| Back |
A Better House Part One Adel, Georgia |
|
|
I hate this shirt. I hate it almost as much as I love the skirt it goes with, and my mother was clear about one thing: she was not buying me the skirt if I didn’t also get the shirt, otherwise I would never find anything to wear with the skirt and that $40 would be wasted. So I got the shirt, and I hate it. It is a sheer, sleeveless white cotton smock with ruffles that encircle my upper arms. While I know in reality the ruffles are not overdone, in my mind they are enormous, they remind me of the giant plastic collar the vet put around my dog Kaye’s neck after she got in a fight to keep her from licking her wounds. Because of the ruffles the shirt makes me feel like an imposter. I am not the kind of person who wears frilly things. I feel like a gorilla in an evening gown. But the skirt—the skirt reaches my ankles and has vertical pin-striping and makes me look tall and thin. It’s feminine but it isn’t frilly. My mother calls it “smart.” Because I love the skirt, I agree to the shirt. Now that I am actually wearing both of them for the first time, I realize that in addition to the despised ruffles the shirt is too short to stay tucked in, which means it hangs tent-like around my waist, completely negating the skirt’s long lean look. We are three hours into our trip to Adel, Georgia for the interview when I realize my full hatred for the shirt. My mother is driving and every now and then she looks over at me and smiles and tells me not to be nervous. “You can’t come in,” I tell her crossly. “You know you have to wait in the car.” “I have to wait in the car?” she says. “I’m so repulsive?” “No Mom! I just don’t want them to think I can’t drive myself to an interview!” “They’ll understand,” she says. “It’s a four hour drive. Your mother didn’t want you to make it alone.” I roll my eyes and almost miss the sign that says we are sixteen miles from Savannah. “How close is Adel to Savannah?” I ask, checking my watch. My interview is in thirty minutes. My mother says if I’m so independent I can look it up myself, so I open the map and see that we are on the spur that goes due east to Savannah, putting us at least an hour and a half from Adel, which is due south. A sudden surge of perspiration jets out onto the ruffles encircling my underarms. “Mom!” I yell. “We’re going the wrong way!” “What?” she says, beginning to tap the brakes, as if she is going to turn around in the middle of the interstate. “We weren’t supposed to get off of I-75! When did you get off of 75?” “Oy,” cluck cluck cluck goes my mother’s mouth. “Well we’ll just find a pay phone and you can call and explain what happened.” “How can I explain what happened?” I practically yell. “If I say I got lost they’ll think I’m an imbecile and they won’t hire me, and if I tell them it was your fault they’ll know my mother is driving me to the interview!” I’m shaking so much the ruffles of my shirt are vibrating. There is a pause, and then my mother says calmly, “Just say ‘we.’” “What?!” “Just say, ‘We took a wrong turn, I will be there at 2:00.’ Period.” I jam my folded arms across my chest and wait for my mother to pull up to the pay phone at the Gulf station. When I get out of the car I am careful to slam the door as hard as I can. Then I poke my head back through the open window. “I hate this shirt,” I say. “I’m never wearing it again.”
You might think it’s funny that I am interviewing for a job at a halfway house when, as my sister likes to say, I am barely halfway there myself. But as I see it I’ve paid my dues. I’ve done the work, cried the tears, suffered the embarrassment that you inevitably feel when your addiction, in my case an eating disorder, begins to wane, and you see yourself clearly for the first time, glued to some ridiculous self-imposed principle, like not allowing yourself over 600 calories in a day if you don’t read at least 60 pages in a book, or acting out some empty compulsion, too petrified to admit there’s no sense in it but so bored by the pointlessness of it all you finally have to. What I want to do now is help other people get to where I am. I am not saying I’m perfect, or even that I’m completely recovered. I am saying that I know enough not to go back, and I have more than a few things I can tell other people that I’m sure will help them get to where I am. Which is exactly what I hope to be able to get across in the interview, only without mentioning the eating disorder part. The two things I do not want my prospective boss to know are 1. I have practically just gotten out of the hospital myself, and 2. My mother is driving me to the interview. Because thinking about how not to reveal these two facts makes me nervous, I have been trying to talk about other things. For example I asked my mother where she thought I should live if I got the job. We immediately got into an argument, which was too bad, except it did get my mind off the interview, and off of the two most important things to know about me that I can’t let be known. My mother says she thinks I should live in an apartment but I want to live in a house. I am not the apartment type. I associate them with frilly shirts and scented candles. I want to rent a little house so I can bring Kaye to live with me. My mother thinks the house and the dog would be too much responsibility, and also she is worried that I will be too isolated in a house. At least in an apartment complex there are other people around, even if I don’t want to actually interact with them, she says. Which I don’t. And anyway I want to live in a house with a yard and my dog, or I kind of do, until listening to her talk about how dangerous it can be and how expensive it is and how lonely I’ll feel wears me down. When that happens I know I won’t be living in one, no young woman rents a house without her life completely falling apart. Houses are for married people and mature people and men. None of which I am, my mother might add. END OF EXCERPT
|