'Angie Gets a Job', by Linda Boroff
Angie was not qualifying; she was crying. With one hand across her eyes, she groped for the tissue box that her interviewer extended without looking up as he checked her typing test. From between her fingers, Angie watched him circle errors. The sharp red pencil reminded her of a bird’s beak: peck, stab, scratch. It left bloody little wounds all over her page. This abysmal performance confirmed every pessimistic prediction of her destiny that Angie had ever heard in her seventeen years.
“Miss uh, Morris.”
The man, gray-haired, with swinging wattles and rheumy brown eyes, held the flimsy page at a slight distance, like a soiled diaper.
“You type thirteen words per minute, once the errors are subtracted.”
Angie ducked behind her tissue.
“We cannot very well hire you as a typist, now can we?”
He arched his brows, as if seeking agreement.
“But I must have a job,” Angie wailed.
A child still, she believed in the magical power of her own needs to drive the decisions of others.
“Or… or else I have to move home.”
This was a lie. In fact Angie needed a job precisely because she was not permitted to move home. But she didn’t dare confide in this grandfatherly personnel director. That would open a window on her past even more prejudicial than her terrible typing.
To Angie’s surprise, her inquisitor hesitated at her mention of moving home, and she, with the canny intuition of the delinquent, sensed a weak spot in his perimeter and pushed on through.
“I’d be so ashamed in front of my parents. I moved out to live on my own and now I’m failing.”
Her head drooped, and her long, curling black hair swept forward to obscure her face, which rather disappointed her interviewer. He liked gazing at the pretty thing in her cheap gray cotton skirt — two runs in her hose — and worn red sweater. Charming. But hopelessly unqualified. She huddled penitently before him, peeking out from her tissue with reddened blue eyes. Angie’s distress seemed sincere enough. And anybody who needed work as badly as she did would surely strive to improve her typing skills.
“Well,” he said with mock reluctance, “I’m going to go out on a limb.”
Angie’s heart gave an extra, tripping little beat.
“I’ll hire you conditionally. But…” he frowned, stern as Jove, and Angie’s eyes widened in flattering response, “you must raise your typing speed to forty words per minute” (the eyes grew huge) “within three months. If you can do that, you’ll go on permanent status.”
Caught in mid-sniff, Angie searched his face. Her grin blazed out like the sun from a ragged rain cloud.
“Oh, Mr....” she glanced at the black and gold nameplate, “Mr. Trueblood! I don’t know how to thank you. Oh, I’ll work so hard.”
“I’m sure you will, Angie.” For a moment they beamed almost conspiratorially at one another, and into Mr. Trueblood’s mind suddenly flashed the word “snookered,” although that did not diminish the width of his smile.
Angie danced out of the office past the scowling old receptionist, who handed her a packet of employment forms with the trepidation of a cold war operative passing classified information to a suspected mole.
Since this was Friday afternoon, Angie now had a whole weekend to luxuriate in idleness and dissipation. She knew of a party Saturday night. And she had a date on Sunday with a man she met at Larry Blake’s Rathskeller on Telegraph Avenue, where she and her roommate Kati were drinking on fake IDs. The man, who confessed to being forty-two, claimed to own a gull-wing Mercedes and a luxurious home in the Oakland Hills from which his wife had recently exited. The anticipation of a restaurant meal and all the liquor she could hold made Angie euphoric as she jolted along on the bus back to Berkeley.
For weeks, fear and uncertainty had kept Angie awake at night. While her roommates slept, she would sneak into the bathroom and weep, rocking back and forth on the seat, wiping her eyes with toilet paper. Only yesterday, Angie had dialed her mother collect from a pay phone and received a histrionic response. Mrs. Morris, an inventory clerk in a Los Angeles department store, had her hands full just supporting Angie’s younger sister, Frances. Even now, Mr. Morris was refusing to pay child support for Francie, in defiance of a court order. The woman he lived with hung up on Mrs. Morris when she called. You have to get a job like everybody else, her mother shouted.
And now, when all hope had fled, Angie was saved. Her roommates, Kati and Maryellen, could reinstate the phone, cut off due to Angie’s arrearage—and they could finally give the air to Butch, their pesky landlord.
For the last two months, Butch had accepted two-thirds of the rent, on the assurance that Angie was seeking work with the determination of an Everest summiteer. But since the girls owed him money, he had taken to dropping by and hanging around, asking suggestive questions and snooping through the rooms, “inspecting” for bogus leaks or electrical shorts. He complained that he was in trouble with his wife over their rent. Butch had a crush on Kati, who was Hungarian and beautiful. If Kati was home when he came by, she had to pretend to leave in order to get rid of him.
Maryellen had curly, platinum blonde hair, a deep dimple in her chin, and heavy thighs. She wore no makeup, which made her look washed out and churchy. But when Kati had suggested a little mascara, Maryellen just snorted.
Maryellen’s brother, Kyle, who studied psychology at the university, had taken Angie on a movie date the week before. When she got into his car, Kyle had pulled his penis out of his pants and driven like that through the city streets all the way to the theater. Angie, uncertain what to do, had chatted away nervously about Berkeley, politics and such. All the while, out of the corner of her eye she could see Kyle’s penis bumping along like a third, silent passenger. When they reached the theater, Kyle had zipped himself back up and the evening had proceeded quite normally.
In the car on the way home, Kyle took himself out again, which Angie had kind of expected. Upon arriving, she had leaped from the car and thanked Kyle for the movie. He bid her good night amiably from behind the steering wheel, still exposed.
When Angie told Kati about the date, they agreed that Kyle seemed weird, but neither could say for certain what was truly aberrant among college men.
“I think Kyle is a pervert in the making,” said Angie.
And Kati must have reported that to Maryellen, because Maryellen shortly thereafter quit speaking to Angie at all. Nights, she would sit knitting on the couch, addressing her comments to Kati as though Angie did not exist. “The bitch,” thought Angie. “She reminds me of Madame de Farge in A Tale of Two Cities,” counting her stitches as the guillotine dropped.
“A Tale of Three Girls,” Angie thought, composing a story in her mind. Secretly, she yearned to be a writer. But Angie’s new job only carried her farther away from her dream, and nobody seemed to care.
Angie needn’t have worried about raising her typing speed. She was in demand at Croft & Comstock the way fresh recruits had been in the trenches of World War I. The company’s East Bay headquarters was located off Webster Street in downtown Oakland, in a five-story building as grim and practical as a penitentiary. A gray-walled reception area held only a green metal desk. The door behind it opened into a cavernous arena containing countless rows of desks eight abreast, with an IBM Selectric typewriter and a woman at each station. At opposite ends of the floor were the glassed-in cubicles of Mr. Kincaid, the manager, and Mr. Caverly, the East Bay Regional Director.
The typists ranged from teenagers to veterans, whose backsides had broadened over the years to fit the office chairs, solid foundations for their atrophied upper bodies. Their arms served only to connect the torso to the gnarled and calloused hands, the fingers hammered spatulate on the QWERTY keyboard. The office was lit from above by fluorescent lights that cast a chill, greenish glare on every blemish, wrinkle, and scar.
Promptly at 8 a.m., the Selectrics hummed to life with a deafening clatter that lasted till five. And weren’t they all lucky to have today’s advanced technology? Not like in the old days, declared Marie, the pool’s champion typist, when their fingers would crack and bleed after hours of pounding the manual keys.
Marie had been with the company for fifteen years. She had a way of sliding the keys together in a sort of arpeggio that generated line after smooth line of perfect type like black cuts across the paper. She was the Vladimir Horowitz of credit report typing. Marie had an unhappy home life, as did most of the typists. Men tricked the women into bed, spent their puny wages, beat, cheated, and abandoned them. Merciless rigor kept the office superficially calm, but beneath was unstable magma. The younger girls had not yet learned the lessons of discretion; they trusted one another with their hearts’ secrets and were regularly betrayed. Screaming battles and deep simmering feuds erupted.
Mr. Caverly, gray and flinty, took little notice of the typists, reserving his conversation for the younger manager, Rich Kincaid. He relished humiliating Mr. Kincaid, delivering ripostes from the side of his mouth in a jocular, hearty way, so that Mr. Kincaid had to laugh along, as if he too enjoyed the jibe.
“Hey Rich,” Mr. Caverly shouted suddenly above the din.
The typists instinctively slowed to listen.
“You got the March receivables bassackwards again!”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Caverly.”
Rich Kincaid rose and sidled hippily across the office, through the too-narrow aisles, knocking papers, staplers, and files from the typists’ desks.
“What the deuce, get this stuff off here.”
A ripple of suppressed laughter followed his progress like a grass fire. The consequences of an outburst were too terrible to imagine—and that was dry tinder to the urge.
Mr. Kincaid took out his own rage on the women beneath him. No petty infraction escaped his notice. And he went beyond that. “
Don’t get caught late here with him.” Angie was warned. “He’ll be all over you. “
As if there were a chance of that! On the stroke of five, Angie was out the door, bypassing the balky elevator to race down the stairs two and three at a time.
At home, she exchanged her shabby dresses for jeans and tie-dyed shirts, wishing she could disappear into their infinite fractals. Then she and Kati cruised Telegraph Avenue, “looking for trouble,“ as they called it. Late at night, Angie might have to find her way home alone, crossing the dark campus, dodging through clumps of trees, hugging the shadows of buildings. By 7:30 a.m., she was at the bus stop in the early drizzle, wobbling on her high heels, eyes half closed.
One morning Angie looked up, and there was Mr. Kincaid in his new Oldsmobile, right at the curb. He smiled and waved, beckoning her into the car.
“It’s my boss,” she blurted. The other bus riders looked at her enviously.
“You waitin’ for an engraved invitation?” asked a tubby woman. “Wisht it was me he was askin‘.”
“I do too,” thought Angie, but a cold, rainy wind was whipping her thin skirt around her legs.
She got into the car beside Mr. Kincaid, squeezing herself against the door to stay as far away as possible. The car was warm and smelled of leather.
“I didn’t know you lived in Berkeley,” said Mr. Kincaid.
Angie smiled with the corners of her mouth.
“Do you live here too?“
Mr. Kincaid mumbled “Livermore,” which was nowhere near Berkeley. Angie wished the Oldsmobile really could gobble up the street the way it did in advertisements. Each stoplight lasted forever; traffic was snarled.
“And where do your parents live?“ asked Mr. Kincaid.
“L.A.”
“My my, far from home.” Well, thought Angie, here comes his hand on my leg. But instead Rich Kincaid said, “My son is dying, you know.”
Angie blinked. “What?”
“He has a rare genetic disorder. I can hardly pronounce the name, even though we’ve been living with it for five years.”
“I’m sorry,” Angie said.
“Would you like to have dinner some time?” said Mr. Kincaid. “It’s just... my wife...has to be with Todd all the time. If his head is not held up, he can choke to death.”
Mr. Kincaid had dark, thin hair cut very short, and sad brown eyes. He looked like a man whose son might be dying.
“How come you yell at everybody all the time?” Angie blurted, dizzy at her own nerve.
“I have a temper,” said Rich Kincaid. “I admit it.“
“Well it’s not their fault.”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t.“
When they got to the parking lot, Angie let Mr. Kincaid kiss her and feel her up. He was so grateful he almost cried. They agreed that he would pick her up at her apartment from now on so she didn’t have to walk to the bus stop.
So Rich Kincaid drove Angie to work, and after a while he brought her home as well, and it was just as easy to stop for a bite of dinner on the way. Afterwards, they sat in the garage at Angie’s apartment building and necked like high school kids.
“We’re Catholic,” he said. “I don’t break God’s law, just bend it a little to keep my sanity.”
“Me too,“ said Angie, a wave of euphoric relief washing over her.
Every morning now, Marie looked sharply at Angie, though she and Rich were careful to separate blocks from the building and enter several minutes apart. Sometimes the entire typing pool was looking at her. So they know, thought Angie. So what? Whenever Rich hollered at a girl, he looked quickly at Angie, who tried to keep her features neutral. After work, he apologized.
“Don’t say it to me,” Angie turned away, arms folded. “Say it to her.”
But Rich never did.
Marie had a black eye. She didn’t even try to put makeup on it, and everyone elaborately avoided asking her how it happened. The eye seemed to hover over the entire office as a dark and silent reminder: no matter how perfectly you typed, how punctual you were, how many rules you followed, it did you no good. The fundamental cruelty and unfairness of life could not be buffered or deflected.
Butch had a black eye. Kati’s brother, Miklos, a fiery, brilliant graduate student who could not decide whom he loathed more, communists or capitalists, had been visiting on a Saturday afternoon, when Butch walked right through the door without knocking. There had been a scuffle, and Kati had screamed. Now all three girls were being evicted.
“You’re our hero,” said Angie to Miklos, who wore a tattered, oatmeal-colored scarf around his neck, and whose shock of brown hair fell across keen gray eyes.
“He’s not MY hero,” said Maryellen, who had been trying to call Kyle, but for some reason their telephone was again disconnected.
“Maybe because Miklos doesn’t whip it out the minute he’s alone with a girl,” said Angie.
Maryellen dropped the phone and charged. She would have given Angie a black eye too, but Angie raced out the door and down the street. Dusk was falling, and a faint aroma of patchouli incense on the mild air gave Angie a sudden aching sense of life’s ineluctable passing, of dreams abandoned. The old Victorian homes converted into student apartments looked wise and decadent and seductively inviting. Psychedelic curtains hung at the windows.
Country Joe and the Fish reached her ears: “Well it’s one two three, what are we fightin’ for?”
“I’m in love with your brother,” Angie told Kati. “Please tell him I’d like to go out with him.“
“He would never go out with a typist,“ Kati replied. “That sounds cruel, but it’s really kind. He would only use and discard you. Sex alone is meaningless to him. He is seeking his spiritual and intellectual equal.“
“I’ll go to school then,“ said Angie.
“He would never love a girl who got an education merely to snare a man,” said Kati. “So it’s hopeless.”
“Hopeless,” said Marie the next morning when Angie told her of this, “is what you are right now. Believe it or not, I once did the same thing with Mr. Caverly.”
“Yuck,” said Angie.
“If you can find a way to get out of here, do it. Before it‘s too late.”
Marie turned her misshapen body back to the keyboard.
Someday, Angie had once believed, all would come right, even if only in the kingdom of heaven. The just God existed transparently, so much a part of the usualness of things that his workings went unnoticed. In the end, though, all the good and deserving, living and dead, must at last heave a mighty sigh of relief and be at peace. But the truth was, Rich’s son would soon die. Angie’s father would never return. The typists would labor away, and love and prosperity would always, always elude them.
Angie sent for her high school transcripts, and made an appointment at the University with an admissions officer named Trevor Beardsley. He was a young man with a prominent Adam’s apple, long, thin blond hair and a faint mustache.
“How can we admit you to the University of California?” Trevor said, holding Angie‘s transcripts at a slight distance. “You meet almost none of our academic criteria, plus you accumulated more than one hundred hours of detention for truancy.”
Angie began to cry.
“But my parents were getting a divorce,” she wailed. “I had nobody to talk to. I didn‘t care about anything.”
This was a lie. Angie had cared deeply about a number of things, none of them having to do with school.
Trevor Beardsley looked around frantically for a tissue, but all he found was a crumpled paper napkin left over from his lunch. He offered it anyway, and Angie groped for it, one hand across her eyes. It’s really a shame, Trevor thought, that the older generation had to lay their sick trips on their kids like that. Angie seemed like a very bright young woman. And anyone freed from a Croft & Comstock typing pool would certainly study hard to keep her grades up. Trevor hesitated...
Linda Boroff graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in English. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and anthologized several times. Her coming-of-age story, published in Cornell University's literary magazine, Epoch, is currently under option to Sony.
Linda’s dystopian first novel, Twisted Fate, was published in 2022. Her Young Adult novel, The Dressmaker’s Daughter, set in her grandmother's Romanian village, was also published in 2022. Her creepy supernatural suspense novella, The Remnant, came out in hardcover in 2024.
Photography by Griffin Wooldridge