Window Dressing. Nikki Rivers
hour later the dishes were done and Moira and I were sitting in the breakfast nook, eating the rest of the apple crisp right from the baking dish while perusing the employment section of last Sunday’s newspaper. It was a warm enough evening to have the back door open. The faint neighborhood sounds drifted in and I felt safe again. But I had to keep reminding myself it was only temporary.
“Here’s one,” Moira said. “Dog grooming assistant. Says they’re willing to train anyone who can demonstrate a love for dogs.”
“I wonder what that means?” I asked suspiciously.
“It probably means you have to not mind getting your leg humped by a German Shepherd with performance anxiety.”
I laughed.
“Or getting pissed on by a poodle. Or lapped by a—”
Sometimes it didn’t do to encourage Moira. “Stop it,” I said nearly choking on my apple crisp. I tossed a pen at her. “Circle it.”
The circle looked pretty lonely on that big page, even though it was the miscellaneous employment section—the last hope of the unskilled.
I sighed. “Face it, I’m not qualified for much.”
“I still think this one about dancing at the Leopard Lounge is your best bet.”
“I’m not seeing me wearing an animal print thong and wrapping myself around a pole anytime soon. Not with my thighs.”
“It’d be the best thing for your thighs, sweetie. It’s become very chi-chi to use stripping moves as a workout, you know.”
Hoping Moira wasn’t going to tell me that she’d had a stripper pole installed in her bedroom, I picked up the page where we’d circled an ad for a day care aide. The pay was paltry and I could no longer see myself wiping noses and helping with snow boots.
“Wait!” Moira yelled as she circled an item in red ink. “I think I just found the solution to your employment problems!”
I grabbed the section of the paper out of Moira’s hand. “A temp agency?” I asked dubiously when I saw what she’d circled.
“Why not? Look,” she said, poking the newsprint with her finger, “it says they have a variety of jobs for inexperienced people and that they offer free refresher courses in computer and clerical skills.”
“I don’t have anything to refresh,” I muttered.
“You’ve done a lot of volunteer work. That shows you’ve got people and organizational skills. The rest,” she said with a flap of her hand like it was the easiest thing in the world, “you can fake.”
Temporary Solutions had a suite of offices downtown in a glassy building that had a shiny marble lobby and a wall of elevators. I was glad I’d borrowed one of Moira’s more conservative suits for the occasion. When I caught my reflection in the mirrored wall of the elevator I was convinced I looked like employee material.
Unfortunately, the first thing they did at Temporary Solutions was test my skills. As far as I could see, there was absolutely no way to fake it. Excel? QuickBooks? PowerPoint? Lotus Notes? The only lotus I knew was a yoga position—about as unobtainable by me as a position at Temporary Solutions was beginning to look.
“You never have worked in an office, have you?” Christy Sands asked.
Christy, who had the harsh hair of a woman who’d been bleaching it for most of the twenty-something years of her life and the slightly red tan of a tanning bed addict, was what Temporary Solutions called my personal career counselor. She was supposed to help me find the job with a perfect fit. What good would it do to lie?
“No,” I admitted. “I’ve never worked in an office. But I’m a fast learner and I really, really—”
“Please,” she said. “I’ve heard it all before. There’s nothing worse than a premenopausal woman begging for a job because her husband just dumped her for a younger woman.”
I gasped. We’d barely met and my existence had already been reduced to a one-line cliché. It was degrading. And, in my case, not exactly the truth. I considered setting her straight but the truth wasn’t going to make me look any better, was it? I was still a premenopausal woman looking for a job because her husband dumped her. I’d just managed to avoid it for ten years.
Having waited so long to take the plunge, I decided I wasn’t going to be deterred by someone who looked like she could be a future candidate for Roger’s harem. (“You remember Christy—my twenty-six-year-old-career-counselor girlfriend?”)
“It says right here,” I said, thrusting the ad I’d clipped from the newspaper in her face, “that you have jobs that require no—”
“Whoa—take a chill pill,” Christy said. “We do have a few jobs that you actually don’t need qualifications for.” She eyed me up and down. “I might have something,” she said as she turned to her computer and started to type. “What size dress do you wear?” she asked as she scrolled through a screen.
I thought I better not lie. Christy was wearing a turquoise Chanel knock-off bouclé suit with a skirt that was about ten inches long. She already knew I wasn’t a size nine. “Fourteen,” I said.
Hmm, the world didn’t stop spinning. In fact, Christy didn’t even blink.
“You don’t mind working with the public, do you?” she asked.
I assured her that I didn’t. “In fact, I’ve had a lot of experience with—”
“Yeah, I know. The PTA fund raiser, the Girl Scout cookie sale, the soccer candy-bar sale,” she recited wearily.
Okay, so maybe I was a tad bit of a cliché.
“Just show up at eight tomorrow morning. I’ll see if I can work something out. Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d come into the office as often as you can. Here’s a list of times when tutors are available in our computer room. Here’s a list of classes we offer for a nominal fee. Now just fill out these forms and—”
I was nearly giddy as she loaded me down with forms and folders. Cliché or not, I was in! I’d been hired!
By ten the next morning, I was standing in the dairy section of Market in the Cove, dressed in a milk maid’s costume, complete with fake blond braids hanging out of my bonnet and white Mary Janes on my feet. Somehow, when I’d thought of the humiliations I might have to suffer as unskilled labor, this one had never occurred to me. When Christy said there were no qualifications necessary, she hadn’t been kidding. I was, however, getting twelve bucks an hour to hand out samples of a new brand of yogurt.
Moira would have been proud because I wasn’t alone. One of my personalities kept reminding me that this was honest work and nothing to be ashamed of while another was praying that I wasn’t going to run into anyone I knew. Still another personality was considering lobbing a few four letter words at a group of teenagers giving me a walk-by heckling when I spied Amy Westcott and Bonnie Williams standing in front of the deli counter. I quickly ducked behind a display of imported cheeses.
Bonnie Williams lived across the street from me in the Victorian next to Amy’s Colonial. They were very chummy but Moira and I still liked Bonnie—and not just because she had more weight to lose than either of us did. Despite the fact that she was naive enough to swallow almost anything Amy told her and that she was overly fond of scrapbooking, Bonnie was really a sweet woman who was prone to sharing her homemade strawberry preserves and bread and butter pickles. It didn’t hurt that her husband owned the hardware store in Whitefish Cove’s quaint little downtown, either. He was a font of information for a woman living sans male in a house as old as mine was.
I could have handled Bonnie witnessing me prancing around among the curds and whey, but Amy? If I knew Amy, she would squeal and gush about how adorable I looked and then speculate endlessly up and down Seagull Lane about what had driven me to make such a fool of myself for a buck.