Dead End Job (3 page)

Today’s shopping expedition was serving a very specific purpose—I had a date that night. I had a profile up on a few dating sites and had been on several awkward dates with various types of men. Unfortunately for me, none of them had come even close to the fantastic first date that is required to create a relationship. I had had a few flings, and even dated an ex of mine for a month or two when I had gotten back from California, but so far nothing had stuck. I was hoping that tonight’s date would be somewhat decent. If not, at least I would get a meal and a couple of glasses of wine out of it.

When I got back to the office about thirty-five minutes later, everything seemed to still be under control. My co-workers were quietly typing at their desks, and the office would have been calm if Elaine wasn’t on the phone, her office door wide open, yakking voluminously to someone about remodeling a bathroom. Everyone at the office knew that Elaine’s only daughter was due to give birth to her first child in two months in Manhattan, and besides the merger, this was Elaine’s main source of stress. Being a total control freak, Elaine was putting up the money for her daughter's expensive downtown apartment, and now, apparently, for an extensive re-model, including all new furniture, every piece of which Elaine was painstakingly hand-picking.

This came as quite the relief for our group of employees. We knew that when Elaine was on the phone terrorizing the contractor, she was occupied and couldn’t terrorize us about the merger—for the moment.

After stashing the goods in my locker, I sat back down at my desk unnoticed. I scanned my emails for anything urgent and didn’t find anything worth my attention, so I picked back up with my text conversations, burning up the rest of the afternoon until I could leave for the day.

“Dude! There you are. Did you hear what happened?” The IM was from Maya, my favorite and most gossip-y Legal Associate.

“Jesus, what now?” I typed back, expecting a report on Elaine’s spazz attack.

“You know Leila Carson at NorCom Portland? She motherfucking DIED last night! She didn’t show up at work this morning and her cleaning lady found her in her bathtub sometime this afternoon.”

“Holy burning ballsack. Serious????” Whoa. That was not at all what I was expecting to hear. Leila was the head of legal for NorCom PR, the competitor in Portland that Merit was trying to merge with. Elaine and the rest of our team had worked constantly with her over the past few months trying to get everything ready for the big announcement.

“Yeah. Messed up, right? I guess they are saying it was an accident. Maybe she got drunk and fell down in the shower. Remember that meeting in April when she drank 2 bottles of wine by herself?”

Maya had a point there. It was pretty obvious to everyone that Leila liked to, er, “let off steam” after work. I didn’t really know Leila, my only interaction with her being some emails to Elaine that she’d copied me on and the occasional conference call, but the news was sad and shocking nonetheless.

“That is some seriously crazy ass news. Who is taking over as point person on the merger? Wasn’t she Elaine’s direct liaison at NorCom?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that Bob guy. This is fucking nuts. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

“Thanks. I am totally sneaking out right now. I have a date tonite. Cover for me.”

“K, have fun. Use a condom : )”

Maya signed off. It was exactly ten minutes until four, so I got up, grabbed my purse, and sneaked out of the office toward home.

Chapter 2: Stinky Cheese Towels

I lived in Greenlake, a weird neighborhood in the northern part of Seattle. There was an actual lake, which was beautiful, but the main draw of the area was the three-mile running and biking path surrounding it. To the east of the lake was a plethora of organic sandwich shops, biking supply stores and yoga studios, as well as a Subway, Starbucks, several wine bars and a World Wrapps among premium Seattle real estate. Despite these distractions, there were always at least 100 people running around the lake. Even in January. In Seattle. The few attempts I had made to run around Greenlake had been pathetic to say the least, and I quit after a group of moms with jogging strollers lapped my sorry, air-sucking, purple face while they laughed and gossiped. My current experience with the lake boiled down to either driving by it or sitting and eating the scones and donuts from the bakery across from the kids’ wading pool. This was my new thing: giving up easily when confronted by adversity. I found that it suited the dream-crushing nature of my life better than the pointless optimism of my early twenties, which had slowly been chipped away with each new and recent disappointment, until I’d abandoned it almost completely. These days what I had left of my optimism was housed in a tiny, cramped basement apartment somewhere in my mind, only to be let out to delude me after the occasional 3+ glasses of wine, or when singing loudly to anything from Mariah Carey’s 1993 album
Musicbox
. Alone. Most of the time it was securely locked up and chained in the depths of my personality, hanging out with my other popular delusions, like becoming a professional dancer or running away with Prince Harry to a tropical island where I will swim in the ocean every day and be a size two forever without dieting.

In stark contrast to the fancy area on the east side of the lake, directly to the west of the lake was Highway 99, the old interstate that wound through downtown Seattle and led north.  This charming part of the city, also known as the “drug and prostitution watch area” (literally, there are signs. In my opinion they should say: “Avoid the crazed hookers” or “Don’t buy crack from that one shady guy with the concealed shank”). This scary place was only three blocks away from Greenlake, practically adjacent to the kiddie-pool play area and the multi-million dollar mansions.

I lived kind of in-between these two areas, in one of those tall, skinny townhouses with the tiny, fenced-in, fake-grass yards in front. At one time, probably around 2006, this townhouse was probably worth close to three-quarters of a million dollars. I would guess that the poor sucker that bought the thing was now out roughly 50% of his original buy-price. I rented from a property manager who was also working for the owner in an unsuccessful attempt to sell the townhouses. There were six of them smooshed together in a sad skinny row, and three of them were on the market and had been for at least the past year. It didn’t really surprise me that no one was lining up to buy: they were in that cheesy, slapped-together-as-quickly-as-possible building style that completely ruins the look of any respectable neighborhood. The siding was actually aluminum—the wavy kind that you would see in a mechanic’s garage or some depressing chemical dump yard as a fence—but the builder, in a weak and misguided attempt to make it look acceptable, had painted it the worst available shade of bright green, then basically glued it in panels over the dark plastic “wood” that the homes were shellacked with. In the future, when the housing bubble becomes part of our national history, townhouses like mine will be preserved by the historical society as cautionary tales as a warning to future generations.

To add to the misery of my living situation, I had a roommate. I hated having a roommate; it was so college-y and embarrassing, but my current reality was that I just couldn’t afford to live by myself. Her name was Kathy, and she was a short, troll-ish woman who had been a fellow student in my International Economics program. Our average class size was only fifteen or so, which meant that in addition to a great education the students were either blessed with extremely wealthy parents or graduated with debt up to their eyeballs and a twenty-year repayment plan. Kathy was one of the former types of students, and because she didn’t have to work for a living, last year she moved back to Seattle on a whim after four years in her home state of Colorado. This move happened just when I was having my “life crisis” and leaving Orange County with all of my worldly belongings packed into a U-Haul. So of course, we found each other through Facebook. While Facebook told me a lot about what she had been up to since college, it didn’t tell me that she had, in the years we’d been apart, become a complete and total slob.

Kathy grew up with very wealthy, workaholic parents, and always had nannies and, apparently, housecleaners. She did not know how to take care of herself in the real world at all. I remember distinctly the moment when I figured this out: a couple of weeks after we moved in, she dropped a glass jar of spaghetti sauce on the kitchen floor and stood staring at it for several minutes, visibly upset.  Then she started to make whimpering noises. It was the most pathetic thing I’d ever seen. Her entire being froze and she stood there staring at the mess with absolutely no idea what to do next. Finally, sighing, I jumped in, grabbed the broom and mop and took care of the mess.

Additionally, while Kathy and I had been renting the place together for a little over a year, as far as I could tell she had yet to wash her sheets or towels. I knew for a fact that when we moved in, her bath towels had been ivory, and now they were a dim grey color, and the smell wafting from them reminded me of aged Parmesan. Occasionally, I would sneak into her bathroom and pour a capful of bleach into her toilet to kill off some of the mold. I did this for two reasons: one, because I couldn't stop myself, and two, because when people walked into my house as guests, I didn’t want them greeted by a moldy, poo-smelling potty and some dingy towels covered in pubes. I don’t know, I just didn’t think it sent the right message, especially if that visitor was one of my dates.

Other than her hygiene, Kathy was an OK roommate. She had lots of friends, and she even tried to get me to do the “roommates/best friends” thing. She gave up after a couple of months of asking me to do things like go to a water-conservation-themed drinking night at the Zoo Tavern with a bunch of nerdy strangers, eventually accepting that I was generally too depressed to be social most of the time. Also, because financially she was fully supported by her parents, she was never late on the bills. She spent most of her time editing a new magazine with her group of hipster friends. From what I could gather from her ramblings, the content the magazine fit along the lines of the super-liberal-Seattle-anti-government-keep-your-hands-off-my-fetus-let’s-grow-some-medicinal-marijuana-and-save-Africa-while-doing-yoga-poses theme.

I considered myself just as liberal as the next person, but Kathy’s friends took political activism up a quite a few notches to the point where most working people would consider them fanatics. It was a bit odd because most of her friends belonged to the same social group that Kathy did: unemployed, credit-card hippies, supported by their mommies and daddies. It was frustrating for me because: A) I actually had to work for a living (corporate America was a big no-no in this social circle), and B) I wore non-organic clothing in addition to eyeliner, so no matter how I voted, I would never be an acceptable member of this group. For all of the all-inclusive conversation, in the end they were very clique-y. In fact, I was pretty sure that they found each other on a forest-green Subaru meet-up website. So even though I knew my friendship with Kathy could never fully flourish, she was nice enough and didn’t drink my wine, which was central to my tolerance of her messiness and social circle.

I highly doubted that I would bring my date home tonight, but just in case, I grabbed the bleach I had hidden in the built-in cabinet in the garage and poured a capful into her toilet. I told myself I was being sneaky because I was trying not to hurt her feelings by pointing out how much of a disgusting human being she really was. The truth was, I was just chickenshit. I didn’t want to have the conversation with her because I knew that any type of confrontation gave me heart palpitations, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep for days if we’d had a fight about it. Plus, I didn’t want to create any drama that might ruin my living arrangement.

I thought about cleaning more of her mess, but, in preparation for my date, I had also promised myself I would get to the gym today. If the date went well and I hung around, I would most likely drink a bit too much, then come home starving and binge eat—switching back and forth between a bowl of cereal and slices from a giant block of creamy, fifteen dollar French cheese that I had splurged on at an organic grocery store on Monday night. After a year of unemployment and those pesky, weekday morning wine and cheese binges, I had gained nearly 20lbs, which had sneakily deposited itself in what I’d self-critically deemed as the sloppy, paunchy areas around my stomach, hips and thighs. I now divided my months in two, surrounding my period. There were the first two (pre-rag) guilt-ridden, near masochistic work-out filled weeks of moping and body-hating PMS, followed by the second two (post-rag), careless weeks of eating cheeseburgers, drinking beer with abandon and lazing around the house. Today caught me smack dab in the middle of the first week, so appropriately I was currently in the throes of body detesting disgust. I roused my English bulldog, Winston, from his daily twenty hours of slumber, prodded him into the yard, and took off for forty-five minutes on the elliptical in order to bolster my self-confidence as much as possible before my upcoming date.

Showering, I thought about my evening and hoped that tonight’s guy would actually be a bachelor, and not another married man. My forays into internet dating had taught me that the only way to spot fake bachelors was to absolutely insist upon meeting friends who can vouch for their stories. I had learned the hard way that if a man won’t introduce you to his friends, he’s married. Or crazy. I prayed that my date tonight would be neither, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. I dried my thick, long, wavy blond hair bone straight (which took considerable effort), expertly applied my makeup, slipped in and ripped the tags off my new dress and threw on some heels, and did a quick evaluation in the full-length mirror. I thought that I looked nice: not too many zits, only a couple of wrinkles, I had spanx on under the dress and had just enough of my ample cleavage out to walk the very thin line between classy and total hoochie. Success. I headed out the door.