"I totally get it. Pick a city, live there several years, go back home. Why are you interested in heading back out?"
"I...I liked it. I like it. The independence of it."
"Was it your first time away?"
"Singapore? Yes it was."
"Any problems adjusting?"
"Just the first few months. After, I was fine."
"Do you think you have it in you to do it all over again?"
I had notes for this interview. It was for a cause-oriented organization so I was ready to pledge my love for dolphins and children and the ozone layer. I was ready to shun plastics and ride bikes if they asked me to, but the life choice drama was a bit unexpected.
"Of course," I said automatically. "I find it exciting."
"Everyone does, at first," Stacy said. "But I’ve gone through three assistants who say the exact same thing at the interview and then bail on me a year or two later."
The pattern, Stacy claimed, was that they were always enthusiastic at the beginning, but then there would be the homesickness, the better career opportunity in Australia, the sudden engagement to the British guy.
"I’m not against anyone making choices for their own personal growth and whatever," Stacy added, because the story was making me think just that. "But when I hire someone I actually need them around for as long as I’m here, and I need to know if you feel the same way, or you’re just going to be waiting for the next big thing to come along and ditch this job for it. I’m going to be frank about it because I know how it feels. I’ve done that to other jobs too. But I really need someone reliable here, and it’ll also be good for you to know that this is the commitment I need."
"This is my big thing," I said, seeing an opening and slipping in what I could. "I have a plan for what the next few years of my life will be like, and this trip back home is just the layover. I do intend to spend the next few years discovering what could be my calling."
Stacy smiled at me and the screen froze a little bit, then kicked into motion again. "—this connection. Am I back?"
"Yes, you are."
"So how long do you intend to work on discovering your calling?"
The trick question. "As long as it takes."
I wasn’t sure if Stacy bought that, but we continued to talk, more about the specifics of the work and what would be required. It went on for maybe another half hour, and in my opinion I was the perfect applicant.
Except this time I was so sure I was saying the right things, but I didn’t know how I felt about it. If I would come to accept it as true.
Chapter 16
The fourth time I babysat Liam, he had the train set again. (No more markers, I told Sarah.) He was playing with it on the floor near the Tower 3 entrance.
"Konnichiwa," I said to the woman, still sitting in her usual spot.
She nodded and responded, and I could make out "parent" and "boy" and not much else. I nodded back though, and it seemed to be enough for her.
"How’s Sir Ethan, Miss Moira?" my favorite guard Kuya Alan said, out of the blue, from his spot at the doorway.
"I don’t know," I answered, and that made me realize that I hadn’t seen him in—I wasn’t sure how long. Oh god, was he still here? Would be leave without saying anything? "He still lives here, right?"
"Yes," Kuya Alan said, and it was amazing how relieved I was. "I’m sorry. I was just—"
"Small talk. I understand. It’s okay."
I wondered how much Kuya Alan knew about me. Or him. Or everyone. If he wasn’t at the door, he’d be at the reception desk where the CCTV monitors were, or maybe the security staff talked about us on their breaks or something. Even with the dozens of people living in the building, everyone had a routine, and it was easy to spot when the routine had changed. Like when people stopped being seen at the gym together, or coming in at midnight after a really late dinner.
Not that it would be ethical to gossip, but we were all human. We all wanted to know.
"Do you know if he’s been making plans to move out?" I asked, not even pretending to be casual.
"He hasn’t requested for anything, no."
"Okay. Great." Two more weeks then, at least. Maybe. Sometimes I would try to listen for telltale noises coming from the unit below mine, but he was either super quiet or the walls were that thick.
Liam pulled at my pant leg and I noticed that the hour and a half that Sarah usually asked for, it was up. I had never had to remind her before, but I sent her a text then.
"On my way," was her reply.
When she appeared fifteen minutes later, she looked frazzled and annoyed, not rested like previous times.
"Did you fight with the husband again?" I said as a greeting. "I told you not to do stressful stuff on your ‘me time.’ You have ninety minutes to yourself..."
She sighed. "I know. It’s my fault. I attract stress, I guess. Thank you so much, Moira, really." Then Sarah surprised me by giving me a tight, long hug, the kind that nearly cut off my breath. When she pulled away she had tears in her eyes, but she didn’t tell me anything about it.
I recognized the smell that was on her, though.
-///-
SARAH
I. CAREER AND FINANCES
+ Doesn’t have to work or worry about money
+ Can afford NV Park
II. FAMILY AND FRIENDSHIPS
+ Adorable son
+ Relatively near family and friends support system
- No time to socialize because of toddler
III. LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS
+ Married, shouldn’t worry about finding someone
- Distance not so fun
- Distracting oneself with attractive neighbor, not so smart
IV. PERSONAL FULFILLMENT
+ She wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, and she is one
- Seems like it’s not enough
-///-
JM was the kind of guy who wore men’s cologne, and you could tell from just being around him. Sometimes when it was a hot day and you were in an elevator with sweaty people it was a blessing just to sniff something pleasant. Other times it ruined the moment, introducing itself as an artificial thing in the environment and then overwhelming everything else.
So it freaked me out a little that I might have been enabling an affair by watching the toddler. Every time I watched the toddler, freaky stuff might have been happening.
Ugh. Eeeh. Bleach, for my brain.
He invited me to dinner that night and told me about the show. They just shot the pilot, and it seemed to have gone well.
"Do you still need me?" I said, as I ate my mozzarella-stuffed burger, trying to get the thoughts of where he was just hours ago and what he was likely doing out of my mind.
"I think so," he said earnestly, because he was nothing but earnest. "They might want me to do an interview next time, so I can’t do as many takes."
"Why are you so nervous? You sound fine when you talk to me."
"I go blank with other people. Strangers."
"You chose a funny career for someone who does that."
JM shook his head. "I didn’t choose this, but it was offered, and people need me to do well here."
Oh finally, something to talk about other than the possibly hooking up with a married woman. "Does your family live here?"
"We’re everywhere. My dad’s in Australia. My mom is here. They’re not together anymore."
"Sorry about that."
"It’s not a big deal. But my mom really needs her own money, so... well."
"Does she work?"
"Yes, but there’s a lot of debt. This isn’t the most secure job, but at least it’s easy and they want me."
I took this for granted because I noticed that people kept looking at him, but JM wasn’t exactly A list. He had one job, and it was on a small show, and I wasn’t exactly being pushed violently aside by screaming fans. Was he going to hit it big? Maybe. But this also might be the best it was going to get.
And
then he’d have to fend for himself, like the rest of us.
At least my entire livelihood wasn’t dependent on my looks. How exactly would I have fared? Sure I had confidence now, but I was judging against my own past performance (I knew I looked better now than before), and not the prettiest faces in town.
JM
I. CAREER AND FINANCES
- Not really a career, not really stable
+ He has everything he needs though (for now)
II. FAMILY AND FRIENDSHIPS
- Complicated family relationships
- Complicated friendships
III. LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS
- Complicated relationships
IV. PERSONAL FULFILLMENT
- Focusing on other people, can’t be fulfilling his own needs right now
Chapter 17
The girl in the ad looked much younger than me, but she was wearing a blazer and high heels and her hair was tied back, so that probably meant she was my age. Or what stylists imagined people my age looked like.
She was pushing a shopping cart along an animated road and she was putting colorful boxes of different sizes in her cart. A small box labeled "food." A slightly larger one labeled "clothes." A huge one labeled "house." And then a not so large but not so small one, "insurance."
A smartly-dressed lady who reminded me of my mom facilitated the discussion, asking the eight of us fellow twenty-something females in the room certain questions about the ad, if it appealed to us, if we at all related to it.
"My box for food would be bigger," Roxie said.
It wasn’t the only thing she said. Roxie had an opinion on everything from the model’s hair to her shade of lipstick to the font face used for the slogan. She did disclose that she worked in marketing, and these things mattered to her.
As for me, my contribution was pretty much just one thing.
"It doesn’t address to me why someone my age would buy insurance, the real reason," I said, when asked directly, given I had been so quiet throughout. "Fear."
-///-
"So how was it?"
"Fine, excellent, until Moira here made it morbid. I’m Roxie, by the way."
"Ashley. Thank you for coming, both of you. You really did me a favor. As I said, coffee’s on me."
Yes it made sense that Ashley, as in Ashley Lorenzo, as in Ethan’s sister, would invite me to that focus group discussion. It was being organized by her ad agency and they needed "women in their late twenties who were starting to make big purchases and investments" and that was me, exactly. Also it was happening at three p.m. on a random Friday and not many of Ashley’s employed friends could make it. She encouraged me to bring a friend, and Roxie was always up for this.
"Morbid how?" Ashley asked as we settled into the coffee shop at the ground floor of her office building.
Roxie laughed, setting her bag down on an empty chair. "She started going on about how the only reason that a young woman thinks of buying insurance is because of fear. Of not having enough, of leaving people behind without enough, blah blah blah."
I sighed. "I don’t know how helpful that’s going to be, but they did ask my opinion."
"Oh I hope it wasn’t a waste of time for you, Moira," Ashley said.
"Not at all. My unemployment hours are infinitely more useless," I joked.
"And I welcome any opportunity to get out in the afternoon and hang out with you, because you have not been updating me lately," Roxie said, and that should have been my cue to kick her under the table, but I wasn’t fast enough. "Are you really done with kissing the guy?"
"Excuse me?" Ashley’s eyes lit up.
"Roxie," I groaned, which was also the wrong thing to do.
"Is this my brother?" Ashley squealed, nearly.
Roxie’s mouth dropped open. "Your brother lives in her building? What exactly is going on here?"
"Nothing! Absolutely nothing." But surely my face was bright red and I wished we had ordered coffee first, so I could hide behind a mug. "Roxie doesn’t know what she’s talking about."
"I will get us some drinks," Ashley said, "But please don’t change the topic."
I tried to anyway, but when she returned she insisted on sticking to it.
"So, you and my kuya," she said. "What’s the status really?"
"Excellent question," Roxie added, nodding.
"There’s nothing. No status. In fact he’s probably mad at me. I said some stuff and I haven’t seen him in two weeks or so." The coffee was too hot but I took a big gulp anyway.
Ashley shook her head. "He won’t say anything. He’ll just disappear. He’s so good at that. But you’re really with the other guy now?"
"What other guy?" I said.
"What other guy?" Roxie said.
"I asked him about you and he said you were dating Julian Martin now."
"What?" I said.
"Holy shit," Roxie exclaimed. "I didn’t know this! You’ve moved on to strippers now?"
So they totally lost me, at least from "other guy" I was supposedly dating onwards, and both of them scrambled to catch me up.
"This guy, he lives in your building," Ashley said, "He used to be an exotic dancer in Australia and now he’s like a minor celebrity here. But videos of him at his ‘previous job’ sort of went viral around here months ago."
Roxie thrust her phone in my face, a Google image search page open and featuring a scantily-clad and oiled JM. "He’s your neighbor?"
"It’s JM," I stuttered. "He’s this really nice, sort of simple guy...and he’s a friend. Get that away from me."
He didn’t mention any of this. Should he have? He probably assumed I knew already.
"Well Kuya Ethan thinks you’re with him," Ashley said.
"He can think whatever he wants to think," I retorted. "It’s none of his business."
"But...you’re not with him. Shouldn’t he know that? I’ll tell him that."
"Why should it matter?"
"What is going on?" Roxie demanded. "I think you need to back up and give me a full update, with names and dates and places please."
"I don’t need that much detail," Ashley said, much to my relief. "But I’m just saying, he should know that you’re not really with this guy. I mean, I don’t know if he’ll do anything about it, but at least he knows."
"It won’t matter anyway, right? He’s leaving soon. I’m leaving soon."
"So that’s the drama?" Roxie said. "Because you’re leaving at some unspecified time?"
"He’s leaving sooner!" I said defensively. "It could be any day now. What’s the point?"
Roxie crossed her arms. "I disapprove."
"You’re not my mother."
Ashley sighed. "I’m disappointed, to be honest. I actually thought he’d fight for someone, for once."
So that stung a bit, because the two weeks of silence from Ethan really just meant I wasn’t that someone. But that was just one thing on top of a huge pile of WTF for this conversation already. "You’re not my mother either."
With much difficulty I managed to get them to talk about other things, but Roxie just had one last word on it when we shared a cab home later.
"I’m still seeing Peter," she said, out of the blue.
"What? You can’t be. Isn’t he in Seoul now?"
"That was before. He’s in New Zealand now. He comes home every few years. And we see each other."
"What do you mean..."
And then it sunk in, what it meant. Peter was an ex-boyfriend of Roxie’s, the one she dated around the same time I was seeing George. He broke up with her when he went to grad school abroad. He had been hopping around living everywhere as some kind of literature professor since then, but I didn’t think they were that in touch.
"But you’ve seen other people since he left," I said.
She kept her eyes on the road, which was useless because she wasn’t driving. "I know."
"So how does that work?"
"We see each other when he’s here."
&
nbsp; "Is that...do you have coffee?"
Roxie gave me a look. "Sometimes not just coffee."
I whistled at that. "That is screwed up. So that’s it then? You’re just going to pine for him forever. What’s the deal with our ‘curse’ then? You had a reason for remaining single all this time."
"I like thinking that I’m in the same boat as you," she said. "You really have everything to look forward to, you know."
"Don’t say that. My life is...nothing’s in it right now. I wouldn’t wish this on you, when I know what you’ve got going on."
"Stop saying that."
"Stop saying what?"
"That you have ‘nothing going on’ with you right now. Are you trying to make me feel better? I know you’re lying."
Our cab driver coughed, and sort of fidgeted uncomfortably. Yeah, I know the feeling, Manong.
"I’m not lying, Roxie. I really literally have nothing going on. I’m a bum and I only get to go out when I see you. While you have so much. I don’t get this drama you’re making out of it."
"Oh please," Roxie snapped, her eyes sharp all of a sudden. "You have money, you got to live in Singapore, you got to go out and experience the world and whatever. And I know you think I’m a coward for not trying it, so don’t even—"
"I never said that."
"No, but you thought it, I’m sure. The way you keep saying that you’ve got nothing is stupid, really, because what does that even mean? What does that say about what I’ve done, because I haven’t done half things you have—"
I bristled at this. "It’s not supposed to say anything about your life, unless you’re being insecure about it."
"Right. Make this about me."
"It’s obviously about you! What are we talking about?"
Roxie shook her head. "We are talking about you going away, having a great time, and coming back here telling everyone that it was no big deal. What’s up with that? You don’t have to pretend to be dissatisfied with your life so we won’t feel bad about ours. I’m not jealous of you at all."
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