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My mother crossed her legs. "Well,"
she said. She picked up the "Living" section of the paper and
cracked it into position. She tilted her head back and dropped her eyelids.
Her upper lip became hostile as she read. She picked up her green teacup
and drank.
"I'm dependable. I could answer an ad for
somebody dependable."
"You are that."
We wound up in the car. My toes swelled in my
high heels. My mother and I both used the flowered box of Kleenex in the
dashboard and stuck the used tissue in a brown bag that sat near the bump
in the middle of the car. There was a lot of traffic in both lanes. We
drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop. They still hadn't put the letter
Y back on the Amy sign.
Our first stop was Wonderland. There was a job
in the clerical department of Sears. The man there had a long disapproving
nose, and he held his hands stiffly curled in the middle of his desk.
He mainly looked at his hands. He said he would call me, but I knew he
wouldn't.
On the way back to the parking lot, we passed
a pet store. There were only hamsters, fish and exhausted yellow birds.
We stopped and looked
at slivers of fish swarming in their tank of thick green water. I had
come to this pet store when I was ten years old. The mall had just opened
up and we had all come out to walk through it. My sister, Donna, had wanted
to go into the pet store. It was very warm and damp in the store, and
smelled like fur and hamster. When we walked out, it seemed cold. I said
I was cold and Donna took off her white leatherette jacket and put it
on my shoulders, letting one hand sit on my left shoulder for a minute.
She had never touched me like that before and she hasn't since.
The next place was a tax information office in
a slab of a building with green trim. They gave me an intelligence test
that was mostly spelling and "What's wrong with this sentence?"
The woman came out of her office holding my test and smiling.
"You scored higher than anyone else I've
interviewed," she said. "You're really overqualified for this
job. There's no challenge. You'd be bored to death."
"I want to be bored," I said.
She laughed. "Oh, I don't think that's true."
We had a nice talk about what people want out
of their jobs and then I left.
"Well, I hope you weren't surprised that
you had the highest score," said my mother.
We went to the French bakery on Eight-Mile Road
and got cookies called elephant ears. We ate them out of a bag as we drove.
I felt so comfortable, I could have driven around in the car all day.
Then we went to a lawyer's office on Telegraph
Road. It was a receding building made of orange brick. There were no other
houses or stores around it, just a parking lot and some taut fir trees
that looked like they'd been brushed. My mother waited for me in the car.
She smiled, took out a crossword puzzle and focused her eyes on it, the
smile still gripping her face.
The lawyer was a short man with dark, shiny eyes
and dense immobile shoulders. He took my hand with an indifferent aggressive
snatch. It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed
my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let go.
"Come
into my office," he said.
We sat down and he fixed his eyes on me. "It's
not much of a job," he said. "I have a paralegal who does research
and legwork, and the proofreading gets done at an agency. All I need is
a presentable typist who can get to work on time and answer the phone."
"I can do that," I said.
"It's very dull work," he said.
"I like dull work."
He stared at me, his eyes becoming hooded in thought.
"There's something about you," he said. "You're closed
up, you're tight. You're like a wall."
"I know."
My answer surprised him and his eyes lost their
hoods. He tilted his head back and looked at me, his shiny eyes bared
again. "Do you ever loosen up?"
The corners of my mouth jerked, smilelike. "I
don't know." My palms sweated.
His secretary, who was leaving, called me the
next day and said that he wanted to hire me. Her voice was serene, flat
and utterly devoid of inflection.
"That typing course really paid off,"
said my father. "You made a good investment." He wandered in
and out of the dining room in pleased agitation, holding his glass of
beer. "A law office could be a fascinating place." He arched
his chin and scratched his throat.
Donna even came downstairs and made popcorn and put it in a big yellow
bowl on the table for everybody to eat. She ate lazily, her large hand
dawdling in the bowl. "It could be okay. Interesting people could
come in. Even though that lawyer's probably an asshole."
My mother sat quietly, pleased with her role in
the job-finding project, pinching clusters of popcorn in her fingers and
popping them into her mouth.
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