Temporary Insanity Page 2

  Some favor, I thought.

  “Fix the Kaplan papers. And send in the Melbas.”

  “Yes,” I said meekly, feeling my blood pressure rise by the second. I dropped the Kaplan documents on my desk, then ushered in Eusebia Melba, along with Carmen, Luis, Carlos, Orlando, and Mariella, who packed away the last of the potato salad before smoothing out her skirt and joining her mother. Mrs. Melba’s youngest daughter, Cookie, remained with her infant son Enrique, breast-feeding him in the reception area.

  Uncle Erwin cleaned something out of his ear with his right forefinger, then began to explain to the family, loudly, as though Mrs. M. were deaf—and in halting English, as though it were his own second language—the significance of today’s visit. Mrs. M.’s English was pretty good, though not stellar. I discreetly whispered a few words in my uncle’s ear.

  He activated the intercom. “Hilda!” he yelled. “Can you get in here for a few minutes?”

  So much for subtlety, I thought. And why bother with such formalities as the intercom button? As Hilda translated Uncle Erwin’s sentences, I handed each of the Melbas their physical exam sheets to review. Mrs. M. followed every word of type with her index finger, moving it along the text as if it had been written in braille. At one point she frowned and looked up at Hilda. “Que?”

  Hilda followed the client’s gaze back to the page. “Yo no se,” she said, sensing a storm in the offing. From her point of view she was being paid to put up with Mr. Price’s shit, not Mr. Balzer’s.

  Mrs. Melba reached across the desk and handed the paper to my uncle. She pointed to the place where I’d listed her injuries. Uncle Erwin feigned shock and total ignorance. “Alice, what’s this?” He showed me the document.

  Oops. I’d mistakenly given her a broken wrist and apparently had attributed her broken ribs to another member of her family. I gathered up the physical exam sheets and quickly scanned the rest of them for additional errors. I’d gleaned the information from the legal pleadings Uncle Earwax had dictated—although, knowing his scant attention to detail, I should have double-checked and looked at the individual medical reports on my own. I usually do.

  I looked at my uncle. “I took this from your dictation,” I said, showing him the sheaf of papers. “You must have told me that—”

  “What?!” Uncle Erwin thundered. “Alice, how the hell could you be so stupid?! Estupida!!” he added for emphasis, waving his arms and wildly gesturing in my direction, in case the clients hadn’t comprehended him. “You went to the best schools, you’ve been working for me for two years already, and still you make stupid mistakes like it’s your first day on the job. Louise could do your job better than you do it and she can’t even manage to take a simple phone message.”

  I stood, shaking, in my uncle’s office, feeling hot tears begin to well up. Carmen Melba fished in her red leather purse for a tissue and handed it to me. This wasn’t the first occasion when I’d been torn between sticking up for myself and protecting my uncle—not just because he’s my mother’s brother, but because he’s the attorney his clients trust and respect.

  You don’t have to take this, you know.

  But he’s my uncle. He’s family.

  He’s abusive. Just because you’re related to him, it doesn’t give him the right to treat you this way.

  But—

  I know you’ll try to make a million excuses for him because you love him…“He’s stressed, he’s having a bad day, suffering from heartburn…” Alice, wake up! And look to yourself, for once.

  Uncle Erwin tossed the physical exam sheets at me. “Take these inside, correct them, and reprint them,” he commanded. He shrugged at Mrs. Melba and threw up his hands as if to wash them of my sins. “Estupida,” he repeated, jerking his head in my direction.

  I give myself good advice from time to time, but I very seldom follow it. Now I felt I had no choice. Uncle Earwax had pushed me one step too far. My face flushed, my cheeks wet with tears, my heart pounding, I leaned down to whisper something to my uncle. Something I’d been wanting to say to him for a long time.

  “Fuck you,” I hissed in the quietest, most controlled tone I could manage.

  Then I grabbed my coat and purse and walked out the door.

  I was seething, and determined to change my life. From the back of my appointment book, I pulled out a slightly rumpled clipping I’d been carrying around for months.

  So, Uncle Earwax had called me stupid. In front of a room full of clients. Which is how I happened, the following morning, to be sitting on the carpet of Turbo Temps’ Forty-second Street office on the unluckiest of floors—the thirteenth.

  I slid my tush against the apricot-colored wall of Turbo Temps’ waiting room and balled up my tweed coat, sticking it between the small of my back and the painted Sheetrock. For the entertainment pleasure of the job applicants, suspended from the ceiling were three television screens, each showing the same Schwarzenegger film, with the volume mercifully muted. Someone was having a horrific allergic reaction to the enormous bunch of lilacs displayed on the glass coffee table and was sneezing uncontrollably without benefit of a handkerchief. All of the furniture in Turbo Temps’ nicely appointed waiting area was occupied. People were sprawled around the room the way my theatrical colleagues camped out in the Actors’ Equity lounge during the wee hours of the morning, just to sign up for auditions. A couple of Broadway shows had recently closed and a major national tour had just ended, which was why the temporary employment agency was flooded with bright, educated people all looking for work. Temp agencies’ rosters typically overflow with the names of actors, writers, and musicians, all in need of a job to tide them over until the next gig. In fact, I’m willing to bet that if all the actors in New York who routinely work in office buildings in order to make ends meet gathered on the same day at the same time on the pier at Twenty-third Street, the concentrated weight would force Manhattan to dip precipitously into the Hudson.

  There weren’t enough clipboards to go around. I had been told to take a numbered ticket as if I were on line at Zabars’ appetizing counter at eleven A.M. on a Sunday. Finally, I snagged a clipboard and a Turbo Temps employment application, or rather “employement aplication,” as it was spelled at the top of the form.

  Hmmmm.

  I wondered what to write in the narrow box where I was supposed to explain why I’d left my last job. It did not appear to be multiple choice. I have a habit when I’m anxious, and I have a ballpoint pen in my hand, of clicking and unclicking the spring mechanism at the top. The waiting area was surprisingly quiet for the size of the crowd encamped there, although there were a few people with their cell phones surgically attached to their ears speaking in hushed but hurried—and occasionally harried—tones to their brokers, their agents, or their mothers.

  My pen-clicking tic got me a few dirty looks as I struggled to find an appropriate, truthful-yet-vague answer to the obvious question of what I was doing there. From a literal perspective, not an existential one. Still, I had to look within for some much-needed guidance.

  Okay, why did I leave my most recent employment?

  Because my own uncle called me stupid in front of a room full of people.

  Well, are you stupid?

  No, of course not.

  So why did you leave, then?

  Because my uncle humiliated me…

  Lots of bosses humiliate their employees. Sad, but true. If you have such thin skin, we can’t place you with an attorney’s office. The receptionist will eat you for breakfast.

  Okay, not humiliate, then. He made me feel…insignificant. He…belittled me?

  Belittled?

  Belittled.

  Thus went my conversation with myself. Yes, Uncle Earwax belittled me.

  And what happens, Alice, when someone feels belittled?

  They feel…smaller?

  Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. And if you feel smaller, then you’re not as big as you used to be or feel. You’re a size or more smaller, rig
ht?

  I looked down at the “employement aplication.” Why had I left my most recent job? they asked. I wrote a single word: “downsized.”

  Well, as a great man once said, a lie is a sort of myth and a myth is a sort of truth.

  Finally, my number was called and I was ushered into a small, cramped inner office overlooking an air shaft. This cubby bore no resemblance to the waiting area, where it was clear Turbo Temps spent the lion’s share of their interior decorating budget.

  “Hi, I’m Tina,” said a young woman, who seemed barely old enough to be out of school herself. She extended her hand. “Can I pour you some coffee?”

  I accepted her offer and she emptied the murky contents of a glass carafe into a paper cup and handed it to me. Good thing I drink it black because she neglected to offer me any milk or sugar.

  “So, Alice, welcome to Turbo Temps. I’ll be your employment counselor.”

  I looked down at the ad in my hand. “What happened to Wally and Stacie?”

  “Stacie’s on maternity leave and Wally’s at the track,” Tina replied with a forced cheeriness. “So it’s me and Linda here all by ourselves today.”

  Me and Linda? Shouldn’t it be “Linda and I”? No, wait…it’s “Linda and me,” isn’t it? Probably not a good thing for someone seeking a secretarial job to have a brain fart about grammar. Then again, it’s probably worse for a placement counselor.

  I perched on the chair opposite Tina’s desk. The upholstery was the worse for wear and there was a mysterious stain on the seat. While Tina reviewed my job application and résumé, I surveyed her terrain. Her certificates in Personnel Placement and Legal Assistant from Interboro Community College were suspended in dusty black frames on an uninspiringly “greige” wall. There was a large travel poster of the Amalfi Coast, slightly crinkled, with the corners frayed and torn. I took a guess that Tina had probably carted it from job to job. I picked up one of her business cards from a black plastic holder facing me on the desk. It read: Tina Benedetto, Turbo Temps Employement Consultent.

  Oh, dear.

  Alice, you shouldn’t judge people on their ability to spell (or not). Plenty of geniuses were lousy spellers. Just look at…oh, Christ. No, I’m not thinking Christ was a crappy speller, although Aramaic is probably a bitch to master…just, “Oh, Christ, I can’t think of a famously shitty speller so I can make my point to myself.”

  Tina looked up from my application. “Ohhh, you were downsized,” she said sympathetically. “That’s happening so much lately. In fact it’s getting harder to find permanent positions for people because of it.” Her face brightened. “You may be in luck, though. Placing temps is usually easier because the employers don’t have to pay benefits, and if they find themselves suddenly overstaffed, they just let you go.” She looked at my résumé again. “Okay, you’ve got a good background, education, all that stuff, so if you’ll just follow me, we’ll give you a typing test and a legal secretarial aptitude test, and after that, we’ll determine how to place you.”

  Eek.

  This is where I got nervous. I suppose I’d known on some sort of intellectual level that I would probably have to take a test, but I’ve never performed well in situations where I feel like I’m being judged. Not a great thing for an actress, where every audition situation is a short but hellish sixteen-bar up-tempo or a monologue-delivered-out-of-context-to-a-blank-wall equivalent of a typing test.

  Tina led me into a long, narrow room full of computer terminals and electric typewriters, the dinosaurs of the technological age, though many New York City law firms still use them to type forms that they’re too cheap to download onto their computer system. This was not my first visit to an employment agency; therefore, I knew that sometimes the typewriter keyboards are specially rigged so that if you make a mistake, you can’t backspace over it and correct it. My “employement consultent” seated me on a dirty orange swivel chair in front of one of the terminals and showed me the “test”: a single-spaced sheet of text that I was supposed to retype, verbatim, first into the computer and then on the typewriter. Tina picked up a black plastic timer and set the clock.

  My palms became moist; I could feel beads of sweat begin to form on my brow, and a zit on my chin swell to the size of a suburb. I suddenly developed a raging headache.

  All you need to do is retype the page, Alice. As quickly and as accurately as you can. Just think of it as a purely mechanical exercise.

  Hah! I’m self-taught as a typist, and while I’m fast, I still need to look down at the keys. This is where my actress memory stands me in good stead. I looked at a sentence or two, memorized them, and began typing, repeating the process as necessary, while on either side of me, other applicants underwent the same test. The brightly garbed girl on my right muttered each word aloud as she typed. The man on my left, in a pin-striped suit so freshly dry-cleaned I could still smell the chemicals, cursed under his breath with practically every keystroke. An older woman seated with her back to me was typing so fast, I was developing an instant inferiority complex. It was hard to keep my concentration.

  As I struggled to focus and tap-tapped away on the keyboard, I wondered why employment agencies aways give typing test text that has next to nothing to do with the types of jobs in the offing. I continued to type: In order to bake the perfect batch of brownies, it is important to blend the batter so that bubbles form on its surface, though overbeating will cause their consistency to be less moist, and therefore, less desirable. What the heck was this? I didn’t think Turbo Temps would be sending me over to Betty Crocker.

  The woman on my right released a string of expletives when, in readjusting the angle of the testing text, she accidentally knocked the contents of her coffee cup into the keyboard. She looked over at me, terrified. I didn’t know what I could do to help, and my own little meter was ticking away. I felt badly that the best I could offer her was a sympathetic look.

  Across from me, the gray-haired speed demon went into a full-fledged panic when the system suddenly froze on her and she was unable to effect a single keystroke. “I don’t know what to do,” she repeated helplessly.

  “Maybe you should wait for Tina to come back,” I suggested. I felt so sorry for her; still, she was raising my blood pressure several notches.

  My speed and accuracy weren’t bad on the computer, but the typewriter began to trip me up because my muscle memory was so accustomed to using the correcting key, which of course had been disabled. I ended up wasting a lot of time trying to make corrections that I knew were impossible to do, then stressing out over the number of uncorrectable errors. I winced when the timer’s little bell rang and Tina came to collect my efforts.

  If I’d nearly given myself an anxiety attack with the typing portion of the evaluation, it was nothing compared to the legal aptitude test Tina then handed me. I returned to the computer and attempted to format the dummy legal pleading in front of me. Too bad there wasn’t a crash course in “legal formatting for dummies,” because everything I had learned had been on the job from Uncle Earwax. I hadn’t a clue about which “hot keys” were required to create footnotes, blacklining, tables of authorities, and other terms of art in the lexicon of legal arcana. I wasn’t even sure what a “table of authorities” was.

  My efforts proved disastrous. My headache had reached Mach 1, I was in a cold sweat, on the verge of tears, and no doubt I was also breaking out into a rash.

  Tina was pretty hard on the applicant whose computer had fritzed out. It hadn’t been her fault, and essentially Tina was accusing her of lying on her résumé about her ace typing skills. “You only scored thirty-five words per minute with two errors,” she tsk-tsked, “and you claim to type ninety words per minute.” She switched into a patronizing tone that didn’t befit her extreme youth. “Our clients do not take kindly to, well, liars,” she said bluntly. “I know you’ve been out of the job market for a while and you’re anxious to reenter the workforce, but I’m not going to be able to do anything for you if we
have ‘character issues.’”

  The applicant looked stunned and tried to stammer out the circumstances under which her typing score ended up so low, but Tina’s assault on her integrity had gotten the better of her emotions.

  I couldn’t control myself. I never can sit idly by in situations like this. “Her computer froze,” I said. “And instead of assuming the worst of this lady and attacking her, why can’t you just give her the benefit of the doubt and retest her on a different computer?”

  Tina gave me a look of surprise, as though the notion hadn’t occurred to her.

  “And call a technician to fix that unit,” I added, pointing to the rogue CPU.

  The employment consultant blinked once or twice, gave a little tug on the hem of her jacket, seated the gray-haired applicant in the chair I had just vacated, and wound the timer. Then she perused my scores and asked me to follow her. “Are you sure you were a legal secretary?” Tina frowned as we headed back to her room.

  I explained the multitasking expected of me in Uncle Erwin’s office, adding that while it was true that I had some law firm mileage under my belt, it had indeed been in learn-as-you-go situations. Yet I assured her that I was a quick study and a fast learner.

  “Well, what sort of job were you looking for?” she asked me.

  “A job in a law office where I have as little as possible to do with lawyers.” Well, it was the truth. Legal skills pay more than regular secretarial ones, which was why I had gone to a legal temp placement agency in the first place. It’s just that I really hate lawyers, especially if they’re like Uncle Earwax. And his colleagues. And his adversaries. But, since I need a day job to pay the rent, I might as well try to make as much money as I can. Then, if I get cast in a show, which may pay me next to nothing, I’ll have a financial cushion to fall back on.

  Assuming you don’t go shoe-shopping, Alice.

  “I was hoping for the graveyard shift in a word-processing center,” I said to Tina. Maximum salary for minimum attorney exposure.