The Drifter(54)

“Well, we—my boyfriend and I—drove here, actually? In a Honda Accord, if you’re into details,” Betsy said, suddenly thinking the navy “interview suit” she’d received from her mother, the one that crushed her with disappointment as she removed it from its box under their miniature Christmas tree and then hemmed in an effort to seem more fashion forward, might be, in fact, tragically short. She shifted her knees far to the left. “Oh, and I’m sure they’re managing without me.” Debra must be a Pi Phi, she thought.

“We drove here, did we, Betsy? Or is there another name you prefer?” asked Debra, who was practically smirking.

“Betsy’s fine. That’s my name,” she said, punctuating her sentence with a nervous, machine-gun fire giggle.

“I’m guessing this is your college boyfriend, right? Let me guess. He was a Sigma Chi!” She laughed. “That’s going to last. For, like, ever.”

“I’m sorry?” Could this really be happening? “Maybe we could just talk a little more about the assistant to the editor position? I’m eager to work. I’ll do anything, really.”

“It pays eighteen-five a year,” she said. “But I’m just going to be honest with you, Betsy, you’re not going to get it. I’ve seen five candidates for this position already this morning, and they’re all experienced writers, or campus newspaper editors. They’ve had multiple internships in publishing. They know what editing is. You need clips, and not from the sorority newsletter.”

That didn’t seem like the right time to mention the sorority didn’t publish a newsletter. Betsy must have looked stricken, because Debra’s expression changed ever so slightly and she tilted her head with feigned concern.

“Look, Betsy, I’m just being honest with you. Somebody should tell you this now before you get too settled. It’s not too late to go back to Florida.”

Betsy focused her gaze on the false grain of the mahogany laminate on the desk between them to steady herself. She could feel her pulse in her ears. Did Debra agree to see her just for sport, or to prove some kind of point? She must have excused herself from the room, maybe even thanked Debra for her time, but she had no memory of how she made it from the office to the elevator, and later onto the sidewalk, where she thought of about a dozen choice comebacks about ten minutes too late. From the pay phone in the ladies’ lounge at Saks Fifth Avenue, she called Gavin in tears.

“I’m an idiot.” She sighed into the receiver, tears of frustration streaming down. “I’m just not ready for this.” No one in the enormous, sixteen-stall bathroom even glanced in her direction. An elderly woman with a tight wash-and-set hairdo sat on the long, mauve pleather bench that stretched across the length of the room under a row of frosted windows, silently reapplying her coral lipstick in the mirror of a case lined with red Chinese silk. Anonymous, Betsy thought, feeling the pang of hope that she would one day feel completely at home in this weird city. The woman caught Betsy staring at her, and when she got up to leave, she patted Betsy gently on the arm on her way out, without saying a word.

“She’s a bitch,” he said. “That wasn’t about you. She’s stuck in HR interviewing people for the jobs she wants. There isn’t a kid in the world who dreams about being a human resources assistant when he grows up.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Betsy, still unconvinced.

“Or she’s a Pi Phi,” he said.

Betsy laughed a short, hard laugh and a stream of snot landed on her jacket. She caught sight of the shiny buttons. Why am I wearing something with shiny buttons? She wiped her nose with a tissue and sniffed the receiver. It reeked of Kool menthol cigarettes.

“Just forget about it,” he said. “You’ll get a job. You’re great at folding. Check to see if the Gap’s hiring. Employee discount?”

“Ha. Ha. You’re such an original,” Betsy deadpanned.

“Come on. We’ll go to SoHo tonight for pizza, have a shitty interview party. It’s only your first one. We should start a tradition. I suspect we’ll be eating plenty of pizza.”

“Again, hilarious.”

“I know. But we’re gonna be alright, B.”

Betsy suddenly recognized a perfect opportunity for total reinvention. After walking fifteen blocks in the wrong direction, she spotted a Kinko’s, slid her floppy disk into the hard drive of a ten-dollar-an-hour PC, and edited her résumé. With a few clicks of the keys, she metamorphosed into Elizabeth Hammond Young, a self-possessed woman who’d never once drank a pinkish Everclear-infused beverage from a trashcan. Debra wasn’t going to tell her what she could and couldn’t have, what she did and didn’t deserve. She moved the cursor over to the line about the sorority and pressed the delete button repeatedly until the evidence was destroyed. She printed out twenty copies and vowed to get a job before she had to make more.

After a drug test scare and a bottle and a half of Goldenseal, Gavin got a job as a camera assistant on a new cable news show. Betsy, on her way toward becoming Elizabeth, was down to her last three résumés. She spent all of her free time uptown, wandering through museums, starting at the top of the Guggenheim and winding her way down, then moving onto the Met or the Whitney. On an unusually warm and breezy March afternoon, she decided to skip the subway and head down Madison Avenue, peeking in the windows as she went. Near 71st Street, in the window of a shop filled with three-foot stacks of hand-knotted Persian carpets in every size, she noticed a small sign that read Sales Assistant Position Available. Inquire Within. She slid a résumé out of a folder in her backpack and walked inside.