Hungry for the World (25 page)

I turned, opened the door behind me. Back to my place on the couch, where I could be warm for a while longer, where I could feign sleep and listen to the known voices whispering around me, until my mother and brother left for work and my father found his bed. Then, I would take a few pieces of the bacon they had left, borrow a coat, a pair of my mother’s shoes. I’d leave that house and step back out into the city, its numbered streets and named avenues, where everything was familiar, where nothing was the same.

A
T THE EMPLOYMENT OFFICE
I sat listening to the sharp-faced woman behind the desk tell me how little was available for someone without a college degree, how my few office skills were not in demand, how, as a woman, I didn’t qualify for the jobs that required heavy lifting. In my hand I held the letter stating that my pitch for unemployment benefits had been denied. She straightened her papers, making little taps with the balls of her fingers around the edges. If only I hadn’t quit the bank, ditched the insurance company,
she said, disappeared from the drive-in. So few points to recommend me. I thought I might explain, speak of mistakes and regrets, but it all came out sounding like lies and excuses. She nodded without meeting my eyes.

I watched the decided way she separated my copies of the papers from hers, pushed them toward me. She smelled like baby powder. I stood, brushed the wrinkles from my skirt. “I’m a good worker,” I said. “I learn fast.”

She smiled tightly. “You might try the County Health Department for any medical needs. They charge minimal fees.” She folded her hands atop her desk, said, “There are others waiting behind you.” We were separated from the lobby by a low partition. I turned to see the line of men and some women, impatient and weary, a few dressed neatly, many wearing the ill-fitting donations of better folk.

No openings at the mill or bullet factory; nothing at Penney’s or Sears. When I did apply for advertised positions—at the offices and warehouses, fast-food chains and clothing boutiques—the response was the same: I’d been fired from my last job; my former supervisors would not recommend me. I left each interview with less hope, less reason to spend my hours filling out forms and waiting for calls that never came.

When I went to the health clinic for free birth control pills, the nurse pointed at the waiting room. “You see all those women in there?” I looked from one young mother to the next, each carrying or scolding or ignoring a clutch of children. “You make sure you take these,” she said, handing me the small plastic case. “You find work. You scrub floors if you have to.”

———

S
LOANE
S
UPPLY
. The dress I wore to the interview had long sleeves, hem to the knees, a modest neckline—and still the middle-aged owner asked his few questions without taking his eyes from my breasts. When he offered me the secretarial position, I rose to shake his hand, but instead of taking it, he looked at my open palm and grinned. Stupid, I thought, for me to have risen first, to have stuck out my hand like a man.

“See you at nine tomorrow,” he said, and nodded that I was free to go.

When I told Connie and Michelle, we celebrated. Money to pay my share of the phone bill; money to buy new clothes, get my hair permed, pay for breakfast at TJ’s. Money to put down on a used car. I felt hopeful for the first time in months.

Michelle dropped me off the next morning. Sloane Supply was located in a refurbished 1950s house. The former living room was now the front office, and as Mr. Sloane showed me to my desk, I marveled at the sudden turn my life had taken: a new IBM Correcting Selectric; a rolling office chair; a multiline telephone with a spongy shoulder rest; an electric pencil sharpener. The office skills I had excelled at while in high school under the tutelage of Mrs. Morris—a stout, disciplined woman who wore black cat-eye glasses and believed secretarial work was an exact science—were still fresh, and I imagined the dictation I would take in shorthand, the speed with which I’d add up the day’s numbers on the ten-key. This was my chance to do it right, and as Mr. Sloane leaned over my shoulder to demonstrate the intercom, I was already lecturing
myself on things to avoid: tardiness, daydreaming, misfiling, coffee left too long in the pot.

Mr. Sloane straightened. “It’ll just be the two of us here,” he said. “I’m in the back office. If you need anything, let me know.”

I returned his smile and nodded. His dark hair was thick, left long over the ears in the style of a younger man. He had a pudgy look about him, a softness, as though water had been pumped beneath his skin and left to find its own level.

The minute I heard his door shut, I jumped to attend to the percolator, whose wheezing indicated the coffee was ready. I stood in the hall for a moment, peering into the other rooms, empty except for a few tables and rolled sheets of paper. I picked up the phone, listened to the dial tone, then placed it back in its cradle. I pulled out the desk’s top drawer, which held a single pencil and three paper clips. The other drawers held nothing. I switched on the Selectric: the little metal ball made a satisfying whir and chatter. I turned to face the plateglass window looking out over Hillcrest Road and realized that I had absolutely nothing to do.

No files to put away. No typing or correspondence. Not a word on the Dictaphone machine. I opened the top drawer and separated the paper clips into compartments. I found a box of Kleenex and dusted the leaves of the philodendron whose vines drooped anemically down the sides of the file cabinet. I checked the few folders the cabinet held, making sure they were alphabetized correctly. I sharpened my pencil to a fine point.

At noon Mr. Sloane opened the door to his office. I’d fallen into a traffic-induced stupor, staring out the front window, and I hastened to make of my props what I could: the pencil
across the desk pad, the phone’s cord neatly spiraled, the phone itself at the perfect angle for retrieval.

He sauntered across the room to the window, hands in his pockets. “Plans for lunch?”

“No, I …home, I guess.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“It’s not far. I’ll walk.”

He turned and looked at me. “In your high heels?” He moved to sit casually on a corner of my desk, crossed his hands on his thigh, and leaned forward just enough for me to catch the smell of whiskey. “Aren’t you hungry?” He leaned in closer. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t be surprised if your boss wants to lay you.”

He winked, slid from the desk, and left.

I was stunned, less by the statement than by the suddenness of its revelation. He’d seen something in my face, in the way I had lowered my eyes.

I don’t remember what I did for lunch, where I went, if anywhere. I waited. When he returned, he offered only a nod my way before closing himself in his office. From one o’clock until five, I did not move from my chair. The phone didn’t ring. The only noises other than the traffic were the squeaks and shuffles Mr. Sloane made as he shuttled between the back rooms. At five exactly I rose and rinsed the coffeepot. I stood several feet away from his door and announced I would be going.

“See you in the morning,” he called back, and in his voice I heard nothing that indicated threat or lechery.

I walked the six blocks home, wincing at the rawness of my heels, unwilling to take the shoes off and ruin my one pair of panty hose. I told my roommates that I’d get paid in
two weeks, soon enough to meet the month’s ledger of bills. I don’t remember that I shared with them what had really happened, thinking that to do so would only enhance the view I believed they had of me as flighty, irresponsible, a woman who did not know how to comport herself around men in a nonsexual way.

It was like a scent on me—the smell of something clandestine, intimate, provocative. No matter how many hot baths and steaming showers, no matter the careful application of sprays and powders, no matter how long the hemline or loose the skirt, something remained to betray me. The next day’s dress would be even more modest, the fabric heavier, brown instead of mint green. I rubbed ointment into my blistered heels, set the alarm, convinced by such small, domestic tasks that I could be dependable, become an older version of that sturdy working girl I had been only a year before.

I had begun to suspect that morality might lie in the exact and complete fulfillment of minutes and minutiae, a rigidly timed and compartmentalized existence. I would give myself no more than an hour for bath, hair, and makeup. I would eat one piece of toast, drink one cup of tea with only a teaspoon of sugar. I would borrow my roommate’s sneakers and allow extra time for the walk to work, arriving at five minutes before nine. I would remake myself into that young woman others would be happy to see: content, temperate, and clean.

“H
OW WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO TO
H
AWAII?”

Mr. Sloane stood in front of the plateglass window, hands in the pockets of his finely pressed trousers. He seemed enormously pleased with himself.

“Hawaii?”

“There’s a conference. I thought you might enjoy it. You can take notes.”

It was my second day on the job. All I had hoped for was steady income, a way to support myself; suddenly, I was being offered free travel to an exotic island, a stay at the nicest of Waikiki hotels. I could see by the set of his mouth, the slight smile, that he believed I could not resist his lavish proposal. A sudden, intense disgust replaced my apprehension, not because he had insulted my virtue, but because he believed me so naïve. I was no longer that girl David had discovered, no longer so easily wooed. Nor was I David’s creation, although I could not yet say what shape my life was taking. All I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with this man or any others like him. I would starve on the street, I thought, before allowing such hands to touch me again.

I leveled my gaze. “What would your wife think?” I asked.

He pulled his hands from his pockets. His smile dropped to a straight line. “Mrs. Sloane,” he said, stepping slowly to my desk, “is none of your business.”

He left, went into his office, slammed his door. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the world was framed in a four-by-five picture window, busy with the traffic of neighborhood people.

I rose and made my way to the empty coffeepot. A spasm of nausea knotted my stomach when I opened the Folgers: during the long rides I had taken as a child up and down the river road from the logging camps to Lewiston, I had often settled my chin onto the lip of an empty coffee can, the sickness of sixty-mile-an-hour corners unchecked by saltines.

As the water began to boil through, I heard Mr. Sloane’s
door open. In the second it took me to turn, he had closed the distance between us. I took a small, sideways step, and he moved with me. I don’t remember the look on his face or what he smelled like or the feel of his hands. I remember the coffeemaker’s asthmatic breathing and the cramped muscle my body became as he pressed me to the wall.

I didn’t panic or run—I knew too much about the excitement of the chase to do that—and I also knew that though I feared his strength, I would not go down without a fight.

“You don’t want to do this,” I said. Perhaps it was the cold resolve in my voice that caused him to pull back. I said, “Don’t you touch me again.” The look on his face changed from rapaciousness to rage. I watched him smooth his hair, and then he turned away, stepped back into his office, and closed the door.

The shaking came on then. I had felt it before, and I hated it. I worked my way along the wall, back to my desk, where I took off my high heels and began slowly lacing the sneakers. I’d have been surprised had he let me go that easily, and when his door swung open, hard enough to hit the wall, I straightened and waited.

He came toward me, furious, nearly wild. I stood my ground, set my eyes against his, saw how he stopped, pulled himself back into the shape of a middle-aged man, a wife at home, two children, a business to run. He blinked hard.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

I nodded and returned to the task of tying my shoes.

“Your work is inefficient. You are not self-motivated and cannot be trusted to see what needs to be done.”

I picked up my purse and high heels. He pulled a wallet from his suit coat and wrote out a check for one hundred dollars. “Good luck finding another job.”

The check floated at the tips of his fingers. I took it and walked out into the bright light that knocked the color from everything. For a moment I forgot which way I should go. I couldn’t remember where I was at all. Then the colors settled back into the trees, the bleached asphalt soaked up its black ash, and I thought the day was good because of it.

I took the check Sloane had given me and stuck it in the frame of my bedroom mirror—it would cover rent and my part of the utilities, with a little left over. Maybe we’d go to the disco. I’d buy.

It would be several hours before Michelle and Connie got home from class. I lay on my bed, surrounded by my guns, my marksmanship medals, my karate certificates, library books piled high on the nightstand, at the bottom a copy of Marilyn French’s
The Women’s Room
. I did not yet know how this book would give me my first true taste of political awareness, how it would make me see my own struggle in larger terms, give me membership in a common sisterhood. I did not know that within months, I would be doing what the health-clinic nurse had urged, cleaning toilets and mopping floors before and after class, scraping together enough money to pay my way through college, into that larger world I had always longed for and nearly forgotten.

I picked up the novel I had begun the night before, found my place, turned the pages, felt my anger and frustration slip away. The night opened before me, the ways I could fill it without end.

W
HEN
D
AVID CAME FOR ME
the last time, he arrived midday and did not try to hide himself but appeared as a
suitor might, an old friend. I don’t remember that I thought to turn him away, not even for a moment. If I resisted this time, I knew that there would be another.