Friendship (27 page)

“But what is it that you want to accomplish, Amy? I’m not really concerned with what you could do for us. I’m sure you could do whatever we’d ask. But in order to know if you’re a good fit, I need to know more about your personal goals.” The interviewer smiled and took a deep sip.

“I was hoping to find a way to put my expertise in action in a way that could help unite consumers with the brands that are the best fit for their needs,” Amy said, as sincerely as it was possible to say something like this.

The interviewer put her teacup down and laughed. “Oh, sweetheart, cut the crap, pardon my French. You’re here because you’re thirty and you just realized you actually care about making money.”

Amy could feel her face shifting through several expressions in rapid succession, trying to find one that wasn’t outright offensive. “Um. I guess I thought that went without saying.”

The interviewer cackled. “Honey, I was just like you. I lived my twenties in New York City, thought I’d be a little Joanie Didion, packing my suitcase for reporting jobs with a leotard and a bottle of bourbon and two pairs of nylons or whatever. Typing away at my novel on my lunch hour and working as a secretary at an ad agency. Lucky for me, I moved up at the ad agency, because it wasn’t a very good novel. Now I own the agency. Do you know what’s glamorous about living in New York City and having no money?”

“Um. I guess there’s—”

“After you’re thirty, exactly nothing. A girl like you needs either a rich husband or a great job, and I don’t see a ring on your finger.”

“I don’t think I would even be good at having a rich husband,” Amy hazarded.

“Better to be in charge of a bunch of other women’s rich husbands, in my experience. Now, the social media thing … I don’t think that’s how we position you. You’ll just get stuck working your way up the rungs of creative alongside a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds. You’ll find it degrading and get discouraged. Do you think you have management potential? It says on your résumé you ran an editorial team at your last job.”

Amy thought of Lizzie and Jackie, whom she’d managed for about ten minutes a day by Gchatting them, begging them to do their godforsaken jobs. “Absolutely, I think so.”

“Great. I’ll set up some interviews. Get a better suit, please, and some real shoes. Nothing edgy.”

Amy looked down at the shoes she’d found in her childhood bedroom closet. She’d worn them to the homecoming dance junior year. “Okay. Wow. Um, thank you so much.”

“Aw, it’s nothing. I owe your dad a favor, and I like helping gals like you. I should warn you, though, you can’t half-ass this. If you’re going to do it, do it one hundred percent. No typing in the Starbucks across the street when you should be at lunch with clients. No secret blog about how ridiculous your clients are. No writing of any kind, except memos and emails and presentations, from here on out. That’s the bargain.” The interviewer drained the last of her teacup, and the brunette appeared from thin air to take it away. Amy held on to her full cup helplessly, not wanting to seem ungrateful and not knowing how to signal that she didn’t want it. The secretary saved her, though, grabbing it from her hand and leaving the room as quickly as she’d come.

“Can I think about it?” Amy heard herself saying.

“No,” said the interviewer, smiling. “If you have to think about it, then I know you’re not cut out for it.” She stood and held out her hand to Amy, who also stood and tried to impress the woman with the firmness of her handshake, though there was no point in doing so now.

Amy’s mom picked her up from the interview, and they drove away from the Georgetown town house via traffic-clogged Wisconsin Avenue. Amy watched the commuters in other cars, sipping coffee, inured to the gridlock, probably listening to NPR. Amy and her mom drove in silence, in traffic that flowed smoothly in the unpopular direction.

For the first time in a while, Amy had a flash of what it had been like to drive, for those few learner’s-permitted months as a fifteen-year-old before she’d failed the test for the third time and given up completely on the idea of being a driver. “Some people just aren’t meant to drive,” she’d told various people in various situations over the years when called upon to explain herself. “And a lot of them are on the road anyway,” the person usually said, and if the person didn’t, Amy would sometimes say it herself. “I’m doing everyone a favor, really.”

What exactly was it about driving that was beyond her? At fifteen she’d thought it was mechanical, that she actually lacked the reflexes and the layers of attention necessary to be aware of shifting speeds and angles of her own vehicle and the vehicles around it; this had seemed like a very small, very specific form of mental retardation. But now she realized that everyone felt that way about driving at first, until they got used to it. Her fear of driving (because that was what it was, not incapacity:
fear
) stemmed from a feeling of being somehow responsible not just for her own car and its actions but for the car and actions of everyone on the road. This was manageable on a two-lane neighborhood side street or a country road, difficult on a three-lane highway, and nigh impossible on the six-lane permanently clogged Beltway where the driving instructor had taken her during her second driving lesson of all time. Signaling, checking her blind spot, getting over into the next lane, then the next, then the next lane to exit—how could she do that, all while simultaneously willing the cars behind her to let her in and to avoid suddenly speeding up and crashing into her? It was too much. She had stayed on the Beltway until traffic thinned, then exited with a heart-stoppingly dramatic swerve at the final possible second. Her instructor had been pretty inured to nearly dying at the hands of phobic fifteen-year-olds, and he hid the tremor in his hands almost completely as they slowly drove back to Amy’s house through the backstreets of suburban neighborhoods, coming to a complete stop at every single stop sign.

Fifteen years had passed, but to be fair, Amy had spent ten of them in New York City, pretty much the last city in America where relying entirely on public transportation didn’t automatically mean that you were poor. But now she was exiled, at least temporarily, and it was probably time to learn to drive for real. Just the thought of going to the MVA filled her with white-hot dread. She thought of how differently the interview might have gone if she’d arrived for it under her own steam instead of being dropped off like a child by a mother who’d gone and gotten them both Starbucks lattes before coming back to pick her up. Possibly not all that differently, but who knew?

Learning to drive would mean admitting that she was living in Maryland for a while, and maybe that was part of why she didn’t know how to do it. Not knowing how to drive was a way of binding herself to New York. But it was a sad kind of bind, less like a pact and more like a trap.

Amy’s mother had to go to work, so she dropped Amy off at the Kiss and Ride with a reassuring smile and a hand pat. Amy had a choice now: another informational interview, this one at an M Street law firm for paralegal work she wasn’t even slightly qualified for—a friend of her mother’s this time. Or, by taking the red line two stops in the other direction, she could go back to her bedroom, where she could eat whatever was in the fridge and watch bad TV and check her email for any signs of hope. Both options were depressing, and for a bleak moment Amy just stood staring into the maw of the Metro, borne along toward the turnstiles by the commuter tide.

She felt the bleak tally of all her losses pile up in the center of her chest and seep out toward her extremities, a physical pain that was inescapable for a moment and so horrible that it left her breathless. Again she thought of what it would mean to harm herself. An infinite eternity or probably more like thirty seconds later, the pain ended by itself, leaving only a lingering ache in some undefinable part of her (her soul?) as she slipped her flimsy paper card into the machine, taking care to replace it in an outer pocket of her bag so that she’d be able to find it easily at the end of her journey; you swiped while entering
and
while exiting here, another dumb thing about D.C. that she would never get used to.

Amy got off the Metro at Takoma Park, but instead of going straight home to her laptop and a cold Tupperware bowl full of last night’s leftovers, she decided to take the long way, past her old middle school and Takoma Park’s meager little main street intersection. Maybe she would pick up a flyer from the yoga studio. The weather had turned springlike, just slightly: sunny and cool. Someone somewhere was already cutting grass. A block later this smell was eclipsed by a muggy smell of industrial food, and Amy deduced its source: a piece of laminated paper taped up on the gate of the Unitarian church read
SOUP KITCHEN TODAY. VOLUNTEERS ALWAYS NEEDED
.

Without thinking too hard about it, Amy parted the gates and went inside.

The smell was stronger in the common room of the church, and it seemed to be coming from somewhere in the back. There was a small team of elderly ladies ferrying foldable furniture around the room like an army of ants, unfolding tables and chairs with brisk speed. Just watching them, Amy’s sad laziness began to slip off her. They didn’t look up from their tasks to acknowledge her presence until she announced herself.

“Oh, you’re new. Are you from the CSA?” the elder of the two ladies said.

“No, I’m just … I just saw the sign.”

“Okay. In that case, you don’t have to fill out a form for your hours, you can just go straight back to the kitchen. Find Chrissie, she’ll tell you what to do. Are those comfortable?” She was pointing down at Amy’s sad taupe interview shoes.

“Um, no, not really.”

“Oh.” The old lady shrugged. “Well, next time you’ll wear comfortable shoes.”

Then she was in the kitchen, which was tiny and full of people, some of whom were obscured by a cloud of steam or maybe smoke coming from near the stove. A tall man with the look of someone who’d been in bands was reaching up to unlatch a window. Amy had never known this church existed; she’d walked past it hundreds of times in her life but never really thought about it at all. The windows in the kitchen looked a hundred years old, at least. The musician was having trouble. “Maybe it’s painted shut?” Amy volunteered.

A fiftyish woman with a nice figure and a long blond ponytail was the only one who noticed Amy. “Oh, another one from the CSA? Okay, honey, I’ll get your form for your hours later. We have a little crisis here.”

“I’m not from the CSA. I just … sorry, up front they said to ask for Chrissie?”

“You see anyone else here who might be named Chrissie?”

Amy scanned the room. The musician had managed to open the window, and the smoke was beginning to dissipate. A broad-faced youngish woman with stick-straight hair and freckles, a woman who looked to be about her mother’s age and was covered in tattoos, and the big blonde, who had that inimitable John Waters–movie Maryland accent.

“Nope?”

Chrissie smiled. “Just get an apron and a cutting board. There’s a box of onions over there to the left of … ugh, are those cold cuts? Just ignore those, those shouldn’t be there. Anyway, they give us these onions—about one in three is okay. Cut them open and see, then cut the good ones into, I don’t know, I guess little pieces?”

“Little like … chop them? Slice them? Dice them?”

But Chrissie’s attention was already elsewhere.

For the rest of the afternoon Amy mostly listened to the banter of the more experienced soup kitchen volunteers. She tried to talk, too, but stopped after the first couple of times she tried to say something and was plainly ignored. She cut open a mountain of brown-hearted onions and produced a smaller mountain of chopped onions, and after that she sautéed them, per Chrissie’s instructions. Her feet were on fire, if she stopped to think about it, but mostly she had no time to think about it. The smell that had almost gagged her when she first walked in—hot, greasy food, questionable fridge, unemptied garbage—was barely noticeable now; it was up in her nose and in her hair and all her clothes. The little window was the only ventilation in the room. When everyone was quiet and she thought there would be more of a chance that they’d listen to her, she asked whether they had to pass some kind of inspection to serve food. The musician smirked. “It’s a house of worship. We get an exemption. We could be slaughtering our own chickens for some Santería ritual back here.”

“It smells like a slaughterhouse already, so why not?” said the tattooed woman who tended the soup. They all laughed, and for a warm moment Amy felt accepted, but then they went right back to ignoring her.

Eventually it dawned on Amy that this coldness was only because so many people showed up and cooked and served, all of them initially high on their own virtue and the idea of themselves as the kind of people who came back to do this week after week, but then none of them ever did. So why bother to get to know them? And probably Amy was just another of these dilettante volunteers. She was thrilled when six o’clock rolled around and she was officially released from her obligation to be there any longer: the meal was complete, and serving would soon begin. Then one of the elderly table arrangers, whom she’d met when she first walked in, came back to the kitchen just as she was removing her apron and announced that they were short a serving volunteer. Amy heard herself saying she’d do it, and they handed her gloves and positioned her at the back of the long room of tables with a big aluminum tray of roasted chicken pieces in front of her. The tables were now full of people. Amy tried not to stare at them. She could smell them. They smelled much, much worse than the kitchen.

She used tongs to dole out the slippery chicken. The people she served were mostly men, some of them mean; they glared at Amy and didn’t say thank you. Some were either so drunk or so tremulous from lack of booze that they seemed almost certain to drop their overloaded Styrofoam plates on their way back to the tables, but none of them did, or none that Amy saw. Some of them looked perfectly ordinary, just slightly more deeply suntanned than your average person typically was in March. But even when people had clean clothes and haircuts, their fingernails betrayed them. Every single person who came to get chicken from Amy had callused, filthy hands, nails like thick pieces of horn, and jet-black cuticles. Some of the women tried to conceal the dirt with nail polish applied over layers of caked-on grime, which was worse than just the dirt by itself. They reached out their hands toward Amy, and Amy looked at their hands and into their faces and tried not to flinch. A lot of people thanked her, sincerely and profusely. They came back for seconds, thirds, fourths, which was allowed, but only after everyone had been fed and only with a new Styrofoam plate each time.