Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

As I popped out the first tape and put in the second, my phone rang and I froze: I still wasn’t sure of the appropriate greeting. “Hello,” I said with false confidence, tucking the phone behind my ear. This was my first real phone call.

“Joanna!” a mirthful voice cried.

“Dad?” I asked.

“It is I,” affirmed my father, in his Boris Karloff voice. My father, in his youth, had been an actor. His comedy group performed in the Catskills, at bungalow colonies and the occasional resort. The other members became famous: Tony Curtis, Jerry Stiller. My father became a dentist. A dentist who told jokes. “Dear old dad. How’s your first day at work?”

“Okay.” My parents had asked for my work number minutes after I told them I had a job. I hadn’t thought they’d call my first day. “I’ve just been typing up letters.”

“Well, you’re a secretary now,” said my dad, laughing. I came from a family of scientists, and my every move seemed to provide them with amusement. “Oh, sorry, an assistant .”

“I think it’s slightly different from being a secretary,” I said, hating the solemn tone of my voice. This was another constant refrain in my family: Joanna takes everything too seriously. Joanna can’t take a joke. We’re just teasing, Joanna! You don’t need to get upset . And yet I always did. “I’m going to be reading manuscripts.” This was the only non-secretarial task that came to mind. My boss, as it happened, hadn’t mentioned it, but everyone I’d spoken to in the weeks since accepting the job had emphasized that assisting an agent primarily involved reading manuscripts. No one had mentioned typing. “Stuff like that. They were looking for someone with a background like mine. In English.”

“Yes, yes,” cooed my dad. “Of course. Listen, I’ve been thinking. How much are they paying you again?”

I looked around to make sure I was alone. “Eighteen five.”

“Eighteen thousand dollars?” my father cried. “I thought it was more.” He made a guttural sound of disgust, the last remaining evidence that he’d been raised in a Yiddish-speaking household. “Eighteen thousand dollars a year?”

“Eighteen thousand five hundred .” This sum struck me as huge. In college, I’d earned fifteen hundred dollars per semester as a writing tutor, and in grad school I’d scraped by on minimum wage, serving beer at a pub and fitting hiking boots at a camping store off Oxford Street. Eighteen thousand five hundred dollars was a vast and unimaginable amount of money to me, perhaps because I imagined it as a lump sum, handed over in stacks of crisp bills.

“You know, Jo, I don’t think you can live on that. Do you think you could ask them for more?”

“Dad, I’ve already started the job.”

“I know, but maybe you could tell them you’ve looked at your expenses and you just can’t live on that little money. That’s, let’s see”—my father could do complex calculations in his head—“fifteen hundred dollars a month. After taxes, maybe eight hundred, nine hundred a month. Are they paying for your health insurance?”

“I don’t know.” I’d been told the Agency provided insurance, which would kick in three months after I started—or maybe six months—and which I assumed they covered. But I’d honestly not paid very much attention to the financial details. The fact that I had an actual job seemed to supersede any other concerns. This was 1996. The country was in the grips of a recession. Almost no one I knew was gainfully employed. My friends were in grad school—getting MFAs in fiction or PhDs in film theory—or working at coffee shops in Portland, or selling T-shirts in San Francisco, or living with their parents on the Upper West Side. A job, an actual nine-to-five job, was an almost alien concept, an abstraction.

“You should find out.” I could see that his patience with me was running thin. “If they’re not paying for your insurance, you’re not going to be bringing much of anything home. How much are you paying Celeste in rent?”

I swallowed, hard. I had moved in with Don—albeit unofficially—before even paying Celeste the first agreed-upon month’s rent, though Celeste’s closet still held a few of my dresses and my one good coat. My parents knew nothing of Don, not even his name. As far as they knew, I was moments away from marriage with my college boyfriend, of whose handsomeness and kindness and intelligence they wholeheartedly approved. When my parents called Celeste’s, I was never there, but they took this as another irksome symptom of youth.

“Three hundred fifty dollars,” I told my father, though I had agreed to pay Celeste $375, fully half of her rent. As was so often the case with me, I’d submitted to these terms without thinking them over, and it had since occurred to me that they were less than fair. Paying half the rent on an apartment in which nothing was mine, in which I couldn’t even extend my legs while sleeping, made no sense. I couldn’t imagine living indefinitely without even a modicum of privacy. But Celeste seemed to crave such close quarters: She seemed, like Hugh, alone. Alone in her anxieties and insecurities, alone in the tyranny of her mind, but also simply, literally, physically alone, her only companion an oversized, paraplegic cat who dragged himself around the apartment like a mythological creature, his front half leonine and furry, his hindquarters shaved bald, for he no longer had the flexibility to groom them. One night, I got back to her place after meeting a friend downtown and found Celeste in bed, covered to the neck in a flower-sprigged flannel nightgown, watching reruns of a once-popular sitcom and stroking her strange cat, tears running down her face. “What’s wrong?” I whispered, perching myself on the edge of the bed, as if she were an invalid. “Celeste, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her round, freckled face—a face I thought of as the definition of wholesome—was red and raw from crying.

“What did you do tonight? Were you home? Did something happen?”

She shook her head. “I came home after work and made some spaghetti.” I nodded. “And I thought I’d make the whole box, then eat it over the next few days.” A lone tear rolled down her plump cheek. “So I ate some, and then I ate a little more, and then a little more.” She looked up at me sadly. “And then, before I knew it, I’d eaten the whole thing. A whole pound of spaghetti. I ate a pound of spaghetti by myself.”

In the year or so since we left school, she’d gained some weight, but I knew this wasn’t what was bothering her, that pound of pasta translating into another pound on the scale. What terrified her was the set of circumstances that allowed her to eat a full pound of spaghetti, the unmoored, untethered quality of her life, in which no one—no mother, sister, roommate, professor, boyfriend, anyone—was there to monitor her habits and behaviors, to say, “Haven’t you had enough?” or “Can I share that with you?” or “Let’s have dinner together tonight” or even “What are you doing for dinner?” She woke up, went to work, came home, alone.

“Three hundred fifty dollars?” my father cried. “To share a room? Aren’t you sleeping on the sofa?”

“It’s actually a really cheap apartment for that neighborhood.”

“Your mother and I have talked about it,” my father said, his patience now fully gone. “If you’re going to take this job”— I’ve already taken it , I thought—“you need to live at home. You can take the bus into the city and save up the money for your own apartment. Maybe you can buy a place. Renting is just throwing money away.”

“I can’t live at home, Dad,” I said, measuring my words. “The bus takes almost two hours. I’d have to leave the house at six thirty in the morning.”