Rick Moody - The Diviners

“What do you think? My mother claims it was the bow tie. That’s her opinion. I get him a bow tie for his birthday, and my mother says it’s that I wasn’t ladylike. Why couldn’t I wear clothes like a girl? Why didn’t I want to wear designer jeans in the late seventies? She has a lot of opinions on this stuff. Never wear black tights. Always wear nylons. Use curlers. Always have on a dark shade of fingernail polish. I remember her coming to a field hockey game once. I was playing in the park, and she’s sitting on the sidelines, knitting some really fem sweater and starting all these conversations so she can tell people that she’s knitting the sweater for me. I could hear everything she was saying.”

As soon as the taxi halts at the back entrance to Penn Station, Vanessa is out. And it’s the same at Seventy-second Street on the West Side and the Upper East Side location, the glazed devil’s food doughnut; the lemon-filled doughnut; the raspberry jelly- filled, with its excess of confectioner’s sugar, the powder somehow like the wigs of French aristocrats just before the Revolution; custard-filled doughnuts, dessert of libertines, fifteen grams of fat per. She wants to see a line of morbidly obese people at the register, noshing, in the line at Krispy Kreme, ordering four or five doughnuts apiece. She knows the location of all the distributors, and she labors back and forth across Central Park, with the tab on the taxi closing in on fifty dollars. And then, at last, she heads for 125th Street. When she was at film school at Columbia, she used to go to the Twin Donut on Broadway, right under the elevated subway, but Twin Donut seems a lifetime away. Her romance is with Krispy Kreme now. It’s not only the remoteness of 125th Street, as a locale for a doughnut adventure, it’s not only that she’s going to be the only white face in the Krispy Kreme of 125th Street, it’s that she has the most decadent doughnut possible on her mind. It will be her fourteenth doughnut of the morning, and the contemplation of this sweetmeat is such that she hasn’t even explained it to her taxi driver. Yes, the most perfect representation of her isolation and restlessness is the triple-chocolate variety, with Bavarian chocolate custard, chocolate icing, and chocolate chips. You really have to put off the triple-chocolate doughnut until last, because if you start with it, it’s possible that you could go into a coma before you get to 125th, and then you will not have visited every single freestanding Krispy Kreme in the city of New York, then you will not have skipped out on a morning’s work, then you will not have driven yourself even further from the possibility of human affection. The light is elegiac. You’d need a blue filter to correct for its sentimentality. Empty polyethylene bags with the names of local pharmacies emblazoned on them lift off in the open intersection. Inside, Vanessa takes her place in line.

The clerk, who’s making do with hourly wages, picks at an incredibly long fingernail for a moment before moving to fill Vanessa’s order. She stares vacantly at a ring on the countertop left by somebody’s extra-large coffee. The patrons of Krispy Kreme are still for a moment, in the compulsion of ordering and devouring. Just then, someone taps Vanessa on the shoulder.

The Indian guy.

Annabel Duffy calls her boss Minivan because her boss is that large. The size of a minivan. In the interiors of her consciousness, Annabel begins or ends all business-related exchanges thus: “Minivan, can I get you some coffee?” She thinks, “Gosh, that designer suit looks fetching on you, Minivan.” She thinks, Minivan, Minivan, Minivan. Because it’s the one effective rejoinder to the oppressions that Vanessa Meandro visits upon her. Like the day Annabel came to interview at 610 Fifth Avenue. Minivan had apparently decided to break down Annabel until she was a quivering protoplasmic blob. Minivan indicated, in this preliminary interview, that she’d interviewed nothing but “anal-compulsive gay men” for three days, and Minivan made it clear that she could not work with these men because they were “prima donnas.” What Minivan needed — and as she made her need clear, she rose up, swelling and posturing — was someone who would submit, someone who could sleep on a bed of nails, someone who could take an hour on the rack and demand more, someone who would be an untouchable, in the Hindu sense, without complaint, who would even be grateful for it. Did Annabel think she was this person? Bullshit. Annabel had no idea what submission meant! Annabel did not yet know what was required because she had not yet been forged in the underworld furnace of Minivan. It was clear to Annabel that Minivan was appraising Annabel’s presentability as she made this observation, that she was checking out Annabel’s skin tone, which was a much darker skin tone than that of any other employee in the office. But there was something carnivorous about the gaze, too; she was checking out Annabel’s breasts and ass, and because of this, Annabel made her first subversive assumption about Minivan: big dyke.

Still, no informed hypothesis about Minivan’s personal life has ever been borne out by cold, hard facts. Minivan has never appeared to have a personal life. No men, no women. And Annabel, as the ass’t, has dealt with every aspect of Minivan’s character. Annabel makes Minivan’s appointments at that spa in Arizona that specializes in overeaters. Annabel fires Minivan’s therapists every few months and gets new referrals. Annabel has learned about Klonopin, Ambien, Paxil, Wellbutrin, and Halcion; she has learned about cocktails of mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and antianxiety medications; she has substituted lithium for Depakote, Serzone for Lamictal or Lexapro or Zoloft, which she substituted for Prozac, has held out antianxiety medication in her palm because Minivan, with remarkable insight into her own character, has noted that she isn’t to be trusted to keep the prescription in her own desk. Since Annabel has been doing all of these things for Minivan, Annabel believes she would have known about a girlfriend if a girlfriend in fact existed.

Annabel knows, furthermore, that Minivan technically still lives at home, though this is a fact shrouded in secrecy, especially this day, because Annabel has been on the phone with the detox ward of the hospital in Brooklyn where Minivan’s mother was incarcerated as of one or two hours ago. Normally, her mother would have called by this time in the AM, in order to launch into some strange, ominous subject, like yesterday’s car crash involving a guy driving up onto a sidewalk in midtown and taking out two or three pedestrians. After which Minivan’s mother, referred to around the office by the name of Rosa, even by Minivan herself, is likely to go on to a torrid sociopolitical subtopic that will include Rosa herself, the mayor of New York City, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pollution in the Gowanus Canal, gentrification in Red Hook, the new crosswalk at Radio City Music Hall, campaign finance reform, and shadowy state and federal agencies as yet unknown to the general public. As Annabel listens to these monologues, inevitably there is an urgent cry from the corner office: “Are you doing your nails or something? Do I pay you to do your nails?”

The name of the company shall be Means of Production, referring here to a meanness of character, a paucity of compassion. Minivan will not commit to this interpretation because she will not commit to any interpretation. Minivan is about pragmatism, realpolitik. Every complaint about Annabel Duffy’s on-the-job performance also contains discussion of Annabel’s weight, as Annabel is willowy, svelte, twiggy. “You know you’re not supposed to be able to see all the bones in your elbow. If you can see them, there is a problem. Think about it.” Or: “Is this a political thing with you? Not eating? You’re expressing solidarity with subsistence farmers of developing nations?” Or: “You’re making me look bad, Duffy. I didn’t hire you to look like a model. You’re here in a miniskirt in order to make me look like a whale. Am I right? Wear a garbage bag or something. Wear a warm-up suit. Go down to Old Navy and buy a fucking warm-up suit that’s four sizes too big and wrap yourself in Ace bandages or something. This is not an environment that I can work in. Go eat a sundae. Get two sundaes, in fact. Bring one back for me.”