My Dream Job, Part One
“The way you tell your story to yourself matters.” –Amy Cuddy
Of course, I wasn’t healthy enough to accept we needed to stop seeing each other. During the few months that remained in the Trinity year, we drifted apart. He came to say goodbye when I was leaving Ireland, and we drank coffee in the back garden pretending we would see one another again although neither of us believed that was true. Trine was driving me to catch the train to begin my trip across Europe, but he was standing on his head and refused to say goodbye. I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Don’t forget me, Christopher Robin.”
photo by Albert Stoynov
Using the money saved from extra work Gabrielle had connected me with through her movie and television agent, I bought a Eurail Pass and travelled from Vienna to Florence, Corfu, to Athens and finally Paris. The week before I flew back to America, I was with Gabrielle in Paris selling the Herald Tribune outside of the Jeu de Paume museum for enough money to cover wine and dinner at a cheap Vietnamese restaurant near the flat she was borrowing. We spent our days talking.
We talked about Gabrielle’s mother who had died right before I left Ireland, Christopher for whom I pined, about how much I didn’t want to return to America and how much we would miss each other.
One evening there was a dinner with a bunch of Trinity people and then we went to a flashy Paris nightclub called Le Main Bleu. We met two handsome French boys and danced until dawn catching the Metro home as the sun rose, someone with a radio playing songs from Saturday Night Fever. We leaned against each other murmuring love and promising not to forget, to remember everything. I felt very young and hopeful, but I was also terrified about my return to a life where suicide would seem like a good idea.
"Don’t go,” Gabrielle said, her huge blue eyes filled with tears. “Stay.”
“I have to go. It’s over. I have to go.”
“You were unhappy there, Molly. You were miserable. Don’t.”
I took the ferry back to England and then the train to Gatwick Airport without reading a newspaper that would have informed me that Laker Airlines, which I’d planned to fly to New York with my last $100, had gone bankrupt. There was a weeklong queue to purchase a ticket. On my arrival at the airport, I was directed to the back of a mile-long line and spent a week having a good time in what resembled a rock concert without music, playing cards, smoking pot, drinking beer and eating sandwiches provided by Good Samaritans. We were interviewed on the news in America and a friend of my parents saw me on television wearing the top of a bikini and pair of shorts playing poker with a Rastafarian and a few other people.
Outside of arrivals at Kennedy I walked with my heavy backpack and leaned against a tree and fell fast asleep. When I woke up my father was parked there having correctly calculated when I would arrive. It seemed like a miracle. I would return for my senior year at Rutgers wishing I had stayed in Dublin but aware that my dependence on my parents both financially and emotionally made this impossible. I would finish at Rutgers achieving a superior education and an unquenchable thirst for alcohol. While I could control my drinking enough to function, my binges were epic and the blackouts frequent and terrifying.
My father drove me to my college graduation. As usual my mother did not feign even a passing interest in attending the ceremony. This was a relief as I had a crippling hangover and was soul sick with a dehydrated body and a headache that started in my heels, ran through every cell in my body until it gathered like thunder in my skull. My mother detected hangovers in the same way she knew when you ate chocolate, and she delighted in torturing the sufferer with endless questions and unflattering observations. My father was oblivious or sympathetic. I was never sure which. The previous day and night I had hosted a wedding at my house for two people who were getting married. My mother would have advised steering clear which may have been why I was Lady Bountiful offering my house for a reception, encouraging them to invite friends and whatever family was willing to attend. Deciding to get married so young or at all seemed the height of silliness to me.
While I was still drinking too much, I had found a roommate who was calming in his lack of ambition and acceptance of life as it unscrolled. Part of his serenity was no doubt due to his daily consumption of marijuana. He was a sharer leaving a neatly rolled joint next to my coffee mug every morning. After an unfortunate fit of giggles in my Milton class I stopped smoking before school, but he was so good hearted I protected his feelings by stowing the joint in my pack of cigarettes where it stayed until I gave it to some stoner hanging out on the quad. Ken was older, in his mid-thirties, employed as a roofer. He seemed to find my quest to score straight A s at school baffling and my belief that all relationships were doomed to failure, amusing.
My family didn’t decorate except for a pristine Christmas wreath, always real, never artificial. There were no streamers or wrapping paper and ribbons at Christmas. There was always a real tree wrestled into an ancient stand by my cursing father, decorated by carefully curated bulbs and a few branches of stark winter weeds arranged around the house. Christmas morning, we were each given a chair with our presents piled on them frequently still bearing a price tag. Whether this came from my mother’s architectural background that emphasized clean lines and simplicity or her horrible experience spent wrapping presents at Macy’s, I was never sure. This rejection of embellishment inspired me to heights of tackiness. For my friend’s wedding. I had purchased cardboard doves, hearts, flowers and paper plates with gold rings stamped on their surface, a tablecloth with “Just Married” scrolled along its hem and any number of cheap silver and gold ribbons which I tied around every surface including the neck of my sleeping Siamese.
The wedding reception was a great success with most of her dull friends, a few of his and our shared history professor on whom I had a massive, soul-crippling crush. I didn’t want to sleep with him, I wanted to sit at his feet, bring him coffee, light his cigarettes and have him read my papers on the French Revolution. He had been in the Chicago Riots during the Democratic Convention in 1968 when Catherine was at Radcliffe dating a Black Panther. By the time I crossed the stage to graduate, Rutgers Class of 1979, the final survivor of my romantic life my boyfriend Jim, was desperate enough to return to his ex, a pathological liar who had stalked him through college, frequently calling him at 3am to announce she had just swallowed a bottle of pills.
She needed Jim and I only needed my father who only needed my mother and so we were like a Celtic snake, swallowing its own tail. In 1979 I was graduating as a history major with a minor in English and acting. In other words, I was virtually unemployable. I had no interest in earning a PhD or continuing in school. I wanted to earn enough money to cut myself off from my parents. The 1979 Oil Crisis meant you lined up to buy gas, which was only available, every other day. Unemployment was at nearly eight percent and no one I knew, mainly musicians, filmmakers, history and English majors had a real job. We had CETA, which stood for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. What this meant in my life was my friends were hired to do things like teach inner-city youth how to play guitar or write poetry or in my case babysit the traumatized offspring of battered women in a shelter.
My father picked me up. We drove across the Raritan in silence.
“What are your plans?” He was staring through the windshield.
“I have a job already. I’m going to work at a battered women’s shelter in Raritan. I’m the childrens’ counselor.”
He was silent. Honestly, until this moment I had failed to recognize the irony of the situation. In fact, it was so obvious it was barely ironic, mostly awful. “Very interesting,” he said. “How will you do that?”
I had no idea except I’d always been good with children, especially badly behaved, lonely, weird ones. “Maybe, games or they can write about their feelings. Or draw.”
“Surely they need therapy?”
“I guess so, but their mothers have to sign on with welfare and they can’t bring them to the office.”
I was back in New Jersey. Reagan was President. Wall Street, red ties, cocaine, and excess was the order of the day. Success was measured by how much money you made. My response was to find a poorly paid job at a shelter run by two altruistic lesbians taking care of the children of battered women.
“You will be very good with those children,” my father said. “You know how they feel.”
Finally, the truth, but it was too little, too late and too painful. I who found comfort in the approval of angry men was in no position to ask my father, “Why?” My mother had provided the story, his father’s disappearance and the brutal nuns in the orphanage, his genius, never the drinking. We had these moments like when I left the house after my mother’s tirade and he came to get me, such a rare thing in my life, to be claimed, and I had told him I was sorry for leaving.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “We drove you away. I’m the one who should be sorry.”
But what was he sorry for, his anger, his sadness, the treachery of his love?
When my father asked me after I had collected my diploma what I intended to do with the rest of my life, I was tempted to answer with, “I don’t know but I will leave and never come back.” We were sitting in Tumultys, a steak and beer joint on George Street near the Rutgers campus. We had ordered a bottle of wine and both of us were drinking as much as possible.
The battered women’s shelter was located on a depressing street in Raritan, one other house was boarded up, the trees were sparse and there was no sign to indicate its purpose. This was a deliberate decision as most of the clients had fled from their abusers in the middle of the night or when they had left for work. The porch had a few chairs that were always empty since hiding was the main activity of the occupants. Hiding, crying, and keeping the older children from sneaking away to call their fathers. Many of the women had serious injuries, broken bones, bruised spleens, broken shoulders, and cracked skulls. They needed to see a doctor and get signed up for welfare. Their children were frequently in their pajamas, clutching a stuffed animal or a blanket, shell-shocked or crying. Despite my drinking I babysat all through my teenage years and I loved little children. They tended to trust and like me. Secretly I wanted to be someone’s mother, a really good mother who saw her child as a separate person and not always react to that child’s feelings as if they were her own. I wanted to be a different sort of mother than the one I had.
My job was to calm, distract and separate all but the babies from their mothers so the women could see a counselor and be persuaded not to immediately return to their husband or boyfriend. The effort to leave the house was so great they were often exhausted and if something went wrong the chances were good, they would return to their abusers. We had wealthy white women from suburbs close to Manhattan who lived in mansions with swimming pools getting whacked by their successful husbands, poor women from Jersey City getting whacked by their pimp/drug-dealing partners in boarded up shooting galleries in Jersey City. In 1979 PTSD was not yet recognized, the streets were teeming with returned Vietnam veterans shooting dope, committing suicide and often being reviled for fighting an unpopular war. The nation was still reeling from multiple assassinations, Nixon’s impeachment, civil rights demonstrations and college campuses that resembled war zones. Divorce had become common, and movies and television depicted the American family as a lost dream.
Meanwhile, in our unmarked house we sheltered women who had been hurt by their partners or spouses and children who frequently witnessed their mother’s abuse. When I arrived in the morning I might have just a couple kids but other times there were a dozen or more of wildly varying ages and backgrounds. We had a van to take them on field trips, donated art supplies and board games but mainly they needed to be comforted and distracted so their battered mothers could receive help. The families that came to the shelter often arrived without any idea of the next step. Most were Black or Hispanic and not thrilled at being told what to do by two openly gay, white women, the shelter’s directors. Our van driver, Mr. White, was kind but his usual reaction to my idea for a child friendly activity was a look of alarm and doubt. He’d shake his head and mutter, “Can’t see that working. Maybe just have ‘em watch television.”
Mr. White may have been right in his gloomy assessment. The local public library was a resource for free story time and one sweltering morning I organized my seven mismatched charges to attend one at a wealthy suburb about eight miles north. The building looked like one of Princeton University’s gothic structures and my children looked scared as they mounted the stone steps. Inside, however, was cool, light-filled and spacious with a huge section devoted to children’s books. We sat down in the story circle, each child claiming a chair and the pretty white librarian began to read a story about cats or cows or cabbages, I’m not sure which. The children were quiet at first, intimidated, no doubt, by the orderly hush, the attentive nannies or mommies, watching over their well-dressed charges that were pros at sitting still.
Five minutes into the book, Leroy, a diminutive black kid who’d witnessed his father break both his mother’s legs by throwing her down the stairs, stood and screamed, “Fire!” and then ran through the stacks, pushing books to the floor, knocking over displays, and then was followed by the other six in a demented version of Simon Says with Leroy as Simon creating mayhem. I had briefly closed my eyes, unused to such serenity so there was a pause before I jumped to my feet in pursuit of Leroy. I headed him off in Periodicals where he had just snatched a copy of Ladies Home Journal out of the hands of a startled, elderly woman and carried him out the front door, kicking and screaming followed by the others. I woke up Mr. White who tended to take long naps and advised him to drive away fast as I buckled the children into their seats.
“Well,” Mr. White looked into the rear-view mirror at the silent children. “Was story-time fun?”
After a long pause, Maria, a small Mexican girl with lovely manners spoke. “Yes, Mr. White. The library was beautiful. But we can never go back.”
“And why is that?” Mr. White started the van and we pulled onto the road.
“Cause Leroy started a riot,” an older kid said.
Mr. White caught my eye and winked. Leroy had his face buried in my lap and was sobbing. “I sorry,” he said. All the children, even the older ones pressed closer to me. Their small hands were on my shoulders, woven into my hair, touching my neck or legs. They were disappointed but there was also a feeling that Leroy had exposed a lie, the lie that their childhoods were normal or happy. We were imposters and as long as we had each other the pain was lessened. Mr. White was drinking something from his thermos. We were all lost and lonely and scared. I checked my wallet and decided it was educational to go to Dairy Freeze.
I had no training for working with victims of trauma except understanding how it felt to watch your parents hurt each other. All I could do was love each child as much as possible, which was exhausting and temporary. The women who ran the shelter had to focus on the long-term survival of their clients, getting them to welfare and lawyers, and helping them find housing. They dismissed my belief I had no business working with these children without any training.
“You’re so good with them,” they said. “You’re a natural. Just make them feel safe.”
My theory was happiness scared Leroy. He was used to bad things, so he welcomed mayhem and anger. Before I’d grabbed him, he’d gone rigid and then limp and he looked relieved to be in custody. Loyalty to the familiar was something I understood. I had a kind, gentle boyfriend, who stayed with me after college, Jim, but nothing he did seemed right. If he asked me about my day, I yelled at him and if he didn’t ask, I’d accuse him of not caring. When he played Under My Thumb by the Rolling Stones, I went ballistic, shouting about systemic violence against women, how rock and roll sexualized abuse, how depraved most men were and the hopeless state of feminism with women either wearing power suits or thongs.
In late August, an older boy managed to smuggle the shelter’s address to his father and the man came through the back door, high, waving a gun. The police were called, and he was removed. I had no filter. The sadness and fear of the children seemed to migrate from their bodies into mine. I wasn’t a therapist or a social worker. All I could do for the children was attempt to distract them, be kind and try to help them forget what they had witnessed. But I’d never forgotten, so how could they?
Each evening I returned home and drank at least a full bottle of wine, usually two. Most nights I passed out in front of the television. My parents were unimpressed by my job. When I defended the importance of working with traumatized children, they pointed out I had no background in psychology and the work simply fed my tendency towards morbid self-obsession.
“Those women always go back to their husbands. Those children are doomed.” My mother seemed completely unaware I was one of those children.
Once I decided to walk the elephant around the living room. “What about you? You never left daddy.”
There was a long silence. I was setting the table, and she was doing something in the kitchen.
“I thought he would kill you, sometimes.” I whispered but I knew she could hear me. “When he threw the phone in your face.”
“Oh,” she continued to grate the carrots. “He was never that bad.”
“Mom, he broke your nose.”
I found you, I wanted to say. I followed a trail of blood into the bedroom and found you. All of those nightmares I had when I was little, you dead in a coffin and me being pushed through a room by strangers to tell you good-bye. Who dreams their mother has been killed night after night?
“No, no. I fell. That never happened. It was never that bad.”
I wanted to contradict her, to explain that it was that bad to listen to them fighting, screaming at one another and hear things breaking and shattering, to hear daddy start the car and drive into the night certain he would never come home again or he’d die in a fiery car crash, lost in that no-man’s –land outside of the Lincoln Tunnel, my daddy dead, my mommy dead, everyone dead.
It felt bad to be forced to comfort your hungover mother and then witness your contrite and guilty father begging her forgiveness so you couldn’t decide whom you hated the most. Why did happiness disappear so fast, I wondered? But I remained silent. What was to be gained from honesty?
The end of the seventies included two catastrophes that indicated the future was bleak. On March 28, 1979, Unit Two of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station melted down; the radio broadcaster claimed that anyone within listening range was probably contaminated by radiation. Walking into my quiet back yard in New Brunswick, the two cats snaking around my ankles, a promise of spring in the air, I could hear the faint rustle of nocturnal creatures and a faraway hum, the sound I feared of nuclear disaster. There was a beautiful full harvest moon, but the air seemed contaminated and shimmering with the threat of poison.
The second event was the murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980, by a deranged fan of the book Catcher in the Rye, a novel I would be forced to teach to depressed teenagers many decades in the future. Lennon’s assassination put a full stop to the sweet memories of Carnaby Street, swinging London, Mary Quant, Twiggy and Biba. and our happy time in London when I faced down a bully. I could no longer fit into the Liberty print dresses my mother had sewn and The Beatles albums my father bought for us were a distant memory.
I called Catherine, my older sister. Lennon had been her favorite Beatle. “Poor Julian,” she said. “He’s lost his father.”
“Life is terrible,” I sobbed.
“Mouse.” Her voice was soft, the tone firm. “Sometimes things are really bad, but they get better. Your life will get better.”
My oldest sister had straightened up, gotten married and was thinking about having a baby while she pursued a PhD in English at Rutgers. Finally, she seemed safe and happy. I loved going over to her house, which my parents still owned, the same one where I lived at 16 Mine Street during my senior year at Rutgers. Catherine was a slob and I’d start washing the dishes piled in the sink while she told me about her latest thoughts on Emerson and what she’d read in People Magazine, or we discussed my job at the battered women’s shelter.
“Do they understand the irony?” she asked me one day. “The idea of you minding the children of battered women?”
“Maybe it wasn’t that bad,” I said. “Mom says he didn’t hit her. I was so little, maybe it wasn’t real, or I dreamed it.”
Catherine shook her head. “It happened, Molly. They got drunk and she said mean stuff and he hit her, and we listened. They had their fucking happy marriage and we listened to all the glass breaking.”
“Then how can she say it never happened? I was there.”
“It’s called gas lighting, Mouse. My psychiatrist said that’s how you remain blameless. You’re fine and the person getting gas lit thinks they’re nuts.”
When my mother suggested I interview for a job at New Jersey Bell Telephone, the shelter was still recovering from the visit by the angry, gun-waving husband. Several of the women had returned to their abusive partners preferring to be menaced by someone they knew. I was drinking more than ever, waking up convinced someone had hit me on the head with a two-by-four, the hangovers so vicious I felt sick for twenty-four hours.
The recipient of a historic affirmative action lawsuit, New Jersey Bell Telephone was scrambling to hire college-educated women to train as outside foremen. Traditionally, former telephone installers who, with few exceptions, were men, had filled these positions, the most highly paid at that level while the women were mainly poorly paid clerks or telephone operators. The plan was to quickly train recent college graduates how to install telephones and climb poles, and then put them out in the field where they would supervise a gang of their own. You would learn the methods but never actually deal with the conditions in real life with tangled wires, crazy customers demanding wires be concealed, blizzards and heat waves, traffic and delays caused by any number of factors. You might never have the experience of the descent into a dark basement to find the wires needed to connect a phone, a basement where a large, angry dog was chained to the wall, the customers eager to see you fail. If you did well as an outside foreman, you could conceivably be promoted into the ranks of highly paid telephone executives.
Of course, I didn’t have a clue what any of these people in business actually did. As the daughter of an English professor/writer/literary critic and an architect my parent’s work schedule seemed to allow lots of time for eating salads and summers spent on Cape Cod. We lived abroad, took transatlantic crossings and they ate lunch together most days.
However, I had started to dread going to the shelter where I felt inadequate and ill-equipped to cope with traumatized children. I also feared I might never cease hating men. I looked at complete strangers and wondered, “Who did he just punch?”
I had an awkward moment with my father when I was describing the intake of a woman with a broken nose. That night was never discussed until I described the incident in therapy twenty years later, unsure whether it was a dream.
“No,” my therapist said, shaking her head. “That wasn’t a dream.”
“I think you should find another job,” my father said, looking sad. “That place sounds poorly organized.”
My mother knew the New Jersey Bell Telephone district manager in Newark and arranged for me to meet him. The interview focused on his telling me how much he admired my mom. I understood his admiration. All my life I had watched her working with contractors and builders, her plans rolled up under her arm, her tall, slim figure in an outfit that displayed her great legs, possibly a Vogue pattern she had sewn herself from fabric brought home from Liberty’s of London. Despite her femininity she was an expert in a field with few women, Harvard educated yet not a snob, an elitist but only about elements like great design, a fighter for affordable housing, aware of environmental concerns while most people were wrapping their plastic in more plastic. I was very proud of her despite my resentment at not having a mother who stayed home and made me lunch every day. Part of me longed for the apron-wearing fifties mom who waited for her children to return from school, greeting them with questions and snacks. My mother was never at home when I got off the school bus and, when she returned from work it was time to make dinner and set the table. I was fully aware there was little you could do to engage her attention short of an injury requiring stitches.
As he finished his tribute the district manager looked at me from across his vast mahogany desk and said, “Are you brave?” I nodded.
After the interview, I was scheduled to take a series of tests that included measuring my body fat with calipers, stripping a wire with a wire stripper, walking on a balance beam and taking a written test consisting of case studies wearing headphones with a recording that contradicted the written directions. I believed I failed miserably and I was glad. I had no ambition to be a manager of telephones in a real job that didn’t focus on writing or acting. I had no experience in customer service or telling people what to do. Of course, they hired me. When I told my parents I was going to be a boss they expressed doubts at my ability to be an authority figure or to give a direct order.
“I remember when you took riding lessons,” my father said. “That horse just looked back at you sitting on his back like a lump and laughed.”
“How can you tell if a horse is laughing?”
My mother patted my shoulder. “You’re a good, helpful girl,” she said.
“I’m supposed to be tough,” I said. “A hard ass. Not helpful.”
They looked skeptical. “Be nice. Julian, what should Molly do?”
"Don’t take any wooden nickels,” my father said.
I moved to Hoboken with my high school friend, Alison, who had a job at a quasi-legitimate publisher called the Franklin Mint. The Franklin Mint republished “great books” in expensive bindings, exactly the sort of company our fathers, academics both, Alison’s at Princeton, mine at Rutgers would have viewed as akin to Reader’s Digest, a publication my family viewed with contempt. Repackaging the classics or abbreviating let’s say, Moby Dick, implied an intellect too limited for our parents to contemplate. In addition to being the offspring of people with impossibly high standards, standards that no one bothered providing any means to meeting, Alison and I were deeply depressed and had been the victim of hideous haircuts and clothes as children.
We had grown closer during our senior year of high school when her older friends had left for college. When I told her I was moving to Hoboken she asked to live with me. Our parallel depressions expressed themselves differently. Returning from her awful job at the Franklin Mint, Alison would lie face down on her bed dressed in her work outfit, invariably one of her mother’s designer cast-off suits, safety pinned at the back since she was so slender. After that she would smoke several cigarettes and then stand at the open freezer eating Haagen-Daz from the carton with a tiny spoon.
Meanwhile, I would return from a ten-hour day at New Jersey Bell Telephone, drop my tool belt, remove my steel-toed boots, put on running clothes and head to the track at Hoboken High School where I would run several miles, my inner mantra consisting of, “Fuck them all.” Stopping on the way home to purchase a bottle of wine, my meals were usually root vegetables; parsnips, carrots, turnips, and onions, cooked in chicken broth and blended into a soup, consumed with the hope I was off setting the damage of so much wine, cigarettes, and stress. I usually drank until I passed out while Alison existed mainly on tuna fish and ice cream.
Our apartment was a roach infested dump but at least our mothers were miles away and we could be depressed without explaining ourselves. Alison wanted to return to live in Madrid where she had once lived while I had no idea what I wanted, to go back to Ireland possibly, to be a famous movie star or writer but mainly to drink without guilt. Having grown up in Princeton surrounded by the wealthy as well as the brilliant, it felt pointless to try to do anything impressive. I wanted to write but my father was a magnificent novelist and literary critic. Many of my parents’ friends were Nobel Prize winners, famous poets, artists and academics.
I didn’t have any interest in following Catherine into the academic world of postmodernism, Derrida and textual analysis. My passion was for stories, fueled by reading obituaries, case studies, examinations of poverty in Oscar Lewis’s book, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. I loved nonfiction accounts of how people lived and, of course, the hundreds of novels and short stories I had consumed over the years. Daddy often commented on the wide span of my interests fueled by fashion magazines like Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Glamour and Mademoiselle but also books like Moby Dick, War and Peace, Middlemarch and To the Lighthouse. I could move from an article about losing weight by keeping a food diary to Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge with its vivid description of an alcoholic selling his wife and daughter for a bowl of liquor laced porridge.
I wrote stories with strong female narrators who lacked self-knowledge. I liked commercials and marketing because I found the embedded stories, the fake perfection and the manufacturing of desire fascinating. My father’s novels were beautiful, but I was a different sort of writer, influenced by popular culture, movies, and television and, of course, romantic fantasies. I didn’t let him see anything I wrote past eighth grade. I knew I had some talent but that didn’t mean I was good enough to publish anything. Sometimes I was hurt by my father’s lack of support, and I assumed he viewed my talent as minimal. But I also understood he had been betrayed by agents and publishers. When boxes of unsold books arrived at our house there might be an increase in drinking and dark statements about the pointless nature of literature. I saw my father’s art as rare and exquisite while I was nothing but a hack that wanted endings to be happy.
Alison and I had both spent years of our childhoods living in foreign countries, we were faculty brats, and our parents drank too much. We were both so afraid of so many things it was a miracle we ever left the apartment. I dealt with my fear by drinking and sleeping with unsuitable men while Alison disappeared into melancholy and endless naps. But when I came home after a terrible day at work she listened to my stories, and we told each other that things would get better even though neither of us knew why happy people were happy and we secretly believed it must be because they were stupid. Our talent was for survival, for escaping from the intricate web of lies and denial our parents created. I was full of noisy self-pity while Alison was silently miserable. We were perfect roommates.
The Telephone Installation Training School was located in North Jersey. The pole yard was exactly that, a massive outdoor space with 40-foot telephone poles used to train future installers how to climb. I practiced climbing in the afternoon following lunch. I was assigned a cubicle with a video player and a pile of Bell System practices in three ring binders. Each lesson had a test, each video had a test, and each wiring situation had a test and of course, climbing a telephone pole was a test in itself. I learned how to splice wire, use a mortar drill, time-out a job, take apart and put together a telephone and how to deal with irate customers angry because you have just ruined their paint job or ran wire across a priceless piece of art, or stapled their cat to the linoleum. The idea was to train me in every aspect of the job of telephone installer in six months and then put me in the field with my own garage, gang and production numbers.
It was a bad idea. Although I was athletic enough to climb a telephone pole, I treated all the technical information I was meant to absorb the same way I had treated math in school. I pretended to understand, nodded when asked if I understood, cheated when possible and ignored most of it. During the final exam, my tester became so angry at my failure to make the phone ring he crossed the wires himself and kicked me out of the model house. The main part of my job would be acting as “boots on the ground” for the inside foreman who kept track of all the installers as they signed on and off jobs. The outside foremen kept him updated and when an installer closed-out he might tell them to go to the next job, help someone in trouble or pick up additional work.
In my New Jersey Bell Telephone car, a target for angry consumers, a white Hornet lacking a radio and air-conditioning, I drove from job to job checking on the gang’s progress, reporting on delays or jobs that had finished early. One problem was they could tell me anything and I’d have to believe them. I was called “that college hire chick” and when I admitted my major was history and not engineering, the response was even more incredulous. However, I felt like I had entered a universe where nothing made sense, especially the fact I was destined to be the boss of a gang of ten, nine men and one woman, most of them considerably older and all of them aware I was a fraud.
No one would eat lunch with me in the Telephone School company cafeteria. This shunning was reminiscent of how I was sent to Coventry in fifth grade while attending Barrow Hill in St. John’s Wood the year we lived in London. So, I acted tough, ignored the muttered comments about my being that “college hire cunt”. Also, I took pride in behaving as a mole, exposing the Bell System by supplying a friend who made weird films with a tape about customer service that seemed to indicate the start of a porn movie.
Telephone Man: “I may have to drill a large hole.”
Lady Customer: “Oh no! Can you hide the wire?”
And so on. Everything the Bell System issued contained a warning that reminded me of those mattress tags that promised dire consequences if you removed them. Leaving the campus with a tape hidden beneath my coat I felt a modicum of satisfaction. I may have sold my soul to an evil, corporate behemoth but I was still a raging hippie who defied authority. I started pole climbing as winter arrived, so my afternoons were spent hooking up a creosote pole. By two o’clock in the afternoon there were deep shadows, which made it hard to see. If you leaned forward to clutch your pole, you “gaffed out” which meant your hooks detached and you slid down, incurring horrible splinters and possibly sinking one of your spikes deep into your calf. So, while it was counterintuitive to lean away, allowing your belt to support your weight, it was crucial. Climbing the poles in winter meant the wood was frozen. You were snowed on, buffeted by the wind, which made it that much harder to remain gaffed in.
Climbing required a hard hat, goggles, a chest protector, a tool belt that included a twenty pound line hammer and gaffs like stirrups attached to your shins with leather straps, the hook mounted on the inside of each leg. You ascended by increments, sinking your hook, moving your hands, the belt hanging down from your waist, sinking your hook, hands, belt, until you reached the top, belted in and leaned back. Assigned to sink an iron spike into the pole using the line hammer that was so heavy it caused me to swing wildly each time I went to strike a blow, I screamed thinking I was about to die.
“No screaming, Moynahan!” The instructor had been a Marine drill instructor in his previous life and found my very existence an affront to his pride in New Jersey Bell.
I pulled the spike from my pouch and noticed an existing hole. I shouted down below, “Can I use the hole that’s already here?”
As the question left my throat, I recognized I’d made a terrible mistake. “No,” the instructor bellowed. “Start a new one.”
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach