Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Thomas told her she ought to come to New York. She phoned him just to talk, one evening when she felt low, and he said, “Catch the next train up. Sleep on the couch till you land a job. Angie says so too.” (Angie was his girlfriend, who had recently moved in with him although Ian and their grandfather were not supposed to know.) But Daphne couldn’t imagine living in a city where everyone came from someplace else, and so she said, “Oh, I guess I’ll keep looking here.”

One Sunday she even phoned Agatha — not something she did often, since Agatha was hard to reach and also (face it) inclined to criticize. But on this occasion she was a dear. She said, “Daph, what would you think about going to college now? I’d be happy to pay for it. We’re making all this money that we’re too busy to spend. You wouldn’t have to ask Ian for a cent.”

“Well, thank you,” Daphne said. “That’s really nice of you.”

She wasn’t the school type, to be honest. But it felt good to know both her brother and sister were behind her. Her friends were more callous; they were hunting jobs themselves, many of them, or waitressing or tending bar till they decided what interested them, or heading off to law school just to appear busy. Nobody in her circle seemed to have an actual career.

At the start of her third week without work, her grandfather talked her into going to a place called Same Day Résumé. He’d heard it advertised on the radio; he thought it might help her “present” herself, he said. So Daphne took a bus downtown and spoke to a bored-looking man at an enormous metal desk. The calendar on the wall behind him read TUES 13, which made her nervous because an old boyfriend had once told her that in Cuba, Tuesday the thirteenth was considered unlucky. Shouldn’t she just offer some excuse and come back another time? It did seem the man wore a faint sneer as he listened to her qualifications. In fact the whole experience was so demoralizing that as soon as she’d finished answering his questions she walked over to Lexington Market and treated herself to a combination beef-and-bean burrito. Then she went to a matinee starring Cher, her favorite movie star, and after that she cruised a few thrift shops. She bought two sets of thermal underwear with hardly any stains and a purple cotton tank top for a total of three dollars. By then it was time to collect her résumé, which had miraculously become four pages long. She had only to glance through it, though, to see how it had been padded and embroidered. Also, it cost a fortune. Her grandfather had said he would pay, but even so she resented the cost.

All the good cheer she had built up so carefully over the afternoon began to evaporate, and instead of heading home for supper she stopped at a bar where she and her friends hung out on weekends. It gave off the damp, bitter smell that such places always have before they fill up for the evening, and the low lighting seemed not romantic but bleak. Still, she perched on a cracked vinyl stool and ordered a Miller’s, which she drank very fast. Then she ordered another and started reading her résumé. Any four-year-old could see that she hadn’t gone past high school, even if she did list an introductory drawing course at the Maryland Institute and a weekend seminar called New Directions for Women.

“Hello, Daphne,” someone said.

She turned and found Rita diCarlo settling on the stool next to her, unbuttoning her lumber jacket as she hailed the bartender. “Pabst,” she told him. She unwound a wool scarf from her neck and flung her hair back. “You waiting for someone?”

Daphne shook her head.

“Me neither,” Rita said.

Daphne could have guessed as much from Rita’s shapeless black T-shirt and paint-spattered jeans. Her hair was even scruffier than usual; actual dust balls trailed from the end of her braid.

“I had my least favorite kind of job today,” Rita told her. “A divorce. Splitting up a household. Naturally the wife and husband had to be there, so they could offer their opinions.” She accepted her beer and blew into the foam. “And they did have opinions, believe me.”

“Too many jobs get too personal,” Daphne said gloomily.

“Right,” Rita said. She was digging through her pockets for something — a Kleenex. She blew her nose with a honking sound.

“Like this florist’s I was just fired from,” Daphne said. “Everybody’s private messages: you have to write them down pretending not to know English. Or when I worked at Camera Carousel — those photos of girls in bikinis and people’s awful prom nights. You hand over the envelope with this smile like you never even noticed.”

“Look,” Rita said. “Did Ian tell you he and I have been seeing each other?”

“You have?” Daphne asked.

“Well, a couple of times. Well, really just once. I guess you wouldn’t count when I accidentally on purpose ran into him at the wood shop.”

No, Daphne wouldn’t count that.

“I went to Brant’s Custom Woodworks and ordered myself a bureau,” Rita told her.

“I don’t believe he mentioned it.”

“Do you have any idea how much those things cost?”

“Expensive, huh?” Daphne said.

She glanced again at her résumé. Page two: Previous Employment. Here the facts were not padded but streamlined, for the man had suggested that too long a list made a person look flighty. “What say we strike the framer’s,” he had said, his sneer growing more pronounced.

“Another example is picture framing,” Daphne told Rita. “People bring in these poor little paintings they’ve done themselves, or their drawings with the mouths erased and redrawn a dozen times and the hands posed out of sight because they can’t do hands, and all you say is, ‘Let me see now, perhaps a double mat …’ ”

“Then after we talked about my bureau awhile I asked if he’d come look at my apartment,” Rita said, “just so he’d have an idea of the scale.”

Daphne pulled her eyes away from the résumé. She focused on Rita’s face for a moment, and then she said, “Don’t you live with Nick Bascomb?”

“Well, I did, but I made him move out,” Rita said.

“Oh? When was this?”

“Wednesday,” Rita said.

“Wednesday? You mean this Wednesday just past?”

“See,” Rita said, “Monday I went to visit Ian at the wood shop, and that night I asked Nick to move out. But I let him stay till Wednesday because he needed time to get his things together.”

“Decent of you,” Daphne said dryly.

“So then Friday Ian came by and we settled on what size bureau I wanted. I invited him to supper, but he said you-all were expecting him at home.”

Daphne tried to remember back to Friday. Had she been there, even? She might have gone out with her usual gang and forgotten supper altogether.

“So when was it you saw him the second time?” she asked Rita.

“Well, that was it. Friday.”

“You mean the second time was when he came to measure for your bureau?”

“Well, yes.”

Daphne sat back on her stool.

This Rita was so big , though. She had that angular, big-boned frame. You’d expect her to be immune.

“Um, Rita,” she said. “Ian’s kind of … hard to pin down, sometimes. Also, I believe he has this sort of girlfriend at his church.”

“So what? I had a boyfriend, till last Wednesday,” Rita said.

“Yes, but then besides he’s very, let’s say Christian. Did you know that?”

“What do you think I am, Buddhist?”

“He’s unusually Christian, though. I mean, look at you! You’re sitting here in a bar! Drinking beer! Wearing a Hell Bent for Leather T-shirt!”

Rita glanced down at her shirt. She said, “That’s not exactly a sin.”