answering phones
Jobs I had in New York in the nineties
On my morning walk, when I am crossing at the four-way stop, and cars are waiting, I feel the urge to run, but I hear Meg’s voice in my head. “Don’t run,” she says. “You have the right of way. They can wait.”
The first day I was in New York, I went with my brother to meet a friend of his from art school. She was leaving the city just as I was arriving, but he thought it would be good for me to make the connection. We met her downtown at the Village Gate to see the performance artist Penny Arcade. It was a show about sex and censorship that featured erotic dancers, improvisation, and even a moment when the audience was invited to dance on stage.
Afterwards, the three of us, exhilarated from the show, went to a small, dark bar and sat at a wooden booth next to a pinball machine. Lydia’s fingers were dressed in stacks of silver rings, her spiked hair midnight black. She twisted her lithe body on the bench across from me, pulling her knee up to her chest.
My brother told her I was looking for a place to live, but she had already sublet her apartment. “Do you have a job?” she asked me.
I said that I didn’t.
“You can have my job!” she said. “The pay is great.”
“What do you do?” I asked. I couldn’t believe the luck of it.
“I answer the phones for a house of prostitution,” she said. “All you have to do is answer the phones and arrange the dates…it’s a clean house.”
I pictured a building with no sign on the door, a narrow staircase, tidy rooms with clean white linens on the beds, then realized “clean” in this context might not refer to physical cleanliness but to something else.
Did Lydia sit in the vestibule of this building and answer phones with an agenda book laid out in front of her? Was she a receptionist? Did she let people into the building and give them a room number? Or did she answer these phone calls in her own home? I had no idea.
“Are you gonna take that job?” My brother asked me before he left to go back home.
“I don’t think so,” I said, and he laughed.
I made friends with the guy who worked at the front desk of the hotel where I was staying. He was an actor from Ohio, and he invited me to share pizzas and Snapple that he kept in a mini fridge below the desk.
I told him about Lydia and the job offer.
“You know,” he said, “the only person in the whole operation who is committing a felony is the girl who answers the phones, right?”
Arrangements in the city happened underground, quickly, and by word of mouth. There were traditional things like Help Wanted signs and classified ads, but they couldn’t keep up with the friend-of-a-friend connections, the immediate need, and the rumor mill.
I’d been living on Horatio Street for a couple of months when Meg, a friend of my roommate, Amberly, came over with a job tip. She had moved out of the apartment into her own place, but still came by our place regularly. Like Amberly, she was a model and possessed the casual, unbothered ease of a woman who knows she’s beautiful. She moved slowly and solidly like viscous liquid.
Once when Amberly and I were getting dressed to go clubbing, Meg said, “I don’t do nightclubs. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand in line and have some door guy tell me whether or not I can come in.”
She had a point, but I’d moved all the way from Kentucky. I wanted to see the clubs.
Another time, she stopped my story mid-sentence as I recalled my mad run down the subway platform and how I barely made it onto the packed car before the doors closed.
“You’ll never see me run for a train,” she said. “Why would I run for a big hunk of metal?”
Meg worked on Wall Street for a dinner cruise line. Party boats, they were affectionately called, though we weren’t supposed to call them that. They cruised around in the evenings, with views of the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan, serving food and drinks, and featuring live music or DJs. You could buy tickets for some of the cruises, but the boats could also be chartered, and this was Meg’s job: to sell and book these chartered cruises.
“We need a receptionist,” she told me, and arranged an interview for me with the manager.
I went to Daffy’s, a discount clothing store, and bought a navy blue skirt and a white blouse with navy pumps to match. Navy blue, a color I never wore, seemed conservative and professional.
I was nervous about the interview. I wanted the job, but I also didn’t want to embarrass Meg, who had vouched for me. I didn’t have any experience as a receptionist, with boating, the financial district, wearing pumps all day, or in the corporate world.
I rode the 2/3 to Wall Street and walked off the train with the slew of business people, newspapers tucked under their arms. I hurried up the stairs, my heels clicking along with all the other clicking heels, pretending.
The manager of Empire Cruises welcomed me into his office. He had a kind face and a mustache. I shook his hand. He asked me questions, and I answered them, calming myself with the thought that he looked like John Oates. When the interview was over, I met Meg outside, and we walked on cobblestone to the South Street Seaport, a shopping mall at the very tip of the island of Manhattan, near the place where the Empire Cruise boats were docked. We had lunch in the food court, then she went back to work, and I made my way back up to the West Village, where I changed into comfortable clothes.
I started my new job the next week. I sat at the front desk, the Empire logo behind my head. From my seat, I couldn’t see the rest of the office. My view was of the glass door and a rarely traveled beige hallway. I sat with a heavy, button-laden phone. When it rang, I answered, “Empire Cruises, how may I direct your call?”
I had a list of everyone’s extension. To direct a call, I had to put it on hold, call the extension, announce the caller, then unhold and transfer, unless the call was rejected, in which case I had to unhold and take a message. Several times a day, I accidentally disconnected the call instead of holding or unholding. Sometimes I couldn’t understand what the caller was saying and had to spell it out phonetically.
Once, a sponsor had called his salesperson several times and been denied. When I told him, “I’m sorry, he’s with a client right now,” one too many times, he yelled, “I’m a client, too!”
“I’m just a person who answers the phone,” I wanted to say.
Once, a caller stopped mid-sentence to tell me I should work for a phone sex line. “You’d be great at that,” he said. When I didn’t respond, he added, “Your voice is so sexy,” as if I hadn’t understood him the first time.
Once, one of the junior salespeople, who was also an actor, brought in cupcakes. “My girlfriend made them!” he said, bounding through the door with them like a court jester. I got first pick. Chocolate with chocolate-mint frosting.
Later, Meg said, “I never eat anything if I haven’t seen the kitchen.”
Donna trained me. She had been the receptionist once, before she was promoted to data entry. She was the first native New Yorker I’d met, and she lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, so far out that the train came above ground. She told me her commute to work took about an hour.
One morning, she asked me if I wanted to go to Century 21 with her at lunch. “I have to get some shirts for my husband,” she said. “He’s in Riker’s.”
She said it casually, like it was something to be expected. People go to prison sometimes.
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know of a Century 21 close enough that we’d be able to buy shirts and get back on time, but Donna was confident. As we walked, however, it dawned on me that she had a full hour for lunch.
“I’d better go back,” I said.
“You only get 30 minutes? Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
The store was hot and crowded, filled with shelves and bins and racks of clothing and accessories and odds and ends. All around us were fast-moving people pushing one another out of the way, but Donna was steady. I watched her choose five white T-shirts, running the fabric between her thumb and forefinger. She held them folded and stacked in the crook of her arm, then patted them with her other hand as if infusing them with a love and kindness that her husband would feel when he wore them.
On the way back to the office, we ducked into a Duane Reade because Donna said she needed one more thing. It was a pregnancy test. She slid her eyes over to me and arched her eyebrows as she paid for it.
That afternoon, she came back to my desk again and motioned for me to follow her to the bathroom. I leaned against the wall and studied the tile floor while Donna peed on the stick in the stall. She came out, and we stood there together silently. I watched the second hand on my watch and then told her when to look. “Positive,” she said, with the same calm voice she’d said “Rikers.”
“Congratulations,” I said, tentatively, and she smiled, but I couldn’t tell if it was a smile of happiness or resignation. Her hand drifted to her belly.
Once every couple of months, Empire hosted a cruise for the team. At five o’clock, support staff, the sales team, and the managers would all make our way down to the street and walk to the dock and across the shaky metal ramp onto one of the boats. There was a cash bar where we could buy tropical drinks and a DJ playing dance music, and sometimes there were hors d'oeuvres.
One time, it was a special dinner cruise with a live band instead of a DJ and a meal of salmon and rice with a light cucumber salad. I sat at a table with Meg, who unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse and shook her hair.
“This is why we do it,” she said.
One of the first things I did in the city as a tourist was climb the hot, narrow steps up through the body of the Statue of Liberty and look out the windows of her crown. Even though I had been inside her, it was surreal to cruise past her, to see her standing tall and green on her little island, holding her torch against the pink sunset.
Meg went to dance with one of the other salespeople, but I stayed in my seat and savored the fine mist of water on my face. I looked at Donna, who was leaning against the rail, her thumb hooked in the strap of her shoulder bag. She was gazing out beyond Liberty Island, beyond the harbor, beyond the boat to something else I couldn’t see.
I hoped whatever had landed her husband in prison was something like theft, drug charges, or answering a phone. Not violence, I pleaded with the air around me. Please, nothing violent.
Donna’s baby, whom I remember as a bump the size of a pumpkin seed, would be thirty-three now. I imagine he lives in Manhattan with his husband. Once or twice a month, they travel to Bay Ridge to visit his parents and the house where he grew up.
His husband notices how much he looks like his mother. They have the same nose and mysterious smile. It hasn’t always been easy, these visits or the relationship between the four of them, but they are moving into a slow acceptance, and he and his husband have a secret language of support, a way they look at one another in response to whatever mildly offensive thing has just been said.
His father, a large and quiet man who always slams the screen door, has jobs for him when they visit. They fix the leak in the upstairs bathroom and put mulch down in the garden. They work side by side and talk about the Yankees. He has always been aware of the trouble in his father’s past but has never known the details.
When he was a teenager, he danced in the living room with his mother. They shared a sense of humor that his father never quite understood. She tried to fix him up with the daughters of her friends, and sometimes he went on those dates. She was always disappointed when it didn’t work out. “Don’t be so shy,” she would tell him.
Once, just before he moved out, he stood at the top of the stairs and watched her sitting in her blue wingback chair, staring out the front window and silently weeping over some sorrow of the deep past she would never articulate, and he would never understand.
Now, she makes cherry pie every time they visit. She puts it in the center of the table on the patio with a stack of plates and forks and neatly folded napkins. He watches her hand land on his husband’s shoulder, then gently pat the side of his face, the way she’s always done to him, her son.
beautiful.