The Ignored (6 page)

“Besides,” she said, “what if you get laid off or something? We could
still survive here. I could afford to pay the rent until you found another job.”

That was my opening. That was my chance. I should’ve told her then and
there, I should’ve told her that I hated my job, that I’d made a mistake by
taking it and wanted to quit and look for another position.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t say anything.

I don’t know why. It wasn’t like she would’ve jumped down my throat. She
might have tried to argue me out of it, but ultimately she would’ve understood.
I could have walked away clean, no harm, no foul, and everything would have been
over and done with.

I couldn’t do it, though. I didn’t have any work-ethic phobia about
quitting, I had no loyalty to some abstract ideal, but as much as I despised my
job, as unqualified as I seemed to be for my position, as out of place as I felt
among my coworkers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was
supposed
to
do this, that somehow, for some reason, I
should
be working at Automated
Interface.

And I said nothing.

Jane’s mom dropped by to see us on Saturday morning, and I tried to
pretend that I was busy when she came over, hiding in the bedroom and tinkering
with a broken sewing machine that had been given to Jane by one of her friends.
I had never much liked Jane’s mom, and she had never liked me. We hadn’t seen
her since I’d gotten my job, although Jane had told her about it, and while she
pretended to be happy that I had finally found full-time work, I could tell she
was secretly annoyed that there would be one less thing she could criticize me
for and harp on Jane about.

Georgia—or George as she liked to be called—was part of a dying
breed, one of the last of the martini moms, those hard and hard-drinking women
who had been so prevalent in the suburbia of my childhood, those gravel-voiced,
raucous women who always seemed to adopt the nicknames of men: Jimmy, Gerry,
Willie, Phil. It frightened me a little to know that this was Jane’s mother,
because I always thought that, in regard to women, you could tell how a daughter
was going to turn out by looking at the mother. And I had to admit that I did
see some of George in Jane. But there was no hardness in Jane. She was softer,
kinder, prettier than her mother, and the differences between the two were
pronounced enough that I knew history would not repeat itself.

I made a lot of noise, working on the sewing machine, purposely trying
to drown out words that I knew I would not want to hear, but in between the
pounding and scraping, I could still hear George’s alcohol-ravaged voice from
the kitchen: “…he’s still a nobody…” and
“…gutless nothing…” and “…loser…”

I did not come out of the bedroom until she was gone.

“Mom’s real excited about your job,” Jane said, taking my hand.

I nodded. “Yeah. I heard.”

She looked into my eyes, smiled. “Well, I am.”

I kissed her. “That’s good enough for me.”

At work, Stewart’s smug condescension gave way to a more direct disdain.
Something had changed. I didn’t know what it was, whether I’d done something to
piss him off or whether it was something that had happened in his personal life,
but his attitude toward me became markedly different. The surface politeness was
gone, and now there was only undisguised hostility.

Instead of calling me into his office each Monday to give me the week’s
assignments, Stewart began leaving work on my desk, attaching notes that
explained what I was supposed to do. Often, the notes were incomplete or
cryptically vague, and though I could usually figure out the gist of the
assignment, sometimes I had no idea what he wanted at all.

One morning, I found a batch of ancient computer manuals piled on my
desk. As far as I could tell, the manuals explained how to utilize a type of
keyboard and terminal that Automated Interface did not possess. Stewart’s
Post-It note said only: “Revise.”

I had no idea what I was supposed to revise, so I picked up the top
manual and the note and carried them over to Stewart’s office. He was not there,
but I could hear his voice and I found him talking with Albert Connor, one of
the programmers, about an action movie he’d seen over the weekend. I stood,
waiting. Connor kept looking at me, obviously trying to hint to Stewart that I
wanted to see him, but Stewart continued to describe the movie, slowly and in
detail, purposely ignoring my presence.

Finally, I cleared my throat. It was a soft sound, polite, tentative,
quiet, but the supervisor whirled on me as if I had just yelled an obscenity.
“Will you stop interrupting me when I’m talking? For Christ’s sake, can’t you
see I’m busy?”

I took a step backward. “I just needed—”

“You just need to shut up. I’m tired of you, Jones. I’m tired of your
shit. Your probation period’s not over yet, you know. You can be let go without
cause.” He glared at me. “Do you understand?”

I understood what he was saying. But I also understood that he was
bluffing. Neither he nor Banks had as much control over me as they wanted me to
believe. If what they tried to make me believe was true, I would’ve been fired
weeks ago. Or, more likely, I never would’ve been hired at all. Someone above
them was calling the shots, and they were hamstrung. They could rant and rave
and piss and moan, but when push came to shove, they couldn’t do diddly.

Maybe that was why Stewart had been riding me so hard lately.

I stood my ground. “I just wanted to know what I was supposed to revise.
I couldn’t tell from the note.”

Connor was staring at us. Even he seemed taken aback by the force of
Stewart’s outburst.

“You are supposed to revise the manuals,” Stewart said. He spoke slowly
and deliberately, angrily.

“Which part of the manuals?” I asked.

“Everything. If you had bothered to look through the books I left on
your desk, you would have noticed that we no longer use that hardware system. I
want you to revise those operator manuals so that they reflect our current
system.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

He stared at me. “You’re asking me how to do your job?”

Connor had grown increasingly uncomfortable, and he nodded toward me.
“I’ll show you,” he offered.

I looked at him gratefully, smiling my thanks.

Stewart fixed the programmer with a disapproving glare but said nothing.

I followed Connor back to his cubicle.

It was easier than I’d thought it would be. Connor simply gave me a
stack of manuals that had come with the computers Automated Interface had
recently purchased. He told me to xerox them, put them in binders, then deliver
them to the different departments within the company.

“You mean I’m just supposed to replace the old books with new ones?” I
asked.

“Right.”

“How come Mr. Stewart told me to
revise
the manuals?”

“That’s just the way he talks.” The programmer tapped the cover of the
top manual he’d given me. “Just make sure you return those to me when you’re
through. I need them. You should find a distribution list somewhere in your desk
that will tell you how many copies each department gets. Gabe always kept an
up-to-date distribution list.”

Gabe. My predecessor. In addition to being friendly and outgoing, he’d
apparently been well-organized and efficient as well.

“Thanks,” I told Connor.

“You’re welcome.”

I licked my lips. This was the first positive contact I’d actually had
with one of my coworkers, and more than anything else I wanted to follow up on
it. I wanted to build on this tentative base, to try and establish some sort of
relationship with Connor. But I did not know how. I could have attempted to
continue the conversation, I suppose. I could have asked him what he was working
on. I could have tried to talk about something non-work related.

But I didn’t.

He turned back to his terminal, and I returned to my office.

I saw Connor later, near the Coke machine, and I smiled and waved at him
as I entered the break room, but he ignored me, turned away, and, embarrassed, I
quickly got my drink and left.

At lunch, I saw Connor leaving with Pam Greene. They didn’t see me, and
I stood on the sidelines, watching them take the elevator down. I’d begun
dreading lunch, feeling self-conscious about the fact that I always ate by
myself. I would have much preferred working eight hours straight and getting off
an hour earlier at the end of the day, not taking a lunch at all. I did not need
sixty minutes each day to prove to me how I was regarded by my coworkers. I was
depressed enough by the job as it was.

What depressed me further was the fact that everyone—
everyone
—seemed to have someone to eat with. Even someone like Derek, who as far as I
could tell was almost universally reviled, had someone with whom he spent his
lunch: a squat, toadlike man who worked someplace upstairs. I alone was alone.
The secretaries who were nice to me during working hours all said good-bye and
waved politely before abandoning me at lunchtime, not even bothering to ask if I
would like to accompany them, perhaps assuming that I already had something to
do with my lunch hour.

Perhaps not.

Whatever the reason, I was ignored, not invited, left to my own devices.

The secretaries, I must admit, did seem to be nicer to me than everyone
else. Hope, our department secretary, always treated me well. She had the calm,
kind, perpetually friendly air of a stereotypical grandmother, and she greeted
me each day with a cheerful smile and a heartfelt “Hello!” She asked about my
weekend plans on Friday afternoons; she asked how those plans turned out on
Monday morning. She said good-bye to me each evening before I left.

Or course, she was equally nice to everyone within the department. She
talked to everyone, seemed to like everyone, but that didn’t make her interest
in me any less genuine or any less appreciated.

Likewise, Virginia and Lois, the women from the steno pool, were decent
to me, friendly in a way that separated them from everyone else within our
department.

Or within the building.

The guard in the lobby still paid no attention to me, although he seemed
to be jovially familiar with everyone else who passed through the doors of
Automated Interface.

To Jane, I continued to give a fairly neutral account of my days at
work. I told her of my frustration with Stewart, complained about some of my
bigger problems, but the day-to-day difficulties, my seeming inability to fit in
with my fellow workers, the sense of social ostracism I felt, these things I
kept to myself.

It was my cross to bear.

A week after I’d distributed the computer manuals, Stewart walked into
my office, waving a sheet of blue interoffice memo paper. I was on break and
reading the
Times
, but Stewart slammed down the memo on top of my
newspaper. “Read that,” he demanded.

I read the memo. It was from the head of the accounting department and
simply asked if we could send an extra copy of the computer manual since
Accounting had recently received a new terminal. I looked up at Stewart. “Okay,”
I said. “I’ll make another copy and send them a manual.”

“Not good enough,” Stewart said. “You should’ve sent them the correct
number to begin with.”

“All I had to go on was Gabe’s distribution list,” I told him. “I didn’t
know they’d gotten another computer.”

“It’s your job to know. You should have asked each department head how
many copies he or she needed instead of relying on that outdated list. You
screwed up, Jones.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re sorry? This reflects on the whole department.” He picked up the
memo. “I’m going to have to show this to Mr. Banks. I’ll let him decide on the
proper course of action to take with you. In the meantime, get that manual to
Accounting ASAP.”

“I will,” I said.

“You’d better.”

My workday went downhill from there.

Things did not improve when I got home. Jane was cooking hamburger
casserole and watching an old rerun of
M*A*S*H
when I arrived. I’d always
hated hamburger casserole, but I’d never told her so and it was not something
she’d ever been able to figure out for herself.

I walked over to the TV and switched the channel. I liked
M*A*S*H
but I was a news junkie, and from the moment I got home until the start of prime
time, I liked to watch the news. It made me nervous not to know what was going
on in the world, to be oblivious to brewing disasters, but it didn’t seem to
bother Jane at all. Even when the news was on, she paid attention only to movie
reviews, and she preferred to watch reruns or films on cable.

It had been the source of many fights.

She knew my position, she knew how I felt, and I couldn’t help thinking
that her choice of TV fare tonight was a direct provocation, an attempt to goad
me. Usually, she had the news on when I came home. The fact that she didn’t this
evening seemed to me to be a direct slap in the face.

I confronted her. “Why isn’t the news on?”

“I had a test today. I was tired. I wanted some light entertainment. I
didn’t want to have to think.”

I understood how she felt, and I should have let it go, but I was still
pissed off at Stewart, and I guess I had to take it out on somebody.

We got into it.

It was a big fight, almost a physical fight. Afterward, we both said we
were sorry, and we kissed and hugged and made up. She went into the kitchen to
finish making dinner, and I stayed in the living room and watched the news. I
kicked off my shoes and lay down on the couch. I hadn’t told her I loved her, I
realized. We’d made up, but I hadn’t told her I loved her.

She hadn’t told me she loved me, either.

I thought about that. I did love her and I knew she loved me, but we
never used those words. Or at least we hadn’t for quite some time. We’d said
them at first, but strangely enough, though I’d told her that I loved her, I
wasn’t sure at the time if I meant it. I’d said it, but the words had seemed
hollow and clich�d, almost false. The first time, it had been more of a hope
than an admission, and I felt no different after than before. There’d been no
surge of joy or relief, only a vague sense of unease, as though I had lied to
her and was afraid I’d be found out. I’m not sure how she felt, but for me
“love” was a transitional word, an acceptable way to escalate the relationship
from boyfriend/girlfriend to live-in lovers. It had been necessary, and not
necessarily true.