Betsy suddenly recognized a perfect opportunity for total reinvention. After walking fifteen blocks in the wrong direction, she spotted a Kinko’s, slid her floppy disk into the hard drive of a ten-dollar-an-hour PC, and edited her résumé. With a few clicks of the keys, she metamorphosed into Elizabeth Hammond Young, a self-possessed woman who’d never once drank a pinkish Everclear-infused beverage from a trashcan. Debra wasn’t going to tell her what she could and couldn’t have, what she did and didn’t deserve. She moved the cursor over to the line about the sorority and pressed the delete button repeatedly until the evidence was destroyed. She printed out twenty copies and vowed to get a job before she had to make more.
After a drug test scare and a bottle and a half of Goldenseal, Gavin got a job as a camera assistant on a new cable news show. Betsy, on her way toward becoming Elizabeth, was down to her last three résumés. She spent all of her free time uptown, wandering through museums, starting at the top of the Guggenheim and winding her way down, then moving onto the Met or the Whitney. On an unusually warm and breezy March afternoon, she decided to skip the subway and head down Madison Avenue, peeking in the windows as she went. Near 71st Street, in the window of a shop filled with three-foot stacks of hand-knotted Persian carpets in every size, she noticed a small sign that read Sales Assistant Position Available. Inquire Within. She slid a résumé out of a folder in her backpack and walked inside.
“Gavin, I got a job!” Betsy shouted over the traffic noises into a pay phone at 72nd and Lexington. “It’s at a fancy shop on Madison, working for a rug dealer.”
“A what dealer?” he said.
“A rug dealer, not a drug dealer. It pays in cash, you know, under the table. The owner seems a little sketchy, but I’ll just be answering phones and stuff. Now that I’m describing it to you I’m realizing I may as well be working for a drug dealer, but it’s a job.”
Gavin sang “Let the River Run” from Working Girl into the phone, and they celebrated with Indian takeout and a bottle of cheap champagne.
Three months later, she was sitting at her desk with one hand cupped around a hazelnut coffee from the deli on the corner, paging through the New York Post with the other, feeling as employed as she ever had. Hazelnut coffee had become her new obsession, and she had one for breakfast and lunch because it was all she could afford, even though she was almost certain it was the source of some significant gastric distress. Regardless, she lost eight pounds on her new regimen and had no plans to stop. When she looked up, she wasn’t entirely surprised to see a couple of serious-looking men in dark suits walking through the door, carrying badges that identified them as IRS officers, since her boss had been dodging their increasingly persistent phone calls since the day she’d started. In a rare prescient moment, she stashed the Rolodex on the desk into her backpack. The next day when she showed up for work, the door was padlocked.
About a week later, she downed a double espresso and worked up the nerve to spin through the contact cards and start calling some of the designers she had met at the shop for job leads. One of her favorites, Kenneth Marks, a small, pinched decorator who was constantly taking $30,000 rugs out on memo and hauling them to Litchfield County for a particularly indecisive client, said he would put in a good word for her with the human resources department at an esteemed auction house.
“Wear something nice, Elizabeth,” said Kenneth.
“What do you mean?” she asked, glancing down at her Levi’s, realizing that she was still wearing the white, ribbed tank top she’d slept in.
“I mean, not that ratty Muppet-fur sweater that you wear every day, and those shoes,” he added.
Betsy looked toward the pile of shoes near the front door and found the offending footwear, black loafers with large, square block heels. She could feel her face burn hot with shame.
“Look, you’re well-spoken and you’re smart. You can be charming, when you want to be. And you’re sort of blonde, which helps. I know you don’t think people notice or care that you walk around with that red backpack and rotate the same three work outfits,” he said, “but . . .”