Yoharie (part sixteen)

Yoharie

Dawn

(part sixteen)

That was how she’d dressed at eighteen, her first job. A half-pay gimme, from her mother’s friend Diane.

“Dawn can come in four hours, afternoons.” Normal voice, then loud: “Can you file, alphabetize? Tina says you took typing.”

“Yeah, I can. Thanks, Diane.”

Dawn was hearing her graduation summer die from the kitchen, Diane and Tina discussing on the sofa, General Hospital on the TV. She was quartering slices of cookie dough, eating two, dropping two on the sheet. Her ears were on Rick Springfield’s lines.

Tina caught her the Monday after, drowsing through Good Morning America.

“Dawn! Get your shoes on! Put on a skirt, you have a job!”

She had scuttled from her mother’s station wagon, stuck with it. Her hair in a quick rubber band, torturing her scalp. A matronly dirndl (her own purchase, though), digging at her waist under a tee (slept in and not changed). Her patent leather church shoes were on without hose.

“Don’t be late again.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry. Tina says you want to be a Kelly girl.”

 Her sort-of aunt turned boss wasn’t fooling, so Dawn said: “I just figured…”

“When you get a job, you be on time, and you don’t make excuses.”

Diane turned, in turquoise, a polyester suit with two blots of whiteout at the hem, and led Dawn on a squeeze along filing cabinets. “You get one excuse today, you have to learn. But take notes when I tell you what to do, so you’re not asking what I already said. That’s good advice for you. For in the fall, when you go out looking.”

 Oh, so I’m not staying. Take notes, Dawn reminded herself, placed at a metal table, with a plastic Coke cup of pens and typewriter tools, a Selectric hiding hair-tangled paperclips…and an emery board, a loose Lee fingernail.

The A row of keys were ground shiny, stained dirty brown.

The office smelled like new carpet and cigarette smoke.

Diane, gone, surprised her by coming back.

“Oh, hi! I was just looking for…”

“Here’s a little notebook.” A promotional, H & R Block, notebook. “Use one of those pens.”

The pens didn’t write. Two doors away, you took things to get copies, and Dawn picked up a promotional pen. By five, her heels had blisters. She stood in the parking lot, squinting at the sun and sore, scanning the road for Tina’s car.

“We didn’t have cell phones,” Dawn told Giarma. “I’m thinking about my first job. A kid today wouldn’t have it so dismal.”

“There are no jobs.” Giarma came out, the skirt’s waist buttoned and the zip undone. “See, you thought you were fat, but you were skinny.”

“Maybe I was, but I made up for it.”

16

Yoharie

Yoharie (part seventeen)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)