Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

  It’s pretty. It looks antique, like something with history. It isn’t that I don’t love the necklace. I just don’t love giving anyone the wrong idea, or even the right idea. I don’t want to give any ideas at all. I certainly didn’t want to hurt my handy boyfriend.

  Now, funneling ashes on my apartment floor, he shows no real sign of distaste for the task, no indication of anger. But a quiet, burgeoning grimace tempts the corners of his smile, as if to say, Well, this isn’t what I expected.

  After several spills, a heap of ashes on the rug, a consultation with a vacuum, and a visit from the lint brush, we succeed in transplanting a sample of the Chairman and securing his rightful place on my person. I lift my hair from the back of my neck in preparation for the chain. I lift my shirt in preparation for my boyfriend.

  Later, while my handy boyfriend snoozes on the couch, I tuck the rest of the Chairman’s remains back in the box. Back in the rear of my closet, back into the square foot where the closet extends beyond the door like a burrow in the wall, a snack pantry, a catacomb, a tomb, beyond my corporate chain-link purses, studded clutches, striped shells, and slitted skirts, furry sweaters standing guard.

  What about a funeral? What about his family? I wonder.

  The first payment from the Chairman’s estate arrives in my bank account the next day. The necklace starts to burn the following week.

  “So this is how the other half lives!” the Chairman says. He’s standing on my couch, touching the ceiling, until he jumps down and sits on the floor.

  “How?” I ask. “How are you here?”

  “I’m a man about town,” he says, like this is all very obvious. I look at my necklace, then look at him. “Do you grant wishes?” I ask.

  “What do I look like, a genie?” he says, vanishing into thin air.

  The boyfriends grow used to these antics. Me, suddenly staring at an empty chair. Me, talking to myself at the dinner table.

  “I see the Chairman has decided to join us tonight!” my agnostic boyfriend says, cracking his knuckles and dying for a debate about death.

  “Is he, like, really tall?” my tallest boyfriend asks on occasion. “Like taller than me?”

  “Close,” I say.

  “What have you told him about me?” my favorite boyfriend asks, and I lie. The truth is, I haven’t told him anything at all.

  “When are you going to take me about town?” the Chairman sometimes complains. “I’m a man about it and we never go anywhere. We never do anything!”

  I put on some sneakers and take him for a run in the park, but the dogs distract him. He tries, and fails, to pet every single one.

  When the Chairman leaves for the day, I put my sneakers in the hall. The shoes I’m hired to fill are constantly switching in size.

  A certain woman who needed her closet of shoes arranged kept me in her employ for years.

  “Yes, there’s the old woman who lived in a shoe,” Farren explained, “but these are the old shoes who live with a woman.”

  “I think I can manage that.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Farren said. “If you do well with this, I can assign you some of our other Mother Goose listings.”

  I almost laughed, but Farren wasn’t kidding. I know a temp who worked a couple shifts doing curds and whey. Farren tried to send her back for a three-month placement.

  “No whey,” the temp said. “Take your tuffet and stuff it.”

  In confidence, I learned that she had a better offer from an agency out west, working with wheat and chaff. Still, with that kind of attitude, I’m sure she docked herself a few years on the road to permanence.

  The woman who lived with her old shoes had a large uptown apartment with ceilings higher than I’d ever seen. She unearthed from the back of her storage space a marvelous bronze shoe rack, shaped like a nautilus shell. It is the same shape found in the angle of flight the hawk employs to devour its prey. The hawk, with her eyes spread out on the sides of her head, dives down to earth in a heavy spiral so she can always keep her target in view.

  “See, they fit like so,” the woman said, and she took a bright orange loafer and fed it into a slot. “You can arrange them by heel height, or by color,” she explained. “Your choice!”

  She delegated this bit of freedom with the implied philanthropy of an angel investor.

  “What about arranging them by frequency of use?” I asked.

  “Oh, I never wear these shoes,” she laughed. “That’s a different closet for a different day.”

  I never saw that other closet, not once.

  The woman who lived with her shoes didn’t live with another living soul. I permitted her a range of unsavory behaviors as concession to this fact. She liked to change the parameters of my job such that each task’s completion was just a later task for undoing. A box moved to would later move fro. The groceries carried upstairs were left to rot, molt, and travel back down the stairs and into the bin. At first I considered this a kindness, a way of manufacturing work when there was none. I now understand it to be a sort of game, the kind of constant undoing that leaves no actual accomplishment, that makes a person question her very existence.

  You might think I took out my frustrations on her shoes, but that would be a misdirected rage, and my aim is true. I cradled her shoes with the utmost care, warding off scuffs and blemishes, wiping the dust with a damp towel and dry cloth. Waxing, polishing, smoothing. I admit to performing a tap dance with my hands stuffed in a particular set of patent leather kitten heels, a holdover from my days shining shoes at Grand Central Station. But I didn’t dare stretch a single pair with my own large feet. When my employer left for lunch, I touched a pink suede pump to my cheek, and it was as soft as a pet. It smelled new and old at the same time.

  My grandmother had a musty closet of sturdy wedges, not nearly as satisfying as these of the woman who lived with her shoes.

  On weekends, I was filling in for the mannequins at a local department store to earn some extra cash. The window designer arranged our limbs in fanciful tableaus.

  “Rest your arm on this cupcake,” he’d say, lifting my elbow so it sat on a life-sized dollop of frosting and cherry. “Make me believe that this sponsored bakery product is providing you solace,” he’d say, adjusting my palms toward the sky in supplication. “Give me dessert eyes.”

  For the holidays, we mannequins stood silent as snow in a diorama punctuated by glitter and tinsel and light.

  My mall rat boyfriend often came to visit me at the food court for dinner. Pretzels, takeaway dumplings. He had a car, and sometimes he would drive me home from work. I liked the feel of the cracked upholstery on his passenger seat, the kind of damage that suggests aggressive comfort. So much luxurious comfort I’d start snoring now and then, seat belted to protect from collapsing into the dashboard.

  “I like it when you stay in costume after work,” he said once. I was wearing a lion-tamer getup, heavy on the tassels. “Give me lion eyes,” the window designer had said, “like you’ve tamed the lion and now you are the lion, but also, not.”

  One evening, on my way to meet my mall rat boyfriend, I made a detour through Women’s Fashion, and there she was. My employer, the woman who lived with her shoes. She sat knee-deep in sneakers, slip-ons, stilettos, mules, boxes and sizes and styles aplenty strewn around her tiny form. If I’d left a moment sooner, I might not have seen her walk away in a pair of crisp moccasins, down the aisle, and straight out the exit without paying for her purchase, leaving her own old oxfords stacked neatly near a cushioned bench.

  This is why, later that week, I felt comfortable swiping a particularly lush pair from her closet. A size too small for me, but still, a shoe for a shoe. I couldn’t bear to watch them waste away in disuse a moment longer.

  Now, at the bar with the tallest boyfriend, I wear the pair in question: high zipperless boots that slide on and off only with great difficulty. The labor is always worth the result; they transform my limbs into calligraphy. On the phone with Fa
rren, I click my heels against the stool. She has a new job lined up, just for me.

  “What are the particulars?” I ask. My tallest boyfriend has commandeered the bartender’s attention on account of his height, and he secures for me a vodka soda.

  “That depends,” Farren says with a hint of ellipsis. “Do you have experience with, or training in, seasickness?”

  “Seasickness,” I repeat. My tallest boyfriend raises an eyebrow, which somehow makes him taller.

  “It’s not on your resume, so I had to check.” Farren says. “Answer honestly.”

  When Farren says to answer honestly, it really means to please be more comfortable lying. I try to feel comfort with this skill every day, practicing mostly on myself.

  Seasickness, I think, but not out loud. I touch the Chairman of the Board where he hangs around my neck.

  “Remember,” Farren says. “Sometimes you have to leave home to earn permanence. There are opportunities for diligence and efficiency in many realms. This is your chance to find the steadiness. The world is infinite, and the work is, like, endless, am I right?”

  Within the hour, I’m shuttled away from the bar in a black van and placed on a large boat. The pirate captain hands me time cards and a confidentiality agreement, and so the whole affair starts to feel official. We spit on our palms to seal the deal. The boyfriends come to the dock to say good-bye, and I can see them running from separate points toward the water, waving in the distance, little specks with arms in the air, my men.

  The gods created the First Temporary so they could take a break. “Let there be some spare time,” they said, “and cover for us, won’t you? Here are all our passwords and credentials. Here is the keycard, and here is a doohickey to clip the key-card to your purse. See? Oh, sorry, here is a purse. Go on, fill it to the brim! Fill it a little more. Yes, it’s supposed to be heavy. Here is your contract, and here is our copier, and here is the shared binder for all known manner of things.”

  The First Temporary fell from the husk of a meteor and glowed with no particular ambition. The gods had to pin her down so she would not float away, so distracted was this new kind of soul, so subject to drift. To be fair, they had not yet invented gravity. This was back when toads without occupation soared straight up to the clouds, back when employment was the only kind of honest weight you could apply to a life.

  The Temporary spent her first day of work reading the shared binder for all known manner of things. She familiarized herself with each section, each document. Birds, bees, mitochondria. She noted how overfull the binder was even then, even when the world was mostly long stretches of empty surface. What looked blank was actually cluttered with microscopic tendencies toward life. There were infinite itemizations to complete. If the world was already so stuffed, would there ever be room for the First Temporary? The word placement meant something very different back then. It was not a job or a gainful assignment of employment. It was simply a place for each thing, a place to belong. The First Temporary assigned placements for trees and sandy shores, for fossils and tassels. She wondered about her placement, its unsteadiness.

  “Can I stay? Permanently?” she asked, and the gods just laughed and went to lunch.

  At the end of the day, when the gods went to their god homes, the First Temporary thought, What should I do now? The office had a smell that happened only at night. “That’s the smell of innovation,” the gods had explained. She found one corner of the office that didn’t smell so much and sat there for a while. It wasn’t really an office, not the way most people today would picture an office. It was a collection of matter and inertia that suggested the sensation of work.

  She activated her keycard and swiped herself into existence.

  WATER WORK

  I’m filling in for someone named Darla on the nautical voyage of an unmarked vessel. “Ahoy!” I say. I’m met with some ahoys in kind. I’m also met with some harrumphs and howdys and plain old hellos. I understand. Like any new company, they’re still working out the kinks. Still oiling the gears of their mission statement, garrisoning their prospectus. The prow of the ship has no mermaid, and the flag that flies has no logo.

  “Not yet, but soon!” the pirate captain says. “We’re considering proposals.”

  My new mates carry weaponry in varying degrees: a dagger here, a pistol there, a cannon on occasion. This is a relief. The worst kinds of offices are the ones where no one can tell who’s in charge. My new crew was once a company of internet pirates, but they rebranded. Delete a few syllables and lo, you have a new profession.

  “There are only a few kinds of jobs in the world, it turns out,” says the captain, who is the type to pontificate and listicle on subjects varied and profound. “Jobs on land,” he continues, “jobs at sea, jobs in the sky, jobs of the mind, and working remotely.”

  “You mean like working from home?” I ask.

  “No,” the pirate captain says. “Working remotely is what we call being dead. Pirate lingo.”

  “Oh sure! Like Davy Jones’s locker?”

  “No, no,” he says, exasperated. “That’s where we keep the office supplies.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” he says with a slap on my back. “The world allows for periods of adjustment.”

  And how grand it is to see that world! Most of the world is water, and so to my mind, I’ve now encountered the meat of the matter. Yes, my flaneur boyfriend makes his annual pilgrimage to Paris. But has he traveled the shivery narrows at the gut of the Atlantic? Excluding the part where his plane flies over the Atlantic? There’s salt in my nose and salt between my toes, and I can’t wait to send a postcard from my new, beautiful, briny life. She’s really going places, is something my boyfriends are maybe saying about me.

  The predicted and dreaded seasickness aggregates somewhere at the back of my tongue. I try to hide it so as not to be caught in a resume fib. I keep a bucket close. When my stomach swings left, I lean starboard. When my stomach swings right, I lean port. In the process, I learn about starboard and port! I try to compensate for the waves roiling in my belly. I hang my head over the side of the ship, and the first mate of human resources finds me swinging there.

  “I’m the first mate of human resources,” he says. He flips me across his broad shoulders, walks me down into the hull, and carries me to his office. I haven’t been carried in such a very long time.

  “Sit here,” he says, placing me on his sofa, “until you’re fit to function.”

  The human resources cabin is mostly bare. A large poster on the wall features a cat with a peg leg paw. “There is no Purr in Pirate!” reads the caption.

  “Are you OK?” the first mate asks.

  I nod, but the nodding is too much like bobbing.

  “Great. Let’s assess the situation. Did the food make you ill? Or was it something one of your superiors said?”

  “No, neither,” I say.

  “Do you have a particularly sensitive gag reflex?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “OK. Are you pregnant?”

  “What?”

  “If a woman is sick at work, she is probably pregnant. Those are the rules!”

  “I’m not.”

  “Great, great. I’m just covering all the bases. Because your resume here says you can, quote, totally handle seasickness.”

  A lump rises in the back of my throat. I swallow it down, but swallowing is like swaying. I lean back into the cushions, but it’s really more like falling. The perspiration on my upper lip desperately needs attention.

  “My bucket?” I ask, and he nudges it closer to me. “Thanks.”

  “Not your bucket,” he says with a laugh. “Company property.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “By which I mean to say, treat it as such.”

  “Right.”

  “By which I mean to say, you probably wouldn’t want to relieve yourself on company property. Right?”

  “Right.”
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br />   “Now.” He sits down in a swiveling chair across from me. The rotations of the wheels are disastrous. “About your alleged seasickness.”

  “Oh no, it’s not that,” I try to explain, my face glistening with sweat. “Not seasickness.”

  “No?”

  “No,” I gag, and my head goes into the bucket. With a single swoop, he pulls my hair back from my face, and he doesn’t stop there. He produces a band from a drawer filled with such accoutrements and braids the length of my tangled mane. He’s done this before, I can tell, the yanking and the coaxing, the application of product. He pulls the braid forward over one shoulder and pins it around the crown of my head in a sort of, well, crown.

  “This is a fresh, hot look,” he says while I wipe my mouth.

  I do feel fresh, and hot. Then he puts his index finger at the base of my skull and gives my newly exposed spine a long, silent stroke. At first I think he’s picking up stray wisps at the nape of my neck, pinning them out of view. But no, it’s a different ritual, one I don’t recognize.

  “In human resources,” he says, “we provide resources to make sure you’re as human as possible. I’ll leave you with some pamphlets about company property and resume accuracy. Here,” he says, and he puts the pamphlets in my lap. Somehow the literature on my legs soothes my stomach.

  “Thanks.”

  “For the seasickness,” he says, “there is a cure. It’s easy. Just think about how much you want the job.”

  “I want the job very much!” I manage to say, wiping my mouth.

  “That’s great. Because you know what happens to land legs that don’t acclimate?” He points to the peg leg kitten.

  I give him a thumbs-up, which is all he needs. He smiles.