Book Lover. Karen Mack
a good Samaritan, maybe Ted Bundy’s brother), I turned the key and the car miraculously started. I had enough power to creep along at five miles an hour across four lanes of traffic to the nearest off-ramp. I coasted down to a gas station in the middle of Watts, where an unflappable Korean attendant called a cab and waited with me until it arrived.
Remember that old saying, “When you fall off a horse you should get right back on”? Well, I didn’t. I kept avoiding the freeway and now, every time I even consider it, my palms sweat and my vision blurs, and I feel like I’m going to hyperventilate so I go home and have a glass of wine. I heard about a therapist who specializes in freeway disorders but I was afraid of all the other stuff she might dig up, so I never went to see her. So now, in a city where there is no public transportation, I am relegated to only those areas of L.A. served by Sepulveda and Olympic. I pull into the Times building after an hour and a half—a trip that should have taken thirty minutes.
It’s a little disorienting going back to a place where I once worked. My instinct is to pull into the same parking space, but instead I take a parking ticket that needs to be validated and pull into the visitor’s lot. Trying to act like I belong, I ask the burly security guy where Al is, the kindly, bespectacled guard I used to bring lattes to from the corner café, which isn’t there anymore. He informs me curtly that Al retired four years ago. “Check your purse, ma’am?”
The newsroom is the same, thank god, with rows of reporter cubicles outfitted with computers and bulletin boards overflowing with cartoons, irreverent slogans, daily assignments, and bizarre photos of attack dogs, creepy over-the-hill actresses, and bloody crime scenes. The same thirtysomething, greasy-haired reporters hunch over their telephones and laptops, blotting out everything around them and pounding away at one story or another. No one looks up when people pass by. No one registers any reaction. That’s the way I used to be, completely absorbed in whatever assignment I was working on, jaws clenched in concentration. I wonder if I can even do that anymore. I approach the assistant Metro editor’s office and knock. God, is she ever young. She can’t be more than twenty-five and she seems vaguely distracted. Her only redeeming feature is that she’s fat. She greets me the way you would greet a bad blind date, trying to be polite but keeping it as short as possible. I give her my résumé. She barely glances at it.
Her office is a pretty good size but the air is close and stuffy, the window firmly shut. There’s a half-eaten piece of pastry smeared on a napkin by the phone, a couple of empty, dirty coffee cups with lipstick stains on the rims, and picked-through copies of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal strewn in a messy pile on the floor. Well, she’s an editor.
I’m always amazed when people describe this job as glamorous. It’s not. It’s a job in an office. You eat, you talk on the phone, you read, you make decisions. You rarely meet anybody except for other editors and reporters. And you don’t even get to go to fun events. There are rewards, naturally. But they are mostly internal and abstract. Like in any art, I suppose. And the pace is relentless—a constant struggle to stay hot and new and on top of everything all the time. The whole process can drive you nuts if you let it. I guess that’s why this woman’s here. She seems all business and boy, is she a grump.
She looks at me skeptically and scowls. “So, you worked here. When? Seven years ago?” The scourge of irrelevance clings to me like flakes of dandruff.
“Well, almost.” Might as well be twenty. She’s waiting for more. What to say? Do I tell her the truth? That the Times was my dream job. That I’d just had an enormous run of luck—a few breaking stories had attracted attention, one of which culminated in the resignation of some key figures in the mayor’s office. That the senior editor had called me in and given me a plum beat. That I felt privileged, part of the inner circle. And that when my father became ill, I left abruptly and then failed to return.
My mother proved incapable of caring for him. Just changing a dressing or giving him his medication on time was more than she could handle. She’d disappear for hours at a time and when she returned, drifting in, a cloud of cashmere, her cheeks flushed with the cold and the booze, she’d attempt a conversation, a few inquiries into his health. Then she’d fall asleep on the living room sofa, the lights blazing, her reading glasses halfway down her nose and a book perched precariously on her lap.
My sister was newly married and Andy had just accepted a position at UCLA. My father would’ve never asked Virginia to leave her husband to care for him. But I was single, my job was expendable, and he didn’t protest when I told him I was moving home to help. Regardless, I wanted to be with him. Palmer was very understanding. We hadn’t been dating that long.
I drove my father to his office every day until he was too sick to continue. Then I cared for him until the end. He never asked me about my job or if I missed it, and I never brought it up.
After he died, months later, when my sister and I were cleaning out his old mahogany desk, I found a blue file folder labeled “Dora.” It was filled with every article I’d ever written, neatly cut out with the date printed in blue ink on top. As far as I knew, he didn’t even have a subscription to the Times. He must have bought it at the newsstand near his office, which sold out-of-state papers and magazines.
When I close my eyes, I can still see him in his prime, roaring into the living room, fresh from the office, wearing his dark pin-striped suit despite the September heat, regaling us with his adventures in the fabric trade, making the intricacies of his business sound as intriguing as national security. And then I see him frail, giving me a soft smile as I helped him into his office building. I feel tears welling up inside of me and I want him back, robust, handsome, looking at me expectantly, waiting for my answers.
“So, the reasons you left?” I look at this girl who is impatiently fidgeting with the papers on her desk, spraying her glasses with a pocket-size bottle of Optimetrix lens cleaner and swiping them with a miniature chamois. Her cell phone rings and she holds up her finger like “this will just be a minute” and then proceeds to have a five-minute conversation while I am sitting immobile staring at her. She hangs up. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
“I had some opportunities in Philadelphia, so I moved back for a year,” I answer. Now she’s meticulously cleaning her keyboard with a small paintbrush. How rude. Wouldn’t it be great if some disgruntled employee burst through the door with a gun and blew her head off? Pow! What a satisfying vision. The only one who would be disappointed would be her twin sister, the hunchback.
And when she asks what I’ve been doing since then, a fine film of perspiration collects on my upper lip. What have I been doing for the past five years, that’s a good question. I had rehearsed what I thought was a reasonable answer, but it now sounds lame and unprofessional, nothing that a twenty-five-year-old hotshot would understand. Telling her I got married was my first mistake, the nagging banality of becoming just another housewife in a ho-hum marriage. It went downhill from there. It was all blah, blah, blah, I did volunteer work, yadda, yadda, yadda, I set up my husband’s office, blah, blah, blah. Just as I’m about to roll into what made me such a good reporter, she looks at her watch and says, “Well, I’ll get back to you soon.”
I want to bolt but I compose myself, acting as though it’s been a thoroughly pleasant meeting, and make my way to the elevator. What would make her want to hire me? Anything? Okay, let’s be fair about this. I screwed up. I should have told her right away about my journalistic awards. I should have offered to freelance, I should have taken it upon myself to tell her about some of my more interesting angles on a run-of-the-mill news story. My forte was finding an unusual slant and running with it. The editors I worked with liked that. She might have liked that too, if I had bothered to tell her. Which I didn’t. I got nervous and went on too long about stupid stuff, which she clearly had no interest in. This just confirms my theory that things usually wind up worse than you expect them to be.
I decide to see if my old friend Brooke is still working in Style. She was an assistant editor when I left and even though we haven’t kept in touch, I know she’ll be happy to see me.
The Style section has an entirely different feel than downstairs. Still the cubicles and concentrated energy, but there are metal