by Jean Ryan
When I was
twenty-two and just out of college, I left the green mountains of Vermont and
moved to Boston. An English Literature major, I was looking for a job in
publishing, which I saw as a gateway position to my true profession: renowned
book critic. I pictured a tasteful apartment in Cambridge, witty, cultured
friends. I knew this manifestation might take some time, but I was certain of
my trajectory. This was the life I wanted: why would I sabotage it?
Fortunately,
I had a friend living in a Boston suburb who offered to put me up while I
searched for a job and an apartment. Each morning I boarded a commuter train,
then fumbled my way through the city, often taking the wrong subway line and
winding up far off course. Exhilarated by everything around me, sights and
places I’d only heard about—Quincy Market, Faneuil Hall, Copley Plaza, the Swan
Boats, the Common—I didn’t mind these accidental forays and saw them as part of
the adventure. At that point, you see, I wasn’t afraid of anything.
Three weeks
into my search, I received a call from one of the four employment agencies I
had registered with. A small publishing company on Columbus Avenue needed a
billing clerk—was I interested? Not the position I had in mind, but a foot in
the door, right? I was running out of money and didn’t want to impose on my
friend any longer. The apartment I found (a tiny studio off Beacon Street) was
also a disappointment, but I signed the six-month lease anyway, figuring I’d be
moving into something better by then. I slid my name into the mail slot and
beamed. There I was: a voter, a tax payer, a citizen.
If anyone
else had wanted me, I would never have taken the job at Benson Publishing. I
might in fact have fled the interview, having seen enough.
Benson
Publishing, I soon learned, was a vanity press, though we were not supposed to
call it that. Housed in an old warehouse, it was dying by degrees, dying along
with its owner, an 88-year-old Christian Scientist named Edward Fleese. To this
day, I can recall his Dickensian scowl and the croak of his voice, and I can
see the greasy brown suit coat he wore every day, the shoulders littered with
dandruff. Every few seconds, if you were close enough, you could see the bits
of skin falling off his waxen face and onto his desk pad. A few long strands of
oily brown hair looped over the spotted
dome of his scalp. His yellowed fingernails, which I couldn’t bear to look at,
were long and chipped.
Somehow Mr.
Fleese managed to employ seven of us, though of course he paid very little. We
all sat at what looked like military surplus desks, in a big room that was
always too hot or too cold. Each of us comprised our own department. I was the
billing department, and my desk was next to the room’s entrance. What I did
each day was type up letters to our clients, requesting prompt payment for
services rendered, and at the bottom of the page I’d stick on a Dunn and
Bradstreet label for emphasis. These letters were sent to the same list of
authors on a rolling basis; when I reached the end of the list, I would start
back at A.
Sandra had
the job I wanted. She was our editorial department and was responsible for
evaluating and editing the occasional manuscripts that came her way. Because
new authors equaled revenue, Sandra approved most everything before turning
back to her real passion: her elaborate wedding plans. Sandra was a tall,
soft-spoken woman, and nothing ruffled her, a knack that made me wistful. She
had a habit of tilting her head to one side, probably to keep her long blonde
hair out of her face, and so she appeared kind and attentive.
Sam, our
funny man, was in charge of marketing. I’m not sure what exactly he did for
Benson Publishing, but he was very skilled at marketing himself. We were all
trying to get out of there, but Sam was especially energetic about it, each
week coming up with ingenious new resumes—which he’d hand over to me for
proof-reading (there was no automatic spellcheck back then; this was the era of
noisy, balky typewriters). I adored Sam. He made me laugh, the way he mugged
faces when Mr. Fleese walked past, and I loved the notes he used to drop on my
desk on his way to the men’s room, quips that amused and sustained me.
Ida was the
art department, in charge of designing book covers. Ida had a face like a fox
and was nasty in a smiling, backhanded way. No one liked her. She was a lousy
artist, which didn’t seem to matter to Mr. Fleece. Ida spent weeks laboring
over a single awful cover, which she would then hold up for applause.
Fitz
was…here’s the thing: I never knew what Fitz was hired to do. Much older than
the rest of us, Fitz was a corpulent alcoholic with flaming cheeks and a sweet
nature. Stubbornly, oddly, Fitz dressed for success: black slacks, rumpled
white shirt, striped tie (the rest of us wore casual clothes that reflected our
opinion of our status). Fitz had positioned his department strategically, his
desk being the only one that Mr. Fleese could not view from his office, and he
could usually be seen with his head buried in his arms, peacefully sleeping the
day away. We all liked Fitz, and on the days he didn’t make it into work, we
lied for him, assuring our boss that he had indeed called in, with the flu, a
funeral, whatever we could think of; we usually agreed on something before Mr.
Fleese arrived.
Last was the
shipping department: Eddie and Zach, two part-time college students who could
rarely be depended on to ship a box of books without incident. Much of what
they sent out came right back to us—insufficient postage or a bum address. At
these times Mr. Fleese could be heard haranguing them—the shipping room was a
dark cubby off to the side—and looking up from my desk I could see, beyond Mr.
Fleese’s flying arms, the bored postures and hangdog faces of Eddie and Zach.
Eddie, the more talkative of the two, would promise to do better, while Zach,
who was constantly stoned, would just nod and smile. Then Mr. Fleese would
shuffle back into his office, Eddie would try to look productive, and Zach
would amble off to the stock room, where, in the towering stacks of books we
would never sell, he had made a nest to nap in.
As you can
imagine, booksellers were not exactly clamoring for our products, but we did have
a few pearls—tabletop books with gorgeous photographs, slim volumes of
surprisingly good poetry. Several of our authors were foreigners who did not
understand the contracts they were signing; others simply trusted us, assuming
we’d keep up our end of the bargain and get their beloved works out into the
world. Sandra said that was the worst part of her job, calling those unwitting
authors to give them “the good news.”
It was a job,
as one would say, and after a short time I got used to the degradation. My
tasks were not difficult: answering the mostly silent phone and typing up form
letters. Easy as the work was, it seldom passed muster. My biggest challenge
was trying to figure out what I did wrong. When Mr. Fleese found an error or
disagreed with my wording, he’d crumple up the letter without a word and toss
it on the floor. After he went back into his office, I’d get up from my chair,
pick up the ball and smooth it out. Sometimes I spent an hour looking for where
I went wrong, which did, on the upside, fill the time.
When you’re
twenty-two, time is something you think you have a lot of. I stayed a year at
Benson Publishing, rescued not by a better job but by the misguided notion that
I needed to leave Boston and move to a place where my luck would change. Things
had not worked out so well. No matter how many excursions I went on, the city held
me at arm’s length, kept her pleasures to herself. Finding no way in, I gave up
and stayed home. The red felt squares on my bathroom floor kept peeling up, and
the plaster on the ceiling was falling into the bathtub. The failing motor in
the half fridge woke me up at night, along with panic attacks that kept me
wide-eyed from midnight to dawn. The man in the basement apartment below me had
lost his job at Honeywell and was now agoraphobic. Sometimes his letters wound
up in my mail slot, and when I went down to his apartment to deliver them, he
would not open his door all the way: I never saw his whole face. I began to
fear the same fate, that one night my panic would never leave.
Little things
helped. Lacing my morning coffee with Jack Daniel’s. Watching TV before work,
some mindless show from childhood. Checking my reflection in plate glass
windows to make sure I was still there. Fortunately, I had made friends with a
beautiful young woman down the hall who dated a succession of doctors and
happily supplied me all the Valium I began to require. Panic attacks are common
in the young, especially in women making the transition from college to career.
You think you’re ready for the world and you’re not. There’s nothing to be done
for it; you just have to heal as you go.
My plan to
become a book critic had slipped a few notches; I was allowing modifications,
leeway. I had no idea how or why this happened. It is said that everything
occurs for a reason, and we all wind up where we should. I doubt it. I don’t
think life has that sort of structure. I think youth is something we mostly
bumble through, and usually squander, and that it can’t be and shouldn’t be any
other way. We are old so much longer than we are young, and there is ample
opportunity to be wise.
I live in
Napa now, three thousand miles from my past. Napa is a lovely place, and one
that suits me. But Boston will always be my favorite city because I was young
there, and scared, and hopeful anyway.
I remember
one particular afternoon at Benson Publishing, when dust motes floated above
us, and the hands on the wall clock weren’t moving, and a mantle of submission
had settled over the room. Sandra was filing her nails, Sam was crafting
another resume, Fitz was sleeping, I was leafing through a travel magazine,
when Ida said: “It’s snowing.” We all got up then—even Fitz roused himself—and
gathered at the dirty windows and watched the first snow of the year fall
between the red brick buildings. Who would have guessed that decades later, I
would look back on this scene, would see each of us with such clarity and
tenderness, would love even Mr. Fleese, who did not come out to see the snow.
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