The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

January- The Family Tree (Part Three)

            I began to apply for jobs with a new force. The application process helped to fade The Food Not Bombs assignment from my consciousness and made me feel better; as if I had control over some things again. If I feared something, then I needed to think of ways to avoid it. I didn't want to be poor, so I worked diligently on getting a job. I felt good, practically responsible, as I looked through the classifieds over coffee in the morning. This really wasn't so bad. My fingers shook a bit and I squinted and struggled to understand what some short forms meant, but I could figure it out. I was no longer looking through a camera lens and constantly asking permission to see. I was now being told to come by today between these times and invited to hand in my résumé. I was no longer passive or waiting for someone else to give me something. I was finally doing something for myself and by myself.

            Gerard was still asleep as I rustled through the paper and murmured on the phone. Even as I walked quietly around the apartment getting my stuff together and putting on the outfit that Vivian had bought me over a month ago, he still remained in his early morning slumber. Inside the bathroom, I shaved and looked at myself in the mirror, wondering how I could appear more than the twenty-five years old that I was. I felt a little weary as I looked at my résumé, but I shrugged it off. Wasn't half of success about showing up? I tried to evoke the confidence that Gerard had given me last night. It worked, a bit, but it was not as strong as it had been yesterday. The cold was back in the outside air and it felt pretty pointless that I had worked so hard to get ready in the morning because most places didn't see the nice, sophisticated clothing I had on underneath my coat anyway. But I persevered, even as I fell on the ice once and damaged a résumé. Most people got jobs, especially the ones I was applying for, out of pure luck and being at the right place at the right time. Just show up, I told myself, just show up. But I still wondered, at the back of my mind, if this was the right place and certainly the right time. I wondered how they were setting their clock and if there was a universal time I could just tap into and then know where I needed to go. I would just get a job if I just knew how. The truth was that I didn't, and the cracks in my performance were showing. As the day wore on, and I went into place after place, I wondered if my confidence would ever be as high as the day before.

            When I went outside the apartment walls, I came face to face with what I was trying to avoid. The first place I went for a job had been a hardware store, and though I knew nothing about tools, I could learn. But as I left I saw copies of my father getting in and out of their cars, one of them yelling at his wife for "being a real pain in the ass, you know, I thought you said you could help?" It made shivers go up and down my spine and I almost wished they wouldn’t call me back with a job. Almost. Maybe if I worked here though, I could lurk in the parking lot and rally up carts and keep an eye on things when they began to go badly. I didn't dare go over to that man now, just being a normal citizen, but if I had an orange vest or a uniform of the store, he might see past my small exterior into some kind of authority. Authority, even minimum wage kind, was the only thing that seemed to work with people like that. For the time being, I was nothing, and I pretended I saw nothing and I walked away from the potentially bad situation of domestic abuse, my mind still reeling (if they were like this in public, what about private?).

            I headed to a grocery store next, followed by a drug store, and it began getting harder and harder to get myself heard. There were babies shrieking in the drug store and the mother kept apologizing subtly that her infant had an ear infection and they would be in and out in no time. I let her go ahead of me to talk to someone so I could have the noise put to an end, but when she got to the counter, her insurance wasn't working and she had to pay for the medicine out of her own pocket. She was counting pennies near the end of it and I felt my stomach drop.