches for our president, Sister Mary Altamont, extolling the virtues of the college, scrupulously avoiding the fact that we’re not attracting new students, that our current students are all kids who probably should be repeating high school, and how our outstanding loans are about to default and our fund-raising campaign has gone down the toilet because the development director quit in a huff the week before.
Which kind of explains why they hired me so quickly. I have to spend half my time writing fund-raising letters and grant p
roposals, something I’ve never done before. In one of her rare appearances in the office, Karen shows me how to use the boilerplate information on the college and tweak it for each new grant possibility.
I suspect Karen is job hunting. Once, when I go into her office, she’s not there (no surprise) but her résumé is up on her computer screen. And I’ve overheard her scheduling an interview.
You see, another drawback of my office is that no one bothered to hook up a phone for me. The phone on my desk is a party line with Karen’s. If she’s on the line, I can’t use it. And if I’m on the line, she just punches away at the keypad, ignoring my pleas to stop. I’ve picked up the phone a few times when she’s been talking to Human Resources offices about job responsibilities.
Turns out Karen’s not the only one looking. The day after I arrive, the admissions director leaves for a job in Kentucky. And the dean of students is scheduled to head for greener pastures in Louisiana by the end of the month. Those are just the ones who’ve made their plans public. According to Irene, the registrar is going to retire soon and the secretary to both the Athletics and Chaplain’s offices will announce her intention to take maternity leave in a month when she starts showing.
I’m on a sinking ship. They must have mistakenly thought I was a life preserver when they hired me. Have I put on weight? I wonder. Note to self: don’t wear white.
That Friday, Sister Mary steps into my closet and grills me about corporate communications strategies and it becomes clear that they think because I worked in the business world, I must have some amazing savvy, that I will be able to design a public relations program that creates an image of success that leads to success itself. They think I have some goddamned magic wand. She stares at me and says cryptically, “Well, you’ll think of something” and smiles even more broadly. I feel like I’m in the Lilies of the Field movie.
I might be good, but I’m not that good. Nobody is. So I tactfully point out to Sister Mary that sending press releases out every day announcing even the smallest occurrence at the college won’t save our butts. In fact, sending out too many releases of the type that we’re sending—announcing personnel changes—telegraphs the very opposite message. She purses her lips together, nods, says “Hmm…” and leaves, nearly tripping over a stack of old alumni magazines.
The job leaves me bushed and irritable, but damned if I’ll tell Henry that. He just figures it’s PMS. Friday night, Fred calls me to ask if I’m going into the flower shop the next day as I “promised.” Groaning, I say yes. So much for a languid weekend curled up with a good book or a good Henry. Or going car shopping. Henry frowns when I tell him.
“I’m going to have to have my car back eventually,” he says as I drink herbal tea wrapped in my terry-cloth robe in the kitchen. He’s annoyed with me to begin with because I don’t want to go out tonight. I’m beat, I tell ya! I’d fall asleep at a movie, and yawn my way through an expensive dinner. I’m out like a light at ten while he watches tennis. No need to worry about that “owning the cow” business. Henry’s getting no milk from me.
On Monday, the car situation for Henry begins to look up. The ship of Our Lady of the Air Freshener is headed for the iceberg with deadly precision.
Karen is leaving. I don’t find this out, though, until right before I’m about to leave for the day. As Mrs. Kliegle, one of the volunteers, packs up her purse to vamoose, she looks at me over the top of her reading glasses and says, “Are you going to apply for the director’s job now that Karen’s gone?”
“Huh?”
“What an opportunity for you. You should take it,” Mrs. Kliegle continues.
“Well, I…where exactly was it that Karen went?” Come to think of it, Karen didn’t come in at all today.
“Skidmore. My grandson told me this weekend. He said it was in the employee newsletter.”
After Kliegle leaves, I search out Irene, but she’s as clueless as I am. I’d step into Sister Mary’s office for a moment and ask her, but her door has been closed tight all day and her secretary has been transferring in a series of calls from bankers. I hear Sister Mary’s voice now from behind the door saying things like “The end of the week? Well, we thought we’d have more time….”
So on Tuesday, I become acting director of public relations, a title that would look good on my résumé if I held it for more than four days, which I am not destined to do because on Wednesday, Sister Mary Altamont asks me into her office, quietly shuts the door and tells me she’s going to need “every ounce of strength and wisdom” I have to give. She’s not smiling any longer.
The college will not open for the coming academic year. Those bankers who called her were giving her the bad news on the financial situation. In a calm voice she explains how the college hasn’t been able to keep up with the times, how a big gift from a deceased alumna was lost when heirs fought it and won in court, and how the college can barely meet payroll from week to week. By the time she’s finished, I’m afraid she’s going to start bawling. Her mouth is turned down into a sorry scowl, and her lips quiver along with her voice. I don’t think I can handle a crying nun. It does not compute.
So I muster all my knowledge and energy and advise her on how to handle the announcement. Since Karen is gone, I have to arrange for a press conference, which we’ll hold the very next day. Sister would have deferred, but if there’s one thing I know it’s bad news will find its way out faster than you can say “abandon ship.” Better to make the announcement herself and control it than to have reporters nosing around Sixty Minutes-style if she delays.
I work overtime getting everything ready, and that night I tell Henry what the situation is. He doesn’t say “I told you so,” but he does raise his eyebrows, and then he tells me that maybe next time I’ll wait for “something more suitable” to my skills, instead of “selling myself” too cheaply.
Huh! He’s getting me for free! No, scratch that—I’d offered to share expenses. I’m paying him! Well, I won’t be paying him for long.
Right after the press conference, which is a showcase for my media talents, by the way, Sister Mary Altamont calls me into her office again. She spends a quarter hour profusely thanking me for setting it all up so well, and I’m beginning to think this is a prelude to giving me a bonus when she tells me I’ll be let go at the end of the week because they’re only going to be using a skeleton crew as they shut down the college. Last in, first out.
Mrs. Kliegle and the other volunteers give me an Avon gold-toned cross necklace as a parting gift. Apparently, they knew I’d be leaving before I did.
When I come home bedraggled and depressed on Friday night, my arms full of press releases for my portfolio, Henry gives me a hug.
“Something will break for you soon,” he says.
What does that mean? Ice will break so I can move forward? Or china will shatter on my head?
“Let’s go out to eat,” he says. “I’m too tired to cook. And you look beat, too.”
We’ve eaten out or gotten carryout virtually every night since I began my job, but I don’t protest. I wouldn’t have the strength to scramble an egg tonight.
Later, I lie down on the bed in the spare room just to “rest my eyes a bit.” When I awaken at three in the morning, a coverlet has been pulled over my shoulders and the lights are out. That Henry. Maybe he’s not so bad.
chapter 16
Thornless rose: Early attachment
Even before you make a commitment to a guy, he can sting. On my fifth date with Rick, we both started talking about earlier relationships. The fact that we could open up to each other so quickly was a sign of how compatible we were, how few games we were playing. It felt good to tell him about my high school sweetheart (who dumped me after going off to college) and the ones I dated during my own undergraduate years, including Ted Brinkley, a history major I actually considered marrying for a while (not that he’d asked me). But when it was Rick’s turn to share and he told me about his law school flame, Sally Chessman, it didn’
t feel so good. It pricked. That was when I knew I was falling in love with him. And that was the night we first made love—at my place, to the accompaniment of Tony Bennett on the CD player and the scent of a rose-perfumed candle.
Being jobless never felt so good.
In fact, after the Our Lady of the Air Freshener fiasco, I’ve come to truly appreciate the up side of joblessness. Henry has his car to himself and I have, well, sleep. And I’m not really jobless because I can still work at the flower shop whenever I feel like it, selling off inventory—at least the silk flower arrangements—and closing the books, right? In fact, going into the flower shop is high on my priority list given how I’ve neglected it.
The down side is that blasted problem of having no income. I’m not even sure I can count on getting my paycheck from Our Lady, which Sister Mary told me should be mailed out “by the end of next week—hopefully.” And Fred’s client has put me on an “independent contractor” status, meaning I only get paid for the hours I work at the shop. I can hardly complain about that arrangement after my less-than-scrupulous attention to the store.
Henry makes it clear on Monday that he doesn’t expect me to contribute to expenses until I “get back on my feet again.” As much as I appreciate the offer, I don’t enjoy feeling like a “kept woman.” Oh, no, I’d much rather be the Little Woman who pays her keeper. Remember the cow?
“I’ll cook,” I say over breakfast. I’m still in my robe while Henry is pressed and combed, in a black pin-striped suit and blue shirt. Man he looks good. I run my fingers through my hair to neaten it. “No more carryout. It’s the least I can do.”
“Whatever,” he says. But he gives me his Atlantic Food Mart card so I can buy groceries.
The first week of this new joblessness has me canceling Henry’s cleaning service, scurrying around searching for dustballs, going to the market, cooking new gourmet recipes (some of which I get from Gina) and giving the want ads at least a cursory glance in the mornings, circling a few so that Henry will see the circles before he throws the newspaper in the recycling bin each night. Okay, and I send in a résumé from time to time as well.