“Maybe you should try an agency,” he said.
When it came to unemployment, he was her best listener. Ian always said, “Oh, something will show up,” but her grandfather had been through the Depression and he sympathized from the bottom of his heart every time she was fired. “You might want to think about the Postal Service,” he told her now. “Your dad found the Postal Service
very
satisfactory. Security, stability, fringe benefits …”
“I do like outdoor exercise,” Daphne mused.
“No, no, not a mailman,” her grandfather said. “I meant something behind a desk.”
She hated desk work. She sighed so hard she rattled her newspaper.
In the afternoons she would take a bus downtown to look in person—“pounding the pavement,” she called it, thinking again of her grandfather’s Depression days. She gazed in the windows of photographic studios, stationery printers, record shops. A record shop might be fun. She knew everything there was to know about the
current groups. However, if customers asked her assistance with something classical like Led Zeppelin or the Doors, she’d be in trouble.
Thomas told her she ought to come to New York. She phoned him just to talk, one evening when she felt low, and he said, “Catch the next train up. Sleep on the couch till you land a job. Angie says so too.” (Angie was his girlfriend, who had recently moved in with him although Ian and their grandfather were not supposed to know.) But Daphne couldn’t imagine living in a city where everyone came from someplace else, and so she said, “Oh, I guess I’ll keep looking here.”
One Sunday she even phoned Agatha—not something she did often, since Agatha was hard to reach and also (face it) inclined to criticize. But on this occasion she was a dear. She said, “Daph, what would you think about going to college now? I’d be happy to pay for it. We’re making all this money that we’re too busy to spend. You wouldn’t have to ask Ian for a cent.”
“Well, thank you,” Daphne said. “That’s really nice of you.”
She wasn’t the school type, to be honest. But it felt good to know both her brother and sister were behind her. Her friends were more callous; they were hunting jobs themselves, many of them, or waitressing or tending bar till they decided what interested them, or heading off to law school just to appear busy. Nobody in her circle seemed to have an actual career.
At the start of her third week without work, her grandfather talked her into going to a place called Same Day Résumé. He’d heard it advertised on the radio; he thought it might help her “present” herself, he said. So Daphne took a bus downtown and spoke to a bored-looking man at an enormous metal desk. The calendar on the wall behind him read
TUES
13, which made her nervous because an old boyfriend had once told her that
in Cuba, Tuesday the thirteenth was considered unlucky. Shouldn’t she just offer some excuse and come back another time? It did seem the man wore a faint sneer as he listened to her qualifications. In fact the whole experience was so demoralizing that as soon as she’d finished answering his questions she walked over to Lexington Market and treated herself to a combination beef-and-bean burrito. Then she went to a matinee starring Cher, her favorite movie star, and after that she cruised a few thrift shops. She bought two sets of thermal underwear with hardly any stains and a purple cotton tank top for a total of three dollars. By then it was time to collect her résumé, which had miraculously become four pages long. She had only to glance through it, though, to see how it had been padded and embroidered. Also, it cost a fortune. Her grandfather had said he would pay, but even so she resented the cost.
All the good cheer she had built up so carefully over the afternoon began to evaporate, and instead of heading home for supper she stopped at a bar where she and her friends hung out on weekends. It gave off the damp, bitter smell that such places always have before they fill up for the evening, and the low lighting seemed not romantic but bleak. Still, she perched on a cracked vinyl stool and ordered a Miller’s, which she drank very fast. Then she ordered another and started reading her résumé. Any four-year-old could see that she hadn’t gone past high school, even if she did list an introductory drawing course at the Maryland Institute and a weekend seminar called New Directions for Women.
“Hello, Daphne,” someone said.
She turned and found Rita diCarlo settling on the stool next to her, unbuttoning her lumber jacket as she hailed the bartender. “Pabst,” she told him. She unwound a wool scarf from her neck and flung her hair back. “You waiting for someone?”
Daphne shook her head.
“Me neither,” Rita said.
Daphne could have guessed as much from Rita’s shapeless black T-shirt and paint-spattered jeans. Her hair was even scruffier than usual; actual dust balls trailed from the end of her braid.
“I had my least favorite kind of job today,” Rita told her. “A divorce. Splitting up a household. Naturally the wife and husband had to be there, so they could offer their opinions.” She accepted her beer and blew into the foam. “And they did have opinions, believe me.”
“Too many jobs get too personal,” Daphne said gloomily.
“Right,” Rita said. She was digging through her pockets for something—a Kleenex. She blew her nose with a honking sound.
“Like this florist’s I was just fired from,” Daphne said. “Everybody’s private messages: you have to write them down pretending not to know English. Or when I worked at Camera Carousel—those photos of girls in bikinis and people’s awful prom nights. You hand over the envelope with this smile like you never even noticed.”
“Look,” Rita said. “Did Ian tell you he and I have been seeing each other?”
“You have?” Daphne asked.
“Well, a couple of times. Well, really just once. I guess you wouldn’t count when I accidentally on purpose ran into him at the wood shop.”
No, Daphne wouldn’t count that.
“I went to Brant’s Custom Woodworks and ordered myself a bureau,” Rita told her.
“I don’t believe he mentioned it.”
“Do you have any idea how much those things cost?”
“Expensive, huh?” Daphne said.
She glanced again at her résumé. Page two: Previous Employment. Here the facts were not padded but streamlined, for the man had suggested that too long a list made a person look flighty. “What say we strike the framer’s,” he had said, his sneer growing more pronounced.
“Another example is picture framing,” Daphne told Rita. “People bring in these poor little paintings they’ve done themselves, or their drawings with the mouths erased and redrawn a dozen times and the hands posed out of sight because they can’t do hands, and all you say is, ‘Let me see now, perhaps a double mat …’ ”
“Then after we talked about my bureau awhile I asked if he’d come look at my apartment,” Rita said, “just so he’d have an idea of the scale.”
Daphne pulled her eyes away from the résumé. She focused on Rita’s face for a moment, and then she said, “Don’t you live with Nick Bascomb?”
“Well, I did, but I made him move out,” Rita said.
“Oh? When was this?”
“Wednesday,” Rita said.
“Wednesday? You mean this Wednesday just past?”
“See,” Rita said, “Monday I went to visit Ian at the wood shop, and that night I asked Nick to move out. But I let him stay till Wednesday because he needed time to get his things together.”
“Decent of you,” Daphne said dryly.
“So then Friday Ian came by and we settled on what size bureau I wanted. I invited him to supper, but he said you-all were expecting him at home.”
Daphne tried to remember back to Friday. Had she been there, even? She might have gone out with her usual gang and forgotten supper altogether.
“So when was it you saw him the second time?” she asked Rita.
“Well, that was it. Friday.”
“You mean the second time was when he came to measure for your bureau?”
“Well, yes.”
Daphne sat back on her stool.
This Rita was so
big
, though. She had that angular, big-boned frame. You’d expect her to be immune.
“Um, Rita,” she said. “Ian’s kind of … hard to pin down, sometimes. Also, I believe he has this sort of girlfriend at his church.”
“So what? I had a boyfriend, till last Wednesday,” Rita said.
“Yes, but then besides he’s very, let’s say Christian. Did you know that?”
“What do you think
I
am, Buddhist?”
“He’s unusually Christian, though. I mean, look at you! You’re sitting here in a bar! Drinking beer! Wearing a Hell Bent for Leather T-shirt!”
Rita glanced down at her shirt. She said, “That’s not exactly a sin.”
“It is to Ian,” Daphne told her. “Or it almost is.”
“Daphne,” Rita said, “you get to know folks when you rearrange their belongings. Ian’s belongings are so simple. They’re so plain. He owns six books on how to be a better person. The clothes in his closet smell of nutmeg. And have you ever honestly looked at him? He has this really fine face; it’s all straight lines. I thought at first his eyes were brown but then I saw they had a clear yellow light to them like some kind of drink; like cider. And when he talks he’s very serious but when he listens to what I say back he starts smiling. He acts so happy to hear me, even when all I’m talking about is drawer knobs. Okay: so he does that to everyone. I don’t kid myself! Probably it’s part of his religion or something.”
“Well, no,” Daphne said. She felt touched. She was seeing Ian, all at once, from an outsider’s angle. She
said, “I didn’t mean to drag you down. I was just thinking of back in school when some of my friends had crushes on him. They used to end up so frustrated. They ended up mad at him, almost.”
“Well, I can understand that,” Rita said. She took a hearty swallow of beer and wiped the foam off her upper lip.
“And he is a good bit older than you,” Daphne pointed out.
“So? We’re both grownups, aren’t we? Anyhow, in some ways it’s me who’s older. Do you realize he’s only slept with two women in all his life?”
“What?” Daphne asked.
“First his high-school sweetheart before he joined the church and then this woman he dated a few years ago, but he felt terrible about that and vowed he wouldn’t do it again.”
Daphne didn’t know which shocked her more: the fact that he’d slept with someone or the fact that he and Rita had discussed it. “Well, how did … how did
that
come up?” she asked.
“It came up when I invited him to spend the night,” Rita said calmly.
“You didn’t!”
“I did,” Rita said. “Bartender? Same again.” She met Daphne’s eyes. “I invited him when he came about the bureau,” she said, “but he declined. He was extremely polite.”
“I can imagine,” Daphne said.
“Then all last weekend I waited to hear from him. I haven’t done that since junior high! But he didn’t call, and so here I sit, drinking away my sorrows.”
He wasn’t ever going to call, but Daphne didn’t want to be the one to tell her. “Gosh! Look at the time,” she said. She asked the bartender, “What do I owe?” and then she made a great to-do over paying, so that
when she turned back to say goodbye, it would seem the subject of Ian had entirely slipped her mind.
Agatha and Stuart didn’t come home for Christmas. Stuart was on call that weekend. Thomas came, though, and they spent a quiet holiday together, rising late on Christmas morning to exchange their gifts. Ian gave Daphne a key chain that turned into a siren when you pressed a secret button. (He was always after her about the neighborhoods she hung out in.) Her grandfather gave her a ten-dollar bill, the same thing he gave the others. Thomas, the world’s most inspired shopper, gave her a special crystal guaranteed to grant steadiness of purpose, and Agatha and Stuart sent a dozen pairs of her favorite brand of black tights. Daphne herself gave everybody houseplants—an arrangement she’d made weeks ago when she still worked at Floral Fantasy.
For Christmas dinner they went to a restaurant. Daphne viewed this as getting away with something. If Agatha had been home, she never would have allowed it. But Agatha might have a point, Daphne thought as they entered the dining room. The owner kept his place open on holidays so that people without families had somewhere to go, and at nearly every table just a single, forlorn person sipped a solitary cocktail. Across the room they saw Mrs. Jordan, which made Daphne feel guilty because if Bee were still alive she would have remembered to invite her. But then Ian and the owner conferred and they added an extra place setting and brought her over to sit with them. Mrs. Jordan was as adventurous and game as ever, although she must be in her eighties by now, and once they’d said grace she livened things up considerably by describing a recent outing she’d taken with the foreigners. It seemed that during that peculiar warm spell back in November, she and three of the foreigners had driven to a marina someplace
and rented a sailboat; only none of them had ever sailed before and when they found themselves on open water with a stiff breeze blowing up, the one named Manny had to jump over the side and swim for help. After they were rescued, Mrs. Jordan said, the marina owner had told them they could never take a boat out again. They couldn’t even stand on the dock. They couldn’t even park on the grounds to admire the view. By now she had them laughing, and she raised a speckled hand and ordered a bottle of champagne—“And you must join us, Ezra,” she told the owner—along with a fizzy apple juice for Ian. It turned out to be a very festive meal.
In the evening Claudia and her family telephoned from Pittsburgh, and Agatha from California. Agatha didn’t seem as distressed about the restaurant as she might have been. All she said to Daphne was, “Did Ian bring Clara?”
“Clara? No.”
Agatha sighed. She said, “Maybe we’ll just have to marry
Grandpa
off, instead.”
“Actually, that might be easier,” Daphne told her.
In January Daphne started working at the wood shop, performing various unskilled tasks like oiling and paste-waxing. She had done this several times before while she was between jobs, and although she would never choose it for a permanent career she found it agreeable enough. She liked the smell of sap and the golden light that the wood gave off, and she enjoyed the easy, stop-and-go conversation among the workmen. It reminded her of kindergarten—everyone absorbed in his own project but throwing forth a remark now and then. Ian didn’t join in, though, and whenever he said anything to Daphne she was conscious of the furtive alertness in the rest of the room. Clearly, he was considered an
oddity here. It made her feel sorry for him, although he might not even notice.