Lori worked at a temp agency and seemed almost like an actual adult as she moved between admin jobs. “You could try it too, she said. “I could get you in at my agency.” She encouraged Jess to enliven her resumé by translating her library duties into office skills, put down her own name as a reference, and promised to pass along Jess’s application when she dropped off her timesheet that week.
Within days Jess was a temp as well, acing the typing test because she’d spent the last four years writing essays; it turned out her education had been good for something. Lori took her shopping for skirts and blouses, which they charged to Jess’s mother’s credit card, and Jess promised to pay her back once her first paycheque came through.
She was overdressed for her first assignment: stuffing 2500 envelopes in the storeroom at a driving school.
“No typing?” she asked, confused. She’d been prepared to wow them with her prowess and be offered a permanent job by lunchtime. Stuffing envelopes was far too rudimentary to lead to such results.
When she returned the following morning—hands adorned in Band-Aids from papercuts—nobody could believe it. “How could you stand two days of this?” asked thereceptionist. It hadn’t occurred to Jess that she had a choice—but of course she didn’t, with only sixty-seven dollars in the bank.
When she came out of the storeroom on the third day, all the envelopes stuffed, her fingers were shredded and the office was empty. Everyone had gone out for drinks, but no one had thought to invite the temp. There was a hierarchy at play, she was starting to understand.
She would have liked to make sense of it all by talking to Clara at night, sitting at the kitchen table with lighted candles, something delicious cooking in the oven. But she didn’t share a kitchen with Clara anymore, and the kitchen in her new house didn’t have a table, because the table had belonged to a girl who moved out in May, and nobody else had one. After her third day of work when Jess arrived home, the kitchen was crowded with hippies in a drum circle.
So she went down to her room, closing the door to shut out the tribal beats, and dialled Clara’s number. She was prepared to relay the whole sorry story, but when she heard Clara’s voice, she couldn’t do it.
Instead, she adopted a different tone, blasé and tired. She had no idea where it came from. “The commute is long,” she was willing to admit, the subway and then a bus out to the suburbs where nothing was more than two stories high. “But I can read on the bus. And the people are nice—they’ll be talking to the agency about getting me back for another contract.” The supply closet was crowded with boxes containing a four-year backlog of instructor timesheets that needed to be entered into the computer, but the work had always been considered too tedious for anyone to manage. “You, though,” said the receptionist, “You just might have the capacity.”
“Well, I’m glad,” said Clara, sounding buoyant. Jess could picture her sprawled on her parents’ bed (now just her mother’s) because Clara didn’t have a telephone extension in her own room. “I knew you’d be okay,” she said.
“For sure,” said Jess, perpetuating this fantasy. “And me and Lori are going out on Saturday. Some club on King Street. With people she knows from work, and some others.”
“You and Lori, huh?” said Clara. “You guys sound pretty tight.”
“I guess,” said Jess. She knew she was laying it on thick. “How’s your mom doing?” And then someone in the house picked up the phone on another extension and set it back down with a crash, and she missed most of what Clara said.
“—and the doctor’s hoping the new meds will help. Alleviate some symptoms, at least. I mean, they’re not going to take care of everything. My dad’s still going to be dead. There’s no medicine for that.”
Jess said, “I’m sorry.”
Clara said, “It’s all right. I’m just glad that I’m here.”
“Me too,” said Jess. A lie. “I just miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
—
Jess got the contract for the timesheets, but after four weeks she felt she’d made little progress, carbon paper being so fine. The weather was beautiful that summer, but she was spending most of her time in a closet or a basement, so she didn’t appreciate it much. She stayed up too late at night, either just not sleeping or sitting on the porch listening to one guy or another playing “Wonderwall” on his acoustic guitar, and the next day, in the dim light of the supply closet, she’d be exhausted.
“So you like the work?” Clara asked during another call. “It’s engaging?” She’d been talking about her own job,fascinated by so much botanical knowledge. “Did you know,” she said, “that tulip bulbs are totally edible and can even be substituted for onions in a recipe?” Clara was excited about the art and science of flower arrangement, the ways in which the craft was an inversion of archeology, which had been all about death and digging. She said, “I’m learning I have an affinity for living things.”
And Jess let Clara have that, an affinity for living things. Never mind that cut flowers were dead, or on their way to being dead, surely Clara knew that. But as long as Clara was rhapsodizing about her job, she wasn’t asking about Jess’s. She wasn’t asking probing questions aboutengagement, even though engagement was a lot to ask of temp work. Mould was growing on the walls of the supply closet, black spores that Jess imagined leaching into her lungs, shortening her life with every breath. Plus, the mountain of boxes full of timesheets never seemed to get any smaller, and she suspected someone on staff was adding to the pile—probably the smug receptionist. She’d been a temp once too, before they’d made her permanent.
“Sometimes it happens,” Lori told her. They were sitting on the porch, where, mercifully for once, they were alone. It was strange being with Lori without any of the intermediaries who’d connected them before. Clara had never liked Lori much—she thought she was two-faced and shallow—but Clara was hard on people, and if it weren’t for Lori, Jess would be homeless and unemployed.
“Going permanent isn’t always the best choice,” Lori said. “Sometimes temping is better. Do you really want to be locked in?”
A bit of permanence might be welcome, though. The last six months had been a lesson in upheaval, a necessaryeducation, Jess kept telling herself. Permanence was illusory anyway. She hoped she would turn out to be stronger than she imagined.
But eventually the timesheets proved to be too much. The texture of the carbon paper made her feel like throwing up, and when she looked at the grids of days and numbers they refused to make any sense. Finally, one day she called in sick and went downtown to her agency to ask for another position.
“But you already have a contract,” said Graham, so self-satisfied in his shirt and tie and stylish glasses, with his human resources diploma. Graham’s entire identity was a façade of professionalism, and Jess envied the power he got to wield. “Plus, it wouldn’t be fair to Gary”—Gary, the owner of the driving school. Jess had never met Gary, and possibly Graham hadn’t either, but this was part of his HR schtick, pretending these transactions were genuine human relationships. As though Gary weren’t the type of person who’d send you to work in a closet with spores.
Jess phoned Clara and said, “I have some time off next week. It would do me good to come and see you.” She was tired of pretending that everything was fine, and she’d managed to save enough money for bus fare and to tide her over until she found another position. She had admin experience now—“filing” was just a fancy word for envelope stuffing, anyway—which would make it easier to get her next job.
But Clara wasn’t sure if her mom would be up for it. Then she told Jess about a date she’d gone on the week before, with her boss’s nephew, a guy called Jake. After hearing Clara’s story—a movie, then a drink, and a kiss on her mother’s doorstep—Jess hung up the phone and lay on her bed, crying, staring at the wall, at the map without Claraon it, at its sad and shabby taped-up edges. Clara was gone and Clara didn’t even seem sorry.
But she must have been a little sorry, because she called back and determined that a visit would be feasible after all. And the following Monday at the bus depot, after a long and winding journey, Jess watched Clara climbing out of a dirty white pick-up truck, so much thinner than in the spring, thinner than Jess had ever seen her. But everything else was the same, and the moment she wrapped her arms around Jess, Jess was home again, Clara’s hold so strong and fast that all her doubts about their friendship disappeared.
