Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [30]
“I hate it.”
“Then you should quit. If you really hate it, you should quit. But you should do it now. You’ve been saying that you hate it for a long time, but the longer you wait, the harder it will be to leave.”
“I want to work at a publishing house,” Isabella said.
“Then you better get on it,” Mary said.
Isabella nodded. She hadn’t updated her résumé in five years. It took her a week to find the file, and when she did, she realized that she should just start over. “The last thing on my résumé is an internship at Harper’s Bazaar,” she said, looking at the piece of paper.
“You have to do it sometime,” Mary said. “Just get it over with.”
Isabella sent out e-mails to every single person she knew who might have a contact in publishing. She typed cover letters and perfected her résumé. She hounded the HR departments of every publishing house she could think of. She did not get one single interview.
“Why did I waste all this time?” Isabella moaned to Lauren one night. “Why didn’t I do this two years ago?”
Lauren didn’t say anything, and it didn’t matter. Isabella already knew the answer. She hadn’t noticed how much she hated her job when she was with Ben. He distracted her from the misery of list selling. And now, it just glared in her face.
“I will probably end up running the fucking company,” Isabella said. “I will probably be the best list compiler and maker in the whole world. And I’ll have Ben to thank for it.”
“That should be your acceptance speech,” Lauren said.
Mary called her, out of breath. “My brother’s friend Andrew works at Cave Publishing, and he said that they need a new assistant. I have the e-mail of the woman who’s doing the interviews, so e-mail her right now. Okay? Are you ready? I’ll read it to you now.”
“An assistant?” Isabella asked. At the list company, she had her own assistant.
“Isabella,” Mary said, with warning in her voice.
“What?”
“Just take the e-mail and send her your résumé. You have to start somewhere, okay?”
“Okay.”
Isabella sweated through the entire interview. Her upper lip had never been so wet, and she was sure she wouldn’t get the job. She assured the woman that she wouldn’t mind starting over as an assistant, that she wouldn’t mind a pay cut, and that she was eager to learn.
The woman took notes as Isabella talked. “I really want to make a change,” Isabella said. “I’m not challenged at my current job, and I’ve always wanted to get into publishing.” Isabella hoped she sounded desperate enough, but not pathetic.
She got the job and was offered a salary that was about half of what she was making. “So, I’ll eat macaroni and cheese a lot,” she said, trying to convince herself. Her parents told her they would help her out at the beginning. Isabella wished she could say, “No thanks, I’ll make it work!” but her new salary barely covered her rent, so she just said, “Thanks. Hopefully it won’t be too long.”
At her old job, people had treated Isabella like she was a savant. “So organized!” they would crow when they walked by her office. “So efficient!” they would cry when she doled out tasks. Now she sat in a cubicle that was covered in paper. “I don’t even know what to do with most of it,” Isabella admitted to Mary. “They keep handing me stuff, and I literally don’t know what to do with it.”
“You’ll get the hang of it,” Mary said. “Give yourself a break. It’s only been a few weeks.”
At night in her apartment, Isabella talked out loud more often. “I’m tired,” she said to the TV. “It’s exhausting having no idea what you’re doing all day,” she told the rug. “I think I’m just going to order Chinese,” she confessed to the coffee table, while lying on the couch.
“Maybe you should get a dog,” Lauren suggested. “Or a cat.”
“Lauren, if you ever tell me to get a cat again, we are not friends anymore. Okay?”
“Touchy, touchy,” Lauren said. Then she considered it and said, “That’s fair.”
“I met a guy,” Lauren told her. “He’s great.” Isabella immediately hoped that it wouldn’t work out, and then felt awful about that.