Jillian

by Halle Butler

“Can we get this dip put into bowls?” said Elena.

  “Oh, yeah, are there bowls in the kitchen?” asked Jillian.

  “I really don’t have time to check.”

  “Okay. Hey, do you want me to start cutting up those sweatshirts?”

  “Yeah, I called Sandy and she said she has some costume things she can bring. We probably won’t need those sweatshirts.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Jillian.

  Everyone in the basement was laughing and taping up streamers and blowing up balloons.

  “I think I need you to go on a sandwich run,” said Elena.

  “Okay,” said Jillian. “But I need you to give me some money.”

  Elena stared at her. “Can’t I just write you a check?”

  “No, because I don’t have a checking account, so if you wrote me a check I’d have to pay ten percent to get it cashed. I need cash or a money order.”

  “Okay, here’s thirty for lunch, that should be enough for some Subway.”

  “Okay, great,” said Jillian.

  When she got back with the sandwiches, Elena was mad that the dip hadn’t been put into bowls. The party was almost starting.

  As Jillian filled the bowls with the dip (she could wait a second to eat her sandwich) Susie from the kids’ room came up to her.

  “Hey, we have a little problem.”

  “What?”

  “Well, Adam is in the ladies’ room and he won’t come out.”

  “Oh, are you kidding?” asked Jillian.

  “Nope,” said Susie.

  The party went until 9:00. At 9:00, Jillian said, “I’m going to run now.”

  “What, you’re not staying for takedown?” said Elena.

  During the walk home, Adam looked like he was sleepwalking. Maybe he was.

  She opened the door. Crispy had strewn the dirty clothes from the hamper all over the floor and was slowly sucking on the crotch of a pair of Jillian’s underwear.

  * * *

  • • •

  Saturday was no breeze for Megan, either. She woke up and immediately felt embarrassed. That nasty, awful, hollow, endless embarrassment that was becoming her life. Randy was still asleep. She lay there, wishing she could be unconscious again. If she got up and out of bed, what would there be to do? She could shower and weep and see if that freshened her up. Maybe she could weep while making pancakes and then, with her gelatinous face, walk into the bedroom and say, “I made breakfast, honey, do you want some?” She could make coffee in the French press and imagine every step as the symbolic destruction of her soul. Grind the beans, boil the water (she could open her mouth for a silent scream when the teapot whistled—possibly that would be satisfying), and then wrap her fist around the plunger and push those fucking grounds down there where they belonged.

  She decided this was a good enough idea. As soon as she was under the water, she started bawling. She sat in the bottom of the tub, cried, and washed her feet.

  When she got out of the shower, Randy was making coffee in the Mr. Coffee. She didn’t want to interact with him until she was dressed, so she walked right past him. Her hair was wet. Her skin felt brittle. Maybe she would be able to go to sleep again.

  Randy sighed.

  7

  On Monday, the phone rang. “Good afternoon, doctors’ office,” said Megan. “Sure, hold on one second.” She put the phone down. “It’s for you.”

  “Who is it?” said Jillian.

  Megan shrugged and handed her the cordless.

  “Good afternoon, this is Jillian.”

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Bradley, this is Mike Johnson calling from the county clerk’s office, how are you today?”

  “I’m doing good, and yourself?”

  “I’m well. Ms. Bradley, I’m calling you to tell you that your court date is a week from this Tuesday, on the thirty-first, at eleven a.m. Can you confirm that for me?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Johnson, but I’m at work right now, and I’m unable to make that confirmation,” said Jillian.

  “Ms. Bradley, I’m aware that you are at work, but we have been leaving messages on your personal line and we have not gotten a response. If you had called us back, we would have been able to work with you to choose a date, but since you did not return our calls, your date has been scheduled for you. If you do not appear in court on your court date, a warrant for your arrest will be issued and your fine will be doubled. If you are unwilling to pay your fine, which I see here is three years standing, we will have no other option but to take you into custody, and you will have to serve time. I am required by my offices to get confirmation from you for this date.”

  Jillian had been married once. It didn’t work out. She was married when she was twenty-two—seems so young now! It lasted a year and then, after the breakup, Jillian found the lord and everything felt glorious. Really, really glorious, like the way you read about. But then there was, you know, she got lonesome. And then there was this coworker, who was really funny. And the way this coworker would look at her and put her arm around Jillian, it just felt so good to be close to people. And so then Jillian started going out with this girl to dance clubs, and it was silly, but it felt so good. To go into the dark, where it was loud. You really didn’t have to think of anything to say. Jillian started going out to buy silky tops with cute patterns on them and a little cinch at the waist, and she painted her nails and did up her face. She went with her coworker to get streaks in her hair, sheesh, it made her feel silly thinking about it. And in the club, when it was dark and the music was loud and everyone was having cocktails, you didn’t even have to say anything. She loved that. Everything was in the pre-prep, the preparation. Put on the outfit, have a drink, then (once you were all wound up) let yourself go in the club. And then just look at a guy or see if he was looking at you. And if you felt like it, you could give him a kind of look that you knew he’d be able to read.

  And at that time she was taking the pill, so it was okay. She was taking the pill, so if she wanted to have someone real close to her in her bed some night, she could. It was great. But then, you know, it was like how sometimes when you’re on a diet and you slip up once or twice. Like, have a donut or a milkshake once or twice, but you’re still really on the diet. That was how it got after a while with the pill. She’d slip up once or twice, but then she’d take two the next day, or flush the two or three she hadn’t taken, and then it was like, when she looked at the pill pack, she was up to date. A little bit of fudging didn’t hurt.

  And then there was that night she met that guy and he was dancing close and he smelled good like some kind of cologne and she gave him that unmistakable glance and they took a cab back to her place.

  “Condom?” he said.

  “I don’t have anything,” she said. She explained she was on the pill.

  I don’t have anything, I don’t have anything, I don’t have anything, for some reason that rang through her head while he put his hand (so big) behind her neck and put his mouth (which tickled) up to her ear.

  “Do you have anything?” she asked.

  “Nuh-uh,” he said and she relaxed so much she wanted to cry. If it weren’t for being so riled she probably would have cried. Already they had something in common. Don’t have anything, don’t have anything. That’s great. And he was sweet in the morning. He thought it was cool how she didn’t hound him about his number or where he worked he said. She shrugged. I think we have something in common she said. And I think we’ll see each other again she said.

  The next day and a couple more times she took her pills, but then, since she wasn’t really going out that much, she stopped taking them.

  It was in the parking lot of a Walmart (of all places!) she figured out she was probably pregnant. It was this feeling, it was a creepy feeling, like something from somewhere else was communicating with her. Like a ghost? Kind of like a ghost?
Because it was this, like, this thing that was going to happen and that couldn’t be stopped (a force?) and it was just, you know, tapping her on the shoulder for a second to say “Hi” and “I’m going to be here soon.”

  She went into the Walmart and bought a betta fish.

  But he was lying when he said he didn’t have anything, because he did have something, he had a girlfriend who he lived with, and that seemed like sort of a lot. She asked around to find that out, and she asked around to find out his number, and when she called he said that it was okay because he and his girlfriend had an agreement about things.

  This was not true, it became clear after not too long. She had a few months where she thought maybe there would still be some kind of a possibility for her and him to get together, but then it was clear that there wasn’t. So then she went back to the church, had her baby, and now here she was.

  “Ms. Bradley, do I have confirmation?”

  “Yeah,” said Jillian and she hung up the phone.

  * * *

  • • •

  Why do we do it to each other? All of this girl-on-girl violence? Well, not really violence in the strict sense, she’d never been in a real fight, but a type of primitive aggression she felt constantly, yes, she really felt it was constant.

  It was one of Carrie’s days off and she was in her apartment, looking at her nail polish and musing. Her roommates were at work. She loved her roommates, she really did, they were dolls, but she even felt it from them. She was the kind of person who liked to feel comfortable with people. She couldn’t help it, it was her personality.

  It was like, she thought, she just wanted to let all of these women know that there was no shortage of ejaculate on the planet and that they could, you know, share it.

  “That’s gross,” she said and shook her head and stood up from the couch. She walked around the apartment. She walked to Janet’s door and nudged it open with her toe. Carrie thought Janet was some kind of a genius. She walked to Janet’s closet and poked through her clothes, then walked back to the couch and resumed the examination of her nail polish.

  No one ever wanted to share clothes anymore.

  She wanted to make a database. When she thought of the database, she became slightly nervous. Not overly nervous, but a little nervous. It was an idea she’d had in the back of her head for almost two weeks now and she wasn’t able to pin down what, exactly, the database would be, what it would contain, or from where it would be accessible. But it would be some kind of database. She’d stopped looking at her fingers and was staring in the direction of the bay windows.

  About once a month she felt nervous, and when she felt this way she had to remind herself that what she was doing was important. It’s hard to put yourself in historical perspective, but it can be really helpful, too, and you really need to do it. She was a part of a cultural movement and a part of a community that was directly responsible for the way the world would work in the future. She repeated this idea. There, now she felt better.

  Maybe the database would have something to do with her ideas on the American workplace. Those were ideas she hadn’t been able to use in her artwork yet. She loved those ideas and knew they were important. People were living in traps of their own habits. People should get up and walk around in the office. They should be able to move their desks, switch cubicles with a friend, use the floor as a chair and the chair as a desk, lie down on their stomachs to stuff envelopes, review the quarterly earnings on a park bench, weather permitting. She knew this kind of re-imagining was essential to the vitality of the American people, and she was lucky (but was it luck, or had she worked to get where she was?) to work for Jill, who would definitely let her try any and all of these new techniques.

  Carrie sat on the couch, staring at the bay windows with her left hand held out absent-mindedly before her. Soon it would be 3:30, soon it would be 4:00, soon it would be 4:30, soon it would be 5:00, then 5:15, then 5:30, then 5:45, 46, 47, 48, 49.

  PART 3

  1

  “There I was in my storage unit. I had nothing, no job, no boyfriend, no place to live, and then, BAM, six weeks later I had my career, and six years later here I am,” said the drug rep, who was standing in the waiting room and leaning on the counter. She had a miniature cart with a few crates and boxes on it, the sort of rig a homeless person would have, but new looking, as if she wiped it down every night and got the wheels and buttons repaired from time to time. Megan thought the whole drug-rep thing was disgusting, corporate, and transparently evil, but Jillian stood on the other side of the counter smiling at the rep with her mouth open.

  “Wow,” said Jillian.

  The drug rep looked like she took street-fighting classes.

  “Yeah,” said the drug rep.

  “You know, I was trying to start my own business,” said Jillian.

  “Oh, really, what’s that?”

  “I was going to do coding. I found the software and everything, but things just didn’t quite work out.”

  “Awwwww,” said the drug rep. “You know, honey, I could always hook you up with a job in my business.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Jillian.

  Megan could not believe this. It was inappropriate to talk about wanting to quit or switch jobs when you were at your workplace and nine feet away from your employer.

  “But I should warn you, it’s real fast-paced.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll think about it,” said Jillian.

  I mean, if Megan could resist it, everyone should be able to.

  “Okay, sweetheart, I’m going to leave these samples with you, and you just give me a call whenever Dr. Billings is ready to meet with me.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Jillian, taking the samples.

  “Can I leave some literature out?” asked the rep.

  “Sure,” said Jillian.

  By “literature” the rep meant advertisements for bowel-emptying medication.

  Jillian’s smile was like stuck or something. She almost started laughing, but she knew it would be a deep, woofing, slow laugh. Ridiculous. Thinking about laughing like that almost made her laugh again, a high-pitched rapid giggle. Ultimately she didn’t laugh, she just stood there and watched the drug rep wheel her little hobo cart out of the lobby.

  Jillian walked back to her desk and said, “That woman is such a sweetheart.”

  Megan didn’t respond, but Jillian was used to that.

  Jillian could feel that her mouth was still open. The T3s were getting less and less effective, not that they were so super effective in the first place. She still felt a lot of pain, you know. But now there was a weird grating feeling inside. Not the inside of her body, because she couldn’t locate the grating feeling in any one of her organs. It was like the Tylenol or whatever was starting to grate at her soul.

  When this occurred to her, her hands started darting around her desk. She picked up and set down her mouse, ran her fingers over the pens in her pen cup, and typed a few blurts of nonsense on her keyboard, which made the computer bonk-bonk with the error sound.

  My soul is messed up now, she thought. She was terrified.

  She reached for a Pop-Tart, it was the last Pop-Tart. Oh, that’s perfect. If that’s not perfect! It’s like I’m down to my last Pop-Tart! She tried to recall some mantras, but she felt like she always messed them up a little bit and then she became frightened that this feeling inside of her came from reciting a devotional incorrectly and now, because of that, she was in serious, terrible trouble.

  She unwrapped the Pop-Tart with shaky hands and tried to let her mind wander.

  There was something about the siding for the house of the soul . . . God, what was it? Something about if you smile at someone, their smile will shine back into you? God, what was it?

  “I’m going to go get some coffee,” said Megan.

  “Oh, sure,” said Jillian.
r />   After Megan left, the phone rang.

  “Good afternoon, doctors’ office,” said Jillian. “Oh, sure. Dr. Schraeder sees patients on Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons. Her first available appointment is one-thirty on the sixth.”

  “Well, don’t you have anything sooner?” asked the man on the line.

  “No, I’m sorry, that’s the earliest availability.”

  “Well, I’m having some pretty severe symptoms over here, and I don’t think I can wait a week and a half to come see the doctor,” said the man.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but if this is a medical emergency, I’d recommend going to the emergency room.”

  “I’m not going to wait two hours in the emergency room just to have them refer me to my own doctor, okay?”

  “Okay, I understand that, sir. I understand that this is frustrating, sir.”

  “And I work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I’m going to need to see the doctor on a Monday or a Saturday,” said the man.

  “I’m sorry, sir, that’s not possible.”

  “Why is that not possible? Isn’t Dr. Schraeder a professional who cares about the well-being of her patients?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure she cares about your well-being.”

  “Well, it really doesn’t seem that way, the way I’m being treated right now. This is just inconscionable, you know. It’s inconscionable.”

  The man was starting to squawk a little and raise his voice.

  Jillian didn’t know what inconsciousable meant, but she had a few guesses.

  “Sir, okay, maybe if you could tell me some of your symptoms, I could pass them along to Dr. Schraeder, and then maybe she would be able to fit you in sooner.”

  “Well, are you a nurse?”

  “No, sir, I am the office manager.”

  “Well, if you’re not a nurse or if you don’t have any medical training, I don’t know why I should tell you any personal information about my health life. Isn’t that illegal?”