Karen Heuler
how i got the job i liked
I had a pretend baby for a while. Well, you know, at a certain point a woman is expected to have a child. A blessed event or a horrible surprise, take your pick. Getting the men all rattled, roping them in. On the other hand, if you say you have a baby, it provides a lot of excuses; that’s how I viewed it. Use society’s traps against society. So I said I was having the baby on my own after my boyfriend left the state. I would have told him if I’d known I was pregnant (I’m pretty sure I would, by the way), but I’ve always been irregular, not that you’d want to know, especially if you’re a guy because guys can talk all kinds of shit but please don’t bring up intimate woman things and call it hygiene or whatever. I know men and their squeamishness well enough.
I’m squeamish, too, so I would never actually have a baby. I said I was pregnant because I missed work or was late a lot, but then they made me leave because there was no pregnancy. They got a bit annoyed. I know I could have said there were complications, but I’m not the sort of person to lie about such serious things.
And it seemed like a lot of trouble, getting my facts straight about what happened. I just said, finally, that I made a mistake, I wasn’t pregnant, it was probably the flu or something and they stopped being guardedly sympathetic and outright fired me. For the flu? Because based on what I’d told them, that I’d had the flu for a few months—well, how can that be fair? The flu shouldn’t be taken lightly. It killed millions of people in the early twentieth century. I looked that one up, to use when I went for unemployment.
“I could have had complications,” I told the woman who did my exit interview. “And then I’d be on disability and the state or the city or whoever would be paying me full-time. I’m only asking for what I deserve.” I deserved severance pay.
“You were fired for cause,” the woman said stonily. “That means you had poor performance.”
“Well, the flu—” I began.
She looked down at her screen. “You were out for twenty-two days in the past three months.”
I was about to say “flu” again but she cut me off.
“Not consecutive days. Suspiciously, a lot of Mondays. You were also seen taking coffee packets and filters from the break room.”
“There wasn’t much else to take. My department was really cheap about coffee. And I brought in donuts, twice, so it equals out.”
“Theft and incompetence,” she said sadly. “You’re lucky we’re not starting any kind of action against you. We could, about the supplies. We all know if you stole these things, you stole other things and just didn’t get caught with them.”
She stood upand held her hand out so I would stand and hold my hand out as well. “Good luck with your employment search. Next!”
It didn’t put me in a good mood, I can tell you, and I went to a coffee shop to calm down, but you probably know coffee isn’t the best thing to soothe your nerves. It didn’t soothe mine. I looked around and I saw old people in their forties chatting in groups of two or three, and young people on their computers, probably students. They all seemed quite content with themselves, and that was infuriating. I had just as much right to be content with myself as they did, but I wasn’t. Someone was thwarting me.
I’ve had that feeling ever since I was a kid, that someone was thwarting me. I remember telling my father exactly that. He had thick callused hands and worked in a factory and was always tired. “Thwarted?” he had asked, puzzled.
“Something’s in her way, she means,” my mother said.
He continued to look at me steadily. “You’re twelve years old. There are rules, sure, but they’re not very hard rules. You’re not thwarted. I’m thwarted. I work ten hours a day, never get ahead, get no fun, and my back hurts, and I’m not as good as anyone else in anything that matters to me.”
It was a revelation. I had never thought my father cared about anything; he always went about his business without saying too much about it. I suddenly understood that he might have wanted a different life, but he couldn’t have it. Why not? I thought grown-ups had all the power in the world. It was a very sobering moment for me. It changed my outlook on life. If I wasn’t careful, I could end up like my dad. And, as the years went on, I realized that these all-powerful grown-ups were by and large laughing hollowly, whispering sadly, grabbing what they could of inconsequential things, moping as they watched TV. They had lost their luster.
As far as I could see, the problem was that they all fell into believing they had to work or do as they were told. Why? Why fall into that trap? I began to cheat on tests, then I suddenly discovered (it came as a blinding revelation, as if from God) that it was easy to skip school and even easier to make up excuses. The world opened up in its possibilities. I took things and put them in other kids’ bags to see what would happen. I liked the confusion. I liked the distraction. I had sex as soon as I hit high school (I had some reservation about doing it before then, I forget why). I bought illegal birth control pills. I drank cheap bottles of colored stuff with guys. By eighteen, I was just as tired of it all as my father was. Only I was tired because I drank too much, slept too little, and ate crap. I felt artificial. I was artificially young. And all of a sudden, I had finished high school. I had to make decisions now about what was ahead of me.
“Get a job or get out,” my father said. “You can’t just shit away your life, not in front of your mother.”
“Robert,” my mother said gently.
He shook his head. “I’d do anything I could for you,” he said, looking at me, “but I won’t sit here and watch you go to hell for no good reason. Get a job or get out.”
I hated that man. I didn’t cry at his funeral, which was two years later. Instead, I was polite at the funeral and the aftermath, and I even waited a day or two before going out to a bar and getting drunk, and soon after, getting a bladder infection. I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.
* * *
I worked at a diner for a month after my father kicked me out, then at a store that sold intimate apparel, then at a supermarket. Next thing I knew, it was five years later, and I realized I was still just looking around. I saw people reading papers and circling jobs in the classifieds, so I got a paper and did the same.
It was easy to get a job as a clerk in a large shipping firm. I just filled out forms and filed forms. That was the one where I was pregnant or had the flu, depending on how you want to define it. It didn’t harm me, because I just skipped them when I filled out “Previous Employment” on the next job application. I bounced around from one thing to another. I stayed until I got bored and then I moved on. But eventually, I decided I wanted a job that paid enough and didn’t really require anything, and I finally found that at a high-school-equivalency treadmill school. They were lax and wanted everything to move fast, so all they cared about, really, was my grammar. I answered the phone at first, but then one day an instructor didn’t show up, and they told me to run the class. They had copies of the lesson plan and shoved a text in my hands.
I loved it. I was a leader. If I didn’t know something, I made it up. I told them it made no difference whether they used lie or lay because no one else knew either. I said if they could use its and it’s properly, they would be considered well-educated. And then I told them the rules of American business success, which I knew because I’d had so many jobs. Always be polite because then people will think they can boss you around. Never eat or drink in public because people are disgusting when they eat. Stay away from semicolons because they upset some people. On a job interview, look at the interviewer’s hands to see if they’re relaxed or tense. Always let the other person have the last word; it will make them like you. No one uses past perfect tense.
My mistake was in telling them that they were allowed to cheat on forms, and then I showed them how to cheat. I was unlucky in that a few of them were moral. They complained, and I was fired.
I dummied up the resume a little, after looking up some professional schools that had closed (that was why I was fired, in fact—I’d told the students to cite businesses that no longer existed), and I moved into a training position in the corporate world. Even now I’m not sure what that company did exactly, but once again I was provided with slides and lesson plans and specific instructions on what to say and do with new employees. Plus, I was given a clothing allowance and an expense account.
I could think on my feet, too, which helped enormously until a trainee asked if there had been any environmental lawsuits about the products and shipping and overseas production. For once, I froze a little because I knew there had, and I had also been told to avoid talking about it. I don’t know what came over me, but I told him everything I knew, and then I made up a few disasters to make it juicier. My trainee immediately went to his new boss and I was led out of the building, flanked by security guards who looked old and shaken. It occurred to me that I had been successful in breaking this new employee in—he would go far, now, because of me.
I learned a little from every job I’ve had, though most of it was how to game the system. It was a matter of pride; I wasn’t going to be anyone’s victim and it was better to be a step ahead of them and have them trying to catch up with me. It had a beautiful logic to it, but then it all went bust the day I went home and found a baby sitting in a car seat all dressed up in front of my door and waiting for me.
That was the whole baby thing in a nutshell. They expect you to have a baby if you’re female. And here one was.
I stopped dead and studied it. It watched me with sober brown eyes. We each calculated what the possibilities were. She seemed to be a clean baby. There was a note:
Hello. My name is Clara.
A large diaper bag sat next to her, filled with diapers and clothes and baby food and bottles.
I looked down my hallway, wondering whether the baby had been deposited at the wrong door. I went and knocked on each one. Nobody answered at any of them.
I got a large sheet of paper and wrote: Baby found. Her name is Clara. Is she yours? She’s not mine!
And I posted the note downstairs on the front door.
I took Clara inside and put her on the sofa in her car seat and we continued to look at each other. Then I noticed I was hungry and I assumed she was as well, and so the day wore on. Eventually, I decided I should go to the store and get something. I stared at Clara again. Should I leave her here while I went out?
How mean that they didn’t leave her in a stroller.
I sighed and took her out of her car seat and carried her with me. I also took the note she came with. There’s a small park on the way to the supermarket. I sat on a bench, put Clara down next to me, thought a few thoughts, and left her there with the sign pinned to her shirt.
A few minutes later someone came running up to me with Clara in his arms. “You forgot this,” he said, and shoved the baby at me.
“Sorry,” I said.
I went to the supermarket and put the baby in a shopping cart. This was much easier than carrying her around. I went up and down the aisles, but I only got some eggs and cheese and milk. I was really taking a look at the popularity of the sections. Over near the cat litter, which was in a corner, I parked the cart, took my eggs and cheese and milk, and left Clara there.
She was a good child, really. Not a peep out of her so far.
I got to the cashier, paid for everything, and was just about to leave when a stock boy pushed the cart at me. “Here’s Clara,” he said. “Nice and bright.”
Clara looked up at me and smiled. “I don’t have a child,” I said. “You’re thinking of someone else.”
“Ha ha,” he said, and winked, and I put her on my hip. Her sign was a little bent at the edge. I figured I would have to make a new one, so I crumpled it up and handed it to him.
She felt much heavier at this point, but I figured it was because I was also carrying groceries. I couldn’t carry her everywhere, though, because it was a handicap to have a baby on your hip. Luckily, my area is pretty poor and un-gentrified. I passed cheap stores with cheap supplies. The strollers were fifty dollars, though, and looked shoddy. But I saw one of those collapsible shopping carts, and it was only fourteen dollars. That left me a little over twenty dollars in cash, and maybe fifty dollars in my checking account. I should check that, I reminded myself.
The problems were getting larger. I had a baby I had to feed and clothe, and yet I needed a job to pay for that. If I had a job, I would need a babysitter. No doubt people save up a lot of money before they have a baby, but since this one was a surprise, that hadn’t happened to me. My whole employment history, I now realized, made no concession to babies.
I detected a smell and changed the baby. I had watched TV enough to know about diapers and smells and cleaning up. I counted how many diapers were left. I looked at the baby food in the bag. All these things were merely token efforts at supplies.
Clara fell asleep on the sofa. I probably would have to find a bed or crib or something.
I appreciated how quiet she was. Uncomplaining. It would be a shame if her parents didn’t appreciate her for this. Why had they abandoned her? Or was there some stupid mix-up? Got the wrong address for the babysitter, for instance. That kind of thing.
“Who are you, Clara?” I asked as she slept there.
I went down to the hallway and put up another sign. I need your help, I said. My friend disappeared and I have to take care of her baby. I know nothing. Please help me!
A little later there was a knock on my door. It was a middle-aged man from upstairs, standing there with a container of milk. “Here,” he said. “I didn’t know what you’d need. I don’t have children. So I got you milk.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I really need baby sitters more than milk.”
He shook his head. “Not me, sorry. I’m no good with babies. But I wanted to tell you that I saw a man with that baby. I saw him come in while I was going out. Your boyfriend, maybe?”
“It’s been a while since my last boyfriend. What did he look like?”
The man shrugged. “I was looking at the baby, mostly. So I didn’t notice. But it was a man. Here,” he said, looking awkward. “Take this for the baby.” He handed me five dollars. “Not much. I know it’s not much. I’ll try to get more.”
I didn’t refuse. I needed a job and I needed some money and I needed a babysitter, and I wasn’t going to refuse anything. Cynthia from the top floor came by later and said she could baby sit occasionally, but she’d need to get paid. I said that was good once I had some money. She shrugged and said she had an old stroller she didn’t need, and gave it to me.
I started leaving a note on the front door requesting help for various things: milk, diapers, baby food. I found plastic bags of stuff in front of my door. This spared all of us some embarrassment, but I found I just couldn’t ask for food for myself.
I called some numbers I found online for work-at-home situations, mostly calling people and getting them to buy things. I was terrible. I had the wrong attitude when I called. I tried being funny, I tried being sexy, I tried being authoritarian, but none of it worked.
Clara needed her diapers changed, needed a bath, needed food, and there were probably things I didn’t know she needed. I found myself stopping other mothers with strollers and asking, “What a lovely baby! How old is she?”
They always told me, and then they asked how old Clara was. “How old do you think she is?” I’d ask in return, and thus I settled on saying she was ten months old, because that was the most common response. “And who’s your baby’s doctor?” I asked. And then, “What shots does your baby have to get?” And little by little, I began to learn what was expected of a ten-month-old baby girl.
I never made more than ten dollars on the telephone job, so I quit it. I was late on the rent. It was getting cold, and I didn’t have winter clothes for Clara.
And then Clara developed a cough. I took her to a clinic, where I gave them a check, and then ran to the ATM to get money out before the check hit. But I was overdrawn; I hadn’t written something down. The ATM swallowed my card. I hit it once. I hit it twice. The ATM user to my right quietly left.
I had to get Clara some medicine. She coughed again. I looked at her; I looked through the glass doors to the main bank, where people stood politely in line, which was not how I approached lines. I made scenes when I had to wait too long. I was in the outside lobby of the bank, and I looked through the glass doors to the inside, where people lined up to face cashiers behind short barriers, begging for their own money. The injustice of the situation overwhelmed me.
I wanted to work, but I couldn’t find a job that paid me and allowed me to take care of Clara, whom I didn’t want anyway but was getting somewhat attached to. I needed to take care of a sick child and I had no idea how to do it.
I pushed the stroller outside, gave Clara some Cheerios in a cup, took one of her small blankets and wrapped it around my neck in an elaborate twist and tie as if it were a scarf. I took my jacket off and put it down to cover Clara. And I put on sunglasses.
I went back inside. While I waited in line, I pawed inside my bag for something I could use to pretend it was a gun, and all I could find was my cell phone. It was small, and if I pushed it against my bag from the inside, it did look like a bulge. No one ever asked to see the gun before they handed over the money, did they? They could ask to see my references, but not my gun.
I got to the front of the line and I told the teller. “Give me all your money or I’ll shoot the person next to me.” I glanced out of the corner of my eyes and saw an old man with a small dog. “And the dog,” I added. “Maybe the dog first.”
She looked at me and I lowered my head a little because of course I knew there were cameras, and I hunched my shoulders. I could sense that people around me were shifting a little. Maybe there was a murmur. The cashier began opening the money drawers.
And then my phone rang. Everything stopped. The clerk had pulled out all the ones and put them on the counter, and her hand stilled on the fives. Her eyes strayed to my bag and the ringing phone.
“That’s not my gun that’s ringing,” I said in desperation, and I grabbed the pile of singles and ran out.
I got outside, grabbed the stroller, put on my jacket, took off my sunglasses, all while pushing her around the corner, and I checked the phone.
It was an alert from the bank, informing me I was overdrawn.
I could hear sirens as I neared a subway station and went down the stairs. Someone even helped me with the stroller.
I had a wad of bills in my pocket, and they felt good for a while, although when I got to count them later, there was only thirty-two dollars. It was more than I’d had in the morning, so it was still a good day, but not as good as if my phone hadn’t rung.
I got what I needed from the drugstore, then bought two slices of pizza and a beer and took my spoils back to my apartment. There was an eviction notice in an envelope taped to my door. I had to appear in court in two weeks to fight it. If I failed to appear, then my landlord would have the marshals toss my belongings out for garbage.
I gave the baby medicine, then sat and ate my pizza. I took a little piece of it and chopped it up in very very tiny pieces and fed them to Clara, who looked thoughtful. She had a tooth or two, so she must be getting close to eating real food.
I thought about my life. I didn’t think things were going well. I didn’t care about the apartment; I could leave without much regret. I was beginning to like Clara, and I enjoyed occasionally asking total strangers about what babies needed; they were always willing to help with that, though what I really needed was money.
I went through my things, selecting some clothes and dried food and formula, and I packed everything into a backpack and a shopping bag and put them in the basket at the bottom of the stroller.
On the way out, I checked my mail. There was a note stuffed in the crease of the box. I’ve changed my mind, it said. I want Clara back. Please be home at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow.
This gave me the creeps. This really made me crazy. I didn’t want Clara. She was a burden, she was controlling me, and yet now I also didn’t want to give her up. “Clara girl,” I said, pushing her out the door, “we’re on the lam. It’s just you and me, kid.”
I felt a great deal of protectiveness toward Clara. I liked the way she watched me and the world so solemnly. I liked the way she adjusted to the way I ran my life, which was erratic and a little unprincipled. I thought, of all the vagrant babies in the world, I had ended up with the one that was suitable. And I believe she liked me.
I was not going to give her back. The man who’d dumped Clara would never find me.
Since I was so short of money, I decided on just one more robbery. The first one would have been terrific if my phone hadn’t gone off, so I turned my phone off before deciding on a bank that was around the corner from a subway entrance, which had been very convenient the last time. I prowled the neighborhood and found a costume place that sold a nun’s outfit. It had a short skirt, of course, but I found a Dracula cape that worked well for a long skirt. I ducked into an alley, put my costume on—the nun’s veil draped across my lower face, and I was done and on my way. I parked the baby outside the shoe store next to the bank and went inside.
I swayed when I was on line inside the bank. I wanted them to notice me; people are a little embarrassed by nuns. Failed vocations, no doubt. People gave me extra space and when I got to the teller, I said (trying for Latin), “Domine, praise be, domine, give me your money for the poor. I kid you not. Corpus Christi.”
She frowned, but then nodded and began shoving money into a pouch. “Start with the large bills,” I said. I learn quickly.
I didn’t wait for her to finish, grabbing the bag when she was through with the twenties. I ran out the door, turned the corner, pulled off my nun’s veil, and yanked at the cape. I was heading down the subway stairs when I realized I had left Clara behind. I froze in horror. I went back up the steps, stopped at the top, considered how much I might look like the thief the cashier would describe, patted my bag with the money, walked hesitantly up the stairs, slowly to the corner, let the police sirens surround me without flinching, and turned the corner to look.
Clara sat in her stroller, her head raised to a policewoman who was bent down to her, talking and smiling. My heart sank. Clara liked that; she liked people talking to her and smiling. Of course that was superficial but she was, after all, a baby. She couldn’t really tell what people said to her, though I was pretty sure that certain words did get through—“out,” “dinner,” “bed.” Like a dog, I thought in dismay. I’m comparing her to a dog.
More police cars pulled up by the minute. Officers were going up and down the block, looking into other stores, asking people who seemed to have been there leaning against things for a while. I saw an elderly woman look in my direction thoughtfully.
For a moment I thought I couldn’t leave Clara, but that policewoman was being so friendly and nice—Clara would be all right. Always.
I turned and went into the subway station and caught a train pulling in, not even noticing whether it was going uptown or down. I had had Clara less than a month, yet she had filled in the edges. A warm weight on my hip, smells of course, smiles, and laughs. Mostly silent, always watching. I had been looking forward to when she began to speak because I wanted to know what she thought.
But she took constant care, constant resources. I couldn’t work and keep her; I couldn’t keep her and work. It was too complicated. But because of her I learned I had a small skill in robbing banks.
I’ve known people to settle into a bland job for life because they had nice coworkers. Then suddenly forty years went by and they realized they’d spent all that time being bland. Clara would have done that to me.
I like robbing banks. I like moving around so that no one gets too interested in finding a particular kind of bank robber. I dress as a man; I dress as a woman. I dress old and I dress young.
It’s an interesting life. I would love to meet a colleague or two and go for a drink. Discuss the best and worst days. Complain about the boss—which I guess would be the cops. You know that particular kind of boss—disapproving, judgmental. The kind I always ended up with when I held regular jobs.
I like the improvisation of robbing banks, of calculating time and place and approach. I make a decent wage and I take vacations whenever I want. I pay for my own health care and so far I haven’t been shot. I give myself good yearly reviews, and when I need a raise I just go take one.
All in all, it’s a good and interesting life. I might have stumbled upon it no matter what, but basically, I owe it all to Clara.
Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 120 literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, such as Asimov’s and Tin House. Her latest novel is The Splendid City (Angry Robot Books, 2022), and her newest story collection is A Slice of the Dark (Fairwood Press, 2023). You can find her at www.karenheuler.com and on social media @karenheuler.