Halle Butler - Jillian

“Good afternoon, Ms. Bradley. This is Mike Johnson calling from the county clerk’s office. How are you today?”

“I’m doing good, and yourself?”

“I’m well. Ms. Bradley, I’m calling you to tell you that your court date is a week from this Tuesday, on the 31st, at eleven. Can you confirm that for me?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Johnson, but I’m at work right now, and I’m unable to make that confirmation,” said Jillian.

“Ms. Bradley, I’m aware that you are at work, but we have been leaving messages on your personal line and we have not gotten a response. If you had called us back, we would have been able to work with you to choose a date, but since you did not return our calls, your date has been scheduled for you. If you do not appear in court on your court date, a warrant for your arrest will be issued and your fine will be doubled. If you are unwilling to pay your fine, which I see here is three years standing, we will have no other option but to take you into custody, and you will have to serve time. I am required by my offices to get confirmation from you for this date.”

Jillian had been married once. It didn’t work out. She was married when she was 22—seems so young now! It lasted a year and then, after the breakup, Jillian found the lord and everything felt glorious. Really, really glorious like the way you read about. But then there was, you know, she got lonesome. And then there was this co-worker, who was really funny. And the way this co-worker would look at her and put her arm around Jillian, it just felt so good to be close to people. And so then Jillian started going out with this girl to dance clubs, and it was silly, but it felt so good. To go into the dark, where it was loud. You really didn’t have to think of anything to say. Jillian started going out to buy silky tops with cute patterns on them and a little cinch at the waist, and she painted her nails and did up her face. She went with her co-worker to get streaks in her hair—sheesh, it made her feel silly thinking about it. And in the club when it was dark and the music was loud and everyone was having cocktails, you didn’t even have to say anything. She loved that. Everything was in the pre-prep, the preparation. Put on the outfit, have a drink, then (once you were all wound up) let yourself go in the club. And then just look at a guy or see if he was looking at you. And if you felt like it, you could give him a kind of look that you knew he’d be able to read.

And at that time she was taking the pill, so it was ok. She was taking the pill, so if she wanted to have someone real close to her in her bed some night, she could. It was great. But then, you know, it was like how sometimes when you’re on a diet and you slip up once or twice. Like, have a donut or a milkshake once or twice, but you’re still really on the diet. That was how it got after a while with the pill. She’d slip up once or twice, but then she’d take two the next day, or flush the two or three she hadn’t taken, and then it was like, when she looked at the pill pack, she was up to date. A little bit of fudging didn’t hurt.

And then there was that night she met that guy and he was dancing close and he smelled good like some kind of cologne and she gave him that unmistakable glance and they took a cab back to her place.

“Condom?” he said.

“I don’t have anything,” she said. She explained she was on the pill.

I don’t have anything, I don’t have anything, I don’t have anything, for some reason that rang through her head while he put his hand (so big) behind her neck and put his mouth (which tickled) up to her ear.

“Do you have anything?” she asked.

“Nuh-uh,” he said and she relaxed so much she wanted to cry. If it weren’t for being so riled she probably would have cried. Already they had something in common. Don’t have anything, don’t have anything. That’s great. And he was sweet in the morning. He thought it was cool how she didn’t hound him about his number or where he worked, he said. She shrugged. I think we have something in common, she said. And I think we’ll see each other again, she said.

The next day and a couple more times she took her pills, but then, since she wasn’t really going out that much, she stopped taking them.

It was in the parking lot of a Walmart (of all places!) she figured out she was probably pregnant. It was this feeling, it was a creepy feeling, like something from somewhere else was communicating with her. Like a ghost? Kind of like a ghost? Because it was this, like, this thing that was going to happen and that couldn’t be stopped (a force?) and it was just, you know, tapping her on the shoulder for a second to say, “Hi,” and, “I’m going to be here soon.”

She went into the Walmart and bought a beta fish.

But he was lying when he said he didn’t have anything, because he did have something, he had a girlfriend who he lived with, and that seemed like sort of a lot. She asked around to find that out, and she asked around to find out his number, and when she called he said that it was ok because he and his girlfriend had an agreement about things.

This was not true, it became clear after not too long. She had a few months where she thought maybe there would still be some kind of a possibility for her and him to get together, but then it was clear that there wasn’t. So then she went back to the church, had her baby, and now here she was.

“Ms. Bradley, do I have confirmation?”

“Yeah,” said Jillian and she hung up the phone.

WHY DO WE do it to each other? All of this girl on girl violence ? Well, not really violence in the strict sense, she’d never been in a real fight, but a type of primitive aggression she felt constantly, yes, she really felt it was constant.

It was one of Carrie’s days off and she was in her apartment, looking at her nail polish and musing. Her roommates were at work. She loved her roommates, she really did, they were dolls, but she even felt it from them. She was the kind of person who liked to feel comfortable with people. She couldn’t help it, it was her personality.

It was like, she thought, she just wanted to let all of these women know that there was no shortage of ejaculate on the planet and that they could, you know, share it.

“That’s gross,” she said and shook her head and stood up from the couch. She walked around the apartment. She walked to Janet’s door and nudged it open with her toe. Carrie thought Janet was some kind of a genius. She walked to Janet’s closet and poked through her clothes, then walked back to the couch and resumed the examination of her nail polish.

No one ever wanted to share clothes anymore.

She wanted to make a database. When she thought of the database, she became slightly nervous. Not overly nervous, but a little nervous. It was an idea she’d had in the back of her head for almost two weeks now and she wasn’t able to pin down what, exactly, the database would be, what it would contain, or from where it would be accessible. But it would be some kind of database. She’d stopped looking at her fingers and was staring in the direction of the bay windows.

About once a month she felt nervous and when she felt this way she had to remind herself that what she was doing was important. It’s hard to put yourself in historical perspective, but it can be really helpful, too, and you really need to do it. She was a part of a cultural movement and a part of a community that was directly responsible for the way the world would work in the future. She repeated this idea. There, now she felt better.

Maybe the database would have something to do with her ideas on the American workplace. Those were ideas she hadn’t been able to use in her artwork yet. She loved those ideas and knew they were important. People were living in traps of their own habits. People should get up and walk around in the office. They should be able to move their desks, switch cubicles with a friend, use the floor as a chair and the chair as a desk, lie down on their stomachs to stuff envelopes, review the quarterly earnings on a park bench, weather permitting. She knew this kind of re-imagining was essential to the vitality of the American people, and she was lucky (but was it luck, or had she worked to get where she was?) to work for Jill, who would definitely let her try any and all of these new techniques.