Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [129]
“I do like outdoor exercise,” Daphne mused.
“No, no, not a mailman,” her grandfather said. “I meant something behind a desk.”
She hated desk work. She sighed so hard she rattled her newspaper.
In the afternoons she would take a bus downtown to look in person—“pounding the pavement,” she called it, thinking again of her grandfather’s Depression days. She gazed in the windows of photographic studios, stationery printers, record shops. A record shop might be fun. She knew everything there was to know about the current groups. However, if customers asked her assistance with something classical like Led Zeppelin or the Doors, she’d be in trouble.
Thomas told her she ought to come to New York. She phoned him just to talk, one evening when she felt low, and he said, “Catch the next train up. Sleep on the couch till you land a job. Angie says so too.” (Angie was his girlfriend, who had recently moved in with him although Ian and their grandfather were not supposed to know.) But Daphne couldn’t imagine living in a city where everyone came from someplace else, and so she said, “Oh, I guess I’ll keep looking here.”
One Sunday she even phoned Agatha—not something she did often, since Agatha was hard to reach and also (face it) inclined to criticize. But on this occasion she was a dear. She said, “Daph, what would you think about going to college now? I’d be happy to pay for it. We’re making all this money that we’re too busy to spend. You wouldn’t have to ask Ian for a cent.”
“Well, thank you,” Daphne said. “That’s really nice of you.”
She wasn’t the school type, to be honest. But it felt good to know both her brother and sister were behind her. Her friends were more callous; they were hunting jobs themselves, many of them, or waitressing or tending bar till they decided what interested them, or heading off to law school just to appear busy. Nobody in her circle seemed to have an actual career.
At the start of her third week without work, her grandfather talked her into going to a place called Same Day Résumé. He’d heard it advertised on the radio; he thought it might help her “present” herself, he said. So Daphne took a bus downtown and spoke to a bored-looking man at an enormous metal desk. The calendar on the wall behind him read TUES 13, which made her nervous because an old boyfriend had once told her that in Cuba, Tuesday the thirteenth was considered unlucky. Shouldn’t she just offer some excuse and come back another time? It did seem the man wore a faint sneer as he listened to her qualifications. In fact the whole experience was so demoralizing that as soon as she’d finished answering his questions she walked over to Lexington Market and treated herself to a combination beef-and-bean burrito. Then she went to a matinee starring Cher, her favorite movie star, and after that she cruised a few thrift shops. She bought two sets of thermal underwear with hardly any stains and a purple cotton tank top for a total of three dollars. By then it was time to collect her résumé, which had miraculously become four pages long. She had only to glance through it, though, to see how it had been padded and embroidered. Also, it cost a fortune. Her grandfather had said he would pay, but even so she resented the cost.
All the good cheer she had built up so carefully over the afternoon began to evaporate, and instead of heading home for supper she stopped at a bar where she and her friends hung out on weekends. It gave off the damp, bitter smell that such places always have before they fill up for the evening, and the low lighting seemed not romantic but bleak. Still, she perched on a cracked vinyl stool and ordered a Miller’s, which she drank very fast. Then she ordered another and started reading her résumé. Any four-year-old could see that she hadn’t gone past high school, even