I Was Told There'd Be Cake Page 4

  “I swear,” she said, “I don’t know what goes through your head sometimes.”

  I looked up, startled. Sometimes? We were on week two. Surely, she must be talking to herself. I sloughed it off. But soon the scolding became unsloughable.

  Take the letters, for example. It was officially the new millennium, but Ursula would write all her letters by hand, often on the backs of restaurant receipts. I’d spend hours attempting to type them into legibility, holding them at various lengths from my face. I would occasionally be able to make out an otherwise unintelligible word from its context but would employ my isolated interpretation of her scrawl when typing the letter. This, in the vain hope that she would write more clearly next time.

  “Weasel? Why the hell would I ask for something by Weasel of next year?” She’d shove the paper back into my palm.

  Then there was the endless ghostly parade of missing objects. At least once a day Ursula would lose something and send me running around the office looking for it, firing the start gun of “You better find it or…” And off I went, not wanting to stick around for the rest of that sentence. When I would invariably come up empty-handed, she would say, “Oh, that? I actually found that on my desk hours ago.”

  What was happening? This woman I had so admired (albeit prematurely), this purloiner of my first job virginity, turned scathing. Some people do yoga in the morning; Ursula gave looks so stern I believe she burned calories creating them. When had I become no better than a haughty vegan Anglophile? It was all so unfair: I had never even read David Foster Wallace. I was a good egg, but I guess you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few.

  Before working for Ursula, I’d never had difficulty retaining information, but suddenly I was so petrified of messing up that the fear blocked all my memory pores. It didn’t take long for me to become precisely what she thought I was: a lousy assistant. Everything I touched turned to shit. I had not known the answers to one too many of her rapid-fire questions and now her trust was broken. I began losing things, misfiling them, sending out the wrong versions of them. The phone would ring, and she’d come popping out of her office like a prairie dog to watch me answer it. Six months had gone by when she stopped scolding and started throwing. Pens, junk mail, a blessedly unbound four-hundred-page manuscript—whatever happened to be in her hand at the time sailed in the general direction of my head. I became acutely aware that, in an office environment, people are almost always holding something. When you screw up as much as I did, it’s an unavoidable observation. There was nothing I could do except surreptitiously hide the letter openers.

  To this day, I have never cried at the office. There was one instance, however, in which I cried near it. After a particularly rough heart-to-heart with Ursula after I’d sent something out via FedEx instead of UPS, it was unsubtly suggested that I find another industry in which to work. I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off one’s cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family. A few blocks later, I ducked into a public atrium and turned my phone back on. I called my sister, a gifted jewelry designer, successful businesswoman, and functioning member of society. Lowering my voice to prevent it from echoing, I found myself glossing over the shameful details. Having dried my tears blocks before, it now seemed anticlimactic to complain. All that came out was that I was dissatisfied with my work situation and that I had broken the Xerox machine. My sister advised me to stick with it. This was only my first job. Hadn’t I ever heard of paying my dues?

  Around this time my precious work ethic began to atrophy in earnest and—truth be told—it has never returned. A basic affinity for office work may appear expendable to most. But I was a good girl from the suburbs, where self-worth was color-coded and bound and crazy-glued into a diorama. Yet when the phone in Ursula’s office would ring, I’d run to the bathroom to avoid picking it up. I’d run to the bathroom in general. As a break I’d indulge myself by locking the main door to the ladies’ room, sitting on the radiator, and breathing. I was, in fact, in that very spot when it dawned on me that Sarah had opted to spend the rest of her life in America’s most violent prisons rather than work another day for Ursula. Once Ursula said to me, almost as a point of fascination, “You sit out there all day and I have no idea what you’re doing.” I wish I could have answered her. E-mail had not yet made its way to the few office computers, nor had the Internet. Mostly I was staring at the plastic bumps on my coffee lid, blurring my vision to make them turn from “cream,” “black,” and “decaf” to “laid off,” “demoted,” and “fired.”

  Over and over I tried to comprehend how things had taken such an acerbic turn. I was a splendid photocopier! I was a finder, not a loser! Dozens, perhaps even as many as thirty, of America’s youth had a better forehand grip because of me. Besides, having tasted the rarefied air of the lofty literary world, I couldn’t go back to shoulder pads and mascara. I sought solace in the receptionist, Lenore, who would tell me that she had seen worse assistants than me. Like a kid demanding her favorite fairy tale before bedtime, I’d repeatedly make her tell me about the dreadful assistant who lasted only a month. About how she was fired for incompetence, cast out of the kingdom of literature, and was now working in textbook publishing in Scranton.

  Having never had another first job, I didn’t know enough to quit. As the weeks rolled by, I remained convinced that I could fix the situation. Just when I was at my most unmotivated and depressed, I would imagine what things would be like if Ursula knew me in a different context. She was so wonderful to anyone who was not me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that in a different world I would be her favorite neighbor or niece. Perhaps when her own daughter grew up she could focus all that marvelously passive aggression on her own spawn, saying things like, “Why can’t you be more like Sloane?” or, “If you’re doing a report on The Taming of the Shrew, perhaps we should call Sloane. I know she wrote quite the extensive tome on Shakespeare’s early work, but it might be hard for you to read since her primary medium at the time was finger paint.”

  I was in a relationship that was going south and going there fast, but if I could just get my partner to see me how she used to—to fall in love with me all over again—everything would be okay. Every morning I would vow to work harder, and every morning something would go wrong. Ursula would insist she’d told me something she hadn’t. Or, worse, some task would be poorly executed (by me) and Ursula would give me a look indicating that she would like to do some executing of her own. Soon even Lenore couldn’t help herself. “I’ve never seen her so pissed before,” or, “I’m buying you earplugs for Christmas.” I was the most easily deflated person on the planet. Ursula’s husband would drop by the office on occasion and give me indiscernible looks. If it was a good day, I would think they were empathetic. Who knew what it was to live under these masochistically matriarchal conditions better than he! If it was a bad day, they would roughly translate to, “So you’re the idiot.”

  The funny thing was, I was already in a relationship. It was my first real postcollege relationship, with an extraordinarily tall man who was a pot dealer by night and a paralegal at a major law firm by day. He used to lock the doors to abandoned offices and take unwieldy naps under the desks with his legs sticking out. Or he’d call me.

  He expressed concern about the change in my personality.

  “I’ve never seen you so…”

  “What? So what?” I was down to a single gear: defensive.

  “Mousy.”

  “I’m not mousy. I don’t even know what that means.”

  But it was true. Not only was I becoming a mousy assistant, I was becoming a mousy person. My backstabbing behavior with Sarah at that first lunch had become exacerbated. I was incredibly disloyal. The few times Ursula spoke to me anymore, she’d complain about Lenore.

  “She gets in here at ten o’clock with her disgusting breakfast sandwiches and then she doesn’t begin work
ing for another hour.”

  I would roll my eyes in sympathetic disgust, sliding a book over my cheese croissant.

  The one thing I did right the entire year was to write a typo-free letter to the U.S. Postal Service. Ursula summoned me into her office and explained in great detail that she had ordered stamps—an act which itself seemed a totally irrational, above-and-beyond enterprise, as it was simple enough to sneak one’s personal utility bills in with the office mail. On top of which, I have never known anyone who orders stamps before. Such foresight seemed reserved for Target-shopping Midwesterners and people who pressed their own flowers. It was not for women who said things like “some people are despicable idiots” before nine A.M., referring to the coffee cart man.

  No matter, she saw me as an ally. When she called someone else a name, I took it as a personal compliment. Apparently the “morons” at the post office (them, not me!) had screwed over the wrong woman by sending her a row fewer stamps than she paid for. She had made several maddening phone calls in which she had been put on hold and led down a primrose path of automated options. Now it was my job to “level with them.”

  I sat at my desk and focused all my energy into being Ursula. Who is this woman? What’s her motivation? I thought about the massive Mommy Dearest–sized gap I perceived between what she let me see and what she let the world see. I thought about the way she’d come back from a business lunch with the smile still on her face, the way she’d laugh out loud on the phone or politely ask people for things, and the way all of her turned to stone when I walked into a room. And then I began to feel that a gap was the wrong image.

  This whole time I had imagined her as a boss with a typically terrifying split personality, a woman whose bad side you’d never want to get on. In stepping into her head, however briefly, I realized that the two Ursulas were connected. It was all one big frantic personality and it never went away. I would never get on her good side because there was no good side.

  The letter was perfect. Reasonable but firm, professional but conversational. Ursula even told me so, taking on the pleasantly surprised tone of a mother whose child had not wet the bed. A week later the extra row of stamps arrived in their wax paper sheath. I put them on her desk. I have no idea if she found them.

  Then came Christmas and, with it, overheated Metro North trains and a sprained ankle from slipping on slush in Grand Central. My boyfriend, Jimmy the Pothead Paralegal, dropped the last part of his title when he quit his day job. He was now free to sleep until noon in his apartment, which was located somewhere along the stretch of shit-stained cracked pavement on Ninth Street between Avenues B and C. This was just before the neighborhood got “cute,” back when you couldn’t walk from point B to point C without breathing in a couple of feces-hungry flies. I was still commuting in from Westchester where everything was insect-free and Windexed and there were always ample paper products. Even now that I live in Manhattan, I think of his apartment as an alternate reality, a sort of falling-off-the-grid vacuum where no one ever goes to bed, everyone smokes with the windows shut, roommates wake up naked on the kitchen floor for no reason, and no one does the dishes. Ever.

  I stayed overnight at Jimmy’s more and more. It was modern bohemian squalor at its finest and it was a million miles away from my daytimes.

  Years later I would read a business book for women with a photograph of a woman in a suit on the cover. Her arms were crossed; presumably, she is the author. I didn’t actually read this book so much as I saw it in a bookstore, thought it was amusing, and flipped it open. “Resist the urge to bake for your coworkers,” cried the book. “You’re not Betty Crocker!” Clearly this was not a title marketed to the pastry industry. I slid the book back onto the shelf, unaware of how sage that advice was. Had I known, maybe I never would have created the Ursula Cookie.

  Since baking has been my one consistent hobby since pre-school, I often turn to it in times of stress. Just in time for the holidays, I had learned to make that smooth solid icing that goes on professionally decorated sugar cookies. I stayed up half the night in the kitchen, making stockings, Stars of David, triple-chocolate lumps of coal, and red circles that would have to be explained as “reindeer noses.” The later into the night it got, the further I tested the boundaries of the holiday cookie milieu. It started innocently enough: flowers, stars, sailboats. I became too tired to sleep. I was despondent and I needed a vacation. Actually, I needed a whole new life, but as long as I never went to bed, I felt I could postpone waking up for my current one. Soon I was making baby pink handcuffs, coconut grim reaper sickles, and the inevitable penis cookie. I took some green food coloring and made marijuana leaves for Jimmy. I dusted them with powdered sugar to represent his increasingly varied substance habits.

  At about three in the morning, covered in flour, my fingertips dyed primary colors, the idea for the Ursula Cookie came down from the heavens like the speckled spotlights in Ghost. Never in the history of human thought has a single notion so thoroughly undergone the “it seemed like a good idea at the time” metamorphosis: the impulse was just a seed, still in its genius stage, when I picked up a wad of wet flour and began pressing it into the shape of Ursula’s head. When baked, the Ursula Cookie was the size of a small Frisbee. I gave her thick yellow flipped-up hair, intense green eyes, candy balls for earrings, and skin like, well, dough.

  Sometimes, when you do something so marvelously idiotic, it’s hard to retrace your thought processes using the functional logic now available to you. This is often referred to as “temporary insanity.” I would venture to guess that I gave Ursula a cookie in her likeness to dissuade her of my total retardation. I wanted one last go at getting back into her favor, a place I felt I was mistakenly locked out of to begin with. I don’t know what I was thinking.

  “Is this me?” Ursula held the cookie by the corner of its Ziploc bag. I had come in at nine on the dot despite my sleepless night and pranced into her office with my present as soon as I heard her hang up the phone. In her tight pinch it looked like a piece of crime scene evidence.

  I immediately realized my mistake. I was overcome with the urge to snatch the cookie out of her hands and gobble it up. Weighing my options, I decided that literally biting her head off might make things worse.

  “Yes,” I mumbled, my foot making circles on the taupe office carpeting. I was embarrassed to have been reduced to the level of a child, embarrassed to have given her a homemade gift, embarrassed by how suddenly and indisputably unprofessional it seemed to give one’s boss a cookie in the shape of her disembodied head. But mostly I was embarrassed to have proven to her that even in the realm outside of the office, I was a failure. Had I not given her the cookie directly, she would never have been able to finger it as her own likeness in a bakery lineup. It looked nothing like her.

  “Too funny,” she said, and shut her door.

  Later I found out that she gave it to her daughter, who ate the whole thing and spontaneously threw up from all the sweetness. After that, Ursula and I stopped speaking altogether. We silently timed it so that we took separate elevators. She forwarded me voice-mail messages and gave me instructions on Post-it Notes. I typed up my to-do list in the morning and left a marked-up version in her in-box at night. We ignored each other on the street. We went on like that until September of 2001.

  Then came the lowest of the low points, as hard as it is to believe that the Ursula Cookie was not it. I found myself awake at three in the morning. Again. This time it was Jimmy’s birthday and I was spending the night. Jimmy befriended a lot of people who wouldn’t leave. Anywhere and ever. I could never understand this, as my parents raised me to arrive and leave everywhere early. Three of Jimmy’s delinquent friends sat in the living room, chain-smoking and theorizing about how much it would actually hurt if you broke someone’s jaw by making them bite a cement curb and kicking them in the back of the head. One of them was midsentence around four A.M. when I got up, went into Jimmy’s room, and shut the door.

  Ev
entually he followed me in. I was awake in his bed, which took up the majority of his bedroom. The heat was broken and I was coming down with the flu. Jimmy began mumbling in his sleep. After fruitlessly trying to extract dirty secrets from his unconscious (What letter? Your letter? Was that “a hair” or “affair”?), I gave up on sleep. I grabbed a pillow and moved to the living room, hoping the change in environment would help. To my relief, it was empty but still no sleep would come. I lay there, patting my postnasal drip with a ream of toilet paper and wallowing in a pool of self-pity. Then I looked over at the stack of ratty paperbacks on the windowsill. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Last Exit to Brooklyn. Sons and Lovers. On the Road. I was besieged by the sinking feeling that it had been over a year since I’d read a book in its entirety. I was a fraud.

  I glanced at the clock on the cable box and reached for the phone. Never having called in sick to a job in my life, I had called in no less than four times in the past two months. Finally I was actually ill—while catalyzed by recreational substances and basic sleeplessness, my body still knew a low-grade fever when it felt one. But this was no time for the truth. It was Sunday night, and it’s a well-known fact that calling in sick on a Sunday night is a fancy way of saying “three-day weekend.” I settled on the infinitely dodgier but always effective alternative: a death in the family. I could even utilize my scratchy throat to create grief. Not wanting to jinx the living, I chose a beloved aunt who had died fifteen years earlier. For one thing, I knew she would approve. If I die tomorrow, I hope my living friends and family make such practical use of my demise. For another, it wouldn’t technically be lying.