So we’re driving to Arkansas and I’m mostly thinking about how I’m hoping really hard that my sore throat and runny nose are allergies that will pass about the time we hit the Oklahoma state line. And we’re flying happily past all the detrious that lines America’s interstate highways – the mobile home dealers, the billboards, the junk yards and truck stops and BBQ places out in the middle of nowhere. We haven’t quite gotten far enough away to hit any real open road when we decide to stop for gas and Cokes at this cool little setup next to a flying saucer (which was for sale, by the way), and that’s about the time I realized that my intuition about this job was fading away. It was like when my pregnancies faded away. They were gone, and I only realized later that I’d known it before anybody told me.
Oklahoma has more trees than I thought it would; they got thicker as we got closer to Arkansas, and sunset and then darkness fell as we rolled down highway 69. We were listening to the election returns on Public Radio, and we commented what a great day we were about to have – a whole new president, a whole new fabulous job, right here in the middle of this devestated economy – solidarity high-five as we roll down the road – too bad I don’t drink anymore, or we could toast this night.
But the allergies held on and by the time we got to Ft Smith I knew I had well and truly gotten a cold. What little neck I had was swollen enough to brush my collar in an irritating way, my throat was burning from post-nasal drip, I could barely hear, and I spent the remainder of the drive blowing my nose, when I wasn’t sneezing.
I woke up the next morning and put on my carefully-selected interview outfit: a red blouse, black slacks, brown sling-back pumps. I worried over my hair and makeup; noted that my eyes matched my blouse exactly, as unfortunately red-rimmed and blood-shot as they were. Blew my nose a whole bunch in a fruitless attempt to pull all the snot out of my body.
Betonville is smaller than my hometown of Canyon, Texas, but for all intents and purposes it’s really just a big technology park, all humongous, low-slung corporate campuses and chain restaurants, with big-city traffic to go with it (minus the lights and freeways, since there were stop signs planted every few hundred feet). David dropped me off in front of the David Glass Technology Center.
I worked my way through the interview itinerary, at the end of which a young woman came to collect me and give me the result , which I still expected to be my official job offer. She couldn’t have been more than 22 or 23 years old, and was wearing the kind of get-up I used to wear to work when I was her age and modeling myself on what career women looked like on television. I was distracted by her hair, which had been bleached and highlighted in to a perfectly smooth back-combed bob. This in contrast to my $80 hair-cut that left two long, dry strands dangling in my eyes no matter how often I pushed them away. I followed her in to what appeared to be a tiny telephone booth. She closed the door. Hesitated as she leaned towards me. And I knew as soon as we ducked in there, really I did.
I felt flushed and speechless with anger and surprise. It made me afraid to speak. And then I noticed her eyebrows. Plucked almost to nothingness, everything near the inner edge of her eye completely gone, just thin little vulnerable lines above child-like eyes, tiny hairs each precisely the same length, something she’d probably worried over the way I’d worried over my own makeup that morning. She’s so young, I thought, and ached with both envy and a useless sense of understanding that this perfect little thing would probably be afraid of me. Afraid to break the news. And she was. She tried to dodge it. Her manager walked in. Clarified things a bit. They escorted me out. That was that.
If I had been her age; if I had been 23 and had just been rejected in this way, I would have gotten in to the car and cried, and then I would have raged against her, against her boss, against everybody I met at Wal-Mart. I wouldn’t have looked back and it wouldn’t have mattered, because my future would have been laid out in front of me like a big, blue sky. But I’m 42 – old enough to be her mother, I realized with dismay, if I could have any kinds, that is. And so I didn’t cry. Didn’t say much at all, actually. I spent most of the rest of the trip home simply wondering – what was I supposed to have learned from this? I’d prayed so hard and so often for God to let me have this job; to have gotten so close only to have it snatched away… only to have my ability to support my family, and to live up to the commitments I’ve made… to have them pass me by; there must be something I was supposed to learn from this, a grand lesson. I don’t believe things happen without a reason, but this experience was testing that belief. Surely there’s more than just punishment for my poor decisions over the past few months, here, I thought, but I couldn’t figure out what.
We drove home in the dark, after we left McAllester. We didn’t talk much. I knew David had been thinking that it was about to be his turn to take time off work; that he’d been right to bet on me, after all, and that everything was going to be allright. And I knew his thoughts had all turned dark, as if I’d shut off all the lights. We were going back to exactly where we were when we left: my PhD husband at his hourly tech support job and his wife; you know, the one who blew her career on booze and self-indulgence, the one who fixates on her physical maladies, the one who gained 40 pounds almost as soon as he married her – the same wife who has no sex drive and spends her evenings in the kitchen, taking pills and puffs off her inhaler, in between bites of her latest, sugary snack.
Since I got home I’ve believed wholeheartedly that there are no jobs out there for me. When I think back through my career it all seems like something only a youngster could do: that I stumbled my way in to jobs I wasn’t qualified for based on my youth and charm until I landed in the one position in the world that required all the experience I’d gained in doing that. A job that was given to someone else before I even left the company; a company I left with technical skills that are now 10 years out of date. Now I’m just an overweight middle-aged woman with soft skills and poor judgement and red eyes who looks uncomfortable in her ill-fitting, polyester interview clothes.
I had a boss when I was 23 who told me I was in the top 10% of the top 10% in the world because I was a young, attractive, witty, intelligent, white American woman. When I worked at IBM I was in the top 2% in the world because of my salary. The world has changed, and so have I. I just wish someone could tell me what percentile I am in, now. It might make it easier to look for a job.
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