Citizen Girl (7 page)

Her expression quickens as she sighs through pinched lips. ‘You graduated.’

‘Yes, but only two years ago. I was hoping I could just take a peek—’

‘No. Absolutely not.’ She shakes her head, crossing her thin arms over her faded floral blouse. ‘We placed you. Your career was serviced. Our task is to get you out the door, but it’s your responsibility from there. Yet you alums come traipsing in here daily, thinking you can just storm the gates and we’ll roll out the red carpet.’

‘Okay,’ I regroup, ‘clearly you’re working very hard and I appreciate that it’s much busier than it ever was when I was here. And I’ve been doing everything I can, but I lost that job.’

‘Yes. I guessed as much. We’re only helping undergraduates now.’

‘But I
was
an undergraduate.’

She broadens her small shoulders. ‘And we helped you then. You had your shot.’

The waiting room swirls. ‘I did not. That was not
my
shot. That was
a
shot.
A
shot. One.’ She puffs up indignantly and puts a finger to her lips to shush me. I will not be shushed. ‘That “job” you folks set me up with
was with the boss from hell. From hell. I’m talking lying and stealing and—’

‘Please, keep your voice down,’ she hisses, indicating the huddled down-jacketed masses behind me.

‘No.’ I wheel around to their frightened faces. ‘You think it’s just about getting there and finding it? Well, let me tell you what happens when you get there.’ I swipe a file folder off the counter and hold it aloft. ‘See this?!
This
will be your new best friend!
This
will be your working week and your Sunday rest! So pick your color now, kids!’ I feel my arm tugged as the door buzzes open behind me. ‘I was working on a
TOILET
!!’

Pin-curls jerks me inside. ‘There’s no need to get bolshy. Fifteen minutes. But if a real student needs a binder, you
must
hand it over. I’m watching you.’

Getting a grip inside the large, musty room, I perch at the humanities table, pull out my yellow pad, and grab a binder. Only a few pages in, I see that almost all the postings have big black check marks drawn through them.

‘Excuse me? What do the black check marks mean?’

‘Filled. Sshhh.’

‘Filled?’

‘Filled, young lady, filled. Thirteen minutes.’

‘Sorry, but why are the descriptions still in here?’

She squeaks her chair out and marches over to me. ‘I will kindly remind you to keep your voice down. You are a guest here. If they get unfilled, we re-enter them.’ She returns to her desk. ‘So you’ll know what you missed. Eleven minutes.’

I roll up the sleeves on my sweater and dig for my real
options. Fewer and farther between, they quickly blur.

Position: administrative assistant, executive assistant, slave. Starting salary: nineteen thousand, eighteen thousand, unpaid. Responsibilities: ordering new paper towels. Making coffee or coffee alternatives for our caffeine-sensitive employees. Arranging my travel, hair appointments, bikini waxes, and therapy. Held accountable for: paper-clip shrinkage, Xerox paper waste, coffee mug abandonment, Fedex, UPS, PMS, my marriage, and my weight.

Falling down a black hole of administrative misery, my eyes finally alight on a promising posting.

Weepy with excitement, I pull the sheet out of its plastic sleeve and run to the front desk. ‘This one still available, right? There’s no check.’

Pin-curls slides on her glasses and glances down. ‘Yes, I rescanned that one myself.’ She types the code into the computer and the information screen opens. ‘You can’t read over my shoulder,’ she scolds. ‘I have to print it out for you.’

‘Okay.’ I step back.

‘No, collect your things and wait out there.
Quietly
.’ She gestures to the anteroom.

‘Okay!’ I pick up my stuff and run out the door to meet her again from the other side of the window, leaning from hip to hip as the listing glides out of the laser printer. I reread the scanned-in description, eagerly scrolling down to the most important information.

You’ve got. To be kidding.

Underneath, in her nauseatingly familiar scratch, Doris has delineated her idea of my perfect replacement. ‘Note to applicants: equal opportunity employer. Males
strongly
encouraged to apply.’

I somehow refrain from puking onto Pin-curls’s wool flannel lap. ‘You scanned this
two
months ago? Are you sure?’

She purses her lips. ‘Of course I am. I suppose you don’t even want it after all that fuss.’

‘No.’ Numbly, I slide the paper back through the window. ‘I just left it.’

‘You mean “lost it”,’ she mutters as I hopscotch over the recoiling hopefuls, run up the stairs and out the fire door, gasping for air.

I sit silently as Mrs Roberts drives through the revived sleet, so busy trying to scribble a grocery list on the back
of an envelope while steering with her left hand that she misses the entrance to the train station altogether and has to pull a K-turn. She places her hand on my headrest before pivoting her body to back up, her fingers loosely brushing my hair. Tears spring to my eyes at the contact.

‘Oh, honey.’ She brakes sharply and drops her hand to my shoulder.

‘Sorry,’ I sputter, fighting the urge to drop into her lap, thankful for the restraint of the seatbelt. ‘I just, this is just, so … hard. I don’t know why she—’

‘You’re taking this so personally.’ Mrs Roberts looks me in the eye, the windshield wipers squeaking back and forth. She reaches down to open the glove compartment, springing a gaggle of toys, maps, CDs, and fast-food detritus across my lap. ‘Shit,’ she mutters.

‘It’s okay.’ I bend to help her shove everything back into the tiny space.

‘Thought we had tissues. Will a Wet Nap do?’

I nod, dutifully blowing my nose into the moist antiseptic cloth. ‘I’m just so scared that I’m actually unemployable.’ That Doris was right. That I suck. ‘If I could just get an interview, or even a lead—’

‘Of course you’re employable – that’s ridiculous. You know, maybe I can get the New York office to see you – they’re still interviewing. I’ll put in a call tonight.’

‘Oh God, I’d be so grateful …’ The train clangs in across the street, forcing her to complete the ragged turn and pull, screeching, into the station.

‘Gogogo!’ she yells, already groping for the headset
again as I unbuckle myself, slipping and sliding up the steps and into the ice-covered train.

Thursday morning finds me standing under the marquee of Radio City Music Hall flipping through my Filofax to locate the address from Mrs Roberts’s message. The frigid wind bellows up Sixth Avenue, making my eyes tear as the fluttering pages reveal that I’m on the wrong side of five lanes of traffic. I scurry between steaming hoods of honking cabs to a tower soaring at least fifty reflective stories into the Midtown skyline. Pushing the revolving doors, I pause in relief under the blast of hot air, accidentally causing a hostile pile-up of cashmere-clad businessmen behind me.

After a full cavity search at security I’m directed to a set of elevators that promise to bypass the first lowly thirty-four floors. As the car hurtles upwards I reapply lipstick and try not to look nervous.

On thirty-five the glass door clicks open and I’m let into a forbidding gray reception area dotted with birds of paradise and black-suited staff, giving the place a distinctly funereal air. After signing in I run my hands down the back of my own dark suit and take a seat in the horseshoe of reception chairs. Surreptitiously glancing at the others also clutching leather folders to their chests, I try to imagine working in a place not illuminated by Technicolor hemp. I like it.

‘Okay.’ A man with a clipboard appears, clearing his throat. ‘We’ll take the next group: you, you, you, you, and you.’ I button my blazer and smooth my ponytail as our
posse follows him into a windowless conference room featuring two concentric circles of chairs: Big Five does Dante. He pulls an about-face, prompting our group to stall in the doorway. ‘I’m Chip, and I want to welcome you to today’s session.’ He pauses.

‘Hi, Chip,’ we say, frighteningly, in unison.

‘Great, so I’m going to grab the associates and we’ll begin with a Group Exercise.’ I get a flash of us doing Tae-Bo. ‘Why don’t you go ahead and take a seat?’

Everyone seems to know to sit in the inner circle and slide their folders under their chairs. Despite their cagey glances, I imagine us in months to come reminiscing about this around the espresso machine; Chip will pass by, give us a thumbs-up. The few chosen ones will be my colleagues; we’ll share our marriages, pregnancies, divorces …

Chip returns with his associates, who are our age, but with the crisp air of the employed about them. They sit ceremoniously in the circle surrounding ours while Chip hands out sheets of mint-green paper, a color that ‘deeply troubled’ Doris. ‘
Scenario
’ is written at the top in bold letters. As I scan down the page I learn that I’m now Sheila Smith, recently stationed on an ‘engagement’ for Teens Make Up company, with the objective of convincing my team to ‘reformat their strategy from explicit to implicit’.

‘You’ll have fifteen minutes for this simulation,’ Chip’s voice booms to us from the two-foot distance between his circle and ours. ‘And … go!’

A man with overly gelled hair begins, ‘I have a proposed
plan of action for which I think there are multiple reasons to consider its flexibility. I’d like to begin with our market share …’ And I haven’t got a fucking clue. Not a single one. All I know is that someone wearing way, way too much Polo cologne is scribbling notes behind me.

Everyone in the group keeps interrupting one another using terms I’ve never heard before: ‘emotional data’, ‘tectonic client shift’, ‘SMEs’, ‘RFPs’ and a lot of talk about a ‘multi-boutique asset management model’. Then a blonde with dark roots announces, ‘I’m Sheila Smith, and I’m working at Teens Make Up Company—’

‘Wait –
you’re
Sheila?’ Everyone stares incredulously at me. Sheila glares. ‘It’s just that
I’m
Sheila.’ I turn to the circle surrounding us. ‘Is that right? Should there be two of us?’ Everyone gasps.

Chip is the first to recover. ‘Well, we can’t proceed after
that
, so we’ll just move on to your individual case interviews.’

Sheila’s eyes well and she spits at me under her breath, ‘Thanks. Thanks a
lot
.’

‘Girl,’ Chip crooks his finger in my direction, ‘you’ll be starting with Stu.’ I gather my folder and follow Stu down a long hallway to an empty cubicle, where we both take a seat. He pulls off his glasses and rubs his forehead fast and hard before refocusing his eyes on my résumé, and then the attached memo from Mrs Roberts. ‘What other consulting companies are you meeting with?’

‘None. I mean, this is my first. I’m just starting to look, so—’

‘Right. How many years of internal consulting have you booked?’

‘Well, I’ve been working as a program assistant over the last two and a half years, which enabled me to take part in a number of interesting research projects—’

‘Uh-huh. So what
would
you do?’ Stu tosses my résumé down onto the desk. ‘As Sheila, what would be your next move?’ I think back to my mousy blonde nemesis with the tapping foot. Highlights with a semi-permanent caramel rinse?

‘Sorry, just to be sure, this interview is for the pro-bono division, right?’

He chuckles. ‘
They’re
not hiring. This is for Insurance, Property, and Assets.’

‘Oh! Okay, well, if you could just explain a bit more about this whole exercise, I’m sure I could give you the information you’re looking for. Maybe you could just give me a quick overview of the kind of work you do here – then I could speak directly to that.’

Chip pops his head over the cubicle wall, like a puppeteer. ‘Stu?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You ready for Monica to join?’

‘Sure, yeah.’

A brunette rounds the corner, her tailored shirt blousing perfectly over her pencil skirt. I look from one naked felt wall to the other, wishing there was at least a bumper sticker’s worth of information about the company, instead of just its name pulsing from every surface. If only their website had been a tad more forthcoming: reverse
engineering, privileged insights, intangible assets – um, Pat, I’d like to buy a noun? ‘I’m sorry, I was under the impression that I would be speaking with your pro-bono division.’

‘Monz, Sheila wants us to give her some background.’

‘Yes, it would really help me to help you if you could just tell me a bit, say, about how you spend your days here?’ I ask hopefully.

Directing her attention to her watch, Monica begins to talk. And talk. And talk. About markets, numbers, teams and an
inordinate
amount of leveraging. Tons of leveraging. Leveraging is the sole verb in her presentation. Stu nods, tossing in statistics and acronyms here and there while I become enthralled by their enthusiasm, verbosity, and prodigious intake of Diet Coke, their watches that most definitely did not come from Chinatown. I marvel that we’re the same age, yet they’re going to jump in their all-terrain vehicles after work, park them in their two-car garages, and feed their big dogs. I plummet into wondering what, exactly, I’ve been doing these last two and a half years, farting around with public policy and thinking this sufficient. Just what has been so important that it’s kept me from the vital work of learning how to leverage a single fucking thing?!

‘I’m up.’ A woman peeks around the side before stepping in. ‘Whitney.’ She shakes my hand in one up-and-down move, light caroming off her four-carat emerald-cut diamond splaying the drab space.