Anyway, I hired her. I knew she was trouble, but I didn’t know how much, for the simple reason that, unlike wall-to-wall carpet, people don’t come with lifetime guarantees.
In this business, for that matter in any business, you never knew what you were getting. You hired them when they appeared reasonably lucid, communicative and reliable, though this was some task, finding anyone reliable. Some responded to the ad and never showed up and some showed up and never returned. I hired anyone still breathing. Looks didn’t hurt. Sobriety helped. Most of them maybe finished high school and some had native smarts, street wisdom. You got what you paid for. We didn’t pay much.
Anyhow, they all came from broken homes, these girls. These days, who didn’t?
“So am I hired?” she asked.
This one was different. She was exotic, as exotic as you can get from the Price Hill section of Cincinnati, where (disgraced) Pete Rose hailed from and which was this town’s bedrock of hard-working, hard-drinking, hardhat lower middle class. Price Hill was to Cincinnati what Peoria was to America. She seemed a cut above as far as intelligence, which wasn’t always a plus for them or a favor to me. The smart ones never stayed very long, that was one problem, the other being that smart girls never knew when something was finished. This girl had eyes that wouldn’t quit and everything about her was just plain provocative, like I’m the one getting the screen test.
Obviously, though, she was a loser, a failure, a castoff, an exile, just like the rest of us, though I’m still not sure what separates success from failure, or if there really is a difference. I have my doubts. Most times success is a cover, a performance. We’re all acting except that those of us who don’t know how to put it over end up here at Harry’s Carpet City, upstairs in the phone soliciting department, sanctuary for the doomed. We’ve tried everything else.
In Cincinnati, or New York, or anywhere really, there’s got to be a place for everyone, or so you’d think. I’m beginning to wonder. Some of us in this world without pity are meant to drift, which doesn’t make us homeless but rootless just the same. We can’t seem to catch on. We seem destined to follow the wrong path or take the fork in the road that leads to nowhere. I blame it on luck and this means there’s no one to blame.
So despite my qualms about this applicant, I had a soft spot for her – for all of them in fact.
Spooky, the way she sat there without the usual interview jitters. Maybe that was why I didn’t terminate (did I say “terminate?”) her right on the spot, as that would have been the cowardly way out, and she would have sensed it…but so what? Hey, I was the BOSS! Except that there was something strangely intimate about a job interview, you were both revealing touches, moments and fragments of yourself and you didn’t want to come off weak. Not to mention the seductive element of a job interview, like any audition. From the start you were calculating the possibilities.
With the right person, an interview was foreplay – as it was with Stephanie Eaton.
“I’d like an answer,” she said.
Why was she in control? I’m the director.
She looked different from every angle. First thing you noticed was that squared-off, masculine jaw. Straight up the face was hard, lips thin, upturned nose, certainly not pretty, but all right in an across-the-river sort of way. I was willing to bet she was originally from Kentucky, Covington most likely. If she came from Newport she’d never admit it – Sin City, USA; comely Cincinnati’s unruly neighbor to the south. Covington, that’s where we went to get naughty and Newport? That’s where we went to get very naughty. Horse country was further south, though there were some thoroughbreds in Newport, along the outskirts. They don’t shoot horses in Newport. They shoot people.
She was a blonde, this one was, but a very serious, grim and gloomy blonde, even when she smiled, which was really not a grin so much as a pre-emptive showing of teeth, doing what was unnatural but required. Smiling was not her strong suit. Her teeth could use some work but so could mine. (Get me make-up!) Her eyes did the scary business. No fluttering of eyelashes, like most of them do; no blinking, in fact. Actually, they were the eyes of an animal or some beast without a soul. She was so self-assured that it could only mean that she had something on me.
I had secrets, of course.
Her name was Sonja Frick. I kept studying her application form for an acceptable reason to dismiss her. Just say no, or offer the usual excuses, like overqualified or under-qualified, though she was neither. I didn’t like her and I didn’t trust her and I don’t know why. The interview was going poorly, from my end at least; I was flunking. If it were me on the other seat I’d never get the part.
“I’m sure I can do whatever has to be done around here,” she said scornfully, scanning the room, a room without frills that’s for sure, walls that needed paint, windows that needed blinds, floors that needed linoleum that wasn’t ripped. The smell? Please! She observed the desks that had been borrowed ages ago from some elementary school, still with valentine hearts and “Leroy” carved into them.
Not much else except the buzz of about a dozen girls on the phones pitching carpet.
She wasn’t impressed.
“Doesn’t seem too difficult,” she said with a snicker. “Nothing I can’t do.”
I didn’t mind somebody scoffing this job, so long as that somebody was me. I wasn’t too thrilled when it came from someone else.
Everybody’s a critic.
This wasn’t brain surgery, true, but it was an honest living, even if it wasn’t completely honest and wasn’t much of a living.
I asked her the usual big question, hoping she’d trip up.
“Are you good with people?”
“What people?”
“People. People people.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’d be talking to strangers all day.”
“I’m good with strangers. Are they people?”
Wise guy, huh?
Her hobby, according to the application form, was reading, which certainly wasn’t objectionable, except that her favorite authors were Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus, which frankly I didn’t consider reading. She also liked poetry, the gloomy kind – Sylvia Plath and all the others who had committed suicide. She also mentioned Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. Nothing cheerful here, either.
I was thinking of ways to tell her no. First of all, I didn’t need the grief. Second of all, I didn’t need girls with PERSONALITY. Personality was intrusive. Third, she’d never fit in. There was a group dynamics thing going on here in my boiler room and it wouldn’t do to have one girl so STRANGE. The others, even the newer ones, and there were always newer ones, managed to nest in together. This one wouldn’t. She felt superior, you could just tell, and she was a reflective sort. Then again, she needed the work. This was a job of last resort, even for me. Nobody – except Mona maybe – grew up with dreams of becoming a telephone solicitor, even under today’s fancier term of telemarketing.
But I had already decided to say no.
“When do I start?” she said.
“How about tomorrow?”