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The Job

Anne Turner Taub

    Disbelief oozed out of every pore. Disbelief alternating with total numbness. Is this what they mean by denial, Martha Gilmartin wondered. Whatever it was, she was denying it right down to her stomach, which thought it was on a roller coaster hurtling earthward. After l5 years in a job which she had loved, she had been told that she must leave in one week. Downsizing, they called it—a horrible word. She felt downsized all right, her normal 5 feet five height felt as though she were two inches tall. She was 61. Where was she to go? Who would hire her now? She had felt very proud that she still had a job while others her age lived on pensions or social security. It had given her a feeling of confidence and a secret sense of superiority to everyone of her peers without a job. Now she felt totally powerless—her whole identity as a human being gone.
    She had been a professor, teaching fashion design at a small college and now she was nothing. Was suicide the answer? No, she couldn’t handle that thought—at least not right away. Was there to be a nursing home in her future? Horrors. She was perfectly healthy, perfectly capable of teaching, teaching, and teaching. She had a family, but they would say it’s time to take it easy, what do you need that job for, anyway. If you need money, we can help you out. The thought of living on others, even her own children—scary—a fear that everyone over a certain age must feel.
    Martha looked down at the cup of coffee developing its own signs of old age as she sat there in total shock, in a restaurant where the waitresses didn’t know how to tell the old lady they needed the table. A part of a poem from her schooldays crossed her mind—how did it go—something like:

“A primrose by the river brim,     A yellow primrose was to him,     And nothing more.”

    That’s what she was—a flower, really a weed, by the river waiting to be washed away by the next wave that came along. What’s with the self-pity, she told herself, that won’t help but I don’t care.
    “Hey, Martha, what are you up to these days? I haven’t seen you in a long time.” She looked up. Tom Johnson. A friend of her late husband. Should she pour her troubles out to him? She didn’t really know him well enough. Anyway, she knew what he would say, “Oh, don’t worry, with your experience you’ll find another job right away.”
    Tom sat down. He began to tell one of his jokes. He always started a conversation with a joke—a way to cover his shyness. As Martha sat there, silently, isolated, numb, Tom looked at her. “Martha, I have to talk to somebody. I just lost my job.”
    Martha looked at him. Was this a sick joke? Was there really someone in the world asking her for sympathy because he had lost a job? Life wasn’t just putting a knife in her back; it was laughing with glee as it twisted.
    “I know we don’t really know each other that well, but I have to talk to somebody or I’ll go crazy. My wife can’t understand the way I feel and I have this feeling you might. You always seemed pretty sensitive.”
    His wife doesn’t understand him. Martha smiled, Buddy, she thought, I understand all right—too well. “I can’t help you, Tom,” she said, “I’m in the same boat.”
    Tom looked at her in amazement. When did this happen? She told him about it—she told him all about it. All about her feelings of helplessness. He listened; he brought in his own feelings. They almost cried together.
    When they left the restaurant, they went their own ways. She felt better for a while. Then the numbness and disbelief returned. The week and the term ended. The dean, a healthy, overweight young man of 35 greeted her with an optimistic grin at life, born of the confidence that with his youth and credentials he could get another position anytime he wanted. He wished her good luck and benevolently added that if registration increased, she might be able to come back as an adjunct. Part-time did not carry the benefits or prestige of a full-time position and though it made him feel better to say it, to her it was the ultimate disgrace. At that moment she looked at his smile—the smile of a do-gooder—and hated him.
    A week later Tom called her. Could they meet for coffee? He was 58 and having a hard time finding a job. His wife didn’t say anything but he knew she hated having him at home all the time—she had bought a pillow for the living room couch which announced in colorful hand-embroidered letters, “For better or worse, but not for lunch.” His grown-up, well-employed children had no idea why he didn’t love his retirement—all that free time to play tennis and golf.
    They began to meet regularly. Martha realized that this was the first time she had ever had a male friend where the basis for the relationship was just that, a friendship. She began to accept her situation, as it sunk in that, at her age, full-time teaching in her field on a college level was the wispiest of fantasies, she started to look for part-time teaching jobs. She got up in the morning with no place to go except to find herself at the end of an unemployment line once a week. She told Tom about those feelings—he knew. She even made him laugh about it. She told him how she felt on the unemployment line—she told him about the clerks and their individual personalities as they highhandedly, or indignantly, or arrogantly or indifferently took her unemployment booklet, and as she mimicked them, they forgot their troubles for a moment and laughed.
    Tom, who had been a manager in a huge computer corporation, now took a job as a computer salesman, being paid on commission. Which meant he was part-time in a sense, too. Nobody cared where he went or what he did. There were no benefits, no structure. No one in the company really considered him an employee because they rarely saw him. It was hard to sell computers these days—the competition was fierce. He had taken the job primarily to get out of his wife’s way. Martha understood and in listening was able for that moment to forget herself. He told Martha about the way he felt having no medical benefits for his family anymore. No status among his employed friends who felt invulnerable, as teenagers feel invulnerable until the first time they are in a serious accident. Martha realized that in talking to Tom, something was happening to her. She began to realize that sharing thoughts and feelings with Tom had become very valuable to her—that this was what real friendship was all about—not having coffee with a girlfriend and discussing diets and fashions. She realized that she had found something precious—something she had never had before. Teaching had mostly been a one-way thing—she talked to—no, at—the class and rarely did she get real interaction about anything but the work assigned.
    Without realizing it, she began talking to her friends in a different way and suddenly they were talking to her in the same way that Tom did. It wasn’t about losing jobs—it was about husbands who didn’t care, children who did destructive things to themselves, illnesses that had become chronic and depressing, incomes that never seemed to be enough to leave space for financial ease—were these the same people she had always known?
    When the dean called her to teach one course as an adjunct, she took the job—no longer afraid of loss of prestige. She had a new relationship with her students and suddenly she found that they had lives, too. They invited her to their weddings, their bar mitzvahs, their baptisms. They told her about husbands who drank away their money, boyfriends who wouldn’t marry them, lovers that physically abused them. The dean responded to the liking the students had for her and gave her another course to teach. Word got around and registration for her courses increased. She told Tom about her new friends, her new students, her new courses.
    Tom hesitated a moment, then told her he had decided to open his own company servicing computers in the basement of his home. He said, “There’s something I have been thinking about—it’s a crazy new idea, never been done before, but I think I would like to try it.”
    “That’s great”, she said, “Now, if ever, is the time to take a chance.”
    “Well,” he said, “I’m glad you feel that way, because you are a part of my new plan.”
    She swallowed. What was she getting into? She liked Tom, but did he want her to invest in his company. She certainly did not have the discretionary income to do that. She liked Tom but she didn’t like him that much.
    Tom went on. “You are a fashion instructor. I know computers are coming out in new colors on a limited scale. But I thought it might be a new device to have computers come out in many different colors—it is just a selling technique that might appeal to women who wanted their computers to fit in with the rest of the décor in their homes or offices. What do you think? Of course, I won’t ask you to invest anything. Your salary will be commensurate with the results of our enterprise. Interested?”
    Martha grinned. “Yes, I’m interested. But why stop at colors—why not produce them in different patterns as well—plaids, stripes, match-your-sofa designs?” With that, she stood up and shook Tom’s hand in a gentleperson’s agreement.

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