Who You Know (4 page)

RETTE

B
ound in my nylons, navy blue suit, and high-heeled shoes, I tried to coax my car into transporting me to my job interview.

My sorry-looking '87 Subaru always had to pull this shit when I had some place important to be. The engine finally turned over, but it wasn't happy about it.

I couldn't complain. It was amazing that the car made it all the way from Minneapolis to Boulder. Still, I prayed it would cling to life for a few more months, at least until I could get a decent job. It was a long shot, as the Subaru had repeatedly made it clear that death was imminent.

On the drive from Minnesota, Greg had driven behind me so he could rescue me lest my car conk out for good. The Subaru made it, but various features in the car went quietly kaput, the most troubling of which was the demise of the driver's seat. At one moment I was driving along the interstate in a seated, upright position, and in the next instant I heard a little snap and I was suddenly supine and staring at the sky through the sunroof. It took me a long moment to understand what had happened, then I screamed and bolted upright, relieved to discover that I hadn't drifted into oncoming traffic. It was twenty miles until the next gas station. Twenty miles of driving without any back support whatsoever is harder than it sounds. At the gas station, Greg wedged a block of wood in to get the back of the driver's seat to be almost but not quite upright. Now when I drove I had to sit at an unnatural angle that made me feel as if I were manning a lunar space module.

Then there was the matter of the sunroof. It wouldn't latch. I had tied it down with a shoelace, but it still didn't close completely. Greg used electrical tape to seal the gap, but rain always managed to drip through anyway. Because of Colorado's frequent afternoon thunderstorms, I'd gotten used to driving smashed up against the driver's side door to avoid getting completely drenched. At stoplights, with my face mashed up against the window, I tried desperately to avoid the gazes of the drivers who pulled up beside me and observed my contorted position with confusion or amusement.

Today, happily, was sunny, and the fact that I wouldn't arrive at my interview sopping wet seemed a good omen. I popped in an Indigo Girls tape and sang along with Amy and Emily.

I had just turned onto the highway when a rock hit my windshield. For a moment I thought the popping sound was a gunshot and the glass shrapnel that whizzed by my eye was a bullet. The crack in the glass burned its way across the windshield, making it hard to get a clear view. The splintered glass changed its trajectory, fashioning a complicated web. Like I wasn't jittery enough.

My heart pounded furiously against my full-coverage support bra as terrifying thoughts seared through my head: What if the glass hadn't missed my eye and I'd been blinded and then spun wildly into traffic, leaving a trail of blood and carnage, my dead body hurled from the car into a Mack truck that, upon impact, exploded into a firestorm of destruction?

Okay, the good news: I wasn't dead. The bad news was that, now, in addition to being forced to drive at an entirely unnatural incline because of my busted-up driver's seat, I could only see through the bottom part of the windshield like you do in the winter when the defrost has only cleared the first couple inches.

Oh well. The car was worth about fifty cents with or without a cracked windshield.

I found McKenna Marketing without further hazard and the human resources director started me off with two hours' worth of spelling and editing tests. By the time I'd handed in the battery of exams, I was more frazzled than ever. My lipstick had worn off from chewing my pencil nervously, my hair was disheveled from slapping my head in an effort to kick-start my brain into thinking, and my eyebrows were furrowed tightly with stress. As the HR director alerted the managing editor that I was ready to see her, I took deep breaths and struggled to gain a modicum of composure.

“We're so glad you could make it,” Eleanore, the manager of the editorial department, boomed as she stormed into the waiting area. She had wild, dyed-to-cover-the-gray blond hair and a huge, artsy medallion hanging from her neck. She wore a tremendous amount of makeup, which somehow seemed to accentuate her wrinkling, crepey skin. She was tall and perilously skinny.

Eleanore was flanked by her assistant, Paige, for whom the effort of uttering her almost inaudible greeting seemed to make her so nervous it heightened my own already epic anxiety, and Sharon, a marketing manager who I noticed, despite my nervousness, had made some truly unfortunate fashion and hairstyle decisions. Why on earth would a pregnant woman with ponderous thighs and sallow skin think a short yellow dress with large sunflowers was a good idea?

They led me into a conference room where the three of them sat on one side of the oblong table and I sat across from them. I cleared my throat more often than necessary.

“As I explained over the phone, our company is growing rapidly, and we need another editor,” Eleanore began. “Paige has been putting in all kinds of overtime to get the job done. That's what's expected at a growing company, but even with all our hard work, there just aren't enough hours in the day to get through all the brochures and reports generated by the McKenna Marketing staff. So, tell us about your interest in editing marketing materials.”

Ouch. “Well, I'm not an expert, but I love learning about new things.” True. “I really enjoyed editing for the business journal in Minnesota.” False. “That's why I worked there every summer when I was in college.” False. I worked there because they paid me seven dollars an hour, which, since it had the distinction of being more than minimum wage, seemed like a lot of money at the time, plus Mom was friends with the publisher. I hoped she didn't notice that I didn't actually answer her question.

“What was it that you enjoyed about the business journal?”

“Well . . . I, uh, learned a lot. I enjoy making things clearer for the reader, cleaning up poor grammar, and checking facts.” Not entirely false.

“You
enjoyed
fact checking?” Eleanore and her entourage laughed a mirthless, corporate laugh.

“I know that sounds weird. I guess I just like taking pride in my work and making sure things are accurate. Some of the stories I worked on were pretty complicated, and I liked . . . it was kind of like putting a complex puzzle together, and I don't know, call me weird, I think that stuff is fun. Editors are kind of, I don't know, not like regular folks. We can debate for hours over whether a hyphen should be put between two words. That is not most people's idea of a good time.”

“Why did you quit teaching?” Eleanore asked.

“Well, my fiancé . . .”

“You're getting married?” Eleanore said. “Paige just got married eight months ago.”

“Great, great,” I gushed.

“When are you getting married?” Sharon asked.

“August fifteenth.”

“Congratulations,” Eleanore said.

“Yeah, it's exciting.” Smile, smile, enthusiasm, enthusiasm. “So, teaching was difficult, but I enjoyed it.” True, false. Oh god, did I say difficult? Shit. I meant challenging.
Challenging
. “But when my fiancé wanted to leave Minnesota to go to graduate school, it seemed like a good way to get out . . . to see some other parts of the country.”

“Margarette,” Eleanore said, “where do you see yourself in ten years?”

The question threw me. What exactly was it that I wanted to do for a living ten years from now? Did I want to move up and become a manager? Would I be editing business shit I wasn't interested in? I cleared my throat. It was taking me too long to answer. “That's an interesting question. I'm not sure exactly. I know I want to be working in the editorial field. I want a job where I'm always learning and growing and being challenged. It's hard to say where I'll be in ten years because things can change so much. I used to think I would teach English until I died, but . . . I don't know. I think it's important to be open to change.” I sounded like a job-hopper, an aimless Gen X slacker. “And yet, stability also is good, too. Stability and change. It's a juggling act, sort of.” What mentally deficient imbecile was this argument going to sway? And tell me I didn't just end a sentence with a preposition while interviewing for an editorial job. Why did they mock me by continuing to ask me questions when I was clearly an unemployable loser?

They grilled me for forty-five more minutes and told me I'd either get a rejection letter or a phone call in the coming weeks. I thanked them profusely for the opportunity to meet with them. I couldn't face Jen and Avery after failing so miserably, so I left without stopping by their office. The fake smile I'd had plastered on all morning melted from my face the moment I left the building.

On the drive home I reviewed every stupid thing I'd said. The emptiness I felt in my stomach and chest swelled into an uneasy nausea.

 

 

In the dark weeks of unemployment, I often thought that my life was like decaffeinated coffee: utterly pointless. Then I'd think of that thirteen-year-old girl who weighed 680 pounds and died of a heart attack in front of the television she never left. Her body was covered in bedsores and there was feces caught between the folds of her flesh because sometimes it was too difficult for her to haul herself to the bathroom. Her story was a sad one, no question. But sometimes I'd think to myself that, you know, even on my worst days,
damn,
at least I wasn't trapped in front of the television shitting on myself; at least I didn't go around with shit caught in my flabs of fat.

It's important to celebrate the small victories in life.

 

 

As soon as I got home I peeled off my constricting interview suit and got into my beloved, battered sweats. I had just started making dinner when Greg came home.

“Hey, beautiful,” he said, wrapping his arms around me and kissing my neck. “This is what I like to see. The wife in the kitchen making my dinner.” He smiled his goofy, lopsided grin that had forced me to fall in love with him.

“Soon-to-be wife and don't get used to it.” I said it lightly, but I wasn't kidding about that last part. Since we'd moved in together, Greg had been busy with classes (he'd had to finish a pre-rec this summer, so three days after we got here in June, he'd become nothing more than a blur of textbooks and notebooks and calculators), and I'd been bored and unemployed, so I'd taken to doing most of the cooking and cleaning. It was important that Greg realized that once I finally got a job, he'd have to start doing a much bigger share of domestic duties.

“How'd the interview go?”

I groaned. “Let's just say I no longer feel above doing temp work.”

“You're going to find something soon, don't worry. What are you making?”

“Chili and cornbread and salad. Wanna cut salad ingredients?”

“Salad?” Greg whined. He was not a fan of vegetables.

“Some of us need to lose weight so we don't look repugnant in our wedding dresses.”

“I don't want there to be an ounce less of you in the world.”

“You won't love me if I'm skinny?”

“I'll always love you.”

“Good. Cut the carrots.” I chopped the garlic and onions for the chili. I wasn't much of a cook, but I had a few simple recipes that I was capable of making. I would have liked to have made vegetarian chili to cut down on calories, but Greg firmly believed in red meat at every meal. So I compromised with low-fat ground beef, which was wickedly expensive.

Watching Greg cut carrots made me smile. He looked so cute, concentrating so intently. Greg had kind hazel eyes and, compared to me, was a giant at six-foot-two. He was thin, too, all elbows and angles.

“Greg, what are you doing?” I asked. He was chopping the carrots into huge pieces. “Do the words
bite size
mean anything to you?”

“Are you dissing my carrot-cutting abilities? Were you aware that
Gourmet
magazine has offered to pay me thousands of dollars to photograph my exquisitely shorn carrots for their cover?”

“Really? That's fabulous. When do we see the dough?”

“Oh, well, I turned them down of course. I didn't want to sell out. My carrots are only for the eyes of my beloved.”

“Oh no, please, sell out. I'm ready to sell my plasma and root through strangers' garbage for aluminum cans to recycle. At five cents a can, we could be out of debt, who knows, maybe before our eighty-sixth birthdays. So what do you want to do tonight?” I asked.

“I have to go back to campus. We have a group project to work on.”

“Oh,” I groaned. “We never spend time together anymore. We never have time for sex these days.” Since Greg started grad school, we were down to having sex only once or twice a week. It wasn't like I was starving for it: In the long, dull hours of unemployment, I was up to masturbating approximately fourteen times a day. While I still appreciated Greg's gentle caresses, the efficiency of the Magic Wand was astonishing and reliable, and I was growing increasingly dependant on its ferociously intense, insistent throb. I needed to get a job soon, if only to keep my relationship with Greg intact. Greg's friends had warned him not to move in with me. They said women never wanted to have sex post-cohabitation. I loathed Greg's friends and would feign nymphomania to prove them wrong.

I pretended to pout.

“Guess we'd better do something about that.” He set the knife down, put his hand behind my neck, and pulled my lips to his. The kiss was delicious, but I was really hungry and not at all horny. Although the pertinent region of my anatomy was nearly callused from overuse, I didn't feel I could say no when Greg took my hand and led me to the bedroom.