When I attended graduate school in Vermont, I trailed around
campus in an almost constant state of irritation, because I was
in Vermont. There is little else to do there (no baseball, no
sweating, no cutting of taxes or trees) except to be irritated
and perhaps graduate, which I did, stupidly.
Now I want to go back to Vermont.
You know what was beyond Vermont? Life. Life was beyond
Vermont. And it turns out (this never seemed to come up in college,
not in Victorian Literature, not in Gender Studies of Ancient
Cultures, not once) that life consists of words like calendar,
save, backup, carburetor, cellulite, void, quota, lease. Since
matriculating in college, Fey Theatre Major Guy, Beret-Wearing
Poetry Slam Girl and I had been surrounding ourselves with bright,
happy words: lexicon, paradigm, Eurocentric. But now: dividend,
premium, fax machine, overdraft. Life is where matriculation goes
to die.
When, exactly, did I lose control of this situation?
I was supposed to be famous by now. By my 25th birthday I was
to have slammed -- slammed -- The New York Times bestseller
list, started construction on the sprawling summer home in the
Colorado foothills and exchanged morning bon mots with my extremely
good friend Regis.
I am, instead, 26 and surrounded by stale Cheez-It crumbs, many
printer errors and hydrogeologists who actually say things like
"Time to make the doughnuts!" as the elevator doors slide open.
When the change of address form arrived last week from my alma
mater, I wrote "Freelance Writer" in the "Profession" blank because
there was no box to check for "Health Insurance Whore."
The hydrogeologists were never part of the Rich Famous Writer
Plan, which has been in effect since I was 14. I announced an
early-decision engagement with Saint Mary's College because I
was told that little girls who want to become big girls, literarily
speaking, attend tiny liberal arts colleges with lousy volleyball
teams and huge English departments. When I completed my Master
of Fine Arts in nonfiction writing at Bennington College, I fully
expected my magna cum laude birthright of a healthy 401K,
a box of 500 business cards and eight to 12 pending book deals.
I am not good for much else. Everyone around me knows better
than to ask me to add in my head. I can't sew, sing, hit, throw,
catch, cook or even drive very well. I never could dissect the
frog without hurling. I do not know my right from my left. Extended
contact with children makes me want to die; extended contact with
people in general makes me want to die. From an employment vantage
point, this leaves writing, and wobbly crop-circle creation.
And yet there isn't a tremendously large market for 17 pages
detailing precisely how much I hate Shania Twain. If there must
be a day job, I decided, I would sell myself out to an industry
that would nourish rather than drain my tortured writer's soul,
withered these past two years by such part-time pursuits as selling
museum admission tickets, a job I not only hated but which hated
me as well. "OK, you've got a $700 discrepancy," was not an uncommon
thing to hear at cash-out time.
The bothersome scientific aspects of it aside, I fawn over the
American space program -- for those who can't, lust. I moved to
Florida to take a job in education at the Kennedy Space Center,
where it became immediately apparent that the ability to recite
the seven Mercury astronauts in flight order means absolutely
nothing when a pharmaceuticals salesman from Topeka demands to
see the room in which the moon landing was staged.
Every single shuttle launch costs approximately half-a-billion
dollars; I was paid 10 bucks an hour. I put groceries and gas
on credit cards and sold roses at bars to bear the full cost of
three different prescriptions. "My master's degree and I thank
you," I would say to customers, stuffing singles and fives into
my plunging uniform bodice.
Once, as I stood at the front of a moving tour bus with a microphone
in one hand and a tiny pair of solid rocket boosters in the other,
a fifth-grader in the very last seat dumped an entire box of jawbreakers
on the floor. The red and orange and green and purple spheres
cascaded down the aisle, skittering through gift shop bags, tubes
of suntan lotion, bottles of $2 water. "This," I thought as the
candy hailed against my feet, "this is exactly what my professors
had in mind for me."
Then Columbia lifted off whole, circled the Earth and
came back home in horrible fiery chunks. The subcontractor I worked
for kept the doors of the Space Center gift shop wide open as
stunned tourists filed back to their rental cars parked in lots
named after spacecraft: Atlantis. Discovery. Endeavor. Columbia.
For weeks of milky aftermath, I slept 12 hours a day, otherwise
sitting very still and staring a lot.
And then for the first time in a year, I sat down to write.
I wrote a letter of resignation. On the day I walked out, my manager,
flanked by a security guard, stopped me in the parking lot to
search the bag I used to tote around my allotment of the company's
meager education equipment.
"It's empty," he said, acutely disappointed.
"So are you," I said, and left.
I fled to an engineering firm in Orlando, where I landed a very
nice tech writing job with a very nice desk and very nice dental
plan. At the end of the interview, I gazed down at the company
brochure before me, a visual assault of evenly cropped, sharply
colored engineers beaming at one another and the wastewater treatment
plants they had wrought. This, then, was how it was going to be:
lunch meetings, kicky screen savers, and long, spellbinding conversations
concerning the backup on I-4.
I moved into my own office with a life-size standup of Obi-Wan
Kenobi and an armload of swing music. The walls, empty and thick,
echoed when the phone rang. Somebody announced that it was Amy's
birthday and brought by a card for me to sign. I had no idea who
Amy was, could not recall meeting her, knew absolutely nothing
about her save that she was apparently a Pisces, but sent warm
salutations anyway, failing in the process to use the word "paradigm"
in any way, shape or form. The engineers, wary of this verbal
object, came to my door, took in the framed 12-by-12 picture of
Jimmy Buffett, and backed slowly away. The feeling was mutual.
I do not walk around my workplace; I hurtle. Hurtling lends
a touch of realism to whatever internal fantasy life is circulating
blood to my heart that day. It is the only way I know of to safety-valve
away the untapped creative energy screaming through me as I dutifully
cut and paste corporate resumes. Every trip to the ladies' room,
each coffee refill becomes a life-or-death dash through the hallways.
Others see me striding purposefully about to ferry grant applications;
I am actually, however, rushing to the side of Indiana Jones because
I and I alone hold the anti-venom for the snakebite he's just
received, and the machete-wielding savage behind me knows this
all too well.
When I return to my office I make observations for magnificent
essays that rarely grow past the Post-it Note stage and sit in
mortal fear of blasts from the intercom, for this may announce
yet another cost-benefits table to be formatted, another sewage
district for which to force fascination. I fling my arms out on
either side, struggling to maintain equilibrium as eight hours
heave and lurch beneath my ergonomic rolling chair.
Florida is a state of storms. It happens every single day in
the summer months: bright morning, climbing humidity, swirling
winds at lunchtime, then blam, the cable goes out. In
my windowless office on the 10th floor I jump at the thunderclaps,
stealing when I can into the heavily draped boardroom to face
down high angry clouds as rain blanks out parking garages and
fleeing tourists. The rain slams against the window I'm peering
through as my business-attired reflection is superimposed over
wind-torn Orlando. By the time I go home the storm has spent the
both of us; most days, I check my e-mail, type a couple of exhausted
paragraphs, then tear off my pantyhose and sink directly into
bed, the blank screen pulsing in the creeping dusk.
I heard an interview with National Thoroughbred Racing Hall
of Fame jockey Gary Stevens as I drove to work one day, one high-heeled
shoe pressing the brake as I negotiated toll booths and monstrous,
rumbling dump trucks. Stevens discussed the ideal form of the
American jockey, the immobile, "sits chilly" posture he must strike
as he balances on two inches of boot while his thousand-pound
mount flies along. You should be able, he said, to "set a glass
of champagne in the middle of my back at 40 miles an hour and
not spill a drop." The very best jockeys, it seems, stay out of
the way of the very thing pulling them into the money.
* * *
Mary Beth Ellis ('99SMC) writes and hurtles in Orlando, Florida.
She currently runs a weblog at www.BlondeChampagne.com.
(January 2004)
