19
You have three messages.
BEEEP
Frances, it’s your father. I renewed your subscription to The New Yorker. Also, I don’t mean to nag, but I’m just reminding you to call me about the wedding. Will you be taking the train? We’re starting Crime and Punishment this week, one of my favorites, as you know. Reread it if you need a reminder that things could be worse. You’re not in prison, only in show business.
BEEEP
Hello, this message is for Frances Banks. I’m calling from Girl Friday Temps. We’ve reviewed your résumé, and we’re sorry, but we aren’t able to place you at this time. You don’t seem to have any office skills whatsoever, and we aren’t hiring receptionists right now. Feel free to check back with us in a few months or if you’re able to add office experience, Windows 95, or typing to your résumé.
BEEEP
Hey, baby. Wow, what a night! I’m just sitting here thinking about you … Damn, girl. So (cigarette exhale), catch you later, okay?
BEEEP
I have to smile, since I learned very quickly that “Catch you later, okay?” means there’s almost a 100 percent chance we’ll be seeing each other later. Ninety percent at least. It’s James’s way of making plans.
The only thing is, while I’ve been spending all these intense, giddy, sexy evenings with him, staying up late and sleeping past noon, it seems as though all the regular waitressing jobs in Manhattan have disappeared. The temporary gigs I’ve always done in the past to fill in the cracks haven’t been steady enough, I’ve had a few commercial auditions but no callbacks, and I’m pretty sure Niagara has stopped airing entirely. I desperately need a job. There have been no weddings to cater, either, so I’ve turned to picking up lunches, but lunches pay the least because no one tips, and the hourly wage stinks because the shifts are so short.
It’s better than nothing, though, so I wash my regular uniform—a white button-down shirt and polyester black pants—every night and I call in every morning, both hoping I’ll get a shift and hoping I won’t, because the shifts—mostly held in soulless, musty corporate conference rooms—are so miserable. They keep promising me things will pick up when wedding season starts in June, but I need a break now.
I haven’t had to call my father for money yet. But it’s getting close to that time.
I literally cross my fingers as I wait on hold while they check what’s available for today, hoping for I’m not sure what. Just not the worst-case scenario.
“Franny?”
“Yes?”
“So, all we have is a buffet lunch at United Electric—it’s in Midtown. Two servers. Just setup, breakdown, and beverage. Want it?”
This is almost the worst, but not quite. It’s one step up from bus-boy. You set up giant chafing dishes full of brown slop that the office workers help themselves to, buffet-style, and take their drink orders, then stand in the back of the room until they finish and it’s time to clear the dishes. It’s hardly even waitressing. Only one thing could make it worse.
“Black and white?”
“No, sorry, their uniform.”
This is the worst, the absolute worst, the most humiliating level of all. I can picture the polyester dress, worn by hundreds before me, in a drab color and shapeless no-size-fits-anyone. But then I picture the number in my bank account.
“Okay, I’ll take it.”
“Also, it says bring pantyhose and a hairnet.” She must be able to hear me take a deep, sad breath.
“Better luck tomorrow,” she says.
I thought I left the apartment in plenty of time, but the train stopped between two stations for the usual unexplained reason, and all my nylons had holes in them so I had to stop at a drugstore on the way, and the only color they had was a burnt orange not found in actual human flesh. I arrive late, and the only other server with me is clearly one of the regular career lunch ladies who looks like she’s worked there for a thousand years. She doesn’t introduce herself or bother to ask my name.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” she says to me brusquely. “These trays don’t lift themselves.”
I change as fast as I can into the bulky brown uniform, made of some fabric that doesn’t breathe, and by the time I’m lighting the butane warmers, I’m already in a sweat. At least there’s no one here to see me, or to care what I look like.
“Franny? Franny, is that you?”
I turn and see an attractive woman in a dark tailored suit. The voice is familiar, but I don’t recognize the face at first.
“I’m sorry, do I know—”
And then it hits me. It’s Genevieve. Genevieve Parker, who lived on my dorm floor when she was a senior and I was a junior. Genevieve, who was always in her room working, but would leave the door open and offer you coffee if you stuck your head in. Sweet, smart Genevieve. She was that category of friend from college who was a happy constant in my daily life, but for some reason we never kept in touch. I didn’t recognize her at first because it’s been a few years, and because she appears to have lost about thirty pounds.
“Oh my God! Genevieve!” I put down the metal tray I’m holding and give her a hug. Her nails look recently manicured, and her hair smells like expensive shampoo from a salon. “You look great! What are you doing here?”
“I was just hired as a junior associate. I work here now.”
“Well, how about that? I work here, too!” I smile and gesture grandly around the shabby room, as if I’m proud to own the place. “Voilà!” I add lamely. I put my hand up to wipe a bead of sweat that has started trickling down my forehead, and my fingertips graze the elastic of the hairnet. I had forgotten for a moment what I must look like. I look down at my uniform and my face starts to burn. I see Genevieve’s eyes take it all in, and I’m overwhelmed by embarrassment. “I mean, this isn’t my regular … I’m just temping. I do work here, but just for today.”
“Sure, yeah, of course!” Genevieve says brightly. “I mean, I practically just got out of law school myself, and only recently … well!”
She trails off, struggling to compare our situations, to find a way to show they’re similar, but I can see the gap between us as if we were standing on either side of a massive canyon. I’ve been on my own timeline, but now I’m looking at the results of a regular person’s life plan, and the reality is a little shocking. Regular people go to law school and graduate and get a job and get a promotion and get a better job. In the years since college, Genevieve became a junior associate who gets waited on in conference rooms, while I played Snow White in elementary school auditoriums, and somehow became the person who waits on people with real jobs.
“So,” she says, her smile undiminished. “You’re still doing the acting thing?”
“Yep. Yeppers,” I say, and put my hands on my hips like I’m a brown-polyester-uniformed superhero.
“And it’s … it’s going well?” Genevieve says, a little tentatively.
“Yes, it’s going—” and, out of nowhere, I start to laugh. “It’s so good—I’m so successful that—” I try to speak, but I can’t even finish my sentence. Suddenly, the situation is totally hilarious. Suddenly, I’m thrilled to be standing in my grungy costume that’s in such stark contrast to Genevieve’s elegantly besuited one, because nothing could be funnier than being dressed in a hideous hairnet and burnt orange nylons, being asked sweetly by an old friend how my career is going. I’m covering my mouth with the back of my hand, cracking up but trying to control myself so that I don’t attract the attention of my surly co-worker, who fortunately has disappeared for the moment, but then Genevieve starts giggling, too, and we’re instantly transformed back into college girls living on the same floor who’ve turned punchy from too much studying and lack of sleep. Finally, we pull ourselves together.
“It’s really good to see you, Gen,” I say, dabbing under my eyes. “It’s not as bad as it looks, I swear.”
“Honestly, Franny, I know you’re fine. All the stuff you did in school—you’re so talented—there’s no way you won’t make it.”
“Aw, thanks.” I can see my lumbering cohort down at the far end of the hall pushing a tray of glassware toward us. “Shoot, I should go.”
“Catch me up—just quickly,” Genevieve says. “Do you see anybody? Anyone from school?”
“I see a lot of Jane—we’re roommates in Brooklyn.”
“Oh, great! Tell her I said hello.”
“Yeah, and, uh, let’s see, we were seeing Elisa and Bridget a fair amount, but Elisa’s on a kibbutz, and Bridget had kind of a—”
“Yes, I heard,” Genevieve says, with a conspiratorial frown.
“But she’s okay now. She teaches Jazzercise.”
Genevieve smiles. “I heard that, too.”
“And, well, I’m sure you know that Clark ended up in Chicago. Even though we’re still in touch.”
Something passes across her face. “Are you?” she says, nodding delicately. “So you’ve—you’ve spoken with him recently?”
“Well, I guess it’s been a few weeks, or gosh, maybe longer. I owe him a call, in fact. We’re each other’s ‘backup plans,’ as dumb as that sounds, and he called—”
“Franny,” Genevieve says with a strange sharpness in her voice. “Oh. I thought you’d—you know, Clark and I, we actually overlapped at the University of Chicago. Just by one year, but …”
Something small and cold grips my heart. Something I can’t quite name.
“Oh, right!” I say, too happily, smiling a little too hard. “Of course—you went there, too. I forgot!”
In my head, I’m struggling to do the math. It’s suddenly very important that I figure out the timeline of when Clark and Genevieve were in school together. Genevieve was going straight to law school right out of college, I remember that now. But she graduated one year before us, and Clark took a year off, which is why it makes sense, as she said, that they only overlapped there for one year. The first half of the year out of school he traveled, teaching English in South America. Then he had that internship, but I forget what the firm was called. He was a proofreader, I remember that, and he had terrible hours. What was the name of the firm? I make a deal in my head that if I can remember the name of the place where Clark worked before Genevieve speaks, then whatever she’s about to tell me won’t be as bad as I think it’s going to be. Please don’t tell me you’re dating Clark, Genevieve, please. It would make sense, I know. You’re so sweet and pretty and successful, but please don’t say it. Where did he work? If I can only remember the name of the place—
“I hope this is the right thing to do, but since you obviously don’t know, I’d feel wrong if I didn’t tell you that Clark just got engaged to my sister.”
While my brain accepts this simple arrangement of words, and their literal meaning, my body seems to be on some sort of delay. For a moment, while I understand what’s just been said, I mercifully don’t have any physical reaction whatsoever. Then, it hits me so hard, my knees almost buckle.
“Oh!” I say, brightly, trying to hide the feeling that I’m being dragged underwater. “How great!”
“It was pretty sudden. I’m sure he was going to tell you himself.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “Really. Guess I should’ve returned that last phone call, huh?” My frozen smile is stretched too tight. If it were a rubber band, it would have already snapped.
“Franny …” She places a hand gently on my arm, but now I’m self-conscious about the uniform, and how scratchy it must feel to her manicured hand, and I pull back slightly. “I’m okay.” I say weakly. But she seems unconvinced, so I put my hand over hers, so now they both rest awkwardly on the stiff brown fabric. “Really. I’m okay.”
The best performance I’ve ever given was in that conference room for the rest of lunch. I smiled and said congratulations to Genevieve, and I wished her sister the best. I took her drink order and remained calm throughout, even when the room filled up all at once with older men in blue suits and brown loafers demanding seltzers and coffees and the occasional cocktail. I cleared the trays of half-eaten mushy tan casseroles onto a cart with wheels, and rolled the cart into the freight elevator and back down to the main cafeteria. I said thank you to the other server, who grumbled something unintelligible back to me. I hung up my borrowed uniform in my temporary locker, and I went into the bathroom to wash my hands.
Only when I go to splash my face with water at the sink, and catch a piece of my reflection in the bathroom mirror, do I come close to cracking just the tiniest bit.
Everyone has moved on.
And it’s not that I don’t want Clark to be happy. There’s even a part of me that’s genuinely pleased for him. If Genevieve’s sister is anything like her, she’s someone nice, at least. It’s what he always wanted—to settle down and start a family. I guess I tried to pretend that’s what I wanted, too, when I knew it wasn’t really. Of course I must have known he wouldn’t wait forever, must have realized somewhere deep down that backup plans aren’t what adults rely on. They’re what adolescents make when they’re not ready to grow up. It’s obvious to me now that people who might still end up together don’t go for weeks without talking. Suddenly it’s clear that making our “agreement” was just the only way we knew how to end things. But it’s a shock to have learned so much and grown up so quickly today, to realize the Clark who said “call me when you change your mind” isn’t my person anymore; now he’s someone else’s Clark.
Somehow I find myself on the D train headed back to Brooklyn. I hardly remember walking to the station or putting my token in the slot. It’s just past three, but already the train is filling up with shoppers and commuters leaving work early, and there’s no place to sit. I grasp onto the nearby silver pole, steadying myself as the train lurches along, my hand slipping on the smooth surface, vying for a safe position along with half a dozen other hands. Today, everything about New York leaves me feeling like I’m competing for space, and just barely hanging on.