My dad worked in one of those boxy modern buildings made of mirrors. Inside I had to take an elevator to his suite, that’s what it was called, a suite. Things don’t get much fancier than a suite when you’re twelve.
My dad had a secretary named Mona and other employees that I didn’t know what they did. Mona had long dark blonde hair and talked to me a lot. When she wasn’t talking to me, she was talking on the phone.
“…Mom knows that what she did was wrong and I know she’s sorry, because she bought me that Gucci jacket. And sure, I appreciate it, but I would rather she just say sorry. But she doesn’t say sorry, she just buys me something she knows I want. It was great when I was a teenager, I had all the nicest things, but it gets a little old when you’re thirty-five.”
I worked there. I’m not sure what I did all the time. I just know I was there a lot and paid something. I do remember laying papers out on the floor to organize them and I remember making copies. And when I wasn’t busy with my office work I typed stories on the typewriter. Everyone else had a computer and I had a typewriter. I was pretty excited about that. Clickety clack!
One Saturday I walked across the street to Mervyn’s where I bought a pair of jeans for $11 with my very own money. I felt so proud walking back to the office with my new jeans in the store bag. I was a working woman buying my own clothes.
A few months later I realized the jeans were hideous and I hated the way they fit, but the point was how momentous it was going to the store myself and buying my own clothes with my own money.
One time I sat in the front of the office waiting for my dad so we could go home. A white-haired man named Jack sat at a desk across from me. I had only ever seen Jack in passing and we never really spoken. But there I was, waiting for my dad and talking to Jack. Let me rephrase that, I did not talk to Jack, Jack talked to me.
Mona talked a lot, but she would have a conversation, Jack just talked into the air between us while facing me. He told lots of jokes. He had the air of a street magician, desperate to entertain and keep your attention at all costs. At the time I enjoyed Jack, but in retrospect, I may have only been laughing because he so desperately wanted me to. When you are twelve and a grown up cares so much about your opinion they seem really great for a moment. And because a moment was all I knew him for, I appreciated Jack. Perhaps if I had known Jack longer his desperation would begin to wear thin and I might have even found him pathetic, but I wasn’t used to grownups wanting my attention, so at the time I thought he was a very nice man.
Days later I asked my dad about Jack and my dad said he fired the fellow. My kind, soft spoken father was capable of firing someone? And firing someone so nice?
“But he was so nice,” I protested. “He was funny.”
“Maybe he should have spent more time making phone calls than making jokes,” my dad said. “He didn’t fill quotas so I had to fire him.”
“So he doesn’t have a job now?”
“I don’t know what he’s doing now. He wasn’t too happy when I let him go.”
“What is he going to do without money?”
“Look, Liesel,” my dad said, leveling his eyes at me. “I don’t enjoy firing people. But it’s part of my job. And when people don’t do their jobs, I have to fire them. It’s not because I don’t like them or because I’m mean, it’s just part of my job.”
It didn’t take long for my dad to shut down that office and work for himself out of a home office. I asked him if he would ever get an office again and he said, “I don’t like working for people and I don’t like people working for me. I’d rather be on my own.”
Maybe firing people bothered him more than he let on.
About Fashion and Healing (and other stuff too) 