Chapter One
I sat alone in a small, sparsely furnished foyer, nervously drumming my self-manicured fingernails on the manila folder with fraying edges full of résumés. I had taken to carrying it with me at all times. The anxiety I learned during my job hunt suggested it was better to take precautions, like always having a résumé handy on the off chance someone mentioned they were hiring. A long shot, I know, but this was my fifth month without a job and only the third interview I’d been able to score. The other two had been early on, both seemed like sure things. Both fell through.
In the deserted room I felt I was attending a funeral for a person no one cared about. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember the short but pointless life of Steven Nicholas’ career aspirations. May they rest in peace.
“I need this job,” I announced to no one.
I was wearing my last suit. I’d sold my other two a week ago to some college kid at a job fair. The one I wore was three years old and slightly worn. I trimmed a few stray threads that morning before leaving for the interview. I chose to keep this particular suit over the other two because it was the one I had worn the last time I’d been interviewed and hired. I’m not a superstitious person by any stretch of the imagination but desperation has a way of making believers of us all. One thing was certain: No one would be able to say I was unprepared.
Waiting wasn’t the worst part. It was the enormous sense of failure that ate away at my confidence. Dad kept telling me, “Just because the economy is rough doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it. Don’t just try to ride it out; make something better of yourself!” Which was easy to say if you were the self-made CEO of your own company like he was.
I’d done all the right things, hadn’t I? I’d saved six months of living expenses in case of emergency, I’d cut back on all the luxuries, though I hadn’t been able to pay for many of them to begin with and so had few luxuries to cut back on. I’d created a résumé and taken it to a professional, making all the changes she suggested. I’d e-mailed and walked that thing out to exhaustion, beating the proverbial dead horse. Job hunting had become my fulltime job. And now my six month reserve was looking pretty anemic.
Hundreds of applications and résumés later I was starting to lose hope, starting to panic about whether I would lose my apartment or have to ask for a loan from one of my “more successful” brothers or worse, my concerned parents. There’s nothing to make a thirty year old man feel like a loser than to have to crawl back to mom and dad asking for that kind of help. I frequently told myself I’d rather live in a cardboard box.
The lights dimmed briefly above me and the faint ashy smell drifted past. I glanced around the waiting area for any signs of what had caused the smell. It was an empty room with a few white plastic chairs. The walls were mostly bare. The carpet was a blend of dark colors and was that tight industrial kind that was so hard it almost might as well not be carpet. One of those cheesy motivational posters with what was supposed to be an inspiring photograph was framed on one wall. There was no fire alarm blaring, no smoke hanging on the ceiling and nothing else to suggest something burning. I wondered if maybe I had imagined it. It was almost imperceptible anyway. It was more like the memory of a smell than an actual one. I went back to waiting.
Finally a woman appeared in the entrance to a hallway. My first thought was that somewhere an African country was missing its queen. She displayed a practiced, polite smile.
I stood and extended a hand and she shook it only once but firmly. She was tall, slender and darkly complexioned. She wore a fashionable business suit and did so with feminine authority, a contrast to my old worn one. Dignified gray was just beginning to streak her pitch black hair. There was a photo ID badge clipped to the lapel of her suit. This was the type of woman who commanded the attention of whatever room in which she found herself.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Nicholas. I’m Jan Fenstra. We talked earlier on the phone. Follow me to my office, please.” She turned and headed through the door-less opening. I hesitated a moment, then followed, almost dropping my file folder full of paperclips and resumes. She navigated down a short hallway into a room filled with cubicles, only half of them containing people working at computers. It was a Saturday, after all. A few turned heads to see who was following the boss which gave me a short lived sense of purpose and importance. The sense quickly faded when the workers turned away, realizing it wasn’t someone important after all. Just another grunt...another potential grunt.
At the end of the room we took a hard right. Halfway down, Jan pulled open a door which bore the legend, “Jan Fenstra, Director.” She waited, holding the door for me. I felt like a kid who had been sent to the principal’s office but didn’t know why. I went in and she followed, closing the door behind us. She took her seat behind her neatly organized desk. She looked at me expectantly and then looked at the chair behind me.
Sit, idiot, I thought and forced myself to take the seat. She smiled to herself, no doubt recognizing her usual effect on those beneath her position. She opened a drawer and pulled out a clean manila colored file. I lowered my beat up file out of sight covering it with my arms. She flipped through the papers in it until she came to the one she wanted and let the file lay open on her desk.
“You are applying for the custodial position, Mr. Nicholas. I see from your application you have a Master’s degree in English literature. These two things seem incongruent with one another. Is there something I should know?” Well there it was. Straight for the jugular without warning. Did she know? And if she didn’t, would it be wise to try to keep it from her? Of course it wouldn’t. This was a woman who had no trouble at all smelling lies and evasions. It would be stupid to sabotage my only shot at a job in months. Rip it off quickly like a band aid and it should hurt less. ‘Less’ being the operative word of that phrase.
“I don’t know if you should know, but I’ll tell you anyway. five months ago I was terminated from my previous position. I was working as a high school English Lit teacher when a group of students accused me of inappropriate conduct. An investigation was conducted, nothing substantial was found, but a group of angry parents, a few of them on the school board, hold more power than things like evidence.” Anger burned in me, just beneath the surface. I tried to stay calm, but was sick of defending myself to people who not only did not know me but also did not know what happened and made their judgments regardless. I could feel the flush of red appear on my face.
The African Queen leaned back in her chair and narrowed her eyes to slits as if focusing some second sight into my soul. She tilted her head to one side.
“Did you?” she asked.
“Did I what?”
“Did you act inappropriately?”
I quickly concluded she was not playing with me as some on the school board had. Nor was she looking for a reason to despise me as one of the other potential employers who’d interviewed me. She was investigating something. She was a dime store novel detective in a business woman’s power suit.
“No,” I said, mild irritation escaping with the word. I had developed a defensive posture over the months since my dismissal but was tired of bringing it to bear. It never helped anyway. In my experience, people formed their opinions of me within moments of hearing I was fired for inappropriate conduct as high school faculty. Her verdict was handed down quickly, too, but not in the direction I expected.
“I believe you. Thank you for being honest with me. That helps with my decision.” She leaned forward and again inspected my application from the file in front of her.
“Sorry, did you say you believe me?” That was foreign to me. Most everyone, even one of my own brothers, opted not to trust me as quickly as this woman chose to believe my version of the story.
“Yes,” she said not looking up from the application.
“Why? Not that I’m offended or anything, but no one else seems to.”
She looked up into my eyes and held my gaze a moment. She s
eemed to weigh something on invisible scales before she spoke again. “I can just tell when people are lying to me. That’s good for you. It’s very important to me that I hire someone I believe I can trust.”
I sat back in the chair feeling somehow strangely relieved and noticed my anger had greatly subsided. She had disarmed me. I couldn’t say exactly how.
“How did you....” I stopped and decided to start over. “Why is it...?” Again, I didn’t seem to know where I was trying to go. One more try.
“Okay, I get the whole, ‘It’s important to have honest employees who won’t steal company pens’ thing, but I’m just asking to sweep and mop your floors a few times a day and empty your trash cans at night.”
She looked at me without speaking. Was she waiting for me to continue? I didn’t know if I could or even if I should try.
I began to think I had made a poor move opening my mouth. Perhaps I should have waited for her to ask a question about my work experience or if maybe I knew which end of the broom to hold as I swept shredded paper bits from her floor when she wasn’t there at night.
Just then I turned my head slightly toward the closed door distracted by something. Again I thought I smelled ash smoldering away. It stayed longer this time, and I believed I definitely smelled it this time. I looked back at Jan and understood she hadn’t noticed it. I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but is something burning?”
She looked briefly confused as if she thought the English major was trying on a metaphor and then realized I meant it.
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“Do you smoke? Cigarettes, I mean.”
“No, I do not.” She wasn’t the least bit put off by the personal question. The interview had waved goodbye to personal formality before we walked into her office. Why bother with it now?, I thought
“It’s just that that’s the second time I thought I smelled smoke since I got here. The first time was in the lobby...” But then it was gone again.
“Rest assured, Mr. Nicholas, we have a state of the art fire alarm system here. It will detect fire before anyone else does. Now, how about we get back to the interview? I see you have had some janitorial experience in college.”
I remained distracted for another second or two. I had gotten a bad vibe from that smell. I turned my face back to the waiting executive. She raised her eyebrows in questioning anticipation. I stumbled back into the conversation.
“Yes, it was part time. I worked for the maintenance and housekeeping department of the university I attended. It helped pay the bills, basically. It wasn’t anything really professional. Sweeping, mopping, dusting, windows, and I ran one of those big floor waxing machines between semesters.” The rest of the interview ran like this. It lasted about ten more minutes and felt much the same the rest of them had. It also concluded the same way the others had. But in another way, an intangible way, it was also very different.
Jan stood up and extended her hand. I got up from the chair and took the hand with a sense of doom knowing what was coming next.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Nicholas, I’ll be in touch with you sometime this week.” There it was. I’d heard that one before. It was the interviewer’s way of saying, Good luck buddy. I hope you find a job elsewhere. In my experience they never contacted you later that week. It was a polite way to brush you off.
“Thanks.” I turned to leave.
“I mean it,” Jan added.
“Mean what?” I turned back to look her in the eye.
“I mean it when I say I’ll contact you later this week. You were thinking I was going to blow you off. I’d hire someone else over you and not bother calling you. That’s no doubt happened to you before. But that’s not the way I do things. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it.”
How did she know that was what I was thinking? I mean, it was almost verbatim the same words as had gone through my head.
I could see she was serious. She not only dressed business, she meant business. And that was what mattered. I somehow knew that everyone in cubicle world on the other side of the door behind me was terrified of this woman. They didn’t know what to do in the face of such naked authority. I also knew they shouldn’t be afraid. If anything she could be their strongest advocate if they were on the same side.
In that moment I liked Jan Fenstra very much. I had no problem with authority and no burning rebellious nature a younger man might possess. I was no mindless robot or no spineless yes-man. I was just looking for my place. I saw in this woman a person with the power to help me restore my dignity.
“Thanks for your honesty, too. I’ll look forward to your call.” And I did. This was beginning to feel like a real opportunity. Without another word between us I turned to the door, opened it and went through.