Right Livelihoods Read online

  Interestingly, there was an automotive implication in both of the offending messages. In the first, it was about traffic on the Merritt Parkway, and in the second, there was the suggestion that someone should run over the coffee machine. With a motor vehicle. Whoever was writing the messages was certainly interested in cars, or had a car, or was a regular rider in a car. Users of mass transit were out.

  Astrid Lang, for example. Astrid’s refusal to drive somehow went with her mouse brown hair, her bowed legs, and her grown son who still lived at home with her. She was sort of anxious about things, and that was maybe why Astrid worked in insurance. She hadn’t fallen into the business by chance. Astrid had strong feelings about disaster. She braced for impact. She was good at persuading people that they didn’t have enough insurance. Who knew what was going to happen in this era of climatic change and earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes? Astrid was convincing about these things because she was worried about asbestos in her house, or else her boiler was making that awful noise, or one of the tree limbs was going to come down, and global warming was going to bring about a precipitous ice age and a forty-foot storm surge.

  Ellie stood sentinel-like by the suggestion box. She was still holding the piece of paper in her hand, a piece of unlined scrap paper, when Astrid Lang happened by. It occurred to Ellie that she should hide the suggestion, and it was this impulse that reminded her: she had told no one about the first note. The suggestion about the parkway. She hadn’t told a soul about it, and why not? She tried to think back on what she had done in the weeks that had passed. She tried to retrace her steps. Was there some kind of shame associated with these notes? Because it was her suggestion box? She was the one who believed strongly in the democratic values of the suggestion box. She was the one who had wrapped it in pink wrapping paper. She was the one who emptied it. It was as if the first note was addressed to her.

  She wished Astrid good morning too loudly. She smiled brightly.

  “What do you have there?” Astrid asked. Astrid was on the alert for any event, any snippet of gossip, any off-hours visit or collective dinner that could be said to have excluded her, even though she rarely attended when invited and never offered invitations in return.

  “Look at this, Astrid,” Ellie said. She felt a bit of relief in handing it over, in making the suggestion a public problem, even if just with Astrid.

  With a brisk certainty, Astrid fetched lavender-framed reading glasses from her weather-beaten purse. She read the message over carefully, penetratingly, before handing it back. Her expression never changed.

  “That’s overreacting.”

  “I’ll say,” Ellie said.

  “It’s typed,” Astrid said.

  Which ruled out certain people. For example, Bonnie Stevenson, who filled out most of her forms by hand and who made Christina type them into the system for her. Bonnie’s nails were too long for typing, that was her argument on the subject. She just couldn’t type, and that was the end of the discussion.

  “Did I ever tell you,” Ellie said to Astrid, “what my father would do to us if we used that word?”

  “What word?”

  “That word. The f word.”

  “No,” Astrid said, “you never told me. But I don’t really have time.”

  Astrid was on her way to Duane’s office. She was intent upon the Duane Kolodny gatekeeper, Dolly Halloran, to whom she would make clear her need to see Duane. After which she would wait as long as it took. Duane was never available. If you wanted to take up something confidential or important with him, the moment to do it was right when he got in. Astrid knew this.

  Ellie stood by the suggestion box for a while, shaken, as though standing by it would persuade it to pity her, and then out of desperation she turned her attention to some of the things posted on a nearby company bulletin board. A note from Duane directing the staff to use express mail services sparingly. A handbill about a time-share in a condo on Sea Island. How to recognize a choking incident.

  In fact, at that very moment, Astrid Lang was resigning from K&K. Astrid had been on her way to quit when Ellie stopped her for her suggestions about the offending note. That Astrid had said nothing about quitting did not surprise Ellie. The employees of K&K had precious little information about Astrid Lang.

  Astrid hadn’t let on that she was going to quit, nor did she let on about what she was going to do next, how she was going to pay her monthly bills, and, except for telling Ellie that she could keep her commemorative mug from the AAIB conference in Cincinnati, Astrid left behind no sign that she had ever been at K&K at all. Her exit was fully accomplished by lunch.

  In the PM, Lisa Weltz and Chris Grady came back for additional interviews. The mood in the office was expectant but worried. The office pulsed with the electricity that is incipient change among personnel. The women suddenly were restless in their client contacts, unable to focus on new solicitations. The women of K&K now seemed to favor Lisa Weltz, though they didn’t want to risk irritating Duane, king of all he surveyed, who, it was rumored, preferred Chris. Never mind that K&K could have used both of the candidates.

  During her big interview with Duane, in the afternoon, Lisa Weltz had complained about K&K compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, noting (this was what Dolly reported) that this noncompliance was likely affecting K&K’s ability to attract large institutional clients. They had no ramp to the office and no railing in the bathroom. The plumbing fixtures needed attention. Everyone in the office, Lisa Weltz observed, was able-bodied. And having delivered these pronouncements, Lisa Weltz cradled her withered arm under her breasts.

  Duane, the way he told it, when they were all gathered in the conference room, tried to be polite about Lisa W., but in the end he’d made up his mind quickly, noting that he would never avoid hiring someone because she had a disability. He would, however, avoid hiring someone because she was sour, had crumbs on her blouse, and exhibited bad manners at a pivotal juncture in the interview process.

  Chris Grady took Astrid’s position as broker, effective the next morning.

  Further weeks passed, and Ellie knew what this meant. The passage of time meant that it was likely the perpetrator of the creepy suggestion box messages, the two messages that violated the civility of the K&K offices, was none other than Astrid Lang. And yet there was something mysterious about this. There was something inexplicable about a woman who had no car making hotheaded suggestions about lane closures on the Merritt Parkway. Would a woman who mostly drank tea complain about the coffee? However, inductively speaking, all the evidence suggested that Lang was the perpetrator. Therefore, Ellie Knight-Cameron forgot about the suggestion box, except once a week when she would reach absently into the bottom of the message receptacle to realize that once again it had gone unused. All was well.

  Here’s the story Ellie had never told Astrid. The story about her father and the f word. Her parents, when she was young, had unusual parenting ideas. For example, you didn’t have to go to school if you didn’t feel like it. Everyone should sleep together in the same bed. You should skinny-dip with your family. You should tell your family about any romantic escapades that you had; it was your obligation. And if you were going to use drugs or drink, you should do these things with your family, so that these activities could be properly supervised. It was only later that Ellie found out many parents had quite different ideas.

  And even though her parents agreed upon these unusual parenting principles, there were far more numerous principles on which they disagreed. For example, her father hated the f word. If anyone used the f word, if her brother used the f word, her father would become extremely agitated. It was not, her father said, tugging nervously on his beard, that he had any problem with the activity described by the word in question. Anyone who wanted to perform that particular activity should do so, according to the rules of consent, whenever he or she wanted to do it, with whomever he or she wanted. Anyone could use whatever part of his or her body he or she wanted to us
e, her father went on, as long as this body part gave her pleasure. The skin was the largest organ on the human body. This was what was good about life, the moment in which skin brushed up against skin. The little skin receptors of delight created cascading sensations in the chakras and in the perineum. In conclusion, a person should not use this f word to describe what she or he was doing, her father said, because to use this f word was to denigrate a beautiful and holy act in which waves cascaded to and from the perineum. By denigrating the act you were denigrating one of the few perfect things about being a human animal in this disappointing world, and Ellie’s father would not tolerate it.

  Red-handed, that’s how her father caught her brother using the word. In fact, it was one of many times her brother called Ellie a “fucking idiot.” Soon the punishment was meted out. Her father made her brother read through the dictionary, and not one of those little paperback dictionaries but actually an old mossy copy of Webster’s Third International, after which her brother was tasked with writing down every single adjective in the f section of the dictionary, so that her brother might be able to call up possible alternatives to “fucking idiot,” such as “felonious idiot,” or “fastidious idiot,” or “fungible idiot,” or “funereal idiot,” or “fetishistic idiot.” Furious idiot, free-spirited idiot, fiduciary idiot, floral idiot, fucaceous idiot, foehnlike idiot, fluorescent idiot, foliiform idiot, facetious idiot, falsetto idiot, funicular idiot, feathery idiot, freelance idiot, fugitive idiot. It took her brother half a day to perform this expiation, during which time he wasn’t allowed to go to school. He went through three number two pencils, his hand developed a horrible cramp, and Ellie felt triumphant. A triumph that would be short-lived.

  That night her mother came back from interviewing migrant farm workers, and she took one look at the pages and pages of dictionary entries Ellie’s brother had copied out onto a legal pad and began calling Ellie’s father an “uptight prude asshole.”

  During the period of weeks when there was no action at the K&K suggestion box, Ellie was in fact making ready to visit her family in Arizona, a trip she did not want to make. Her father had called to tell her that her mother had turned up, after going missing for several days, in Tempe, a town that Ellie found particularly melancholy. Ellie’s mother had been detained by the authorities on a charge of drunk and disorderly behavior, somewhere near the campus of the state university, where she was not registered for classes.

  Chris Grady demonstrated, in his first months on the job, that he was a man on the go. The offices rang out with the banter of Chris and Duane in the executive office in the mornings, talking about the golf they had played, about the basketball tournament they had bet on, or about an impending football game. At first this fraternity seemed like a good thing, based on Duane Kolodny’s theory that a mixing of the sexes resulted in a productive workplace. Chris was always in the office early, before Ellie arrived, and when she threw her trench coat over the couch in the lounge and turned on the coffee machine, Chris always called out to her, “Hey, babe, how the hell are you!”

  To which she replied, “Don’t call me babe!”

  Nonessential employees were the first to go. Christina Niccoli, the filing clerk, decided that she needed business school in order to realize her dream of working as a buyer for one of the larger department stores. Ellie herself wrote the advertisement for the Advocate in which they invited applications to replace Christina, experience a plus. She returned to the restaurant with the painting of the Acropolis in order to draft the text. Christina was a sweet kid, and when Ellie conducted her exit interview, Christina complained that Duane didn’t seem to care about the office the way he used to. In the old days—they weren’t so far in the past—Duane would occasionally call a halt to the business day and take them all out for ice cream.

  Then, Annie Goldberg, the staff researcher and unrepentant gambler, disappeared. And it was a few days before anyone even noticed. Ellie asked Dolly Halloran if she’d seen Annie, and Dolly said truculently, “Who?” Of course, in the present business environment, the big decisions were made by the parent company—about rates, the deductibles, that sort of thing. Clients had begun complaining about the wind deduction, especially on the region’s marshy coast. Hurricane season was longer with the greenhouse effect. And there was the risk of terrorist activity. Annie used to keep statistics on claims, but computers could do all that now. People and their foibles just clotted up the system. The big imponderables appeared on the horizon, wrought their havoc, and left claimants to reassemble shattered lives. Price tags were in the tens of billions. Kolodny & Kolodny didn’t control the Atlantic hurricane season or the winter cold snaps. Didn’t matter what a bunch of salespeople in Stamford thought about anything; they could all drive off a cliff. Their families would collect.

  How many people had worked at K&K in the twenty or thirty years that Duane Kolodny had managed the company? Maybe he no longer cared. The only constant, besides Duane, was Dolly Halloran. How could a woman with such a hoarse, acid laugh be called Dolly? Who’d ever thought she was a Dolly? She was too skinny. The skin hung off her elbows. She penciled in her eyebrows. Dolly favored tissues in little plastic packets, and she was always using these tissues to dab at her rheumy eyes. People said that Dolly had been Duane’s mistress, or at least Bonnie Stevenson said so. Yet this implied that at one time Dolly had loved someone.

  What really concerned Ellie Knight-Cameron was not whether Duane and Dolly had conducted a bittersweet office affair. What concerned Ellie was that Astrid had now left the company, and Christina was gone and Annie Goldberg was gone, and with Annie went the room freshener that she used in her cubicle, one of those plug-in jobs. A hint of cinnamon. Christina had listened to music on her headphones. She was always tapping on things. She wore too many earrings. Christina was pear shaped, but in a cute way. Considering that Ellie Knight-Cameron, according to statistically sound methodologies, had in prior weeks removed Duane and Neil Rubinstein from consideration in the matter of the suggestion box, and considering further that Christina and Annie had now abandoned the K&K family, and discounting Astrid Lang, that left as potential suggestion box culprits only Angie, Dolly, Bonnie Stevenson, or Maureen Jones. These people had opportunity and access, but did they have motive?

  Angie Roehmer cornered her by the water cooler. Down the hall from the bathroom. They were both working late. Business was so good Duane was thinking of expanding. Ellie was trying to get prices on a larger suite in the same office building. This despite the fact that they had never hired a fourth broker and the rest of the staff was actually shrinking. It had been raining for days. A yowling stray cat in the parking lot had scuttled all attempts to locate and muzzle it.

  It was all about Chris Grady. Everything was different for Chris Grady, Angie Roehmer said. Things had been easier before Chris Grady. There were certain things that women did for one another, Angie said. One thing they did was they tried not to be cruel, and they tried to remember to clean the dishes in the sink in the lounge if the dishes piled up. They didn’t leave old coffee cups around with a three-day-old paste in the bottom. They didn’t ignore one another. They weren’t out for another person’s job. Even when the women were disrespectful to one another, they tried to do it in a graceful way where nobody had to go to the bathroom and cry. And if someone did have to go and cry, they’d offer her a hug after.

  “I heard him in there, and I think he’s trying to get people fired. He’s trying to make us look bad.” Angie filled yet another paper cup with water from the cooler and downed it in a swallow. “You think I don’t notice stuff?” Crushing the cup emphatically. “I wasn’t hired yesterday.”

  Angie suggested they booby-trap Chris Grady’s clients. He was offering discounts that he shouldn’t have been offering. On bulk enrollments. He took days off without marking the time sheets, which meant he was stealing from the company. He was always going sailing or waterskiing with his richer and more successful relatives. They could catch him i
n it, and things would return to their earlier, calmer state, where women coexisted peaceably, working together for the common good.

  “Angie,” Ellie said, “I can’t do anything like that. That wouldn’t be right. I—”

  Look at the organization chart! Read her job description! She was just an office manager. She ordered carpet remnants. She telephoned plumbers.

  “I always thought you were a goody-goody,” Angie said.

  How to make sense of this embittered remark? Well, for one thing, Angie’s daughter was going to college soon, and Ellie happened to know that her kid barely spoke to Angie, the single parent. Ellie had watched this daughter as she went through her sullen adolescent patch before graduating into a full-fledged hatred of her mom, which had been much on display at both the summer office picnic and at the Christmas party. Last Christmas, the daughter, whose name was Maria, got sloppy drunk, and later, when everyone was climbing into their cars behind the steak house, Maria could be heard berating her mother: You’re so fucking boring, why don’t you go take a boring pill or something. All I ever wanted was a little fun. Ellie gazed at Angie, and she saw herself in another fifteen years, desperate to hang on to a job she didn’t care about so she could pay for college for a daughter who hated her.

  She may have been wrong about Chris Grady and Astrid Lang, but now she was right. It was Angie Roehmer. No question. Angie was the one who had written the suggestions. How could Ellie have missed it before? Angie was willing to do anything. She was willing to say whatever she had to say to protect her small, miserable family. You controlled or you were controlled, and if you didn’t control, if you saw life and liberty slipping beyond your grasp, then you began doing things you would regret later, like beating up on your girl’s soccer coach or embezzling company funds. You grabbed a Starbucks employee by her green apron and told her you were going to knock all her teeth out if she ever again put whipped cream on your half-decaf mochaccino.