Zipped

by Laura McNeal

  One of them had coppery red hair.

  One of them was Lisa Doyle.

  The rest of the morning passed in a rush. Mick completed an application form, went through a two-minute interview, and was pronounced qualified. Then, along with the others, he was given the Village Greens Younger Employees’ Handbook, the Village Greens Injury Prevention Program, and a demonstration on the safe use of such small equipment as blowers, Weed Eaters, and mowers. The man, a Mr. Blodgett, said, “It’s all common sense, but Uncle Sam’s never happy unless he’s whipped up a batch of paperwork,” and here he passed out Safety Training Acknowledgment Forms for everyone to sign.

  When Lisa Doyle signed hers, she leaned close to Janice Bledsoe and whispered something that made Janice laugh. Except for their own brief interviews, they’d been sitting together all morning.

  “Okay,” Mr. Blodgett said, “we’re ready to break into teams. The building you’re in sits roughly at the center of the community, which, for maintenance purposes, we break into four quadrants”— here he pointed as he talked—“northwest, southwest, southeast, and northeast. Take a look at your Employees’ Handbook. In the upper right of the back cover you’ll see your designation.”

  There was a shuffle in the room as everyone found their handbooks and flipped them over. Mick’s said NE. Northeast.

  A boy in the front said, “Mine says ess double-ewe—what does that mean?” and everyone laughed.

  Mr. Blodgett said, “That would stand for southwest. You’ll be working in the southwest quadrant.” He pointed to four older boys standing against the wall. “I’m going to introduce you now to your crew chiefs. They’ve all worked here for at least three years and have proven themselves able workers and supervisors. Okay, beginning with the northwest team—”

  Mick stared at the four. They all wore work boots and khaki shorts. Their T-shirts and caps were embroidered with the Village Greens logo. They all smiled and looked more or less ruggedly handsome.

  This time it was Janice Bledsoe who, red-faced and excited looking, leaned over to Lisa Doyle and whispered something that made her laugh.

  “And the leader of the northeast team,” Mr. Blodgett was saying, “is Maurice Gritz.” Maurice took a half step forward, nodded, and very slightly widened his smile.

  Mick thought, He looks okay, I guess.

  Mr. Blodgett said, “Alrighty then, the team leaders will go to separate corners, and each of you will join his or her team leader for further orientation.”

  Alrighty then, Mick thought.

  Everyone stood, and most of the kids started moving toward one corner or another, but Mick noticed Janice Bledsoe and Lisa Doyle standing uncertainly, then going over to Mr. Blodgett. They were asking for some kind of favor, Mick could tell by their body language, but Mr. Blodgett just smiled and shook his head no. Then he turned to the room in general and said, “I’m sorry, people, but assignments can’t be changed or traded. You must report to the crew leader you’ve been assigned to.”

  This seemed to affect Janice more than Lisa. Janice’s shoulders drooped. She gave Lisa one last look and headed off to the southwest team. Lisa turned and walked toward the group gathering around Maurice Gritz.

  The northeast team.

  Mick’s team.

  Maurice Gritz blew pink gum bubbles while he waited for his new recruits to assemble. When they had, he expertly deflated the bubble, sucked it into his mouth, and led the group outside, where it was quieter. “Okay,” he said. “Bad news, good news. The bad is that we’ve got another hour or so of orientation. The good is that you’re now on company time and will be paid for it.”

  This was met with a general murmur of assent. Mick was at the back of the half circle of kids that curved around Maurice. Lisa Doyle was in front of him, so close that, if he leaned forward, he might smell her shampoo. If she leaned to the side and let the sun through, it gave her hair a coppery aura. Otherwise, he knew no one in his group, although there was a pretty Hispanic girl he thought he’d seen around school.

  “Question,” Maurice said, and scanned his group. “Who knows what Lilliput is?”

  After a second or two, Lisa Doyle said, “Where the Lilliputians live.”

  Maurice smiled. “And what are Lilliputians?”

  Lisa said, “Little people.”

  Maurice’s gaze was now fixed solely on Lisa Doyle. “And where exactly is Lilliput?”

  Lisa shrugged. “Someplace in England?”

  Maurice slowly separated his gaze from Lisa. “I suggest you all look around, because you’re standing in it,” he said. “This is Lilliput. The old coots you see around here look normal sized, but they’re not. They’re Lilliputians, and they want their little village to look a certain little way.”

  Mick had the feeling none of this was coming from the company script. There was a strange suppressed vehemence to Maurice’s words.

  Maurice gazed beyond the crew for a second, then was looking at them again. “Making Lilliput look a certain little way is what you and I are paid to do, and we’re going to do it efficiently and we’re going to do it right. Are you with me on this?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Okay,” Maurice said, “for your first six Saturdays, you guys will be officially known as jeeps, which is hand-me-down service slang for new guys. After that you’re normals—those of you who make the grade—and if you’re good enough, you’ll work full-time during summer. While you’re jeeps, you get minimum wage. When you’re a normal, you get minimum plus a buck.” He grinned. “Which ain’t bad, considering.”

  He went through his roll sheet, using only last names. Doyle, Furman, Gallagher, Nichols, Traylor, and then he stopped. “Uhoh,” he said. He looked at the last new recruit, the pretty Hispanic girl. “Are you Lizette Uribe?” He pronounced it in sluggish separate syllables: you-rib-bee.

  She nodded. “Except it’s oo-ree-bay.”

  “That’s the problem right there,” Maurice said. “It’s too hard to pronounce. I’m what you might call monolingual, and I don’t want to offend you by mangling your name. So how about we go to something easier? Something I can pronounce?” He grinned at Lizette Uribe. “How about if we just call you Gomez?”

  One of the boys laughed. Traylor.

  Lizette Uribe just stared, as if confused.

  Mick thought he ought to say something, but didn’t know what.

  “Okay, then,” Maurice said. “It’s Gomez then. I’ll just make a note of it.”

  Lisa Doyle blurted, “Couldn’t you just call her Lizette? That’s easy to pronounce.”

  Maurice turned sharply, snapped a quick bubble, and stared at Lisa for a long still moment. “Problem is, Lizette is too close to Lisa. That could lead to confusion, and confusion can lead to safety problems.” A sudden grin split his handsome face. “But high marks, Doyle, for looking for solutions.” He kept his eyes directly on her. “There’s nothing I like better than a good little problem solver.”

  The hour went quickly. Maurice showed them the men’s and women’s locker rooms, the time clock, and the sheds where tools were kept and trucks stored. They all climbed into a Village Greens minivan and he drove them around “their territory,” the common areas of the northeast quadrant. Mick had taken the seat right behind Lisa Doyle, but by the time the tour was over he hadn’t thought of a thing to say to her.

  Back at the maintenance shed, Maurice brought out two big boxes of Village Greens hats and T-shirts. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You show up every day on time wearing your official three-color Village Greens shirt and hat in good condition during any pay period, and you work all day without leaving early in that pay period, then you get a fifty-cent bonus for every hour in that pay period. So wash ’em, iron ’em, and wear ’em with pride. The half bucks add up.” He scanned his grin around the group and let it land on Lisa Doyle. “Okay, the hats are like me. One size fits all.”

  Everyone laughed because they knew they were meant to laugh.

  “T
he shirts come in five sizes,” Maurice went on. “Small, medium, large, extra large, and V.O.” He waited a beat. “V.O. is for very obese.”

  Another weak laugh from the jeeps.

  Maurice said, “I wouldn’t have said that if anyone here were actually in that category.” Another beat. “Wouldn’t want to be accused of sizeism.”

  This time Traylor was the only one to laugh, but that didn’t seem to bother Maurice. “Okay, I’m pretty good at estimating sizes, so if you’ll allow me.”

  He gave Mick, who wasn’t large, a large. When Lisa Doyle checked her label, she said, “I think small’s going to be too . . . small.”

  Maurice grinned. “Boys wear ’em loose, girls wear ’em small. That’s informal policy on Maurice’s crew.” He was closing up the boxes, putting them away. Mick couldn’t help but notice that Maurice was the exception to his own rule. His own T-shirt wasn’t tight exactly, but it was close fitting, so you couldn’t miss the definition of his pecs.

  The recruits dispersed without talking. The two older boys headed off to their cars. Lisa Doyle headed off to the maintenance shed, probably to find Janice Bledsoe. Mick followed a distance behind, and when she glanced back he swerved toward the driving range, where a row of older men and women were whacking balls here and there. When Mick again looked back, Lisa Doyle was nowhere to be seen.

  He started walking out. Lizette Uribe was in front of him, moving so slowly he couldn’t avoid catching up. When he did, he said, “Hi.”

  She glanced at him, but didn’t speak.

  “Maurice is kind of a donkey, isn’t he?”

  Silence. This time she didn’t even glance at him.

  “Okay, I’ll see you next Saturday,” Mick said, and picked up his pace. But he honestly wondered who would be back next Saturday.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Plebes Like Us

  Mick was relieved when he returned home Saturday afternoon and found no one there except Foolish. On the memo pad next to the telephone was a note from Nora:

  Mick,

  Your dad’s working all day so I went out. Reece left message, which I saved.

  Nora

  P.S. I’m dying to know how job interview went!

  Winston Reece and Mick Nichols had been friends since third grade when they both would sneak away from recess kickball games and go inside to investigate Mr. Reger’s miniplanetarium. Now Mick went to the answering machine in the pantry, hit play, and heard Reece’s voice. “Reece’s log, Saturday, April 21, 11:30 A.M. I have awakened refreshed and finding no parental units present am now free to roam about the cabin.” Click.

  It was now nearly one o’clock. Mick made himself a sandwich, dialed Reece’s number, and counted the rings. Reece never picked up before three rings. On the fourth ring a voice answered in a monotone. “By design or happy accident you have reached the telephonic nerve center of the empire’s only Reeceman. At the tone, briefly state your business, please.” The voice then made a short beeping sound.

  “Hey,” Mick said.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Reece said.

  Mick said, “So what besides confirming your own weirdness are you doing?” He said this flat voiced. It was one of his standard lines.

  “Usual Saturday stuff. Sleeping, eating, and downloading.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ve never heard of them.”

  “Yeah, I have.”

  Reece said, “You’ve heard of A Geek’s Worst Dream?”

  “Just did,” Mick said, and laughed.

  They went on like this for a few minutes more, and then Mick told him about the new job. Reece responded to each of its requirements—being there at 7:30 A.M.; wearing the official three-color Village Greens hat and T-shirt—with an incredulous, “You’re going to do that?”

  “For a while,” Mick said, because that’s what he’d decided. He’d stick with the job as long as Lisa Doyle did. In describing the job to Reece, he hadn’t mentioned that Lisa Doyle was also among the new recruits, not that it would’ve mattered, because he’d never told Reece he was interested in Lisa Doyle. Reece was maybe his best friend, but he was a hanging-out kind of friend, not a talking-to kind of friend. The person he talked to was Nora, but that, he suddenly realized, was now a past-tense issue. He said, “I guess I’ll take Foolish to the park in a while. Want me to call you when I go?”

  Reece said, “That would mean putting on clothes, wouldn’t it?”

  “Your decision entirely,” Mick said, and hung up.

  He put his lunch dishes in the sink without washing them, something he knew Nora hated. In the living room, he sat down at the old Chickering upright and played a few chords of the piece his piano teacher, Mrs. Marquart, had given him last week. He knew he should do his finger exercises, then his lesson pieces, then try to finish off his muckraker paper, but he was too tired. He lay down on the sofa, remoted through the TV channels, and turned off the TV. The room was dim—all the lights were off— and he felt tired. He lay on his back and spread his leather jacket across his chest like a small blanket, then closed his eyes and imagined Lisa Doyle in her too-small T-shirt, which didn’t help him fall asleep, so he thought of himself lying in a rowboat on a still lake on a sunny afternoon, which did.

  He awakened to the tink of the front door latch followed by Nora’s quick-clicking steps in the tiled entry. She hung a scarf on the hall tree and peered up the staircase. “Hello? Anybody home?”

  Mick said nothing. He expected the sheer force of his gaze to cause her to turn his way, but it didn’t. She flipped on the entry light and leaned close to the hall tree mirror. She adjusted the collar of her dress. She stretched her mouth and with the nail of her little finger scraped something from her upper lip. Then she did something odd. She leaned back and smiled at herself in the mirror. Mick thought he knew what she was doing because he’d done it himself. She was trying to see what she’d looked like through someone else’s eyes. Even from here, Mick could tell her face had a flushed look.

  “You’re back,” he said.

  Nora started and wheeled around. The pink in her face suddenly deepened. “Hi, Maestro,” she said, but her voice didn’t sound quite like her voice. “Mick,” she said, correcting herself.

  “You look kind of hot,” Mick said.

  Nora tried to laugh. “That’s your father’s line,” she said.

  Mick just stared. “No, I meant your face looks kind of red.”

  “Oh.” Nora tried to laugh again, but it came out more of a gurgle. “It’s the weather. I went to the mall, but I overdressed. It turned so warm out. You live in Jemison long enough and you don’t know how to act when the sun comes out.”

  There was a short silence that Mick broke by saying, “Was it crowded at the mall?”

  Nora’s eyes slipped away from his. “Not very,” she said. Mick studied her. “What did you buy?”

  “What?”

  “I just said, ‘What did you buy?’ ”

  “Oh. Nothing! It was some kind of personal best! I tried on a zillion things and bought nothing. I’m thinking this’ll please your father big time.” She made another odd gurgling laugh.

  Mick said nothing. A question formed in his mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask it. The question was, “How was Alexander Selkirk today?”

  Nora said, “How come you didn’t answer when I said, ‘Anybody home?’ ”

  Mick made a slow blink. It was strange how little he cared now what Nora thought. He said, “I guess I was asleep and thought I was dreaming.”

  This time it was Nora studying him. She gave him a slow, dubious nod. She broke the silence that followed by saying, “I’m going to change my clothes and make dinner. I thawed pork chops.”

  His father’s favorite, they both knew that.

  She was three steps up the stairs before she suddenly stopped and turned back around. “Oh, my God, I forgot! How’d the job interview go?”

  “Fine.”

  “You got the job, then?”

>   Mick nodded.

  Nora was grinning her old grin now, the infectious mischievous grin. “Anybody else of interest apply?”

  “Not really.”

  “No redheaded girls?”

  “If you mean Lisa Doyle, yeah, she was there.”

  Nora laughed. “Yep, that’s what a little bird told me.”

  “A little bird,” Mick said in his flat voice.

  Nora grinned and nodded. “A little bird named Melissa Daley.” Mrs. Daley, a math teacher at Jemison High and a friend of Nora’s.

  Mick said in a sullen voice, “So why didn’t you just tell me Lisa Doyle would be there?”

  The cheeriness drained from Nora’s expression. “You don’t seem exactly grateful about this.”

  Mick just stared.

  Nora said, “I didn’t tell you because Mrs. Daley posted the flyers, and she heard Lisa say she might apply. I didn’t want to mislead you.” She paused. “I was also worried that your knowing she was applying might scare you off.”

  “You didn’t think I could handle the truth.”

  Nora said in a soft voice, “That’s not what I thought at all.”

  “I thought the deal was you tell the truth to people you care about.”

  “C’mon, Mick! I was telling you the truth. I told you you ought to apply for this job, and that was the truth. You should’ve, and you did.”

  Mick didn’t speak. He knew his expression was sullen, but he didn’t care.

  Nora took a breath and said, “Mick, look. The truth isn’t of exact dimensions. It isn’t rigid. It can be shaped, made a little bigger here, a little smaller there. But it’s still the truth.”