Escape Artist

BEFORE MY HUSBAND AND I WERE MARRIED, we lived together for a number of years-a lifestyle newly popular with our generation. When I announced our plans to cohabitate, my mother sucked her cheeks and took a deep breath, but stuck to her needlepoint and didn’t say a thing. In her day “nice” girls never even contemplated such an arrangement. But this was 1976 and my father thought it a sensible idea. “Might as well take it for a test drive,” went his logic.

After some months of pseudo-connubial bliss, I decided it was time for me and mine to get serious, and by serious I meant as in vacation. For me, marriage was not the goal. I was not interested in children or a mortgage or settling down. I was interested in seeing something of the world, and now I had a companion with whom to do so.

My boyfriend and I were like-minded when it came to travel. We enjoyed going down to the city, strolling around Greenwich Village or through the park, watching passersby from a window seat at Ray’s pizza, but for the most part we preferred the country, and certainly for getaways of any length we headed for the hills or the shore. We’d pack up the Omni with hiking boots, bathing suits, not much else and take off. My traveling companion liked to sing, and in fact has such a good voice that it hardly mattered what was on the radio or in the tape deck. His James Taylor serenaded me from Stockbridge to Boston, he crooned like Johnny Mathis through the foothills, and Neil Young had nothing on his “Damage Done.” He sang to me all over the Northeast, up Route 6 to P’town, down the Merritt and along the Kankamagus Highway, his “Chances Are” chasing away any blues.

We had moved on from our jobs at Victoria Station, a then-popular steakhouse, as had most of our colleagues: undergrads who appeared seasonally, grad students saving for medical school or the law, artists who reverse-commuted from New York City. Among this industrious bunch were a future clinical psychologist, a heart surgeon, an accountant for one of the Big 8 firms, a Wall Street trader, an Abstract Expressionist painter, and a classically trained actor who’d one day find fame as Quark on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

My partner and I had no such direction. We were still trying to find ourselves, trying out this job or that, blithely assuming a rewarding path would reveal itself by sheer dint of our expecting it to.

Both of us took jobs at psychiatric facilities, a not illogical move from restaurant work where one learns to cater to a variety of personalities and temperaments. I worked on a per-diem basis at a bucolic retreat where the likes of Rita Hayworth and Greg Allman went to dry out. My boyfriend had two gigs, one at a woodsy facility for over-indulging teens with means, the other in the psychiatric wing of a suburban hospital.

Basically, I was hired to sit with sleeping patients and make sure they stayed put, not much in the way of stimulating work, but at least I got to read and the hourly wage was good. Only once was I assigned to a patient who was not only awake but ambulatory. My weeklong shift ran from four in the afternoon to midnight, my only duty to accompany my charge around the grounds or wherever she wanted to go, within reason. She was my mother’s age, from a patrician family, and lived in the same town in which I had grown up-Greenwich, Connecticut-albeit the toniest, backcountry part. To my mind there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. She looked for all intents and purposes like any of those athletic, well-preserved women I’d see on Greenwich Avenue doing their errands in some beat-up station wagon, never flaunting their wealth, perfectly comfortable in clothes they’d owned since their twenties and still fit into as well.

We’d spend the afternoon strolling over foot bridges and the babbling brook that wound around a handful of cottages, scenery that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a storybook. My charge would alight on a bench or wall, and each time I’d think it would be for a while instead of the brief moment it always turned out to be. I assumed she and I would share the same easy companionship my mother and I did, but her restlessness was a high barrier. At the pool pavilion, I always asked, too eagerly I’m sure, if she wouldn’t like a swim-”What could be more relaxing, more relieving?” I’d suggest-the buoyancy of the water, the steady pressure from all sides somehow soothing for her, I thought, holding her up, together. But she was suspicious of my motives and wouldn’t indulge me. “It’s closed,” she’d say, exercising in the only way she could some measure of control.

I don’t know what medication she was on, what therapy she received, what illness she in fact had. She’d talk about her former husband as if they’d just finished a set of tennis. What a good mixed doubles partner she was, a real Helen Wills Moody, he apparently used to tell her. I played along, nodding and smiling, in cahoots with this person she described, the person she no longer was. It seemed the kindest thing to do, really. Finally we’d head back to her cottage, indoors to her room where she’d rummage through her meager cosmetics or purse half-filled with the few things she was allowed to have, or a bureau drawer bereft of something that was never there.

One evening near the end of my stint, her brother came to visit, a handsome, well-dressed man with a full head of hair the same steely shade as his sister’s and a gentle expression wholly his own. I excused myself to give them some privacy and waited in the common living room where one of the residents, a cheerful, talkative man in his forties, sat on the floor making a loop rug, Winnie the Pooh on a blue background. The nurse turned on the TV; the other three residents listened quietly or pensively or noncommittally, it was hard for me to tell, waiting for their meds.

After a brief meeting with his sister, the brother motioned to me and the two of us went outside.

“So, how are things?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said.

We could have been exchanging pleasantries at one of my parents cocktail parties, he asking me about my major while I held a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

“But how do you think she’s doing?” he asked, concerned. He smelled familiarly of aftershave or gin and tonic, an undertone of lime somewhere.

“Well, she’s pretty fine,” I said again, as expansively as I knew how.

He looked sadder at this, and I followed his lead.

“Better than yesterday,” I offered, hoping to lift his spirits.

“Yesterday?”

“She seemed a little edgy yesterday.”

“Edgy?”

“Well, maybe not edgy, but, you know.”

“Mm. So, what do you think?” he pressed, and I suddenly wondered if my job description didn’t include credentials I didn’t know I had.

“I think she could do with some tennis,” I prescribed, as professionally as I knew how.

After a summer of this, my mother told me I was marking time. “You’re in limbo,” she said. “You need a real job.” For whatever reason, I didn’t disagree. She enrolled me at Katharine Gibbs, in a six-week cram session for college grads to learn to type, take stenoscript and not begrudge the fact that male college grads didn’t have to.

“You want me to be a secretary?” I asked, more than a little dismayed.

“I was a secretary and it was most rewarding,” was her rejoinder.

“You quit at twenty-three.”

“I got married,” she said, making her point. “Just get your foot in the door,” she instructed. My mother had the quaint notion that a well-heeled foot was all that was required to work my way up the corporate ladder, and the even quainter notion that I would somehow end up like Doris Day in Pillow Talk, using my many and sundry artistic talents to redecorate Rock Hudson’s apartment.

Two months later, having knuckled down the home row, I took a job with an entrepreneur who imported woolens and other cheap goods from Nigeria, and got paid the highest rate for anyone in our graduating class-$200 a week. The office was in a nice building in New York City’s garment district, and since my boss and his young family lived in the suburbs, every morning he’d pick me up on my doorstep in his bomb-proof limousine for the drive into Manhattan. He was as dapper as Jackie Gleason, had the stature of Napoleon, and was as jumpy as a chihuahua. I’m not sure why he was so nervous. Perhaps there was contraband stuffed in the shipping cartons that arrived on the docks nearly daily, though nothing suspicious ever showed up on the bills of lading. But after one of his flunkies-in-training stuck his head out the limo’s window and barfed on the way to meet a client in Queens, I got the feeling no amount of lead in the door panels was adequate.

I quit the job and Manhattan and decided to stick closer to home by temping. I found a decent agency run by a den mother of a woman who knew every human resource department head between Westport and Greenwich. I told her I wanted to sample the merchandise before buying the whole bolt, so she put me to work at the shortest-term, highest-paying assignments she had. It didn’t take long to discover the reason such jobs went begging. They were either excruciatingly boring or overwhelmingly busy. At the boring ones you had a choice of reading corporate literature or listening to the secretary next to you give a blow-by-blow account of last night’s episode of “Knot’s Landing.” At the ones designed for workaholics, people were too frantic to tell you anything, much less where the emergency exit was. Either way, I could feel my normally low blood pressure begin to spike.



On the urging of a girlfriend who thought I could use more meaning in my life-she herself was a nurse who worked in a variety of capacities, with wayward teens and recovering addicts, stray animals, the homebound, and indeed any creature in need-I agreed to meet with one of her colleagues, a man who ran a training center for inner-city youth. The man was well-spoken, not overly friendly, with a tired, slightly put-upon expression, a combo of Richie Havens and Malcolm X. His office was in a converted factory close to the “Stacks,” a high-rise public housing complex, plainly visible as the blight it was as one drove north on the thruway, as we used to every time my mother drove us to the country club we belonged to in Darien or to the club’s private beach on Shippan Point. It was hard not to stare-at underwear hanging limply from windows, dark faces seemingly holding it in place, at doorways with no doors and graffiti everywhere, crazy with color, spiraling over cinderblock foundations and broken asphalt barren even of weeds.

My assignment was vague. From what I could gather, I was to make myself available to a classroom of young women trying to learn what I had just learned at Katharine Gibbs. They were already mid-course, self-guided, using a book that instructed them on things like salutations and where to put an inside address. My job was to help with tangibles such as these, though I was doubtful how much difference I could make. I wasn’t trained to teach, nor was I an expert as far as skills went-I had been using mine for all of two months. And there were intangibles as well.

No employers from nearby corporations came looking for workers here, no job postings offering two weeks’ vacation and full benefits and a subsidized cafeteria were in the offing for these trainees. I was introduced to the class of six girls, a few years younger than I was, all at different stages in their skills book, all showing little enthusiasm for me, another white presence that only confirmed the handicaps ahead.

I was uncomfortable, too. The only black person I knew growing up was Bessie, our cleaning lady. The first black person in my class-and the only one at our junior high-was a smart, funny boy who caused me some discomfort by liking me, and because I was friendly back, a fat, freckled, busybody of an Irish girl used to tease me-Ramon likes you, Ramon likes you-just to see me blush. That was in seventh grade. Years later, none of my friends were black; I barely had any acquaintances who were.

With so many corporate headquarters within walking distance, I asked the girls what kind of jobs they wanted but drew blanks. The looks on their faces were similar, I’m sure, to the one on mine when my father asked me repeatedly and in ever-louder tones, But what do you want to do? I had just graduated from college and had no idea. The only recruiters who showed up at my university were from banks. I was an English and Art History major. I scanned the Help Wanted ads and felt sick. Is this why I went to college, to work in accounting or sell pharmaceuticals?

I couldn’t very well tell my father the truth-that any corporate job seemed to me a kind of death. I wanted a comfortable life, yes, but the kind of jobs that could buy it didn’t go to females with liberal arts degrees. They went to men with wives and children and memberships at country clubs.

I drew a blank at my father’s question because, like the girls sitting before me, I had no concept of possibilities other than those I’d been born to, all of which, frankly, depressed me. At least these girls had hopes of doing better than their parents.

After an hour in the classroom, Richie Havens/Malcolm X called me into his office and asked, pointblank, “Can you teach these girls how to speak?” I knew what he meant. The girls’ grammar was poor, their pronunciation rough (“I don’t have no paper.” “Gimme dat.”), indelible marks of their class. I was no Henry Higgins. I told Richie Havens/Malcolm X that I couldn’t do the job. He seemed to understand, didn’t try to change my mind and didn’t linger. We shook hands and he swiveled back to his desk, a man with more on his mind than me.

I felt guilty about my relative good fortune, about the impossibility of being able to help those girls who had faith there was something beyond what they’d been born to even if they couldn’t envision it. I closed the door to the classroom as quietly as possible, hardly necessary in the clatter of typewriters behind me, and slunk down the stairs and out of the building, with Richie Havens ringing in my head: “Free-dom! Free-dom!”

###

Deborah MacFadden is a freelance magazine editor living in Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA.

email: debmacfadden@gmail.com
BLOG: DelvingEye.com

Posted 07:40 PM on Thu Aug 27 2009

By Grammar Girl

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