Ask Again Later
Authors: Jill A. Davis
Ask Again Later
With love,
For Ed and Campbell
I
CAN REMEMBER
the first Christmas after my father left. I was five. We didn't get a tree that year. We didn't buy gifts. Somehow it seemed pathetic to deck the halls and allâwhen Dad wasn't there. We missed opportunities. And I got really good at missing opportunities.
I am Emily. Emily Rhode. When I was in second grade, I experimented with changing my identity by misspelling my last name. I had hopes that a new spelling might transform me and permit me access to a new home, and a new life.
Sometimes it was Road. Or Rowed, and even Rode. Almost no one ever noticed the way my name was spelled. People just assume you're going to get your own name right. Except for Miss Bryan, my English teacher. She seemed curious. Or, at the very least, not comatose. She gave us an assignment.
“Write one paragraph about your home,” said Miss Bryan. “Spelling counts.”
Write about homeâ¦should I tell her the combination
to the safe, too? I was eager to share, the perfect accomplice, and I didn't need more than one sentence. The sentence is as true today as it was twenty years ago: Home is a place you can never leave behind. I liked that it was both insistent and ambiguous. I spelled my name correctly, because spelling counts.
While you can't leave it behind, you can look at the events of your past from a new point of view. Turn them around. See all the angles. Consider it your second chance. Second chances do come your way. Like trains, they arrive and depart regularly. Recognizing the ones that matter is the trick.
MY OFFICE CHAIR IS
parked behind a small desk, and on the desk is a giant phone. I intentionally use the word
parked
because the chair is enormous andâif you believe the old wives' talesâengineered by the Ford Motor Company.
In front of my desk is an impressive wall of bulletproof Plexiglas. It's the one thing I'll miss about this crappy job when I leave. I've been able to work in confidence knowing that if someone tries to shoot meâthe fabulously sultry gal who answers the telephoneâthe bullets will bounce mockingly off of the Plexiglas and not disturb me from the important business of answering the telephone.
When the phone doesn't ring for a while, I start to
think about bringing in my own gun and taking a couple of shots at the Plexiglas to test it. Sure the manufacturer
says
it's bulletproof. I don't own a piece though, and when I call a shooting range somewhere in Millbrook, New York, they tell me not to call again. Ever. They refused to answer my question. How much will it cost to hire a guy to take a couple of shots at a piece of Plexiglas in a Midtown high-rise? It isn't their line of work, they claim.
“Yeah, but bottom line it for me, sister. Send a body out to gimme an estimate. Bottom line it for me,” I say.
“You're crazy, lady,” they say, and hang up. I'm just killing time and hoping they'll play along, and I'm disappointed when they refuse. For a moment I worry that I work for one of those companies that monitors its phone calls under the guise of quality control. I am instantly comforted when I realize I work for a law firm too disorganized to tap its own phones.
To say all I do is answer phones is to seriously downplay my role around here. I also control the buzzer button that opens the main door, allowing lawyers into their offices after they get off of the elevator, or return from the bathroom.
Sometimes I fail to push the buzzer with the deftness they might like. I eat up a second of this person's life, five seconds of that person's life. The ones who grow impatient quickly and who are easily angered are the ones I steal twenty seconds from for the sheer pleasure of it. They
grunt and growl in sincere pissiness, and it makes me feel terrific, alive in that way that you don't feel often enough.
I DAYDREAMâAND GET
paid for it. I recall a scene from An
Officer and a Gentleman.
At the end of the movie Richard Gere, dressed in his naval whites, goes into a factory, picks up Debra Winger, and carries her out of that depressing place with all of those dirty machines.
I wish that would happen to me. Of course the whole time I'd be worried that the guy was trying to guess my weight or something. I realize how truly pathetic I am. Some guy in a uniform drags his woman out of the workplace to stick her in a house to cook and possibly even clip coupons, and I am starting to buy into it, into the antifemale propaganda disguised as romance. As soon as he picks her up, things have to head south from there, because at some point, he has to put her down.
I blame my father for my current situation. It's so much easier to blame him than rehash my past and actually work through it. Instead, I pin all of my disappointment and loss on my current post. I can't decide what's worse, clock-watching or minimum wage. Luckily, I'm steeped in both, so I don't have to choose.
The world of nepotism is ugly and dark. I know. There are people out there paying their dues who probably deserve to sit behind this Plexiglas more than I do. If not for the fact
that my father is so well connected, I'd be forced to do a job I got solely on merit. I'd be working as a lawyer, on track to make partner, at a firm where a senior partner was not 50 percent responsible for creating me. I would be boosting my résumé and sleeping with young enthusiasts of all things legal. The notion of being shot would, in all likelihood, not even occur to me. It certainly wouldn't preoccupy me. I may be the only professional in history to take several giant steps backward by cashing in on my “connections.”
I INHALE A DRAG
from an imaginary cigarette being held in an imaginary cigarette holder, recline in my massive chair, and say to nobody, “Jesus is comingâ¦and I haven't a thing to wear.” I say this as if I were preparing to attend one of those cocktail parties at which the women wear giant fake pearls and have the alcohol tolerance of a four-hundred-pound man. I go to great lengths to amuse myself because, you see, no one else does.
I'm one of those people who other people like but never remember. I think most of the world is probably like me. Until recently nothing about me was outstanding, and then my mother got cancer. It's a disease people like to talk about, so I'm more popular now. And when I flip through magazines, I read the breast cancer articles first, even before the numerology column.
At lunchtime I walk downstairs to the lobby and buy
the tallest, thickest magazines I can find, then walk down Fifth Avenue with them propped up in front of my chest. I've grown to feel naked without the Plexiglas shield.
If a sniper tried to get me, would the magazines stop the bullets? I had great confidence that
Vogue,
particularly their September issue, might have the heft to stop a shower of hot lead. A cautious person by nature, I skip every few steps, hop on one foot, turn around, duck down, and pop up. If a sniper is waiting for me, watching me, well, he is going to work for this hit. I am no one's easy mark.