Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [111]
“What’ve you got there, Bicka-Beck?” David asked. He was sitting on the floor aiming the remote control at the television, switching channels every time a commercial came on. Above him on the windowpane were reflections from the television screen, jerking and dancing across the glass.
“A dental assistant,” Rebecca said, from where she sat at the table. She circled the ad with her pen. “Experience preferred, but they’ll train if they have to.”
“Oh, sweetie,” said David, looking at the television. “People’s mouths?”
There was no way around it, jobs were a problem for her. The only job Rebecca had ever enjoyed was a job she had one summer at the Dreambeam Ice Cream Machine. The manager was drunk every day by two o’clock and he let his help eat all the ice cream they wanted. They’d give the kids who came in huge ice cream cones and watch their eyes get big. “ ’S okay,” the manager would say, weaving between the ice cream freezers. “Run the place broke, I don’t give a shit.”
Right before Rebecca had moved in with David, she’d been a secretary at a big firm of lawyers. Some of the lawyers would buzz her on the phone and tell her to bring them coffee. Even the women lawyers did this. She kept wondering if she had the right to tell them no. But it didn’t matter—within a few weeks, they’d sent a woman over to tell her that she worked too slow.
“Remember, sweetie pie,” David said, switching channels again. “Confidence is the name of the game.”
“Okay,” said Rebecca. She kept on circling the ad for the dental assistant until the circle took up almost half the page.
“Go in with the attitude they’re lucky to get you.”
“Okay.”
“In a nonthreatening way, of course.”
“Okay.”
“And be friendly but don’t talk too much.” David pointed the remote control and the television switched off. The end of the living room was dark. “Poor old sweetie pie,” said David, standing up and walking to her. He put his arm around her neck and squeezed playfully. “We should just take you out to the pasture and shoot you, poor old thing.”
David always fell asleep right afterward, but a lot of nights Rebecca lay awake. That night she got up and walked into the kitchen. There was a bar across the street that you could see from the window, a noisy place—you could hear everything that happened in the parking lot, but Rebecca liked having the bar there. On nights when she couldn’t sleep, she liked knowing there were other people awake. She stood there thinking of the man in the story, the ordinary, balding man sitting alone in his office at lunchtime. And she thought of her father’s voice, how she had heard it in her head. She remembered how one time he had said to her, years ago, There are some men in the world that when they lie down beside a woman, they are no different from dogs. She remembered how once, a few years after her mother left, Rebecca announced she was going to go live with her. You can’t, her father said, without looking up from his reading. She gave you up. I’ve gone to court. I have sole custody.
For a long time, Rebecca had thought it was spelled s-o-u-l.
She watched a police car pull into the parking lot. Two policemen got out and the flashing lights stayed on, the edge of them zinging blue through the window, across the sink and the Maalox spoon. There had probably been a fight—a lot of nights there were fights in the bar. Rebecca, standing at the window, felt a tiny smile inside her getting larger—how delicious it would be: that one moment of perfect joy, propped up and righteous with booze, to let that first punch fly.
“Feel this,” said David, flexing his muscle. “Really.”
Rebecca leaned over her cereal bowl and touched his arm. It was like touching frozen earth. “That’s amazing,” she said. “That really is.”
David stood and looked at himself in the toaster. He flexed both arms together, like a boxer showing off before a crowd. Then he turned side-to and looked at himself that way. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Not bad.”
The only mirror Rebecca’s father had in their house was the one that hung