Claire licks her lips. Not seductively, but because they were dry and she forgot her lip balm when she switched bags that morning. She has about seven lip balms scattered around her apartment and in different bags, but somehow she forgot to transfer one into her big tote bag before she ventured outside today. It’s mid-Autumn and the humid summer air is finally receding. She likes the cooler, crisper air that comes with Autumn, but she couldn’t stop licking her dry lips. She looks down and notices her ankles are also dry, and digging in her bag for lotion she realized she forgot that too.
She is sitting on a park bench in the middle of the city. The other half of the bench was occupied by an old woman when she first sat down, but the woman got up and walked away with a friendly smile after a few minutes. Claire will only sit next to old women at this park. She is wary of the older men and nervous around the attractive younger men. Old women are usually a safe bet; she feels comfortable smiling at an old woman.
Claire is at the park because she had a job interview downtown. The interview did not go well, but the weather was nice so she decided to stop and sit for a while before getting back on the bus. She is reading a book of short stories because she likes to feel like she has finished something and committing to a novel takes too long. She occasionally looks up at people walking by. If they are walking dogs she will look down and smile at the dog. At one point she gets distracted watching an old man feed pigeons. The pigeons are relentless, stepping all over the man’s feet and pecking at each other. One of them apparently had enough and takes flight across the stone path, over Claire’s head, and onto the grass behind her. She felt the bird’s wing brush her hair as it flew overhead. She touches the spot where the bird’s wing touched her. She knows pigeons are filthy animals, but there’s still something sweet about it. It’s still a bird. She glances over her shoulder and notices that this pigeon isn’t the typical blue and grey of the other city pigeons, instead its feathers are a mix of whites and tans. Kind of beautiful, she thinks.
Not that Claire is one of those annoying people who strives to find beauty in everything, just that she does sometimes see beauty in places others don’t bother to notice. Like the young father pointing out the little brown mice scurrying along the trolley tracks to his little boy. Or the bright white flower blooming out from the bottom of a spruce tree like it belonged there. She takes great joy in these small moments of beauty, but she also likes to keep them to herself. At one point she tried keeping a journal to capture these moments and images, but she found that in the act of writing it down the memory lost some of its magic.
An hour ago Claire was sitting across from an office manager interviewing for a job she needed but didn’t want. She knew she was overqualified for the position of a part time office assistant and she knew the interviewer knew it too. She knew the interviewer probably saw her master’s degree from a prestigious university and assumed (not entirely incorrectly) that Claire would be gone as soon as a better offer came along. What the interviewer didn’t know was that Claire hadn’t been able to go properly grocery shopping in over a month, that her credit card bill was way overdue, and that she had been saving every penny in hope that she would be able to make rent in a couple weeks. The interviewer didn’t know that Claire had resorted to stealing toilet paper from a bar in her neighborhood so she could avoid that annoying expense, or that she was running dangerously low on clean underwear because she hadn’t managed to save up enough quarters for laundry since the last load. The interviewer probably assumed that Claire’s parents were paying her rent. The interviewer didn’t know that Claire came from a working class family and through some crazy miracle had managed to get into this prestigious university and was now $80,000 in student loan debt and that she had recently run out of the excess student loan money she took out to survive the period of unemployment that she knew would come after graduate school, but that she naively thought would be over a lot sooner than it was.
During the interview Claire wanted to be truly honest with the interviewer: Look, we both know I’m overqualified for this job, but I really need it right now. It’s going to make a difference in my ability to continue to have a roof over my head. I am more than willing to work for less than I’m worth right now. You know I’d do a good job. I can assure you I would go above and beyond because that’s what I do. Have some fucking compassion. Of course she would never actually say any of these things. She didn’t want to appear desperate. Instead she tried to be polite, but she might have said "umm" too much and she really could have thought of a better example of a time she had to handle conflict.
Claire would send a nice email to the interviewer when she got home and thank her for her time, reminding her of why she would make such a wonderful addition to their team. But right now she was busy watching a small white dog chase a much bigger brown dog around in the grass.
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