Steamed

by Conan-Park, Jessica

  Correctly so. The following day I discovered that the main similarity between my social work classes and the classes I’d had in college was that the first day pretty much consisted of being handed piles of papers with monster-sized syllabi and listening to professors regale the students with proclamations about impending workloads. My Social Policy course was taught by a frizzy-haired guy in his late sixties, Professor Harmon, who handed us each a forty-page list of required reading. According to his plan, I was to read approximately six thousand pages from nineteen different sources each day. And should I find myself thirsty for even more social policy information, I could jump from the required to the recommended list. I would also be writing a ten-page midterm paper and a twenty-five-page final paper. Then Mr. Slave Driver told us to go buy our books and sent us on our way. That’s just a sample. The rest of my classes that week were equally horrifying.

  The good news was that I had morning classes only; my afternoons were free. I waited until after the week’s final boring lecture on Friday morning to go buy my books. The cramped bookstore was overflowing with students, and I had to shove my way through to the back to reach the social work section. I started pulling books off the shelves, and by the time I’d filled my little basket, I realized that there was no way I could carry all these books, never mind do all the reading. I was going to have no life whatsoever. I started to panic. What had I done? I was going to flunk out of school. And embarrass my dead uncle. I stood staring at my book list in disbelief. The basket was full, my arms were aching, and I had the books for only two of my classes.

  “Honey, you don’t need to buy all those books, you know.” I turned to my left to see a six-foot bald guy in a tight yellow T-shirt. On his face was an expression of genuine pity. His gold ear clips and blue-tinted sunglasses were making me guess gay—but I’d been wrong before. He reached over and grabbed the papers out of my hands. “Okay, now who do you have for General Practice? Oh, Wolfmann. So, you only need these two textbooks, and, well, maybe this paperback here.” My savior reached into my basket and put back seven books for me. “I’m Doug Kingsley. I’m a doctoral student here. Thank God I found you, or you’d probably go home and put a bullet through your head thinking you’d have to spend the rest of your life trying to read all this crap.”

  “Hi, I’m Chloe. Thank you so much. I was beginning to think I’d need a truck to get all these books back home.”

  “Yeah, they like to scare all the first-year students by throwing the syllabus at you the first day and telling you all the reading you supposedly have to do. Don’t worry, it’s not that bad. Nobody does all the assigned reading. You’ll figure out what you have to read and what you don’t.” Doctoral Doug finished helping me select what to buy and what to toss back on the shelves. “And I probably just saved you six thousand dollars in book costs, so you’ll have to buy me a mochaccino sometime.” Definitely gay. Damn.

  “I’ll buy you any caffeinated beverage of your choice. Thank you so much for your help. I am totally lost here.”

  Doug wrote down his phone number for me and said to call him if I needed anything. He’d gone home after his first day of classes and wept like a baby, he said, so the least he could do was prevent that from happening to another student.

  I lugged my books home from school, checked my voice mail, and listened to a message from Heather, who demanded to know all the torrid details of my romantic Back Bay date and asked why hadn’t I called her all week, and so on. I decided to call her later. The last thing I felt like doing was telling my horror story one more time. I also had a message from my parents to announce their return from Bar Harbor, Maine, and to invite me to stop by. That would have to wait, too. I called my new supervisor, Naomi, to check in about my internship. I mean field placement.

  “Boston Organization Against Sexual and Other Harassment in the Workplace. This is Naomi, how can I help you?”

  Oh God, please don’t make me answer the phone there. I explained who I was and asked about starting next week.

  “Excellent,” Naomi said enthusiastically. “I’m glad you called. I was actually wondering if you could pop by this afternoon so I can show you around and get you set up for Monday. I have to go to a coalition rally at the State House early next week, so if I could get you situated before then, that would be great.”

  I groaned silently but agreed to come in at two and decided I’d park in one of those expensive parking garages. I’d thought that the school misery was over for the week, but now I had to go downtown and deal with this organization with the ridiculous name. This whole graduate school business was really going to interfere with my socializing and my television watching. What’s more, since I should make a decent impression on my new boss, I’d now have to change into something other than jeans.

  Totally annoyed, I threw on a good shirt and some decent footwear before driving downtown. I parked in a garage and found the address Naomi had given me, an office building right in the heart of Downtown Crossing. I made my way up three flights of stairs (the elevator was broken) and found Suite 412. When I entered, I instantly realized it was no suite, at least as I understood the word. To me, suite conjured up the image of luxurious rooms at the top of the Ritz with beautiful views, room service, and a minibar. What I saw before me were two rooms separated by a dilapidated door that stood open. Industrial gray carpet covered the floors, and one tiny window in the second room provided a view of a concrete wall. The only furniture in the first room were two cafeteria-style tables and some metal filing cabinets overflowing with papers.

  “Hello?” I called into the apparently empty rooms.

  “Chloe?” A woman popped her head out from the far room. She walked toward me. I smiled weakly. Far from looking like an international supermodel, this Naomi Campbell had ghostly pale skin and medium-brown hair that fell to her knees and was plaited in tiny braids with multicolored beads adorning the ends. She couldn’t have been much older than I was, but she was dressed in bland, hippyish clothing, her outfit completed with, ugh, Birkenstock sandals. I’d gone to a radical leftist, politically activist, politically correct college, and I thought I’d escaped when I graduated. And what was up with her hair? I silently christened her Braids.

  Braids eagerly reached to shake my hand. “Well, let’s get started. As you can see, we’ve got tight quarters here, but we make the best of it. I’m going to clear a space for you at one of these tables, so you can have a workstation for yourself.”

  Great.

  “Come into my office, and I’ll fill you in on the organization.”

  I followed Naomi into her dinky office and listened to horror stories of women who’d been harassed at their work-places. My job was to answer hotline calls from women who were dealing with creeps at work and needed help in fending off the jerks. Then there’d be a lot of “outreach” work, as Braids called it. As far as I could tell, outreach work meant calling random companies I would select from the Yellow Pages and offering to present sexual harassment workshops.

  “Now, even if they say no at first, you should always make a follow-up call,” Naomi instructed. “Every organization is required to have a sexual harassment policy, but not many places know how to educate their employees properly.”

  “So you want me to harass them about their harassment policy?” I suggested. My new boss glared at me. I couldn’t blame her for feeling disappointed in the quality of student she’d been assigned. “Um, who else will I be working with?” I asked.

  “Well, we have some volunteers who come in sometimes during the week to help out. And there’s a board that meets once a month in the evenings, so you’ll get to meet all those folks when you come to those. But for now, we’re a small group.” She smiled at me.

  “So, it’s pretty much just you and me?”

  “We’re a nonprofit organization, and at this point we don’t have the funds to pay for any other staff. But maybe that’s a project you’d like to take on while you’re here. Fund-raising. Fund-rai
sing and getting the word out about our organization.” Organization was a generous term for this one-woman operation, but Naomi had to think positively, I supposed.

  We finished up with Naomi leaving me a big, fat folder detailing the history of the organization and the procedure for handling hotline calls. She said I could tackle the material when I returned on Monday. I didn’t see why I couldn’t take this bad boy home with me and read it in front of Days of Our Lives next week, but I just nodded and smiled and otherwise did my best to look breathless with expectation about my new line of work. How I was going to survive the year cooped up in this little room with Naomi was beyond me. “See you Monday,” I called with false cheer as I swiftly made my exit.

  I’m free! I’m free! On to my weekend! Oh, damn. I had Eric’s funeral tomorrow. What was happening to my life?

  I found my car in the lot and felt grateful that I’d had the foresight to park in a garage. Even though Friday afternoon traffic in Boston was going to be rough and I probably could have made it home faster on the T, this way I could be alone in the car rather then pushed up against some smelly frat boy starting his night early. I pulled up to the parking booth and handed over my ticket. “Fourteen dollars,” the burly woman in the booth called out.

  “That can’t be right. I was only here for, like, an hour?”

  “Fourteen dollars,” she repeated sternly.

  I sighed and reached inside my purse for my wallet, where I found nine dollars. It’d been a while since I’d parked downtown, but it didn’t seem possible that it could cost this much. I leaned out the window. “Um, I only have nine dollars in cash. Can I use a credit card?”

  “Cash only.” She laughed and shook her head at my naïveté about the big city.

  “Okay, well, let me just pull back into one of those spaces, and I’ll go to an ATM.” What a nuisance.

  “Sorry. Those spaces are reserved. And this ramp is a one-way, anyhow.” She was having more fun by the minute.

  “I can’t just pull into one of those spots for five minutes while I get some money?”

  She shook her head firmly. I looked at her in disbelief. What was she going to do? Keep me hostage here in the garage until money magically appeared in my purse?

  “Should I just leave my car here then?”

  “If you’d like me to have you towed, sure, go ahead.”

  I should’ve strangled her, but I’d seen enough murder for one week. Dammit. I started rummaging around my car looking for change. I finally pulled together another two dollars and forty cents and offered up my findings in the hope of release.

  “Honey, you’re still short over two bucks. Can’t let you go.”

  I snarled at her and continued ripping apart my car for money. I even climbed into the backseat, pulled up the floor mats, and dug in between the seats, where, to my delight, I uncovered some additional change, including a couple of quarters covered with a revolting semisoft crud. Still, money was money, and I’d found enough to get me out of there. Smiling smugly, I handed my encrusted findings to the beast in the booth.

  She peered at the coins and looked up at me with satisfaction. “I can’t take two of these quarters. They’re Canadian.”

  For a few seconds, I hated Canada. Then I revved my engine and shot the woman a menacing glare that apparently persuaded her to end the battle. She let me go.

  I wormed my way out into the downtown traffic and poked through it feeling sorry for myself. On the radio, horrible Mariah Carey shrilled the message that love takes time, and I felt myself drift back into that teenage stage of dreaming about young love and first kisses, and dancing in the school gym to Jamie Walters, Color Me Badd, and other musical mistakes of the early nineties. Had the dreams been mistakes, too? If not, when was I going to meet my true love? Where was my sweaty hunk? When was I going to make out to “Stairway to Heaven”? It was probably going to be a high school dance song until the next millennium, so even now, long after high school, there was still time, wasn’t there? Okay, I did dance to that song once in tenth grade with Billy Lajewski, but that damn Billy warned me at the beginning of the song that because it was really long, he wouldn’t be able to dance with me through its entirety. And even with only half a song, he’d had plenty of time to kiss me, which he hadn’t, so “Stairway to Heaven” didn’t count at all. I’d been so hopeful back then that I’d find a perfect love or that I’d at least tumble so quickly from one passionate relationship to another that I’d barely have time to catch my breath. So far, I was not living up to my high-school expectations. And that just about defines failure, doesn’t it?

  EIGHT

  SATURDAY morning marked the one-week anniversary of Noah’s philandering and my Internet dating error. The one-week anniversary of my enrollment in nightmarish social work school was approaching. Yay. And I had Eric’s funeral today. Yay, again.

  I called up Adrianna to find out what to wear. “If I were you, I’d wear something loud and obnoxious, gobs of makeup, and big hair. Don’t play into their impression of you as the grieving girlfriend.”

  Ade could’ve pulled it off, but I went ahead and scrounged up something that my mother would have deemed appropriate: black pants, sleeveless black top, and black blazer, all in different shades of black, since God forbid that I ever get it together to take things to the dry cleaner’s and prevent all my clothes from fading. The day was gorgeous and sunny, and I’d have to spend most of it dealing with the Raffertys while sweating in black. But between rescuing Oops paint and consoling the Raffertys, I felt as though social workers far and wide would be proud of me.

  I found the funeral home in Cambridge with no problem. Reluctant to commit even my car to the Raffertys, I avoided the funeral home’s lot, parked on the street, and fed the meter. After last night’s fiasco with the parking booth bitch, I had actually remembered to bring quarters. So here was my plan: I’d sit through the funeral service, make proper remarks to fellow mourners, briefly stop by the Raffertys’ after the service, and run home to change my phone number so they couldn’t find me ever again.

  I entered the funeral home through big wooden doors. A man in a suit asked for my name and then quickly escorted me down the aisle. The room was about half full, mostly with middle-aged people. My usher took me through the main room to the first row and presented me to a scrawny, pale woman in an expensive-looking black dress. “Ma’am? Ms. Carter has arrived.”

  “Darling, I’m Mrs. Rafferty. I cannot believe we’re meeting under these circumstances.” Eric’s mother leaned into me and wrapped me tightly in her bony arms. She eventually pulled back, but kept her grip on my upper arms and stared at me. “Oh, you must just be sick about all this.” Sheryl Rafferty had carefully styled gray-blonde hair. She’d managed to pull herself out of her grief long enough to accessorize with elegant jewelry and to put on makeup, but her perfectly applied blush didn’t hide her fatigue and obvious sorrow. She turned to the man next to her. “Dear, this is Eric’s fiancée.” Either Eric had been a pathological liar, or Sheryl Rafferty had gone psychotic following her son’s death. “Chloe, this is Phil, Eric’s father.”

  Phil Rafferty was quite a handsome man, probably in his early sixties, with a full head of jet black hair, a color that wasn’t, I guessed, natural. The problem with men like this is that they don’t have the sense to just go ahead and dye their eyebrows to match their dyed hair. I mean, really, who has black hair and gray eyebrows? Mr. Rafferty looked as haggard as his wife but hadn’t gotten it together enough to look as collected as she. His tie was askew, his shirt rumpled, and his fake-black hair uncombed.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I offered meekly.

  Mr. Rafferty practically fell onto me as he threw his arms around my neck and pulled me toward him. Ah, whiskey breath. That could explain his disheveled appearance. The poor man started sobbing as he hugged me tightly. At a loss about what to do, I lightly patted his back.

  “I can’t believe he’s dead. I can’t,” he cried. This hard
ly seemed the same loud-spoken man I’d talked to on the phone yesterday. But grief hits people in different ways and at different times, and I was sure that the morning whiskey hadn’t improved this man’s ability to cope with pain. “Thank God that damn Veronica hasn’t shown up. I was afraid she’d try to make this day worse than it already is and come in here screaming and crying and making a big scene and saying how much she and Eric loved each other. I would’ve had to have her thrown out. I’m so glad you don’t have to see that stupid bitch and listen to her lies.” Actually, Veronica was beginning to sound pretty entertaining. And she could’ve taken the focus off me.

  Sheryl tugged me away from Phil’s grip. “You’ll sit with the family, of course, Chloe.” Of course I would: no hiding in the back pew by myself. Sheryl introduced me to some aunts, uncles, and cousins sitting nearby. “Now, we’ve had Eric cremated.” Sheryl paused as if uncertain about how to continue. “You can see the urn right up there among the daylilies. After the service, we’ll take him home where he belongs. Oh, here comes the minister. Should be a lovely service. Just what Eric would have wanted.” She patted my knee as I sat down between her and her husband.