Things I can’t Explain (8 page)

Shoving the slouchy sleeves of my vintage St. Anne's thrift shop blue satin bathrobe up to my elbows, I shoot the cursor to the search bar and arrange my fingers on the smooth, square keys.

H-E-A-D …

 … S-P-A-C-E.

What? No!

Delete, delete, delete, delete!

I am absolutely
not
going to Google Nick's studio. That would be the cyber equivalent of riding my bike up and down his street, as if he were the cutest guy in my seventh-grade English class.

“That surly look is uncalled for,” I say to Elvis, who has invaded my workspace with a condescending glare. “Scram!” I yell, shooing him away, but he doesn't budge. How unfair is it that cats are both cute and invincible? I try to refocus. “Clarissa. It's a job you're looking for, not the deets on the CCG,” I say out loud, secretly hoping for Elvis's approval.

 … H-U-N-T-E-R.

Better. Throwing myself into the task at hand, yes, sir! Can't keep a good Darling down, just ask my mom. (My brother and father might have a slightly different perspective on that, but I am not giving up!)

I hit enter and muddle through the non-applicable sites. (Wow, look at how much porn avails itself when you type the word
head
into a search engine. Really? Who knew that Cronut was a position?) But I dismiss that line of inquiry and soon I have a list of highly rated professional headhunters who will gladly pimp me out to all of Manhattan's and some of Westchester's and Long Island's journalistic endeavors.

Something about the term
headhunter
rattles my brain. What does it remind me of?

I see the skull of a tiny head with missing teeth and straw-like blond hair that looks like me in my baby pictures. The head with its frozen smile rattles like a maraca. A guy in a loincloth with some pretty radical
Lion King
makeup shakes the rattle while stabbing a long pointy spear into the air. He vigorously shakes his head “no” and chants something that sounds like “
Curriculum Vitae”
but in Swahili. At the end of the spear there's a piece of paper—it's my résumé.

Okay, let's just postpone the headhunter idea.

I sigh and take a sip of the steaming tea, not my usual java blend, and I'm immediately punished with a mouthful of Sunflower Spit or Berry Blast or whatever tea-that's-trying-too-hard variety left behind in my canister by super-slacker Norm. I'm always worried when drinking teas with hieroglyphics on the tin that I'm about to ingest something that could double as potpourri. I flash back to yesterday, remembering that businesswoman who bought an herbal tea from Nick … I wonder what kind she ordered.…

Stop!

I take a deep breath and go back to the kitchen, where I dump the horrid tea concoction into the sink and rifle through the cabinets for a more acceptable beverage. As long as I'm here, I decide to organize the contents of the cupboard, beginning with the cereal boxes. My job search awaits, but a quick alphabetical reordering should take no time and I'll feel so much more accomplished afterward: Granola … Kashi … Post … Quaker …

Lucky Charms? Must be a rogue box left over from the weekend Piper spent at my place while her apartment was bombed for roaches. Ordinarily, I wouldn't even consider introducing a single spoonful of such overprocessed garbage into my digestive system (I am Janet Darling's daughter, after all). But it occurs to me that if I don't get a paying job soon, those marshmallow clovers might turn out to be the only thing standing between me and certain starvation.

I shove Lucky, the smiling leprechaun, to the back of the cupboard and move on to alphabetizing the spices. This is sure to be less problematic. Cayenne, Celtic sea salt, chaat masala …

It makes me wonder if I could land a job at one of Martha Stewart's magazines. She has, like, twelve or thirteen of them, right? I wonder if Martha Living Omnimedia would go for an article like “How to Cook with Leftovers in Jail.” I've heard that M. Diddy (that was her nickname in prison) made crab apple jelly and no-bake cheesecake with crumbled graham crackers, lemon juice, vanilla pudding mix, pats of margarine, and coffee creamer while spending time in the slammer. I congratulate myself on the brilliant idea, but then somewhere between the grains of paradise and the amchur powder, it dawns on my foggy brain what I'm doing.

Avoidance. Classic technique—ask any job hunter. As you wait for the phone to ring or the e-mail that will change your life, you will do
anything
to keep from facing reality. If you can't find work, busy work will do. Distraction is key! Any random act of accomplishment with a beginning, middle, and end feels better than endlessly waiting and hoping for something out of your control. Want to hear just a few things I've done while trying to forget I'm looking for a job?

1.
Painted the bathroom—twice. First Ikea yellow and then robin's-egg blue.

2.
Written a novel—okay, only the first two chapters, until I found myself desperately avoiding my chosen form of avoidance.

3.
Researched new cellular service providers—because clearly, the service I have is not working. If it were, the phone would be ringing nonstop, right?

4.
Read every published report about millennials making up 41 percent of the unemployed, having reduced lifetime earning potential, growing up believing we're special because of Barney the Purple Dinosaur, and suffering through the dial-up age with every bad photo taken of ourselves forever on the Internet. But at least we'll never have to live without Wi-Fi short of the apocalypse, right?

Google that for a little while and see if it doesn't make you physically sick.

So enough with the spices and the cabinets already! A job! My well-ordered Kingdom of Spice for a job!

“What did I come in here for, anyway?” Elvis glances around the minuscule kitchen and I follow his gaze. Right. Coffee. Must brew coffee. I fumble through a drawer filled with tiny takeout packets of soy sauce, sweet-and-sour, ketchup, and granola bars until I find the last remaining single-serving coffee pod, and make a mental note to order more now that I'm making my coffee en casa. I take the brightly colored pod and approach the machine on the counter. It's depressing to say the least—a coffee maker that brews one cup at a time is about as lonely as it gets.

In an hour or so, Nick will be firing up Frankensteam for the morning onslaught. Those New Yorkers fortunate enough to still be working in that building will be tipping the half-and-half carafe, sharing smiles and making small talk, continuing their micro-relationship in the aura of that cool CCG now known as Nick, aka “the one who got away.”

As the morning foot traffic picks up, I arrive and ask for tea. He's shocked that I haven't asked for coffee; Nick's face contorts into a mask of horror. He turns and runs. Was it something I said? Had I violated the terms of our faux relationship and very genuine breakup? Was it because I asked for tea?

“Stop!” I yell as I chase after him, but he keeps running and when we turn the corner we're in Williamsburg somehow, darting through the gentrified streets. It looks like I'm in one of those first-person-shooter games as everything fish-eyes around me. Why am I chasing him? Why can't I just leave the poor guy alone? How many life points do I get if I catch him?

Hot on his heels, I hurdle hipsters, shove geriatric men and their walkers aside. At the edges of my vision, I see graphics that digitally ring up an ongoing tally of effective life points every time I shove someone out of my way. I dive through sidewalk racks of secondhand clothes marked
EVERYTHING TEN BUCKS
. I can't help pausing to examine a pair of vintage suede Fiorucci gauchos. They're a killer deal, but Nick is getting away and now I'm losing health points fast, so I leap over the fallen sale items in hot pursuit, calling out his name (now that I know it, I might as well use it).

If I don't catch Nick, how will I carry out my secret plan to make him drink the special cup of Lapsang souchong tea I've brought, which I may or may not have doctored with knockout drops? And how many points will that be worth?

We turn down an alley and he's cornered. I force the special cup to his face. Drink up, Nicky boy! That's what you get for being so damn cute and shy. I hold his mouth open, making him swallow it all, massaging his Adam's apple to make sure he drinks it. He awakens to find himself chained to my bed wearing his motocross jacket and nothing else. How convenient.

Hmmm
 … I pull back my chair,
let's work that fantasy for a bit
 …

“What am I doing!?” I say, and slam my forehead on the kitchen cabinet to wake myself up. Elvis looks at me like … well, like I'm nuts … because I am. Tortured daydreams at a single-cup coffee machine.

“See what happens when I deprive myself of java?” I try to explain to Elvis, who could care less. “Just brew a cup, Clarissa, and get back to finding a job,” I say, snapping the little plastic pod into the pump and clamping its jaw shut. Seconds later, the coffee beast is drooling java into my cup.

“He's gone. Opportunity missed. I just have to deal with it. Right, Elvis?”

Elvis is so fed up, he acts as if I've offended him and heads toward the window—his magic portal.

“Everyone, Elvis has left the building!” I shout, thinking I'm clever, then plop myself into the desk chair and, looking at my computer screen, I blink. How had I missed them? I blink again. There are five e-mails!

I look at the time stamps. They must have popped into my mailbox sometime last night after the heart-wrenching demise of my whirlwind sham romance.

As I click to read I can't stop thinking about my back rent, knowing I'll soon cross that shuddersome three-month limit that stands between my life as an adult and having to move back home with my parents, who aren't even together.