Citizen Girl (3 page)

‘What? Wait. I’m sorry, I gave you a draft on Monday. I can print you up another copy now—’

‘I’m in meetings all afternoon. The note’s on your desk. It came to me at three a.m., while I was peeing – you can forget about sleeping after you turn fifty – and I realized just what this conference is missing.’ The speaker at the other end of the phone picks up and I’m forgotten. ‘He-llo! Doris at your service!’

I walk back to my desk, which looks up at me, sadly violated, trying modestly to cover itself with an article ripped from
Ms. Magazine
about teenage apathy. I sit down to stare at the flimsy toilet-tissue note paper-clipped to it, in which only an ‘A’, ‘S’, and ‘T’ are distinctly legible in the two-word message scribbled in bleeding felt-tip. ‘Arrogant thrust’? ‘Apologetic trust’? Wait … is that an ‘M’? Carrie, another program assistant, squeezes by my desk and I grab her arm. ‘Doris-speak.’ I hand her the tissue.

‘
Absolute must.
’

‘Thanks.’

Carrie fixes me a quick look of desperation and jerks her head towards Odetta’s cave. ‘Staple machine’s busted again.’

‘Open with how much you love her and that you in no way consider what you’re about to say to be her fault.’

‘Thanks.’ We exchange a nod and she disappears around the corner.

‘GIRRRRRLLLLLL. DID YOU FIND THE NOTE?’ Doris’s scream proceeds her.

I leap up to catch her elbow. ‘Please,
please
wait right
here. I’m making a copy of my presentation right now – you could read it on the way home. Let’s schedule a meeting tomorrow to go over your feedback.’ I grab her calendar. ‘I’ll pencil it in on the way to the copier. You stand here—’

‘Of course I can
stand
here,’ Doris mugs for a passing director. ‘You don’t have to be so
dramatic
.’

First thing the next morning, having collated into the wee hours, I lure Doris to her desk with the aid of multiple cheese Danishes so she can review my presentation. She waves me back to work with the promise of a ‘little helper’. And when he arrives he is just that. The home-schooled offspring of Doris’s friend, this germ-riddled assistant comes to just below my thigh. It takes his five-year-old hands eleven excruciating minutes to slide a single flyer into a single folder. Which is still faster than Odetta. Progress.

‘Bor-ing. I want to play with the toys.’

‘Great! Fine! Go play.’ I wave him away to drip snot over the tower of training tools lining the walls of the Speak-out Room.

‘Hey, get that down for me.’ He points at the Tupperware tub of colored chalk.

‘What?’ I look up from where I’m stuffing double-time. ‘Yeah, okay.’ I pull the tub from the shelf and toss it on the floor.

‘Hey! I want to play with the markers!’ Followed by, ‘I can’t reach the red things.’ And then, ‘See that yellow box? Get it—’

‘LOOK. You are going to have to pick one thing here, mister. And
just
one thing. I only have one more reach in me, because, while it may not be apparent to anyone else in a twelve-mile radius, I’m actually
working here
!’ His lower lip starts to quiver and, remorseful, I crouch down to his level. ‘So which would be your very, very favorite one to play with?’

He sneezes into my face before pointing to something high on the shelf that I have to balance on the conference boxes to get down. I toss him the container and try to make up for lost time.

‘Aaahhhhh!’ His orgasmic cries of passion startle me. ‘I … LUUUVV … STYROFOAM!!! I LOVE IT!’ I pivot to discover a billowing cloud of sherbet-colored peanuts rising and falling in little bursts above the collating piles. ‘Ooooh! STY-RO-FOAM!’ I inch around the table to find my helper supine beneath a pile of peanuts. Bits of mucus-covered foam cling to his ears, nose, and mouth. His eyes in a drugged-out half-mast, he rolls back and forth, smearing peanuts across his chest.

‘Okay, you’re done.’ In one movement I jerk him up and into Doris’s office.

‘He –’ I deposit him in the doorway – ‘is not helping. Thanks, though.’

‘Well, you should have told me that right away, Girl. How can I help you if you don’t communicate with me?’ Doris rolls her eyes at Little Helper’s mother before turning back to address him as if he’s deaf. ‘
I bet you’re very helpful at home, aren’t you?
’

‘I clean up the paintbrushes!’ He sneezes, spitting pastel
peanuts out of his mouth like a spastic Pez dispenser while my eyes fall on his mother’s batik-covered lap. On which sits a very highlighted and underlined presentation.

That.

I.

Wrote.

‘Justice, come over here. We’ve been over this: Styro foam is a killer of the universe and that means a killer of you.’ She pulls him to her, swinging her gray braid behind her. ‘Now wait here while Momma finishes up her speech.’

‘Doris, can I speak to you for a sec in the hallway?’ It’s out before I know what’s coming next.

‘Excuse me, Justice, while I go in the hallway to be
spoken to
.’ Doris curves the ends of her mouth down and raises her eyebrows. ‘Here, why don’t you show Justice the pictures from our Guatemala retreat?’ She hands a water-stained envelope to Momma Batik and follows me outside. ‘Yes?’

‘That’s my presentation. That I gave to you to review. Why does she have it?’

‘We’re a team and you’re sounding very accusatory.’ Doris rests her shoulder against the wall. ‘You should take a moment to listen to your tone.’

‘I respect that we’re a team. But I don’t understand. The research has taken me over a year and a half. I’ve spent weeks of my own time to get it written. When I interviewed with you—’

‘When I
took a chance
on you, I made it extremely clear that you were committing to flexibility—’

‘Right—’

‘So, listen to yourself.’ She stares at me evenly, daring me to go on.

‘I have done
everything
that you asked me to do and I thought we agreed – look, don’t you remember our conversation in August? When the air conditioner was broken and I had to ice your forehead? How you said my research would be invaluable to the conference participants, helping them mobilize young women for the next election – when choice and health care will be on the table. That my proposal was written with fresh eyes. Fresh. Eyes. Mine. That’s verbatim what you said. We agreed that I was ready to—’

‘You only hear what you want to hear. I never said—’

‘But you did!’

‘Did I?’

‘Remember, you said that it was a great starting point for me and if I wrote my findings up, I could do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘PRESENT!’ I feel like I’m speaking Martian. Is she deaf?! Am I crazy? Shaking, I point my paper-cut-riddled index finger in her pruny face. ‘Look, you! I know what I said. I said it and you said it and I’m doing it’cause that’s what we said I’m going to do. So … just say that I said just now what I just said and you heard. Say it, I’m—’

‘Fired.’

2. Choking on My Parachute

The buzzer on my decrepit intercom rattles my tiny studio, rousing me from what is snowballing into a month-long power nap. I lift my head in the dusk-darkened room, pulling the phone from where it’s embedded in my face. BBBBUUUUZZZZ. After soliciting every remotely charitable women-for-women organization in the tri-state area, I passed out a few days ago while trying, in vain, to get through to my oldest friend, Kira, BBBUUUZZZ who’s cruelly abandoned me to dig a well in some BBBUUUZZZZ godforsaken country with one fucking phone and an inordinate number of water buffalo BBBUUUZZZ. I’m cosmically dumped and everyone else is off on graduate odysseys BBBUUUZZZ while I stifle another sob and wait for whoever is torturing me to realize that they’re pushing the
WRONG BUTTON
.

BBBBBBBUUUUUUUUZZZZZZZZZ! BBBBUUUZZZZ! BBBBBBBUUUUUUUUZZZZZZZZZ!

Muthafucka.

I rouse myself from the futon, pull my bathrobe tighter, and shuffle to the door through a snowbank of pro forma rejection letters.

BBBBUUUZZZZ!

‘Hello?’ I ask tentatively, holding down the ‘Talk’ button, blood draining from my head.

Static.

‘
Hello!
’ I cry into the wall.

Crackle. Crackle.

‘HEEELLLOOO!!!!’

‘It’s me.’ Whoosh, whoosh, crackle, crackle.

‘Who?’

‘YOUR BROTHER! I’M COMING UP!’

Shocked, I press the button firmly with an added jiggle at the end, undo the multiple locks, and step out onto the landing, blinking beneath the bare bulb. I hear Jack trudging upwards, thumping something heavily against every stair. He emerges, Cubs hat first, dragging our mother’s ancient plaid suitcase, and looks squarely at me. ‘Been sent to rescue you.’ He flexes a hint of bicep before leaning back against my neighbor’s front door to catch his breath. He lifts his cap off to run a hand through his tangled chestnut mop.

‘Rescue me?’

Jack gives my old bathrobe a once-over before raising an eyebrow with disdain. ‘Yup. Grace says you’ve stalled.’

Following inside, I drag the suitcase down the path between the we-regret-to-inform-you’s, lock the door, and do my best to scrape up some semblance of dignity in furry parrot slippers. But Jack’s already thrown off his coat, chucked aside the empty Mallomars packages, and dropped onto my futon. ‘There’re muffins,’ he says, clicking on the Knicks game.

‘Jack! It’s not safe for a fourteen-year-old to be wandering around this neighborhood alone. It’s
rife
with junkies and pimps and … and … drummers.’ I kneel down to tug at the suitcase’s chipped gold zipper to find two Tupperware bowls of Grace’s oatmeal pecan muffins nestled between my grade-school skating trophies. I hold up my dusty
Twelfth Night
costume in disbelief. ‘
This
is what I need right now? Pantaloons?’

‘Mom packed it. Said you needed to “reconnect with your root accomplishments” – there’s a note.’ I find a piece of torn paper bag marked by Grace’s editorial red ink: ‘Get on with it.’ I bite into a muffin to quell the lump in my throat, swallow, and dial home.

‘Chatsworth Writers’ Colony.’

‘Hey.’

‘Hey, chica.’ My mother’s voice drops to an intimate timbre. ‘I only have a minute – that poet has locked himself in the pantry, trying to “rebirth”. It’s nearly dinner. We’re all getting hungry and grumpy and I really don’t think I can invite him back. Has Jack arrived?’

I watch Jack clicking through my meager seven channels. ‘Yes, miraculously he hasn’t been sold for crack.’

‘Well, I didn’t think he’d fetch much.’

‘I’m being serious.’

‘I know you are. You wouldn’t let me come, so I sent an emissary. At fourteen I was—’

‘On a kibbutz. Fifteen in Finland. I know.’ Jack gestures a gun to the head.

‘
You
should go back to Finland. Remember when you were three – you loved the Northern Lights.’

‘So you tell me.’

‘Feeling any better?’

‘It’s not the end of the world,’ I lie.

‘I know. Out here, we know that.’ I shut my eyes to the pile of homeless résumés, my unworn interview suit. ‘After you eat the muffins, I want you to celebrate all the incredible things you’ve accomplished. Put on the pantaloons.’

‘Right, a tenth-grade play is
exactly
what I want to look back on as my professional high point.’

‘And then I want you to get some perspective. Reread the opening to
Grapes of Wrath
. It sounds like you’re getting a little dire over there.’

‘It
is The Grapes of Wrath
– nobody’s hiring! I’m competing for unpaid internships with fifty-year-old PhDs who’ve introduced their own bills in Congress!
Nobody
is sitting out there tonight praying that some twenty-four-year-old with a whopping two and a half years’ clerical experience will swing down their chimney.’

‘C’mon, chica, who was the five-year-old who had a booming business charging a nickel an adjective to the writers—’

‘Mom.’

‘The fifth-grader who got her idiotic school board to build a Women’s History section in the library—’

‘Mom—’

‘The twelve-year-old who offered her own class in the barn when that ballet school refused to teach modern—’

‘Grace—’

‘Do I have to remind you that class is still running?
You and I both know what you’re capable of. As soon as you get in the door, you’re going to knock their pantyhose off—’ The televised roar of Madison Square Garden fills my tiny apartment, drowning Grace out.

I grab a balled-up sock and toss it at Jack’s head. He gives a suit-yourself shrug before the basketball game audibly shrinks back to its nineteen inches. ‘Thanks, but there
is
no door. I haven’t been offered a
single
interview.’ My shoulders slump. ‘I should’ve handled things differently with Doris.’

‘Oh, no, Missy May, we’re not going down that road. You wanted to quit that job from day one. Now you’re shot of it and can sign up for unemployment. It’s a blessing—’

‘A blessing that I spent eighteen months on research that may never be released? I dredged up
every single
detail dating back to the first suffragette! I went to the Smithsonian Institute – on my own dime! And it’s all going to have zero impact by the time she’s done translating it into crazy to make it sound like she wrote it. All that work and it won’t make a fucking difference to a single woman—’

‘Language. G, I have about thirty seconds so here’s my three cents.’ I see her pointing her red Bic as she speaks. ‘Start your own thing. If you can’t function within the system, strike out on your own. Start your own organization—’

My head reverberates. ‘Oh my God. Mom, I’m doing everything I can just to get a desk. A desk and a paycheck. I just want my desk back. I want my paycheck
back
. I even want that fucking broken fax machine back—’

‘Language. And that’s system talk.’

‘I know! I operate
fine
within the system. I
like
the system! The system and me, we’re like this!’ I cross my fingers.

‘So then get out of bed. I love you. Put Jack on.’