Emily Books

Hilary Leichter

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781566895743
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In Temporary, a young woman's workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it's shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, "there is nothing more personal than doing your job."

This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

WATER WORK

I’m filling in for someone named Darla on the nautical voyage of an unmarked vessel. “Ahoy!” I say. I’m met with some ahoys in kind. I’m also met with some harrumphs and howdys and plain old hellos. I understand. Like any new company, they’re still working out the kinks. Still oiling the gears of their mission statement, garrisoning their prospectus. The prow of the ship has no mermaid, and the flag that flies has no logo.

“Not yet, but soon!” the pirate captain says. “We’re considering proposals.”

My new mates carry weaponry in varying degrees: a dagger here, a pistol there, a cannon on occasion. This is a relief. The worst kinds of offices are the ones where no one can tell who’s in charge. My new crew was once a company of internet pirates, but they rebranded. Delete a few syllables and lo, you have a new profession.

“There are only a few kinds of jobs in the world, it turns out,” says the captain, who is the type to pontificate and listicle on subjects varied and profound. “Jobs on land,” he continues, “jobs at sea, jobs in the sky, jobs of the mind, and working remotely.”

“You mean like working from home?” I ask.

“No,” the pirate captain says. “Working remotely is what we call being dead. Pirate lingo.”

“Oh sure! Like Davy Jones’s locker?”

“No, no,” he says, exasperated. “That’s where we keep the office supplies.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” he says with a slap on my back. “The world allows for periods of adjustment.”

And how grand it is to see that world! Most of the world is water, and so to my mind, I’ve now encountered the meat of the matter. Yes, my flaneur boyfriend makes his annual pilgrimage to Paris. But has he traveled the shivery narrows at the gut of the Atlantic? Excluding the part where his plane flies over the Atlantic? There’s salt in my nose and salt between my toes, and I can’t wait to send a postcard from my new, beautiful, briny life. She’s really going places, is something my boyfriends are maybe saying about me.

The predicted and dreaded seasickness aggregates somewhere at the back of my tongue. I try to hide it so as not to be caught in a resume fib. I keep a bucket close. When my stomach swings left, I lean starboard. When my stomach swings right, I lean port. In the process, I learn about starboard and port! I try to compensate for the waves roiling in my belly. I hang my head over the side of the ship, and the first mate of human resources finds me swinging there.

“I’m the first mate of human resources,” he says. He flips me across his broad shoulders, walks me down into the hull, and carries me to his office. I haven’t been carried in such a very long time.

“Sit here,” he says, placing me on his sofa, “until you’re fit to function.”

The human resources cabin is mostly bare. A large poster on the wall features a cat with a peg leg paw. “There is no Purr in Pirate!” reads the caption.

“Are you OK?” the first mate asks.

I nod, but the nodding is too much like bobbing.

“Great. Let’s assess the situation. Did the food make you ill? Or was it something one of your superiors said?”

“No, neither,” I say.

“Do you have a particularly sensitive gag reflex?”

“I don’t think so.”

“OK. Are you pregnant?”

“What?”

“If a woman is sick at work, she is probably pregnant. Those are the rules!”

“I’m not.”

“Great, great. I’m just covering all the bases. Because your resume here says you can, quote, totally handle seasickness.”

A lump rises in the back of my throat. I swallow it down, but swallowing is like swaying. I lean back into the cushions, but it’s really more like falling. The perspiration on my upper lip desperately needs attention.

“My bucket?” I ask, and he nudges it closer to me. “Thanks.”

“Not your bucket,” he says with a laugh. “Company property.”

“Right,” I say.

“By which I mean to say, treat it as such.”

“Right.”

“By which I mean to say, you probably wouldn’t want to relieve yourself on company property. Right?”

“Right.”

“Now.” He sits down in a swiveling chair across from me. The rotations of the wheels are disastrous. “About your alleged seasickness.”

“Oh no, it’s not that,” I try to explain, my face glistening with sweat. “Not seasickness.”

“No?”

“No,” I gag, and my head goes into the bucket. With a single swoop, he pulls my hair back from my face, and he doesn’t stop there. He produces a band from a drawer filled with such accoutrements and braids the length of my tangled mane. He’s done this before, I can tell, the yanking and the coaxing, the application of product. He pulls the braid forward over one shoulder and pins it around the crown of my head in a sort of, well, crown.

“This is a fresh, hot look,” he says while I wipe my mouth.

I do feel fresh, and hot. Then he puts his index finger at the base of my skull and gives my newly exposed spine a long, silent stroke. At first I think he’s picking up stray wisps at the nape of my neck, pinning them out of view. But no, it’s a different ritual, one I don’t recognize.

“In human resources,” he says, “we provide resources to make sure you’re as human as possible. I’ll leave you with some pamphlets about company property and resume accuracy. Here,” he says, and he puts the pamphlets in my lap. Somehow the literature on my legs soothes my stomach.

“Thanks.”

“For the seasickness,” he says, “there is a cure. It’s easy. Just think about how much you want the job.”

“I want the job very much!” I manage to say, wiping my mouth.

“That’s great. Because you know what happens to land legs that don’t acclimate?” He points to the peg leg kitten.

I give him a thumbs-up, which is all he needs. He smiles.

“Remember that I helped you! Remember, I’m your trusty HR mate. Helping is what mates do,” the first mate of human resources says. He extinguishes the cabin light with two damp fingers, closes the door, and lets me get some sleep.

Come morning, I’ve been terrified into excellent health. A note on the door reads, “A clean bucket is an acceptable bucket, and an acceptable bucket is the only kind of bucket worth filling.”

I file the daily logs and keep the desk materials neat and orderly. I swab the deck and stack the clean company buckets. I find a corner of clutter that hasn’t been dealt with properly, and I deal with it. I study The Pirate Book of Burdens, The Pirate Book of Crimes, and The Young Pirate’s Book of Crafts. The job blooms before me at its own pace: These things can’t be rushed.

They pay me decently on this boat, just as Farren promised, though I suppose I can’t judge the fairness of my salary, having no experience with boats. Then again, I do recall a skinny canoe from childhood, settling on the side of a grassy lake.

One particular paycheck comes in the form of three red stones, clear at their centers, taped inside a windowed envelope.

The man who handles the payroll has long, twisty hair and a dimple in his chin. He wanders the ship at night, repeating conversations from earlier in the day. He reminds me of my caffeinated boyfriend, the one I date for suspense. Sometimes he perches on a post, nose to the sky, flapping his arms ever so slightly.

“He’s filling in for our parrot, Maurice,” the executive assistant explains.

I see this parrot man every evening from afar, after I finish organizing the daily logs. I’m excited to meet another temporary.

When our paths finally cross, he stops me with his hand, or wing. He puts his other hand-wing on the small of my back and walks me to a quiet corner. He breaks character, the entirety of his face softening and hardening in unexpected ways. I think I notice a rapid growth of stubble where there is none. He’s brand new. He tells me that soon I will walk the plank.

“They’ll throw you overboard, just wait,” he says calmly. He’s not like my caffeinated boyfriend at all. His hand, still pressed against my back, doesn’t shake. His hand, as steady as a wall.

“Sorry?”

“Just wait. You’ll walk the plank.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“I’m just saying,” he says, then he walks away, as if saying something out loud is ever a minor thing. He rearranges his body to once again replicate Maurice the parrot.

I don’t pay much attention to him. No one does. Every office has a long-haired man who doesn’t trim his sideburns, who tells his coworkers things they don’t want to hear, who does a passable impression of a bird. If he gets under my skin, I can report him to the first mate of human resources. Or I can go to my desk, the miniature porthole where I watch the waves and feel at ease. The view isn’t life changing, but it’s nice. I’ve seldom had a window at my workspace, and certainly none with an ocean lookout.

Most everyone else is friendly in an affirmative, nodding sort of way. There’s a woman in a patchwork skirt who makes conversation with me every morning, waiting in line for grub.

She says, “Good morning, Darla!”

I say, “Good morning to you!”

She looks supremely disappointed shoveling hash browns onto her plate, knowing I’m not Darla, that I have no desire to be Darla, that I’m not even in character as Darla, that I’m only humoring her. It takes an aggressive empathy to accurately replace a person. A person is a tangle of nerves and veins and relationships, and one must untangle the tangle like repairing a knotted necklace and wrap oneself at the center of the mess.

I concentrate over my scrambled eggs. I try to feel Darla’s absence as it relates to every other person, using an ancient meditation technique that temporaries sometimes find helpful. It’s not a standard brand of meditation. In fact, the average employee might call it “staring.” The woman in the patchwork skirt sits alone but stares back at me with quiet ferocity. I sense Darla is someone both loved and feared, and I try to adjust my temperament to properly fill her boots. I slap a lot of backs and laugh a lot of laughs, and other times I walk the deck with stern and hollow eyes. A little of this, a little of that.

“Not bad,” the captain says, encountering me on one of my jaunts. “Not bad at all.”

“Thanks,” I say, but then I wonder, Would Darla give thanks?

Under a sunset sky and over a dinner of fish chowder, my cowork-ers explain what Darla would never do.

“Never would Darla do to others as they would do to her,” says the pirate captain.

“She would do them one better!” says his executive assistant, who’s always stealing punch lines for himself. The captain rolls his eyes.

“Never would Darla steal a lady’s pudding,” says the woman in the patchwork skirt, “especially if the pudding was clearly labeled with the name Pearl.”

“Never would Darla brew herself some coffee,” says the executive assistant, “then retrieve the coffee and leave the old grounds sitting there for no purpose other than to prevent someone else from easily brewing a fresh pot of coffee. Never would Darla not brew a fresh pot after she had enjoyed her own coffee, and this is the most important bit, write this down: Never would she claim credit for the new, fresh coffee she brewed, for a fresh pot of coffee without credit is like a love note in your locker—it’s just magic, and if you take credit, you might as well not have made any coffee ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Onboarding
• City Work
• Water Work
• First Work
• Blood Work
• Memory Work
• Sky Work
• Paper Work
• Home Work
• Post Work
• Exit Interview
• Acknowledgments
• Funder Acknowledgments
• The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press