by Theresa Alan
RETTE
The Cruel, Self-Esteem Crushing Job Search, Revisited
I spent far too much time waiting like an expectant lover after a promising first date for the phone to ring. Why wasn’t McKenna Marketing calling? The rejection was excruciating. And none of the other résumés I’d sent out were getting me interviews. The worst was having to explain, over and over to Jen, Avery, Mom, Dad, and Greg, that no, no one was interested in me, there had been no new developments in the job front, I was just a big old unemployable loser.
I felt like my life was on hold. I wanted my future to begin. I fantasized about paid sick days and having health insurance. I envisioned getting a stressful, high-paying job and wearing nice suits like Jen did, or getting a job editing for a small magazine and eventually getting a better job at a bigger magazine where I’d earn scads of awards and endless critical acclaim.
Looking for work was about as relaxing as a shopping mall parking lot at Christmas time. When I wasn’t fantasizing about becoming a senior editor at the New Yorker or Random House, I fixated on our albatross of debt.
I made millions of budgets and long-term financial plans. Even in the best case scenario, it would be years before Greg and I could put a down payment on a home. Mom had told me over and over that the only way to get ahead was to invest in a house. Getting ahead seemed preposterously abstract when we were struggling so hard not to fall further behind.
Every time I sent out a résumé, I felt as hopeful as if I’d bought a lottery ticket. The chances of getting a decent job were equivalent to my chances of winning a zillion dollars. Who knew how many people applied for each job I applied for? Maybe they hired from within or hired the boss’s nephew’s friend.
I was so desperate, I entertained the idea of becoming a technical writer. I had no interest in it, but the pay was decent and it was at least tangentially related to my major. Of course the ads specified that I needed years of experience and knowledge of computer programs I’d never heard of. It was quite depressing to realize I wasn’t even qualified for jobs I didn’t want.
Practice
I flipped through the pages of Bride’s magazine. I loved all the intricately designed dresses, the lace, the fabric, the satin shoes, the veils, the gloves, the flowers, the sophisticated, emaciated models who always looked so content.
The wedding itself terrified me. In my fantasies I was an elegant, demure bride who would host an event that would be talked about for years to come. The reality was that I hated the idea of everyone watching me walk down the aisle and say my vows. I hated public speaking. How could I say my vows in front of everyone I cared about and, more important, the people I didn’t particularly care about but wanted to impress?
The wedding was ten months away and I was already having trouble sleeping. How could I relax with images of stumbling over my vows or my dress falling off plaguing me? Or tripping on my way down the aisle. God, what if I broke my leg and the wedding, all the months of planning and all that money, went to waste because I needed to be rushed to the hospital? What if one of us got sick or I broke out in hives the day before the wedding? What if I got a really terrible hair cut? For sure at least three of my nails would break the week of the wedding.
Why was I worrying about my wedding when it was still months away? I didn’t handle stress well, never had. Even as a kid I came home from kindergarten with sidesplitting stomachaches if I ever missed a question on a spelling test or if little Freddy Hanson called me Carrot Top. I suffered from allergies, tension headaches, gastrointestinal problems, and an increasingly serious weight problem. I was an evolutionary reject. In any other era I would have been mercifully exposed on a mountainside long ago.
I was already in training for the big day, practicing looking graceful and skinny in high heels. I paced up and down the living room floor trying to feel elegant and bridal despite the oversized, faded sweats I wore to train in. I tried not to wince in pain from the constricting shoes as I imagined myself as a glamorous model striding down a catwalk. Just as I was losing myself to the fantasy, I lost my balance, and my shin went careening into the coffee table. I fell to the floor, gripping my damaged shin. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Someone knocked at the door. I fought through my pain to teeter over to the door, my feet screaming for me to free them from the vise-like shoes.
“Should I ask?” Avery said, eyeing my sweats-and-heels ensemble and following me inside.
“I’m scared I’ll trip when I walk down the aisle, so I’m practicing.”
“I thought you hated heels.”
“I do, but weddings aren’t about comfort, they’re about beauty.”
“I thought they were about love and commitment.”
“Whatever, yeah, that, too.”
“Isn’t the wedding like ten months away?”
“I really need the practice,” I said, collapsing on the couch beside Avery, rubbing my bruised shin. “Oh my god, these shoes are torture. In college I used to waitress, you know? And being on my feet for hours gave me this bunion that makes these shoes even more unbearable. I only waited tables for six months, but the job left my right foot permanently deformed. Only surgery can correct it. Mine isn’t bad enough to go through all that. So I just have to buy shoes that are like a size too big for me. What I want to know is, why don’t shoemakers notice that women’s feet don’t come to a point at their toes? And why do they make shoes so damn skinny?”
“I don’t mean to gloat or anything, but you do realize that you’re talking to someone who had the good sense to get married at the Justice of the Peace?”
“Yeah yeah, okay. But didn’t you ever want a big wedding?”
“Sometimes I wish we had. But we didn’t have any money, and the important thing was that we were in love and I was marrying a gorgeous, sophisticated, wonderful—at least so I thought—man. So have you decided what you and Greg are going as for Halloween?” she said, changing the subject.
“I have some ideas.” Historically I’d tried to ignore Halloween, but I wasn’t going to let Avery down.
Halloween was a holiday for people with creativity and enough self-esteem to look ridiculous. I could never think of anything creative, and I didn’t like spending money or time hunting through thrift stores to come up with props. I wasn’t the kind of person who saved old stuff and had yarn and glue and paint stored in some closet and could miraculously transform it into some clever costume.
“I’m so bad at Halloween. What are you going as?” I said.
“It’s going to be a surprise. So what are these ideas of yours?”
“I was thinking we could go as literary characters. I could go as Hester Pr ynne and wear a scarlet A. But I’d need a bonnet and an apron. I thought Greg could go as a savage school boy from the Lord of the Flies, but we’d need to get him a conch.”
“I have a conch and an apron.”
“You own an apron? And a conch? That’s amazing. I wish I kept handy things like that around.”
“It’s not handy. I’m just a pack rat.”
“Are you inviting Art to your party?”
“I think it would be awkward to meet at a party.”
“You’re just chicken. Don’t lie.”
“That could very well be. I guess I don’t want to find out he’s human. I like the Prince Charming I’ve made him out to be in my head.”
“Men usually are better in theory,” I agreed.
Masks
It would not be inaccurate to call me a social misfit. I preferred to spend my weekends at home reading or watching a video with Greg than going out and partying. So of course I wasn’t going to attempt to go to Avery’s Halloween party sober. Beer was another thing I wasn’t supposed to drink, yet another substance that had a nefarious influence on my stomach, but I had vats of Maalox and Pepcid to appease my ornery internal organs.
Getting myself to the party wasn’t the only obstacle. I had to plead and cajole Greg into going. Like me, Greg was opposed to look
ing like an idiot, but I finally convinced him that he would have a blast and his costume would be brilliant, and besides, what else were we going to do for Halloween?
I had to explain my costume and Greg’s costume about four hundred times. Greg joked that graduate school had turned him into a savage. It was cute the first time, but it lost its appeal by the eleventh time I’d heard it.
One of the main reasons I liked to be in a relationship was to avoid confronting social situations solo. However, I ditched Greg as soon as he started telling the story about his boss at his last job. The punch line was not even funny. The first time I heard it, we were on our second date. I’d laughed, which only encouraged him. It was the beginning of a new love. I was giddy and happy then. So sue me.
The house full of smiling strangers made me tense. I tried to chug my beer, but all the beer-guzzling talents I’d developed as an undergraduate had faded, and I had to settle for sipping my beer demurely.
I surveyed the room, looking for Avery. There were the usual random goblin/scary types, someone in neon green with a sign that said “Toxic Waste,” a woman with a lampshade on her head and a nightstand around her waist that was a one-night stand, and an assortment of other costumes, all of which were better executed and more creative than my frumpy Hester Prynne. Avery caught my eye from across the room, but it wasn’t until she smiled and came toward me that I recognized her. Her makeup was amazing: her body, face and clothes were splattered in paint, splashes of green, blue, and black that somehow wove together beautifully. I could barely distinguish her face.
“Quit hiding in the corner,” she said. “I want to introduce you to some of my coworkers. They don’t work in editing, but maybe they can somehow put a good word in for you anyway.”
“You look awesome. What are you?” I asked.
“I’m supposed to be a Jackson Pollock painting.”
“Of course. You look so good.”
“Thank you, Rette.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. You look exactly like that. You look great.”
Avery introduced me to Lydia, who was good-looking in a bland, wholesome way. Her nurse’s costume strained over her pregnant belly.
“Where’s Dan?” Avery asked.
“He wasn’t feeling well, so I brought my cousin Ben as my date. What are you supposed to be?” Lydia asked me with a toothy smile.
Didn’t anyone fucking read anymore? Why did I live in such an illiterate country?
“Hester Prynne. From The Scarlet Letter. The book. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s a great work of literature?”
Finally, a look of recognition passed across her face. “That was made into a movie with Winona Ryder, right? She’s so great, don’t you think?”
“Mmm.”
“I dressed as a nurse because ER is my favorite show. I never miss Thursday night ‘Must see TV.’ ”
I smiled and thought, How embarrassing for you to admit that.
Thankfully, just then Jen and her latest boyfriend had finally shown up dressed as Dana Scully and Fox Mulder from The X-Files.
“Jen is here,” I said. “I should probably go say hi. It was nice meeting you.”
Jen looked gorgeous in a green pantsuit with a badge pinned to her lapel that read FBI.
“Sorry we’re late,” Jen said.
“No problem. You look great.” Next to Jen, I felt even frumpier and more old-fashioned. Hester Prynne was about as sexy as roadkill. Everybody knew who Jen was supposed to be. The X-Files were just slightly more hip than an eighteenth-century literary character.
“I’d like you to meet Tom,” Jen said. “He works in our IT department, but before that he was a white-water raft guide, a blackjack dealer, a carpenter, and a paramedic. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Tom, tell her that story you were telling me the other day about when you were a paramedic.”
“Oh yeah, that was kind of interesting. I was telling Jen about how, this one time, we had these two whacked-out cases right in a row. First we were called to the home of an eighty-eight-year-old woman with pneumoxia—that means that she had too much liquid in her lungs and not enough in her blood.” Tom was cute in a rough way. He said “wit” instead of “with” and his hard gestures emphasized his muscular arms. “She was blue, just blue from lack of oxygen. We needed to get an oxygenating valve to force air into her lungs, but all of her veins were collapsed. I mean she was so sickly, we had no way to get the valve in her. There was nothing we could do, except there’s this procedure an EJ stick, an external jugular stick—you jam it right into the patient’s jugular. It can be really dangerous if it’s not done right. You only do it if the patient is absolutely going to die without it because if you don’t hit the caroted artery, it cuts the flow of blood to the head. I mean you’re jamming a huge needle into a patient’s neck. None of my partners had ever done it; I’d never done it. Ken and Jim were like, I’m not going to do it, what if we mess up and the family sues us? But I was like, she’s most likely going to die anyway, why not give it a shot? So I took a needle and stuck ten cc’s of epinephrine right into her neck and instantly, instantly the woman turned pink and started moving, started talking, asked what had happened. This had all happened in moments; we were still at her house. It’s kind of unusual to see a patient reanimate right in front of me. Usually they’re unconscious when we pick them up until after we’ve dropped them off at the hospital. Our job is to just keep them alive while transporting them. So it was kind of cool. I was feeling really high, like I’d really saved a life instead of just helping somebody cling to life till I got her to the hospital. So I’m feeling good, we’re on our way home, we stop at a stop light, and this man knocks on the door to our ambulance. For a second I think he’s going to try to steal the ambulance or I don’t know what, but he gestures to indicate that he can’t breathe, and sure enough he’s turning blue. My partners and I get out of the cab and walk around to the back of the ambulance to give him some oxygen. We give him some oxygen, and the guy says he’s feeling much better, and then he dies, just collapses right there.”
Why did Jen get all the exciting guys with interesting pasts?
“So me and my two partners immediately go to work, and the guy revives within seconds. He never knew that he had died, he only knew that suddenly three big guys are holding him down, shoving tubes down his throat and needles into his arms. He starts fighting us off, he pulls the IV out of his arm as he reaches up to get the tube out of his mouth. Obviously if you’ve just died, you don’t want to engage in heavy exercise, like wrestling three people, for example. I need to inject him with some Valium, but I also need to get the IV back in and the tube back down his throat. I’m practically sitting on the man’s face. My partners Ken and Jim are holding his arms down, and I get the IV in in record time, then we inject him with some Valium. But get this: while all this whole big struggle was happening, the guy’s daughter had driven by and recognized her dad’s car and she gets out of the car screaming, oh my god, oh my god, that’s my dad—she’s just wigging out. We tell her he’s going to be okay, we’re taking him to the hospital. I guess she had a cell phone to call the rest of the family and they must have lived like right there, because by the time we’d stabilized him and gotten to the hospital, this guy’s whole family is there. That’s really rare for us, too. Usually the family doesn’t show up until long after we’ve come and gone. We never get any credit for keeping people alive. But here we could see what we’d done. All these teary-eyed family members, the wife, the daughter, the teenage son, it was pretty cool.”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
Jen beamed proudly.
“Yeah, that was pretty cool. We got a few interesting cases a year, but mostly it was just really grueling work. A lot of crazed drug addicts, a few grotesque car accident victims, and zillions of heart attacks.”
Greg came up to us and gave Jen a hug and Tom an enthusiastic, “Hey! How’s it going? I’m Greg, Rette’s fiancé. Nice to meet you.” They sho
ok hands and Tom agreed it was nice to meet him, too. For a moment there was a lot of awkward nodding, then Tom asked if Greg had caught the Broncos game, and off they were, rambling on about such and such a play and who was going to win some upcoming game. Greg never watched football on TV, but somehow he managed to be conversant on the subject. He never talked sports with me so it was strange to see him be able to suddenly discuss it with such enthusiasm.
I was instantly bored out of my mind, but Jen looked enthralled by their conversation. Jen moved as though she expected to be caught on film at any moment, as if she felt watched and admired. She ate neatly, taking small, ladylike bites, and her eyes were always animated. She was captivating. Did she ever shut it off? Did she ever tire of performing? She could pretend to be fascinated by the most boring person. It was a skill that served her well.
Greg and I went up to our own apartment at two in the morning. The party had been fun, but I was exhausted. Even though I’d taken a Pepcid before drinking, my stomach rumbled irritably. It was bloated and distended and I felt like a woman nine months pregnant with twins. I did not feel at all sexy, so when Greg put his hand on my breast and tried to kiss my neck, I found his touch repulsive.
“My friends warned me this would happen. They warned me not to move in with you,” he said.
“Don’t be a jerk. I’m tired and my stomach hurts. We never have sex anymore because you’re always busy with school. We’ll make a sex date for tomorrow night. Wait, what time is it? Tonight I mean.”
I wanted to talk more, but he just grumbled and turned away, slamming his head down into his pillow.
AVERY
The Party
I’d forgotten how much work it was to throw a party, but the turnout was good, and my costume turned out well. Even so, I wondered what it would have been like if Art had done my makeup. I imagined his gentle hands lovingly painting whimsical spatters on my face, neck, and arms.
