Pink Slip Party (27 page)

“Enough parent-talk, Todd. Can you get me out of jail?”

“Everything is
always
about you, isn’t it?” Todd sighs.

“I’m in jail. Forgive me if I can’t afford to be sensitive at the moment,” I say.

“What have you done this time?” Todd asks me, as if I am a repeat felon.

“It’s a long story,” I say. “It’s not my fault.”

“It never is,” Todd says.

I give the short version of events. Todd is laughing so hard on the other end of the phone he can barely talk.

“That’s not helping me,” I say.

“Only you, Jane,” he manages after taking a few deep breaths. “Only you would end up in jail because of an ex-boyfriend drug-dealer. Wait until Kyle hears about this.”

I panic. “You CAN’T tell him,” I shout.

I can’t imagine anything worse than Kyle knowing.

“I am so going to tell him,” Todd says, reverting to a kind of Valley girl lisp.

“You can’t. I’ll kill you. I swear.”

“I am going to call him right now.”

“TODD,” I scream, desperate. “Please don’t. PLEASE. He’ll never let me hear the end of it. Todd, I’m begging you. Don’t.”

“Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.”

“TODD! If you tell him, I’ll tell Mom and Dad who REALLY broke grandmother’s antique vase.”

“I doubt they’ll care about that now,” Todd says, but he sounds uncertain.

“Mom cried about that for a week,” I say.

“Well,” Todd hesitates. “Breaking a vase doesn’t compare to jail.”

Everything is always a contest to Todd.

“Just don’t tell Kyle. I will KILL you.”

“Maybe,” he says.

“Now, will you get me out of here?”

“OK, I’ll make some calls,” Todd says, switching into problem-solver mode. “Oh, and Jane. Don’t drop the soap.”

“That’s only in men’s prison,” I snap.

I suppose it is official. I am now not only an unemployed degenerate, but also a jailbird. I think this is about as far as I can fall.

I’ve never wished so hard to be back at my parents’ house, even if it may be a broken home. There are many worse things, I decide, than having to go live at home again. Jail is definitely worse.

I spend the night awake, fearing that one of the pregnant women might stab me with a shiv while I sleep (I’ve seen
Oz,
I know how it is), and blinking back the garish fluorescent lights overhead that never go off. It’s almost like being trapped in a cubicle, except for the gray metal bars and the fact that instead of plastic potted plants as decoration, there’s a small pool of vomit in the corner, next to the seatless aluminum toilet.

The next morning, as most of the other women get out, I sit and wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

My clothes are beginning to smell. I wish that during my layoff period I’d taken some Zen meditation classes. They would have come in handy now.

I decide that perhaps I let things go too far. That perhaps my whole problem is that I don’t set up boundaries with people. That despite the fact that I can be hostile and generally unfriendly, no one seems to take me seriously. I must look like the sort of person people can walk all over. I must look like a wimp.

How else to explain the fact that my apartment is now a halfway house for the city’s worst degenerates? Or that I’m in jail because I’m friends with the city’s worst degenerates? When I get out of jail, I decide, I am going to work on setting up boundaries. I’m going to work on telling people “no.” Maybe that’s my whole problem. Maybe it’s not that men like Mike take advantage of me, but that I let them do it.

The guard calls my name around ten, when I’m starved, and I think I might eat my own shirt. Todd is waiting for me in the adjoining room. The minute I walk through, he snaps my picture with the digital camera.

“Blackmail material,” he says.

“Great,” I say.

“You smell,” he tells me when I get close enough to punch him in the arm.

“Thanks,” I say.

“You know I had to take a sick day for this,” he says. Todd never calls into work sick, and he hardly ever takes his vacation time. He hoards it as if, like precious metals, it will gain value over time.

“I appreciate it,” I say.

“Do you have any idea how much it cost to bail you out?” he asks me. He doesn’t wait for me to finish. “Let’s just say you really owe me.”

“OK, I get it,” I say.

“I’m thinking indentured servitude,” he says.

“Fine,” I say.

“You’re lucky Mom isn’t around at the moment to see you like this,” he says.

“Great,” I say.

“Between jail and losing your jobs, you sure make it easy to be the good kid in the family,” Todd says.

Todd drives me home in relative silence. He asks only what jail was like, taking an unusual interest in small details like the group toilet.

“Todd, are you gloating?” I ask him.

“Maybe,” he says.

At my apartment, I discover that Landlord Bob has made good on his promise to change my locks. My key no longer works. I ask Todd to wait for me.

“What’s wrong
now?”
Todd whines.

*   *   *

I am buzzing Landlord Bob’s apartment, but he refuses to answer. I know he is in there, I can hear his raspy breathing, but he refuses to open the door.

Finally, after ten minutes of pounding and tapping out messages in Morse code, he shouts, “GOEZ AWAYZ. NO TALK.”

“Bob — open up and come talk to me like a man!”

I don’t know why I felt the need to add “like a man” because Bob in his pink fuzzy robe is not much of a man to begin with. Still, I have the court notice in my hand and it says I have a place to sleep for another twenty-four hours.

“At least unlock it for me and let me get my clothes,” I say.

Bob considers this a moment. “NO!” he shouts.

I kick his door hard in frustration, then I remember my bedroom window, and in a few minutes I am snaking up my fire escape like Ron and attempting to sneak into my own apartment. The window slides open, and I sneak inside. There’s no sign of the muses or any party-goers. I try not to assess the damage to my apartment, although I can see plenty of empty beer cans and there’s the distinct smell of a fraternity house. Instead, I run to my bedroom and throw clothes in a bag, along with Mike’s folder from under my mattress.

“You’ve been evicted?” Todd cries, when I come down carrying my duffel bag. “Unbelievable.”

“Can I stay with you?” I ask, hopeful.

Todd scoffs. “Well, you can if you’d like, but my girlfriend’s moved in.”

“Deena? You let Deena move in with you?”

“We’ve gotten to
that
stage,” he says.

“Todd,” I say, flabbergasted. “You
never
get to that stage.”

“Well, what can I say? Even I’m not immune to love.”

“Now that’s a serious personal milestone for you, Todd. I’m really proud.”

“Oh, stop it,” Todd sighs, but he’s smiling. “At any rate, it’s probably better if you go back and stay with Dad.”

“Great. But I need you to take me someplace first,” I say.

Todd pulls up in front of the Kinko’s near Dad’s house and puts the car in park. Todd has assumed I am making photocopies of my resume.

“I’m surprised you want to do this now,” he says. “Surprised but impressed.”

“I’ll be fifteen minutes,” I say.

Dusk falls and the wind picks up as I duck into Kinko’s. Instantly, I smell Wite Out and photocopier toner. There are college kids on the computers in the corner, dark circles under their eyes, hunched over their grande lattes. I’m going to finally make Mike pay, I think. I’m going to make two copies of his personnel file and send one to his fiancée and one to CNBC.

I pick a machine, put the card in, and start making copies. One piece of paper comes out before the machine jams.

I glance over my shoulder at the Kinko’s worker behind the counter who is trying to pick up a stick of a woman wearing red-striped jogging pants. She’s trying to get pricing on spiral-bound notebooks, and he’s trying to look down her shirt.

I move over to the next empty copier, and start copying.

The second machine spits out a piece of paper that’s black. Entirely black. I touch it and my hands come back covered in toner — the powdery substance flaking off my fingers and spilling onto the toe of one of my shoes.

I look up, but the Kinko’s guy is still occupied. There are no other empty machines.

I wonder if this is a sign.

At the front service counter, I wait in line behind the woman in the red-striped jogging pants. She can’t seem to decide whether she wants a blue binding or a red binding for her term paper. The Kinko’s employee can’t seem to decide whether he wants to concentrate on her left or right boob.

I look at the folder in my hands. Mike deserves it and much more. He deserves to lose his job, and his fiancée, and his new shiny silver Porsche. If there were justice in the world, these files would be printed on a double-spread in the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Chicago Sun Times,
and there’d be a billboard on Waveland, outside Wrigley Field, detailing his many misdeeds.

He deserves this and more. He deserves to suffer.

But this won’t get me my job back. It won’t erase the outstanding debt on my credit cards, or get me my back rent to save my apartment, which at this point, is probably a lost cause. It won’t undo the gap on my resume, or the fact that I spent the night in jail.

Nope. It won’t do any of those things.

I get out of line and head toward the door. On my way out, I drop Mike’s folder into the trash and turn my back on it. I don’t know if that makes me feel better or not, but I’m pretty sure it’s the right thing to do.

“That was quick,” Todd says when I get back in the car.

“Line was too long,” I say. “I’ll do it later.”

My parents’ house — my mother’s pristine house — looks like I do the morning after a drinking binge. Disheveled and unkempt. Old newspapers are tossed everywhere. Trash cans are overflowing. There are two empty cardboard pizza boxes lying facedown on the kitchen floor. Dishes are piled in the sink; magazines are tossed haphazardly throughout the living room. I have not seen the house looking so out of sorts since I lived here my senior year of high school.

Three days without Mom and Dad has let everything go.

When I walk into the house, I expect Dad to start yelling, but instead, he sits up from his recliner and rubs his eyes. He’s un-shaven, and his hair is sticking straight up. He looks like he hasn’t left his chair in days.

“You OK?” he asks me. There are no accusations of drug abuse, or lectures about how I’ve disappointed the family. Dad looks tired and for once, unsure of what he should be doing.

Dad has no reaction when I tell him I’m moving home. He just nods at me and tells me to try to keep the noise down so he can hear the phone if Mom calls. I can’t believe my parents are breaking up. It feels surreal, like I’m watching an after-school special, except I know there’s not going to be a happy ending.

*   *   *

My mom has kept my room exactly how I left it at age eighteen. There are The Cure posters on the wall, along with Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sting. It is like the world froze in the year 1988. I half expect to look under my bed and see black nail polish bottles, goth lace stockings, or clunky military boots. I was a morose teenager, so it’s no wonder I grew into a morose adult. There is not a single color in my room. Even my comforter is black.

I wonder who will own this room now. Mom? Dad? Will they sell the house? I try not to think much more about it.

I crawl under my comforter and try to sleep.

But I can’t sleep.

Because my mom has gone missing on her own accord, and may or may not be back, and my parents’ thirty-five-year union is disintegrating before my very eyes. And I realize, this is probably my fault for failing so miserably at the basic responsibilities of adulthood: finding your own food and shelter and avoiding jail. I was the straw that broke the back of their marriage, and this makes me feel two inches tall.

I need advice on what to do next, on how to fix things, and I find myself wanting to talk to Kyle. But then, that’s impossible, because I’ve made a mess of that relationship, too.

I think it must be the fact that I am again in my old room, that all of the world’s greatest problems boil down to boy troubles. It must be that I am regressing to my junior high school days of torturing myself with unrequited love of boys about as sensitive as lava rocks. I’d be thinking about the universal truth of Robert Smith’s lyrics, while they would be trying to get to third base so they could tell their friends what it smelled like.

I sigh, roll over, and wonder for the first time if I might be clinically depressed. Clearly, something is wrong with me.

I call Jean Naté and discover that she’s found someone to hire permanently, who isn’t me. Apparently, even from the least appealing jobs, going to jail and missing work will get you fired.

“We just didn’t feel you had the right qualifications for the job,” she tells me.

“I understand,” I say.

“If you’d had more filing experience,” she says.

“Really, it’s no problem,” I say.

For once, I am not upset about being let go from a job.

There is no word from Mom, and Dad and I sink into our own silent, separate depressions as we sit together watching daytime television.

“Why are they bothering with those damn DNA tests?” Dad shouts.

I laugh.

“I
know,
that’s
exactly
what I said,” I say.

We look at each other and share a smile.

“I really screwed things up with your Mom, didn’t I?” he asks me.

Dad looks so shrunken, so completely defeated, I feel like crying.

“Well…” I say.

“Go ahead, tell me the truth, I can take it,” he says.

“Dad, she’s had a hard time of it. Working and all. You haven’t exactly been supportive.”

“I
thought
I was being supportive — in my own way,” Dad says.

“By supportive, I mean cooking your own meals and doing your own laundry.”