by Lisa Moore
Then Marissa is holding the woman in her arms. Holding her tight. This is Marissa. Delicate, hilarious, Marissa. Impulsive. What a loud laugh for such a petite woman. Because for whatever reason now the two women are laughing.
I take the Indian woman’s purse and snap it shut. I wait as Marissa pushes the woman out to arm’s length to better have a look at her face. She makes the woman look back. Lifts her chin. Am I seeing this?
There is a text on my phone. I hear the blip that means there is a text. I feel shut out now, I am as far from Marissa as I have been since she met Angus, shortly after that trip to the west coast, the motel in Port aux Basques, waiting for the ferry. Vanilla. That’s what I’m here for. Jillian needs vanilla extract. For the cookies. A second blip reminds me there is a text I haven’t viewed. Jillian has small tins she bought at the dollar store, presents for our friends and family, and for my clients. Little fluted paper cups, tissue paper. Reindeer and Santas and toy soldiers dancing around the tins. Jillian likes to make the Christmas gifts, she’ll spend days baking. We are not lovers in that wordless way, Jillian and me, we have settled for each other. Her baking, her butterscotch hair. We understand each other perfectly. We could put it into words.
That’s better, Marissa says. You’re okay now. She’s okay.
The Indian woman wipes under her eye with the back of her wrist and it knocks her glasses askew. There is a box of Cap’n Crunch in her bag, and some kind of ground meat.
Two old ladies. Marissa is old. He fell, he fell. The crack of his head.
The text when I look: my client is moving his account. It’s a text from Gloria herself: Sorry Jim. That’s all.
She must mean, I am sorry for you.
Let me drive you, I say.
Jim, Marissa says. There’s my taxi.
The Challenges and Rewards of Re-entering the Workforce
Everybody had a target on his back. His or her back. Lists up all over the building so you had to look and see who’d bump you. Or whom you were going to bump. The bumps were blocked, and everybody was told there would be tribunals to appeal the blocks. If a block held, you had to do another bump. Some people had up to twenty-five people trying to bump them.
Everybody agreed you had to wait and see.
Everybody reconfigured his resumé so it was bump-proof. His or her resumé.
Some people were escorted out of the building while the budget was broadcast. Others were given twenty minutes to clear out their desks.
They said if you hadn’t heard anything by the end of the week, you wouldn’t hear anything.
But the following Monday, more people were called in, one at a time, and let go.
People walked into new positions they barely knew how to fill. People didn’t have the skill sets, basically. The new people came in, from the jobs they had lost in other departments (jobs they knew how to do), and the people clearing out their desks just looked at them. Gave them the worst kind of look. The people who were still in their jobs and now had to work with the replacements let those new people know they were very pissed off at losing the other person, the person still clearing out his or her desk, the person who had been bumped, their former co-workers, who knew the job already, who were good at it.
People made a shovel of their arm and swept it along the desk so everything, cups with pens and paper clips and some kind of sticky, grit-caked resin at the bottom, a snow globe from Whistler, a pewter-framed photograph in one instance, lined on the back with dark blue velveteen beginning to peel away from a splotched cardboard backing (juice from the packet of pickled ginger that came with the sushi from the food court in the mall), and on the front, under cracked glass, a photograph of a baby girl — everything fell into the cardboard boxes held flush to the edges of the desks.
Everybody said everybody was afraid to open his mouth. His or her mouth. Everybody literally whispered. If they were all sitting together in the cafeteria, they’d cast their eyes left and right before speaking and hunch in to talk.
They even looked over their shoulders before they spoke. They sometimes did this in an exaggerated way. They overdid it. They joked about the clandestine nature, and then they drew back and said it wasn’t funny.
They were tainted, basically, is what it felt like. They felt diminished by everybody else in the cafeteria who had not been bumped or cut or axed.
A lot of people were angry like you wouldn’t believe. They had great stores of anger. It must have been there all along, tamped down.
People said certain people had no balls or they were pussies, or they asked each other why wouldn’t anybody take a stand. One guy took a stand, and he was disciplined and had to take a package.
Or else it came out of nowhere, the anger, fully formed. Burst out of their foreheads like firehoses, or demons holding blowtorches.
There were rumours that if someone stood up redundancies would be rescinded, but nobody would stand up.
People couldn’t believe how cowardly some people were.
Their co-workers.
Stand the fuck up, somebody, that’s what people were thinking, but they wouldn’t stand up themselves.
* * *
The Downeys were both let go on April 2. Marilyn Downey was called into Chad’s office, Chad her senior manager, at eleven thirty a.m.
Marilyn, who was in clerical at Innovation, Business, and Rural Development for seven years, and her husband, Noel Downey, who was in tech support with the office of the chief information officer, also seven years, and who was let go at the end of the same day, around four thirty p.m., were both escorted from the building. OCIO lost two people. Now if you work in the building and you need a new keyboard, forget it.
The Downeys had married in Cuba six months before, and Marilyn wore a mermaid-style ruched silk dress, so tight all the way down to her ankles she couldn’t even really go to the bathroom. She almost drowned in an undertow during the wreck-the-dress photo shoot, the bridesmaids on the beach with their iPhones at arm’s length, the foamy surf at sunset, and Marilyn trying pretty hard not to actually wreck the dress, and nobody helped her out of there until they had some really good shots, half of which were Instagrammed while she was going down for the third time. The Downeys had recently bought a new three-bedroom with two and a half baths and a two-car garage in Prince William Estates. Prince or King or some other ass-kissing name, with a mortgage Noel’s parents had co-signed. The down payment, even though they were first-time homeowners, took everything they had.
Then they had the stink from the dump to contend with, now that it was warming up, and the property devalued before they stepped over the threshold. Soon a new RE/MAX sign swung on a faux wrought-iron pole with a neon sticker over it announcing New Price.
The Downeys, for example, were very angry.
* * *
Fiona Jamieson knew Marilyn Downey from her book club (last book The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, rating 9.5), and then the sex toy party, for which many of them had got primed on martinis at Fiona’s beforehand, and Marilyn had modelled the edible underwear (banana, bubblegum, watermelon, hot pepper).
Fiona had just purchased a new stackable washer-dryer set, but she had to return it. She had been teaching adult basic education at the College of the North Atlantic. Private business colleges were taking over ABE now, for which the students would require loans in the maybe tens of thousands, for upgrading, like in the eighties, when they were getting student loans to learn WordPerfect 2.20 at the Veronica Vokey School of Business.
The movers had nicked the paint off the door frame leading to Fiona’s basement. More than the paint, actually, there was a splintering noise after a sharp crack that seemed to her a synesthetic rendering of the pain experienced by the loss of her job. A chunk of the door frame had been gouged off and was left hanging by sinuous blonde threads of wood.
Fiona had taught people with severe disabilities, emotiona
l disorders, and economic disadvantages. She’d had two home-schooled evangelical Christian teenagers who could not cope with their flaxseed-eating, woven-shawl-wearing, ukulele-picking, depressive/ecstatic, rapturous/repressed pious mothers anymore, and had taken to cutting themselves (just scratches) or playing online poker.
There was a young girl whom Fiona had no record of, whose name did not appear on the enrolment sheet she took attendance from, but who showed up late and sat in the back. Fiona thought the girl was probably of very low intelligence and perhaps developmentally challenged and non-verbal. She was probably coming to class just to get in out of the cold.
The girl emanated a pelt-thick body odour, and had a pale complexion and eyes so deep-set they appeared in shadow under the buzzing fluorescent lights of the classroom. She had long, very dark, oily hair that had once been bleached, so the bottom half was a tawny yellow. The mass of hair fanned out over the shoulders of a man’s oversized windbreaker the girl wore every day and did not take off. It hissed softly when she turned her head and the long hanks of hair swished across it.
Sometimes she fell asleep, her head nodding down and jerking back up, a thread of saliva from her top front tooth to her bottom lip blowing out and in with each breath, her cheek eventually touching down on the desk.
* * *
Most of Fiona’s attention had been taken up with Glen Reardon. One of her mature students, in his early fifties, Glen had required a great deal of endurance and fortitude to even arrive each day at CNA, because he was so beset with self-esteem issues and accessibility difficulties.
He had not ventured out of his apartment for three years before applying online, with the aid of his home care worker, and being accepted into the ABE program at CNA, and specifically into Fiona’s English Composition class, for which forty percent of the final grade was an essay about the Challenges and Rewards of Re-entering the Workforce.
But he did. Glen did come out of his apartment for Fiona’s class. He came every day, no matter what the weather.
He moved with a jerky wrenching-up of one rubber-tipped titanium crutch and a thrusting forward of his upper body, a jolt/stagger that allowed him to be suspended for the brief instant it took to slam the crutch back down. He’d lean hard on it before dragging the other one up and slamming it down, too, a foot and a half ahead of the first one.
Once he had crossed the classroom, he could aim himself into the child-sized orange moulded plastic chair, bolted to a metal bar of other chairs, at the end of the first row.
Each chair had been fitted with a desktop, gouged with obscenities and hearts in BIC pen, that folded away on hinges. Glen would collapse into the chair and flip up the desktop and let the crutches drop to the floor. He would take a spiral-bound notebook and a pen out of his knapsack. The tremor in his hands would not allow him to make use of the pen but he brought it with him every day anyway.
He was a slack-faced, fierce-eyed man whose speech Fiona had difficulty understanding, but as the months wore on Fiona had learned to decipher his sense of humour, elegant and honest. He was subject to frequent rages, instant and of maximum intensity, but Fiona found them inspiring. His fidelity to English Composition was unassailable.
The other students caught on, too, began to untangle what he said, and even the Christian kids with the studded leather wristbands, dog collars, acne, shaved heads, plaid underwear, and chained wallets in the back pockets of their jeans with the low-hanging crotches, even they bought him Cokes with their own money, from the machine down the hall.
The Challenges and Rewards of Re-entering the Workforce essay that Fiona had transcribed for Glen, word by agonizing word, talked about the water stain on the polystyrene ceiling tiles in his mouldy basement apartment, and the particular pine-scented industrial floor cleaner the landlord’s cleaning lady used, a mix of sinus-slicing chemicals that brought on his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He could not make himself understood to the cleaning lady to stop her from using the cleaner.
There had been a few attempts, mentioned in the essay, when Glen saw the cleaning lady coming with her buckets, and he’d found himself shaking with frustration and shouting, stabbing the air in the direction of the cleaning products, but she had shouted right back, even louder than he, that it was no trouble, that it was the least she could do, that she was grateful for the opportunity to help.
Also mentioned in the essay (inverted pyramid format) were the rate of deterioration of his condition (very fast), and the kindness of the nurses in the emergency ward at the Grace, when he became so short of breath he feared suffocation, and the fear that when it snowed he would never get out of the basement. If a particularly bad snowfall occurred and his COPD got bad, the snow covering each of the windows and the resulting grey light all through the apartment, like a granite tomb, and the screen door pressed shut by the weight of a drift — how akin, Glen said, all of that was to being buried alive.
And finally, the sexual longing he felt, the — never mind longing — need when the durable green, shapeless drawstring pants of polyester-cotton blend the nurses wore rubbed unselfconsciously against the chrome guardrail of his gurney while they reached up to attach a bag of saline to the IV pole as he huffed Ventolin through an oxygen mask, hissing steam like a dragon (inverted pyramid format abandoned), his climbing heart rate causing the monitor’s bleating to accelerate and — simultaneously, it seemed — to become louder and more piercing.
Glen also told Fiona to please write down that when it really felt like he was drawing his last goddamn breath, forgive his French, he sometimes felt his cock would “explode” was the word he used, the word itself exploding with spittle and sweet breath like cotton candy.
The word “explode” in this context made Fiona blush, un-teacherishly. Perhaps more hot flash than blush, accompanied by a slathering sheen of sweat so thick she felt a drip on her temple and by the side of her nose, and she was humiliated and aroused.
But never mind humiliated, because Fiona wasn’t going to see any of them again. None of them were ever likely to re-enter the workforce.
The girl in the man’s oversized windbreaker had not attempted the Workforce essay, but she handed in a coloured-pencil drawing of a house with four windows and a front door and a tree on the side and smoke coming out the chimney.
There was a scroll drawn over the house that said Home Sweet Home, and Fiona was certain there was no satire in the caption, though they’d already covered the Learn and Laugh with Satire and Technology unit. One of the learning outcomes was the production of a concept map on satire in a) A Modest Proposal, b) Lord of the Flies, c) Shrek, or d) The Simpsons.
The girl had looked Fiona in the eye just twice during the academic year.
The look the girl gave her was full of unmediated adoration, is what Fiona felt, an adoration that was part plea, part offering, an insatiable longing fused with an innate generosity, magnetic and mesmeric, wordless but alive with telepathic current.
The first time, the girl was reaching her hand into the 40 Timbits Snack Pack Fiona had brought for the class to celebrate the completion of unit five (Exposition, Setting, Atmosphere, and, inexplicably, Concrete Poetry), and the girl had glanced up, half-cringing, as though expecting a slap. She had taken a handful — like, five Timbits in the one go — and Fiona saw in her eyes that she was very hungry and knew intuitively that the girl was pregnant.
The second time was while the girl was handing Fiona the loose-leaf with the drawing of the house with the scroll that said Home Sweet Home, in lieu, it seemed, of her concept map.
The look in the girl’s eyes then was greedy, child-innocent, and aggressive, but at the same time closed down, shut-off, and dead. Basically, a look Fiona wasn’t likely to forget in a big hurry.
* * *
You don’t have seniority, Joanne Brophy’s supervisor was saying. It had nothing to do with the quality of Joanne’s work, which, her supervis
or was saying, was exemplary.
She was calling to say Joanne should bring in a cardboard box to clear out her desk. She was saying everybody in the office was demoralized by the bump. They were all really upset by having to see her go. Joanne was at the supermarket holding a bunch of beets by the stems. Clots of black soil hung on to the hairy roots at the bottom of the dark bulbs, a dank mineral loam, ozonish, purple smelling, the waxy skins slightly damp. Joanne’s husband, a sheriff at the provincial court, had been laid off the week before (now they didn’t have enough people to operate the metal detector, so come on down, everybody, to provincial court, with your guns and switchblades), and she, Joanne, dropped her cell into the perforated stainless-steel shelving unit that showcased the produce.
The phone got slimy in the fresh cilantro, and the automatic sprayers let out a blast of cold mist over which she could still hear the static-riven, plaintive voice of her supervisor explaining the tribunal process. Joanne had a young client who had given the shelter’s number to a girl who was fourteen and pregnant and on the street, but who was not a client. The girl who was not a client would phone while Joanne was working intake on the night shift for Better Decisions, Better Lives.
The girl who was not a client, and therefore could not be serviced through BDBL, was advised by Joanne, many times, to call social services, and, as Joanne had said repeatedly, she would very gladly provide the number.
If the girl were to become a ward of the state, the baby would also become a ward, obviously, which means, yes, the girl would more or less have to give up the baby, and the baby would probably go into the privately managed First Steps program, which was housed in the apartments on Kenmount Road, and would be taken care of by staff who rotated on twelve-hour shifts for the rest of its childhood and adolescence, but on the upside they could both get all kinds of services not available to the girl now. Joanne advised this course of action until she was blue in the face.
