She went into the Walmart and bought a beta fish.
But he was lying when he said he didn’t have anything, because he did have something, he had a girlfriend who he lived with, and that seemed like sort of a lot. She asked around to find that out, and she asked around to find out his number, and when she called he said that it was ok because he and his girlfriend had an agreement about things.
This was not true, it became clear after not too long. She had a few months where she thought maybe there would still be some kind of a possibility for her and him to get together, but then it was clear that there wasn’t. So then she went back to the church, had her baby, and now here she was.
“Ms. Bradley, do I have confirmation?”
“Yeah,” said Jillian and she hung up the phone.
WHY DO WE do it to each other? All of this girl on girl violence? Well, not really violence in the strict sense, she’d never been in a real fight, but a type of primitive aggression she felt constantly, yes, she really felt it was constant.
It was one of Carrie’s days off and she was in her apartment, looking at her nail polish and musing. Her roommates were at work. She loved her roommates, she really did, they were dolls, but she even felt it from them. She was the kind of person who liked to feel comfortable with people. She couldn’t help it, it was her personality.
It was like, she thought, she just wanted to let all of these women know that there was no shortage of ejaculate on the planet and that they could, you know, share it.
“That’s gross,” she said and shook her head and stood up from the couch. She walked around the apartment. She walked to Janet’s door and nudged it open with her toe. Carrie thought Janet was some kind of a genius. She walked to Janet’s closet and poked through her clothes, then walked back to the couch and resumed the examination of her nail polish.
No one ever wanted to share clothes anymore.
She wanted to make a database. When she thought of the database, she became slightly nervous. Not overly nervous, but a little nervous. It was an idea she’d had in the back of her head for almost two weeks now and she wasn’t able to pin down what, exactly, the database would be, what it would contain, or from where it would be accessible. But it would be some kind of database. She’d stopped looking at her fingers and was staring in the direction of the bay windows.
About once a month she felt nervous and when she felt this way she had to remind herself that what she was doing was important. It’s hard to put yourself in historical perspective, but it can be really helpful, too, and you really need to do it. She was a part of a cultural movement and a part of a community that was directly responsible for the way the world would work in the future. She repeated this idea. There, now she felt better.
Maybe the database would have something to do with her ideas on the American workplace. Those were ideas she hadn’t been able to use in her artwork yet. She loved those ideas and knew they were important. People were living in traps of their own habits. People should get up and walk around in the office. They should be able to move their desks, switch cubicles with a friend, use the floor as a chair and the chair as a desk, lie down on their stomachs to stuff envelopes, review the quarterly earnings on a park bench, weather permitting. She knew this kind of re-imagining was essential to the vitality of the American people, and she was lucky (but was it luck, or had she worked to get where she was?) to work for Jill, who would definitely let her try any and all of these new techniques.
Carrie sat on the couch, staring at the bay windows with her left hand held out absent-mindedly before her. Soon it would be 3:30, soon it would be 4:00, soon it would be 4:30, soon it would be 5:00, then 5:15, then 5:30, then 5:45, 46, 47, 48, 49.
Part 3
ONE
“There I was in my storage unit. I had nothing, no job, no boyfriend, no place to live, and then BAM. Six weeks later I had my career, and six years later here I am,” said the drug rep, who was standing in the waiting room and leaning on the counter. She had a miniature dolly cart with a few crates and boxes on it, the sort of rig a homeless person would have, but new-looking, as if she wiped it down every night and got the wheels and buttons repaired from time to time. Megan thought the whole drug rep thing was disgusting, corporate, and transparently evil, but Jillian stood on the other side of the counter smiling at the rep with her mouth open.
“Wow,” said Jillian.
The drug rep looked like she took street fighting classes.
“Yeah,” said the drug rep.
“You know, I was trying to start my own business,” said Jillian.
“Oh, really, what’s that?”
“I was going to do coding. I found the software and everything, but things just didn’t quite work out.”
“Awwwww,” said the drug rep. “You know, honey, I could always hook you up with a job in my business.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Jillian.
Megan could not believe this. It was inappropriate to talk about wanting to quit or switch jobs when you were at your workplace and nine feet away from your employer.
“But I should warn you, it’s real fast-paced.”
“Well, maybe I’ll think about it,” said Jillian.
I mean, if Megan could resist it, everyone should be able to.
“Ok, sweetheart, I’m going to leave these samples with you, and you just give me a call whenever Dr. Billings is ready to meet with me.”
“Oh, ok,” said Jillian, taking the samples.
“Can I leave some literature out?” asked the rep.
“Sure,” said Jillian.
By “literature” the rep meant advertisements for bowel-emptying medication.
Jillian’s smile was like stuck or something. She almost started laughing, but she knew it would be a deep, woofing, slow laugh. Ridiculous. Thinking about laughing like that almost made her laugh again, a high-pitched rapid giggle. Ultimately she didn’t laugh, she just stood there and watched the drug rep wheel her little hobo cart out of the lobby.
Jillian walked back to her desk and said, “That woman is such a sweetheart.”
Megan didn’t respond, but Jillian was used to that.
Jillian could feel that her mouth was still open. The T3s were getting less and less effective, not that they were so super effective in the first place. She still felt a lot of pain, you know. But now there was a weird grating feeling inside. Not the inside of her body, because she couldn’t locate the grating feeling in any one of her organs. It was like the Tylenol or whatever was starting to grate at her soul.
When this occurred to her, her hands started darting around her desk. She picked up and set down her mouse, ran her fingers over the pens in her pen cup, and typed a few blurts of nonsense on her keyboard, which made the computer bonk-bonk with the error sound.
My soul is messed up now, she thought. She was terrified.
She reached for a Pop-Tart. It was the last Pop-Tart. Oh, that’s perfect. If that’s not perfect! It’s like I’m down to my last Pop-Tart! She tried to recall some mantras, but she felt like she always messed them up a little bit and then she became frightened that this feeling inside of her came from reciting a devotional incorrectly and now, because of that, she was in serious, terrible trouble.
She unwrapped the Pop-Tart with shaky hands and tried to let her mind wander.
There was something about the siding for the house of the soul . . . God, what was it? Something about if you smile at someone, their smile will shine back into you? God, what was it?