Chapter 5

A lone, fat drop of cocoa-coffee plunges from the spoon onto the square that says “Last high school, college, university or other school.”

Does anybody notice?

Farrell, who has been holding the spoon with her left hand while writing with her right, looks over the tops of her oval, metal-rimmed glasses. How could anybody not see what happened? The café sits in the center of the bookshop, slightly elevated by a platform and separated from the dignified rows of dark wood shelves by little more than a rounded, brass rail.

To Farrell’s relief, the mid-day shoppers have eyes for nothing but the books.
She lowers the spoon and sets down her pen, a black Cross ballpoint she gave her mother as a birthday gift more than seven years ago. Should she get another application? There are only two people at the bank-like counter of registers at the back of the room, near the ledge where the shop keeps the applications.

Farrell looks at the paper she’s soiled. Yes, only she could mess up something so important. But she can’t bring herself to get another. She’s got a bad feeling about asking for work here. Most of the customers are dressed in snappy business attire. Farrell is in jeans, a black wool turtleneck, old tweed blazer, hiking boots, and an old, very crushed, olive-colored duster. Amid such a crowd as this, she appears impoverished, if not homeless. She likens herself to all the welfare people she saw seeking work in New York, even though this isn’t New York and she has a few dollars to go before she should think of welfare.

But Farrell Schmidt has been out of work for the past seven months. Because she has no work, she has no income. Though she’s been living off the insurance money left from her late mother’s small estate, she must believe she has nothing because she has no income. Believing the worst now and preparing for welfare will let her accept the time down the road when she really does have nothing.

She finishes the last drop of cocoa-coffee, neatly folds the application and tucks it in her worn, black-leather Coach bag. She can’t bring herself to get another application. Whoever saw her take the first one will wonder what she did to need a second.

Once upon a time, she would have dismissed the wayward coffee. This afternoon, she prefers to go home. She has a feeling she isn’t right for the store; she’d be refused employment. Everyone who works here is young, collegiate, and oozes the artificial zeal of people paid too little to work too hard.

Looks-wise, Farrell fits in. She has an elegantly slender frame, trendily styled straight but fine brown hair and the kind of unadorned eyes that belong in an Italian Renaissance painting. Her unlined face inspires most strangers to think she’s closer to thirty than forty. It helps that the bifocals in her oval metal frames blend with the rest of the lenses.

Right now, however, her frame of mind is such that all she sees is the gauntness that comes from months of unceasing failure. She knows she won’t get the job. She’ll be told she’s overqualified to work as a bookseller. She won’t be told the truth: she’s just too old and tired.

Farrell lives in a one-bedroom flat in what she calls The Project, one of the many garden apartment complexes built in the bogs and cornfields east of Princeton.
Though she’s surrounded herself with much of her mother’s old mahogany furniture, the flat doesn’t feel like home. Home to Farrell Schmidt is still a little white ranch house outside Fair Mantle. She bought it with Mom, and for seven years she lived there with Mom. Since her name was on the deed with Mom’s and she had rights of survivorship, it passed to her on Mom’s death. Like any other home, it’s a place where people lived and laughed and loved and guarded relics of family history. But Farrell can’t live there. The home she shared with Mom is in an adult community. And the law says the association that governs the community can keep Farrell out because she’s too young to lie there.

The Project sits in a park-like setting with a public golf course at one end and a little league field at the other. The grounds are manicured; the buildings are painted and kept up to code. But to Farrell, the trappings don’t count. The place could be Hell on Earth. The walls vibrate with bass waves from recordings blasted from flats on the other side of the grassy court. Couples fight with each other and with children. Televisions are so loud she can hear them from behind closed doors.

Her upstairs neighbor plays the television so loud it could be in her parlor. One night it was so bad she had to call the police. The officer who responded discovered the neighbor working at a computer in his dining room, nowhere near the television. The neighbor didn’t mean to be nasty, the officer said. All he wanted to do was listen to the news The dispatcher Farrell spoke to when she called the police had her own theory: The neighbor is just another person who can’t care less about others.
The noise turns Farrell’s stomach, gives her headaches, and (she imagines) pushes her blood pressure through her skull. She’s lived in college dorms and she once had her own flat in Manhattan, but for the life of her, she will never understand why people have to harass their neighbors.

So going home is not a treat for Farrell Schmidt. What should be her refuge from the drudgery of life is one more bead in a never-ending rosary of misery.

The first thing she does after turning up the noisy, forced-air heat is check her answering machine. The little red light glows steadily. No one has called; not even one of the alleged placement counselors from one of the seven temporary employment agencies she’s been registered with since the summer.

Farrell is relieved. She loses no love on the counselors. Most of them are high-voiced, long-nailed, big-haired bimbos who don’t know what to do with her because she knows computers but never worked as a secretary. Farrell has no choice but to suffer them. Theirs are the only agencies in the area. Oh, she’ll look for work in New York or Philadelphia. Someday. Working in the city means using mass transit. Trains and buses make her sick.

After paying homage to the answering machine, Farrell investigates the refrigerator. The entire stock consists of a gallon of milk, cheddar cheese, butter, two eggs, an open jar of spaghetti sauce, and half a package of frozen Italian vegetables. No, no need to go to the store yet. How about the dry stuff?

She looks in the cabinet over the counter. There’s enough cereal and noodles to last into next week. Good. She might be able to save an extra ten dollars for gas.
Satisfied that everything is in its place and she doesn’t need to go back out to a store, Farrell finally takes off her coat, exchanges her sunglasses for her “real” glasses, and slips the seven-hour-long, Russian-language version of War and Peace into the VCR.

Four hours later, trumpets blare the fanfare from the March of the Battle of Marengo, and French Chasseurs canter along the abandoned streets of Moscow. At the same time, a timid electronic babbling wrests Farrell out of 1812 and back into the 1990s. Her heart thuds. Her stomach churns.

The phone. Dear God, it’s the phone.

Farrell can’t stand to answer her phone. Though she has an unlisted number which she’s given only to a friend at the paper she worked for and to the tenant in her mother’s house, when she hears a phone ring, she envisions not friends, but collectors for doctors’ offices.

Mom had Medicare and secondary insurance, but most of the doctors Farrell dealt with didn’t accept Medicare assignment, and they couldn’t bother with secondary insurance. They coerced people into paying up front by threatening to ruin their credit rating.

What’s worse, Farrell concluded that all the people in doctors’ billing offices are mature women who have the security of a husband and steady income. They couldn’t care less if people were out of work or if the client had died. In fact, they want to care less; they go out of their way to show their contempt. Farrell has long believed what she thinks the billers and collectors want her to believe: people out of work are trash that simply refuse to support themselves.

At the sound of the phone, Farrell’s throat knots. Her eyes burn and blur with tears. Who’s calling her this time?

She puts the Chasseurs on pause and raises the volume on the answering machine, trying not to listen to her lackluster greeting. She wonders if the caller will be discouraged by the defeated tone of her voice and decide she’s not worth the effort. She’s almost surprised when the machine gives the signal for the caller to begin the message, and the signal isn’t followed by the familiar click of somebody hanging up.
“Farrell, this is Bruton over at Fair Mantle Village. Please call me today, tonight, whenever, Soon, We need your help. This time, we’re in a position to offer some, uh, significant compensation.”

Farrell is suspicious. What can Bruton do now that he couldn’t do two months ago? And how on earth did he get her number?

She remembers her friend at the newspaper, then remembers that she gave the village her new number when she gave them the change of address so she could continue to receive their mailings. She never expected to be called.

“Just call or, better yet, stop by,” Bruton was saying. “I’ll be around this week. Time for the yearly budget meetings, you know. So! It would be good to see you again.”

The machine rewinds itself and blinks its little red light. Bruton’s voice has been trapped.

Fair Mantle Village is among Farrell’s happier memories. To some people, historical interpretation is an escape of a primer for acting school. For Farrell, it was always a discovery. She’s always loved history and the arts. She liked dressing and acting the way people dressed and acted in the past. It helped her understand why people thought, wrote and painted the way they did.

One of the highlights of the village’s social season was the yearly Independence Day dance on the green. The volunteers spent weeks practicing country dances and the more fashionable dances of the period, such as the minuet and the gavotte. The park rangers were required to don Colonial garb during village events, yet they never found time to acquire many of the skills needed for proper Colonial socializing. Oh, they had no trouble firing muskets for the militia part of the programs. But when it came to making polite conversation or dancing?

Farrell has a vision of Greeta literally dragging Tom Von Aldo around in a reel. The poor guy was banging into people and stomping around like Groucho Marx in buckled shoes. When he took Farrell’s hand in a turn, she thought he was going to twirl her across the border into Pennsylvania.

Farrell doesn’t know it, but she’s smiling. Bruton said it would be good to see her. Well, maybe it would be good to see the village again, though she knows at heart that she isn’t wanted. Bruton probably called her because he couldn’t find anybody else to do the job.