“Very funny,” he says.
“I try,” I say.
We both look at the painting.
“They look like they just got the news that they have to abandon their farm and come work in a cube,” Kyle says.
I grunt a laugh.
“Did I ever tell you I was laid off once?” he asks me.
“You?” I say, surprised. I can’t imagine Burberry Tie Kyle ever in the unemployment line.
“It was my first job out of college. In New York.”
“Really?”
“It took me six months to find another job.”
“What did you do for all that time?”
“I watched reruns of Green Acres and Days of Our Lives.”
I laugh, because I think he’s kidding.
“That Stephano is one bad-ass dude,” he says, straight-faced.
This makes me laugh.
“You have a good laugh,” he tells me.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean you have a good laugh.”
I study him. Wondering if he’s trying anything funny.
“Relax, Jane. Have a bit of fun, will you?” he tells me. “Remember when you used to have fun?”
“I’m trying,” I say.
I don’t know if it’s the champagne at work, or if I’m actually enjoying myself. It’s hard to say exactly when I stop wondering why Kyle is being nice to me. At the end of the evening, he insists on parking, which in my neighborhood is anything but easy.
At my door, there’s an electrical charge in the air, and I can’t decide if it’s the champagne I ingested, or the fact that Kyle is flashing me one of his deliberately charming smiles. I’ve seen him use The Smile countless times on unsuspecting women. He reels them in with a smile, and then when he gives them the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech six weeks later, they never know what hit them.
“Aren’t you going to invite me up for coffee?” Kyle asks me, still smiling.
It occurs to me that Kyle actually is quite good-looking, if you go for cookie-cutter types. He looks like he’d be right at home in a Ralph Lauren ad.
“That’s pathetic,” I tell him. “You’re so used to girls fawning all over you that you aren’t even trying to come up with good lines anymore.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, pretending innocence.
“You know very well that most women, God knows why, find you attractive,” I say.
“Hmmmm,” he says, pretending to contemplate this concept. “Perhaps it’s my boyish good looks,” he jokes. He pauses. “So why is it that…you know.”
I smile, amused. “No, I don’t know.”
“That you never…”
“Yes?”
“Well…” He’s squirming. “…wanted to date me?”
I laugh.
“Your ego is entirely out of control,” I tell him. “You really think every woman should fall at your feet?”
“Only the really, really hot ones,” he says, flashing me his smile again.
I laugh harder, and give him a playful shove, which causes him to flail his arms in an exaggerated windmill and pretend he’s going to fall over.
“Good night,” I say, slipping through my door.
Illinois Department of Health and Human Services Office
Springfield, IL 62781
Jane McGregor
3335 Kenmore Ave.
Chicago, IL 60657
March 12, 2002
Dear Ms. McGregor,
We received your request for food stamps and are afraid that you do not qualify for them, despite, as you wrote, “being a single mother to your two-bedroom apartment’s appliances.” We appreciate the fact that should you receive food stamps you would not use them to buy “booze or drugs.”
However, with your unemployment benefits being what they are, and your lack of (human) dependents (we’re afraid roommates, no matter how annoying, don’t count), we have no choice but to reject your application for food stamps. Should you have further questions on this matter, or would like more information, please feel free to contact us.
Best,
Jane Miller
Associate Social Worker
Illinois Department of Health and Human Services
7
I am flat-out broke.
I have less than $10 in my bank account, which means that I can’t effectively get it out of any ATM, and because my bank charges me $5 to see a teller, I’d be essentially halving my meager savings if I go in person to collect it.
These are desperate times. I have two minimum credit card payments due and the electric company just sent me a bill in a pink envelope.
“Do you have any money I can borrow?” I ask Missy.
She snorts at me.
“Do I look like Bank of America to you?” she hisses at me, not looking up from my television set. My couch has a permanent imprint of her butt in it, which is only one of the many drawbacks of living with Missy.
Another happens to be that Missy claims to have severe allergies to dishwashing liquid. This is her reasoning for not touching the dirty dishes in the sink. Or her laundry piling up in the hallway. Detergents of any kind, she claims, cause her to break out in life-threatening hives.
Oddly, this does not prevent her from using my BedHead shampoo.
“I’m going out,” I say.
“Whatever,” Missy calls back.
I pack up thirty of my CDs and take them around the corner to the used CD shop, where I get $10. Apparently, Oingo Boingo and Duran Duran aren’t the hot items they used to be.
It is a sad day when ten bucks doubles my total net worth. On the bright side, I can now deposit this $10 into an ATM and retrieve a full $20 out.
My next stop is the blood bank around the corner, where I have to answer a list of a hundred questions, including “Have you ever sold sex for money or drugs?” and “Have you ever taken intravenous drugs or had sex with a person who’s taken intravenous drugs?” I pause on the question: “Have you had sex with an ape/monkey/or any species of primate since 1980?” I almost check yes to this, thinking Mike might count, but decide that he’s less of a monkey and more of a pig.
I sit in a chair while a young nurse pokes me eighteen times with a needle before she finds the vein she calls “slippery.” When the bag fills up in a matter of seconds, the nurse tells me I’ve got big veins, which makes me a fast bleeder.
At least I’m good at something. It’s nice to know if I’m ever in a major car accident, I’ll bleed to death in eight point two seconds.
It’s only after they take enough blood from me for a major transplant operation that I discover they no longer pay people for blood donation. For my trouble, I get a juice box and a small pouch of Oreo cookies.
When I get back to my apartment, Missy is nowhere to be seen. I check my valuables — a pearl necklace from Grandma and my television and DVD player, but nothing seems to be missing. Plus, Missy’s boxes are still here, as well as her boyfriend’s cash-stuffed wallet. I assume she’s coming back.
I take advantage of the silence to get started on Ron’s CD project, which is the first fun thing I get to do all day. For me, there’s nothing better than concept art, and having no constraints except what you can draw. In a half hour, I have a rough sketch of a giant sink stopper, which I fill in with some deliberately oversized brush strokes. If I had a job that just allowed me to do this all day, I think I could be happy. I just want a job that requires more creativity than designing office supply catalogs.
I decide it’s time to try looking at job listings. Looking through online classifieds is boring and self-defeating, and by the time I’ve scrolled through hundreds of job result screens, my eyes feel red and strained, and I am filled with self-loathing. I resent my parents, who did not have the ingenuity to invent something really marketable, like the beer hat or Liquid Paper. I resent the people who stumble into fortunes by inheriting the buildings around
Wrigley Field, where you can rent out your roof to a Budweiser ad and happily sustain a lifetime of excess by simply allowing a beer company to paint the top of your building. And where’s my benefactor? Where’s my check from the National Endowment for the Arts? Where’s my corporate welfare?
It all seems so hopeless.
In desperation, I start firing off resumes to things I’m overqualified for, including: Gap sales representative, theater usher, and dog walker.
I apply for those as well as thirty other jobs that I’m under-qualified for (including CFO of Chrysler). Like Todd says, how do you know you won’t get the job unless you throw your hat into the ring?
The benefit of having lots of time is you have the rare luxury of being able to waste other people’s.
My front door opens with a bang and Missy walks in, wearing a wool suit, complete with heels.
“You had an interview,” I accuse, pointing at her fitted black blazer. I feel like I’ve walked in on a boyfriend having sex with my best friend. I’ve not even had a telephone interview, much less one that required business attire.
“It was a wash,” Missy says. “They’re only paying seventy. It would be a step down.”
“Seventy thousand dollars?” I spit.
Missy shrugs. “It’s beneath me,” she says.
The phone rings.
“Are you ready to get plastered? I am,” Steph declares on the phone. “My mobile phone died on me. My plane was late. The conference was a mess, and, well, I’ve got some serious news to tell you, but I think I should do it in person.”
I have $20. I try to tell myself this is enough for a night out on the town, like back in college when I managed to get the change in the couch cushions to support a night of pitchers and cheese fries.
“I’ve got news, too,” I say. “Missy’s moved in.”
“What? Are you joking?” Steph coughs. “You let the klepto into your apartment?”
“I sort of didn’t have a choice, and besides, you said you didn’t even think those rumors were true,” I say.
“OK, well, what the hell. I’m feeling generous. She can come along if she likes.”
“She might have to. Of the two of us, she’s the one with cash.”
We all gather at the bar at Red Light, because Missy won’t be seen in one of our “local dives” and she insists that she’ll pay for our ten-dollar mango martinis rather than be seen in an Irish pub sucking down Harp.
“So? What’s the news?” I ask Steph.
“Well…Ferguson has lost weight,” she says.
Ferguson was my old supervisor at Maximum Office. Everyone called him Fat Ferguson with no sense of irony. He was probably nearly three hundred pounds, and because of this, Fat Ferguson had a sweating problem. He carried a ring of sweat around his armpits and a spot on his belly even on the coldest of days. I never saw him without his sweatbands. I kept thinking that perhaps they meant something, like the rings in a tree, but I never found any correlation. They were just there. Pit stains.
“You don’t know pain until you have to work on that man’s computer,” Missy says. “Do you know he once got an entire French fry stuck in his keyboard? Don’t ask me how he did it.”
Steph laughs.
“So how much weight has he lost?” Missy asks. Fat Ferguson had already started the Subway diet well before I left, and was already less of Fat Ferguson and more like the incredibly Shrinking Ferguson. His pants always seemed in danger of falling down.
“You wouldn’t even recognize him. He looks almost normal. He’s lost fifty more pounds,” Steph says.
“Are you stalling?” I ask Steph. “Surely your big news isn’t that Fat Ferguson is still on his diet.”
“OK, well, do you want the bad news or the good news first?”
“Good,” I say, without hesitation. Missy snorts.
“I quit my job!” Steph beams, looking proud.
I drop my cigarette. Missy pats Steph on the back. “Nice work,” Missy says.
“You quit! Do you have any idea how crazy that is?” I can’t believe Steph would willingly embrace a life of squatting, bill-evading, and bad credit. It doesn’t seem possible.
“I’d taken all I was going to take,” Steph says. “I quit on the last day of the convention, after I’d not slept for nearly three days.”
“But, Steph, maybe you could still get your job back,” I start. “You don’t know what it’s like out there. The job market is terrible.”
“I’m not too worried. I’m going to freelance,” Steph says.
My mouth drops open. “Freelance? Are you crazy?”
“Don’t listen to Jane. You don’t need those cocksuckers,” Missy says, tapping out some ash into my empty martini glass.
“Steph, I think you need to think this through,” I say. I am beginning to sound like Todd.
“Too late. I told Mike that he was a low-life asshole and Ferguson that he smelled like Vienna sausages.”
“You told Fat Ferguson he smelled?” I know I should find this funny, but since I am channeling Todd, I seem to have misplaced my sense of humor.
“Worse, I told him he should check out the new modern invention called deodorant,” Steph says.
Missy starts laughing. “Now that is the funniest damn thing I’ve heard all night.”
“At least someone appreciates it,” Steph says, sending me a look.
“It’s funny,” I say, but I’m not laughing. Selfishly, all I can think is that most of my friends are now unemployed. My only free beers will have to come from Todd or Kyle. “You’re sure you can’t get your old job back?” I ask, hopeful.
“I wouldn’t take it if they offered it to me at twice the salary,” Steph declares.
“Amen, sister,” Missy echoes, holding up her martini and clinking it against Steph’s glass.
“So if your quitting is the good news, I hate to even hear about the bad news,” I say.
“Right,” Steph says. “Well, I’m not sure how to say this, so I’m just going to come right out and say it.”
I wait, expectantly.
“OK, well, the thing is —” Steph pauses and gives me a worried look.
“Just say it,” I say.
“Right. OK. Well, it has to do with Mike.”
“OK,” I say, cautiously, trying not to hope too hard that he’s been fired, or that something awful happened to him like he somehow contracted leprosy.
“Well, it seems that, Mike, sort of, well…” Steph coughs. “Mike has a fiancée.”
“No shit,” Missy exclaims.
I can’t seem to speak. I have lost all feeling in my tongue, and my ears are ringing like I’ve just come back from a Metallica concert.
“What do you mean, he has a fiancée?” I manage to say, slowly and carefully, pronouncing each syllable deliberately, so that I don’t start shouting.
“Well, she was there. In New York. She lives there, or she did until a couple of weeks ago when she relocated to Chicago.” Steph pauses and coughs. “And, she told me that they’ve been engaged for more than a year, dating for three.”
Missy is slapping her knee. “Son of a bitch,” she breathes. “I knew he was an asshole, but damn.”
I feel like I’m turning three shades paler than white. He has a fiancée. Of course. It all makes sense now. The fact that we always sat in the darkest corners of restaurants. How he never gave me his home number, just his mobile. How he kept making unexpected trips to New York. How he never suggested that I meet his family, or his friends, or anyone who might be able to expose his double life. It’s no wonder he was so quick to end things with me. His fiancée was moving to town.
I am the dumbest girl alive.
“This calls for another round of drinks,” Missy says.
“I second that,” Steph shouts.
The bartender plops down three more martini glasses. My hand is shaking, but I manage to pick up my drink and down it in one long swig.
It is only by some miracle that I d
o not drunk dial Mike.
Steph stops me at the bar by locking her mobile phone and refusing to give me the pass code. Both Steph and Missy stop me from using the pay phone in the bathroom.
Missy and Steph bond over this, and they both shake their heads at me when I’m too drunk to actually walk myself up my own stoop. I don’t know if it’s Missy or Steph, but somebody hides all the phone cords in the apartment, so that when I try to pick up a phone at 3:00 A.M., I get no dial tone.
I wake up the next morning feeling like sometime during the night someone hit my head with something hard and flat. Repeatedly. I sit up and groan, rubbing my eyes and pushing back the mat of hair that has formed into the consistency of a Brillo pad sometime during the night. My tongue feels furry and sour.
I stumble into the bathroom, my ears a roar of white noise. I drop my toothbrush several times in the sink, my coordination gone along with all ability to concentrate on anything for more than two minutes at a time.
It is then that I realize that Steph has spent the night. She and Missy are drinking coffee in my living room.
“Look,” Missy shouts from the living room, “Fat Ferguson!” She’s pointing to a picture of a man on Ricky Lake who’s confined to his bedroom and can’t get out because of his excessive weight.
“Don’t you just love this girl?” Steph asks me.
“There she is, the queen of martinis,” Missy says when I enter the room.
I groan and head to the kitchen to pour myself a much needed cup of coffee. My head is splitting.
I notice that Steph and Missy act as if they’ve known each other all their lives, instead of only for twenty-four hours. Steph didn’t even really know Missy, except by reputation, before last night. Now, they act as if they’ve always been the best of friends.
“I want to kill Mike, the smug bastard,” Steph sighs.
Pink Slip Party Page 9
