Orientation (14 page)

Her name was Hailey, and she was a paralegal assistant at a successful real estate practice. Long ago, in her first months out of paralegal school, they’d had a Christmas party where one of the lawyers she worked for had taken her into an empty office and kissed her for ten full minutes. He was twice her age and married, with three children in college. After the holidays he’d taken her to lunch and apologized, all stammering and shy. She hoped he would call this week, ask after her, wonder where she’d been for three days. But he didn’t. She was twenty-nine years old, on the brink of her next decade, and in love with a man who did not call her after she saw somebody die.

She never told anyone. She moved gingerly through the weeks and months that followed, as if stepping from foothold to foothold to balance the secret she carried inside, the thing that no one could know. She was different now. Words no longer came tumbling out of her mouth, rushing to fill a silence she once dreaded. She was contained, withheld. At first she had felt guilty, had been laden and bleary with it, and people at work had asked if she was all right—even her lawyer. But the guilt lifted quickly, and then she felt guilty about that, until that went, too, and soon she felt only clean and new and grateful, as if, climbing out of bed from a long and frightening illness, she now stood blinking in bright, clean light. She felt lucky. She was alive.

Years passed. Hailey waited for her lawyer. She watched him grow old, divorce, marry again. Then he died, and she was alone once more. His son stepped into his father’s shoes at the firm and treated Hailey with kindness and respect. She was an esteemed figure in paralegal. “My father always liked you,” he told her. And she thought:
So he did remember.

She moved north, across the canal to Green Lake, and every evening, rain or shine, she walked the path around the lake in the park. She had seen other old women walk the lake, striding briskly past, all vital and vibrant, nodding and saluting at everybody. Who were these fast walkers, these show-offs? Where were they going so fast? Hailey was in no hurry. She kicked through swaths of fallen leaves. She sloshed into deep puddles in her waterproof boots. She stood in downpours to watch red-winged blackbirds flit crazily through the reeds along the bank, or to follow the progress of an intrepid swimmer cutting the rain-pocked surface of the water. She stopped for shaved ice at the snack shack, gave her change to the regular panhandlers, sat in evening’s last light watching the kids on the monkey bars. Mothers smiled solicitously at her and she smiled back. Near the small boat launch she peered at a map of the park and eavesdropped on boys and girls on first dates teasing and cajoling each other into rowboats. She spotted a walking stick once, a slash of green against a brown thicket, and she stopped for an hour, drawing a small crowd that joined her to observe the insect step gravely along a narrow twig. Hailey was alone, still. She had never even gotten a pet, neither dog nor cat nor bird. Pets were substitute companions, and she would have a real one or none at all. She had read somewhere, long ago, that solitude was not a sad thing, but a vital and transformative phase, in preparation for love. She didn’t believe it anymore. But she still remembered it.

One day at work, Hailey was going over preliminaries with a client entering into a commercial leasing arrangement with her son-in-law. She was a silver-haired woman who sat regal and straight-backed in a chair across from Hailey, who was taking notes. She was saying that she loved her daughter, but did not like or trust the man she had married. She called him a heel, and an ass. She was from the South, and when she spoke, she elongated these words into two syllables:
hee-uhl
,
aa-uhs
. She was saying that she wanted the legal arrangement to be rock solid and unimpeachable, to protect herself and her daughter from certain ruin. She stopped talking mid-sentence. Hailey looked up from her notes. The woman was crying.

Hailey capped her pen and took off her reading glasses. She looked from the woman’s face to the window behind her, and the woman turned in her chair to look as well. They sat in a conference room on the nineteenth floor of a building downtown, and through the plate-glass windows they had a spectacular view of the bay. It was late afternoon, the end of a hectic week, and the office was still. Outside, gray clouds hung in panels across the sky, and the light moved behind them. The water changed color from blue to green to silver. Shafts of light tilted down from nowhere and tracked the surface and disappeared. Tiny ferries docked and departed. Finger-size cargo ships slipped seaward. The conference room grew bright and dim, bright and dim—the vast and languid heartbeat of sunlight itself. The woman reached a hand out behind her, and Hailey looked at it for only a moment and reached across the table and took it, and she did not let go.

*   *   *

She did forget his face. Everything fades. Everything goes. Long after the woman she loved had died—after brief, good years that Hailey thought she’d never have with anyone—there were moments when he would come back to her. A cold fall night, the sweet rot of dead leaves, the thrum of far traffic in a city’s teeming silence—these would bring him back, not like a photograph, but rather the memory of one, as if someone were describing his photograph to you, and you listen and think:
Oh, yes
. His smile was sweet and taunting. He held the bag out to her, daring her. And Hailey—long ago, on a Saturday night ice-cream run—reached out and took it from him and thanked him, and meant it. She was alive.

Temporary Stories

I.

One day, early in her life as a temporary employee, the Agency called with a new assignment for Clarissa Snow. It was a long-term job, eight to twelve weeks. But it was phone work, and Clarissa Snow was not a phone person. “We
know
that, of course,” said Mrs. Delahanty, her Placement Counselor at the Agency. “But we’re in a pickle with this one, and we could sure use your help! You’re our best girl. You know that, don’t you?” She did know that. “And you can say no if you want,” Mrs. D. told her. “You know that, too, don’t you?” She knew that, too. But she also knew never to say no to an assignment. For while the mechanisms of temporary employment were a black box to her, its laws were simple and unforgiving. If you ever said no, you never worked again.

A receptionist in the Human Resources Office of the county hospital had quit without notice, and they needed someone to fill in. On Clarissa Snow’s first day, the other receptionist went over the Human Resources Office phone protocol: Always answer before the third ring; always answer with either “Good morning!” or “Good afternoon!” followed by the institution name, the office name, your name, a brief pause, and then “How may I help you?”; always ask the caller’s permission before putting the caller on hold; never keep the caller on hold for more than two minutes; after two minutes, always check back to ask if the caller minds being on hold; and so on. The other receptionist ticked off each procedure on her fingers while Clarissa Snow took notes. The other receptionist was a very large woman who confided to everyone, without anyone’s asking, that her largeness did not bother her. “Yes, I’m fat!” were the first words she said to Clarissa Snow. “And proud of it!” she added proudly. She took the phone protocol very seriously and spoke of it with meaningful pauses to convey that seriousness. “We are,” she said, “representatives— … of this institution. We provide— … service. And that— … is our mission.” Clarissa Snow nodded. “Representatives,” she wrote in her notepad. “Mission,” she added, and then, in double underline, “Service.”

The two of them worked in the Human Resources lobby, within a circular counter situated in the middle of a low-ceilinged, windowless room with recessed fluorescent lighting, dusty potted plants, and the oil portraits of hospital benefactors bolted to its walls. There were twenty-one chairs arranged in three semicircular rows facing one quadrant of the counter, and twenty-one clipboards with twenty-one pens attached to them by twenty-one tiny chains. And every day, from eight to five, there were twenty-one applicants rocking and fidgeting in these chairs, filling out job forms. Upon this beige-carpeted sea of employment anxiety, the other receptionist captained an efficient little ship of mission and service, gliding from computer to printer, from fax machine to phone console in her wheeled chair, which she steered expertly with her tiny feet. She could complete any task and offer any assistance without ever getting out of this chair. She could answer any question put to her and never move faster than was
just
necessary for whatever crisis was at hand. Clarissa Snow often caught herself staring in openmouthed awe at this woman, who spun chaos into order while turning placidly within her circular domain. She was like a twister in reverse, gliding cows into their pastures and floating roofs down upon houses.

There were eight phone lines at the reception desk, and they never stopped ringing, and Clarissa Snow’s job was to answer them. On her first day, she said “I don’t know” to so many callers that the other receptionist referred to her as the I Don’t Know Girl. “Just give them to me,” she said gaily. “Just give them all to me until you get the hang.” And as the morning progressed, so did Clarissa Snow. For some questions she consulted the Learned One, the other receptionist’s pet name for the Employment Bulletin, a black, half-foot-thick duct-taped ring binder of job listings for the entire county hospital system. Handling these calls was as easy as looking up a word in a dictionary and reading a definition into the phone. For questions that the Learned One could not handle and the I Don’t Know Girl could not yet possibly know—which schools offered EMT certification, for instance; or whether they would be hiring occupational therapists in the near future; or what the lunch special in the cafeteria was—for these questions, Clarissa Snow put the callers on hold, for no longer than two minutes, and gave them to the other receptionist, who—while simultaneously coding an applicant’s job forms or proofreading copy hot off the fax machine—took each call in turn, nodded with equal gravity to each query, and answered immediately: Northpoint College, possibly next month, and Cajun chicken with garlic mashed potatoes. Clarissa Snow noted the correct answers and eventually got the hang of these calls as well. “My, my,” the other receptionist said to her just before the lunch hour. “We’ll need to find another nickname for you, won’t we?” Clarissa Snow beamed as she left the lobby for lunch. The benefactors on the wall—a high gloss in their pink cheeks—seemed to beam after her.

O hubris of the temporary employee! For that very afternoon Clarissa Snow received a series of phone calls for which she was completely unprepared. “So,” began a woman on Line Six. “Do
you
think I should apply for this position to get my foot in the door and take the chance of getting stuck in a dead-end job? Or should I risk waiting for the job I
really
want to come up, which could possibly be never?” “Tell me,” Line Three implored. “Tell me I haven’t missed the application deadline for the job in Medical Records.
Please, please, please. Please
tell me that.” “Guess where I’m sleeping,” Line Four began. “Okay, I’ll tell you. I’m sleeping on my brother-in-law’s living room sofa. I’m a forty-four-year-old man sleeping on my brother-in-law’s living room sofa, and if I don’t get a job by the end of the month, the punk is going to toss me out on my ass.” “I see,” Clarissa Snow said. (What else
could
she say?) She was, by the end of the day, distressed and befuddled. But the other receptionist was encouraging. “A
good
day’s work,” she told her as they locked the lobby doors. And Clarissa Snow was comforted.

The next day was worse. One caller with questions about openings in Occupational Therapy proceeded to tell her about his messy divorce from “that bitch.” (Later that week, a woman would call and discuss her divorce from “that bastard,” leaving Clarissa Snow to ponder the coincidence.) A woman calling from a pay phone near some sort of major traffic artery shouted absurdly generic questions about employment—“What kind of work do you have! How much do you pay!”—then abruptly asked if you had to skip a meal, which one would you skip? An ex-priest struggling to get back into the job market confessed, with quivering voice, that he was scared. And there were more such as these, caller after caller who took Clarissa Snow’s rote offer of help and service too readily to heart; who begged her for work and pumped her for advice; who shared more than she needed or wanted to know about themselves, and without warning sent her sprawling into the intimate muck of their lives, clutching at her simply because she was the one who picked up the phone.

The other receptionist, of course, handled these calls expertly. She had an answer for everyone. Platitudes bubbled out of her as if from a ceaseless wellspring of benign concern. “That field is
very
promising. And that kind of work can’t be replaced by a machine, you know.” Or, “Well, breakfast
is
the most important meal of the day. Breakfast is definitely a keeper.” Or, “These
are
difficult times, darn it! But try back in the spring. Things
always
come up in the spring!” She nodded appreciatively, uh-huhed understandingly, then blissfully reeled off whatever cliché popped into her head.

By the end of her second day, Clarissa Snow had the jitters. And by the end of Week One of her eight-to-twelve-week assignment, she had developed an eczema rash on her neck and arms. She was popping aspirin like breath mints. Her hands would not stop shaking. Her bus ride to work in the mornings felt like the Bus Ride of Doom, her mind racing in loops of dread of the day to come. And out of this heat of her frenzied anxiety came the Jobless Beast, the coalescence of all callers: a large, sad, hulking thing that lived only to forage for employment; that slept in its car under freeways at night and emerged by day to make calls from pay phones; that loped from Human Resources Office to Human Resources Office, presenting itself with an awkward smile and a jocular tone edged with desperation, stooped and cramped from its hunger for work, for any morsel or crumb that Clarissa Snow had to offer, crying out to her, I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything, just help me, please. Why me? Why me? she implored the Beast in her mind. Because, the Beast implored back, because you answer the phone.