Bev feared her divorce had trapped her into a never ending cycle of poverty. She understood now that her downhill slide had commenced when her husband Arnold had lost his job with a "major accounting agency." College sweethearts, they had been happily married over twenty years. They had raised three children, Kelly, Karl, and Arnold Junior to their teenaged years. Starting out in an apartment building in Chicago's northwest suburbs, they had worked their way to a modest home in Arlington Heights, then to their dream home in Barrington Hills, an exclusive suburb replete with many farmettes which sported stables. They had lived the American dream.
Then Arnold was abruptly downsized. After two years of unemployment, they had been forced to sell the house and rent a modest brick bungalow in the old village core of Palatine. After three years of unemployment, Arnold's drinking had reached an unacceptable level for Bev. When she pointed out his disheveled appearance and suggested it might impair his job search, he said, "They don't want any pot-bellied, grey beards." He snarled at her to, "go get a job if it was so easy." So she did.
She had never worked since their marriage. Prior to that she had worked as a retail clerk in a cosmetics department in a Loop department store. She proudly found a job at the local K-Mart store working in the jewelry and watch department. When Arnold pointed out that it was a minimum wage job and would have no appreciable impact on their financial situation, she tartly replied that at least she wasn't a bum like some people.
Within six months they had divorced. She kept the aging Camry. Arnold kept the now rusty Lincoln. They had sold most of the furniture and electronic goodies by then anyway, so there wasn't much more to divvy up. Arnold Junior, the oldest, elected to go with his father. Then Kurt acted like he wanted to go with the men, too, but she finally talked him out of it, saying that Arnold Junior would be back soon.
And she was correct in her assessment. Arnold had always acted far too sternly with the boy, and that tendency had been exaggerated by their currently reduced circumstances. Before two weeks had elapsed, Arnold Junior had returned to her. Her ex-husband then disappeared, but three months later she began receiving very small, court-mandated, child support checks. She realized that he had found some kind of minimum wage job, too. The envelopes were postmarked from Chicago's north side. Arnold Junior said he thought his father was working as a security guard, because it had become the focus of his late night ravings during his worsening drinking bouts.
It bothered Bev to think that her husband felt that he had to leave because he could only get a minimum wage job. His pride hadn't permitted him to remain with her and the children because of his employment. After all, he had earned a Masters Degree in Business and CPA certification. Guys like him weren't supposed to be unemployed. Bev knew that his 54 years worked against him as it did her, too. She was 47. Arnold's pride made her sad because any job would have been temporarily acceptable to her, even minimum wage, provided that he kept looking for professional level work. However, she couldn't permit her divorce to take up the spotlight of her attention. She had to focus on her own deteriorating financial situation. Even with all three kids working part time jobs she couldn't make the monthly rent on their house.
The operative emotions she encountered when she found her meager furniture and belongs on the sidewalk and in the snow in front of her house were humiliation and anger. She found Kelly sitting in one of the kitchen chairs next to the curb. The sheriff had nailed an eviction notice to the door. Kelly informed her that the landlord had already changed the locks. She also informed her mother that her brothers had been so embarrassed they had gone to the public library to wait in the warmth. Despite having picked up an additional weekend job working at a local convenience store she simply could not afford the rent on a house. She turned down a job as a cleaning woman because the work looked too athletic for her age. She ruled out prostitution for the same reason.
They moved southeasterly again, following the Chicago and Northwestern rail line toward Chicago. She found a two bedroom apartment that she could afford in a massive apartment complex near O'Hare Airport. They all hated the area. Technically suburban, the area had a menacing urban look to it. The neighborhood was crisscrossed by expressways and shadowed by skyscrapers. Their building was filled with Mexicans, Middle Easterners, Filipinos, and Europeans including Irish and Polish right off the boat.
The kids hated it. They were accustomed to suburban locales where the Anglo Saxons ruled as a majestic majority. Kelly had nightmares about the long interior hallway they had to traverse to reach the apartment. All of the children hated their new high school. Bev tried to explain that both she and Arnold had grown-up in diverse communities on Chicago’s North Side. The kids didn’t buy it.
For a brief period she accepted welfare and aid to dependent children. The women she had met in the basement where everyone did their laundry were happy to explain were and how to apply. A young Palestinian girl drove her to the welfare office located on the nearby Northwest side of Chicago and showed her the ropes. Bev hated all the legal red tape.
Then she found a job. She responded to a newspaper advertisement, a sales position, which required someone who spoke fluent English and communicated well with people. She telephoned the listed number as directed and spoke with Dick Richhead, the owner of the company. She sold herself hard, bringing up her Bachelors Degree in English and her recent retail sales experience. Later she realized the only thing Dick had been looking for was fluency in English. Shortly afterwards, when she left for a face to face interview, she discovered the office building that housed the company, Pumping Sunshine, was well within walking distance of her apartment. Unfortunately, no sidewalks existed and the embankment of the Northwest Tollway provided an insurmountable obstacle. The only way to reach the tall glass walled building was by automobile, and it took half an hour via a serpentine route.
Inside the modern building, Bev felt better. She liked the atrium and the flourishing tropical plants. She took the elevator to the 15th floor as directed and quickly located the office door marked Pumping Sunshine, a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Sky, Inc. And she was surprised to discover that she wasn't really being interviewed. The woman who had been introduced as her supervisor, a young, slim, nervous woman but well attired, perfunctorily asked her to fill out her employment papers. Her name was Athena Wells. She chain smoked cigarettes. Bev later learned that Athena's father was English and her mother Greek.
"Could you tell me what the salary is?"
"I thought Dick covered that with you. Base pay is seven dollars an hour. Depending on how well you do on each shift, you can earn almost double that. It's commission based; didn't Dick tell you?"
"Noooo. Can you tell me what I'll be selling?"
"Whoa. He didn't tell you shit about the job, did he?"
"Well, he said it would be inside sales..."
"Inside sales, my ass. You're going to be selling magazine subscriptions to people. You have to call them, make a scripted pitch, close them, and move on to the next one. We rotate shifts once a week. One week you work days. The next you work evenings. You gotta make your daily, weekly, and monthly quotas. If you don't, you're gone. Simple as that. You want the job or what?"
"Yes."
Bev found the money a respite from minimum wage, but she hadn't expected selling magazine subscriptions to be a pressure packed job. Two women quit in the middle of the shift her first evening on the job. She didn't like the idea of being monitored on another line by Athena either. And she found it difficult to make her quotas. People hung up on her half way through her scripted pitch. When she tried to deviate from the script, Athena called her over immediately after the call and reprimanded her. When she arose to use the bathroom, Athena told her that she could only leave her cubicle during breaks or lunch period. She had said, "Ok," but made her way to the bathroom anyway.
After her first dreary week of evenings spent on the 15th floor, she had already had enough. Her headset left her ears numb after eight hours of pinching. Her wrists ached from typing the information gathered after each call into her dumb computer terminal, and her bladder was usually full. Two more women had quit. It was impossible to socialize with anyone at work. The only social time available was in the parking lot or on the elevator. With the alarming volume of turnover of her co-workers, she realized the job would be socially atomizing.
She persevered through the winter, generally making quota or a little above. Athena gave them group "motivational" talks that only seemed to further demotivate and demoralize people. Everyone appeared to be frightened to speak up to complain about the working conditions or the idiotic scripts they were forced to cheerfully present to the hapless customers. Bev grew mightily tired of the men who shouted obscenities at her over the telephone. What did they think? She enjoyed calling people away from their dinners or favorite TV programs in order to be pitched a magazine subscription? Why didn't they show a little common decency? She was just doing a damn job. She didn't own the company or come up with the idea of dunning people in their homes. As long as it was legal, why take it out on her?
The most annoying aspect of her job was that Bev had to ring a little bell, the kind that was used in small retail establishments to call a person out of a back room. The bell enabled Athena to listen in on the successful sales presentation and confirm the kill. Sometimes Athena walked the aisles between the cubicles reminding the women tethered to the telephones and computers that she hadn't heard that bell in awhile. Sometimes Athena would divide the "killing floor" as she called it into two teams to create additional competition. Bev grew to hate Athena.
By spring, Bev had seen a complete turnover in the women employed by Pumping Sunshine. She had managed to make most of her quotas, but she rarely earned more than the base rate. Going below your quotas, of course, meant termination. She had seen a number of women terminated by Athena. Only the strong survived until termination. Because Athena would ride them every hour, every day, until they buckled under the stress and voluntarily quit. Athena seemed to pride herself on her toughness. She had developed the ability to listen, poker faced, to all the hard luck stories. She faced with equanimity the sudden, ugly, explosive scenes which occurred when women quit in the middle of a shift showering Sunshine and Athena in a merciless rain of expletives.
Bev came to understand that the favorite method of quitting was simply not showing up for work anymore. The second most favored method was feigning illness in the middle of a shift, departing, and never returning. And the third, least favored method, which was chosen by some of the emotionally volcanic women, was the social explosion at work, which enabled them to shout obscenities at Athena. Athena serenely supervised through it all. Even the rumored threats Bev heard repeated in the elevators from discharged telemarketers didn't seem to phase Athena.
In the spring, Bev felt depressed. Kelly continued to do poorly in high school. Arnold Junior tried returning to his father once again, and Kurt simply remained morose. Bev didn't have any friends anymore. Her rotating schedule took a toll on her remaining budding friendships with women in her apartment building. Geographically she felt atomized by her neighborhood, and her work life could be described as tedium punctuated by terror.
She sought other work and even got a few interviews. But when she came face to face with employers she suspected, that like Arnold, she was just one more "pot bellied grey beard." Then the Camry finally broke down, and she found herself saddled with more bills. She feared being in debt the rest of her life. As her motivation seemed to drain off with the fine spring weather, she routinely fell short of quota and found Athena stalking her more and more frequently. Athena’s sarcastic remarks became habitual. "Planning on selling anything tonight, sweetie, or are you just gonna fill up the chair again?"
Completely demoralized, Bev struggled to make quota. After two successive evenings below quota, Athena summoned Bev into her office at the end of the shift.
"You were below quota again tonight."
"It was a bad list, Athena. It was a bad area code. How many people in New York City want to buy a magazine about fishing?"
"I've sold that magazine to plenty of people in New York. I just don't think you've got what it takes to be in telemarketing. Your numbers have been slipping for quite some time."
Then the cold realization struck Bev. Athena had already written her off. This wasn't a pep talk, it was the beginning of protracted harassment to force her to quit. Somewhere a Blue Sky computer had spit out her name as "unproductive" and had targeted her for termination.
"I'll bring the numbers up tomorrow."
"You better. The company can't carry you forever, you know." Athena gave her a cutesy look through the cigarette smoke.
* * * *
Bev visited the gun shop with some trepidation. She had never owned, loaded, or discharged a firearm in her life. In fact, she loathed guns. Like most Americans, she was heartily sick of the massacres that routinely dotted the newscasts. But times and people change. Athena had given her an ultimatum. "Meet your monthly quotas in the upcoming week or you're fired." A clearly impossible task, because she had fallen so far behind, Bev had decided on another option.
The bald headed, tattooed man behind the counter had a name tag pinned to his t-shirt. It proclaimed his name Daryl.
"Daryl, I'd like to look at a used handgun that a lady could use for self-defense."
"Well, the boss makes me wear this here." The middle-aged man pointed to the name tag. "My true name is Duke.
Bev felt immediately attracted to Duke's earnest demeanor and warm smile. "I've got an asshole for a boss, too."
Duke deftly walked her through the small caliber firearms, professionally describing each piece and demonstrating the loading, safety features, and aspects of each weapon. She settled on a .25 automatic that fit her budget. Duke talked her into buying an extra clip and two boxes of bullets. When they discovered that Bev didn't have an Illinois firearms card, Duke cavalierly purchased the firearm and ammo in his own name and accepted cash from Bev to complete the illegal transaction. Duke prided himself on his judgment of people. He felt convinced that Bev was a good citizen despite the fact that he had just met her. He also supplied Bev with the necessary forms for her to apply for the Illinois gun card.
* * * *
Bev began staking out the parking lot after each shift, timing Athena and observing where she typically parked her automobile. Bev assumed she would be fired on Friday, Athena's favorite day for "cleaning house," as she was fond of putting it.
Thursday evening, Bev quietly awaited Athena. She had pulled her rusty car next to Athena's sleek new Mercedes. When Athena came clipping down the sidewalk, Bev started her engine and then got out to confront the young woman. She looked startled when Bev accosted her.
Bev casually pulled the .25 auto out of her purse and pointed it at Athena's face. Bev had taken care to make sure the chamber and her clip were empty.
"What's this?" Athena sounded unsteady. In the moonlight she could see the glint of the stainless steel frame of the automatic handgun. Bev blocked her access to her automobile.
"I just thought that I'd shoot you before you fired me." Bev responded cheerfully.
"What?" Athena's usual low gravelly voice broke into an uncharacteristic soprano. "What?" She repeated with even less energy.
"Yeah. I'm going to shoot you." Bev snapped back the slide of her little gun. It sounded convincingly ominous despite the fact that it wasn't loaded.
"Please, I wasn't going to fire you." Athena put her hands up in front of her plainly shaken face to shield herself from the incoming bullets. Athena had grown used to people whining or throwing shit fits when she fired them. Bev's calm steely determination completely unnerved her.
Athena began tentatively stepping backwards while simultaneously crouching into a fetal ball. Her hands remained over her face in a futile attempt to hide in the sinister void of the vast parking lot. "Don't... please..."
"Why not? You got it coming, and you know it."
Athena involuntarily began dry sobbing. She did know it. But she also continued her instinctive backpedaling even as she crouched low toward the sidewalk. In a minute, Athena found herself fleeing headlong back up the walk toward the massive shape of the office building looming in the darkness.
* * * *
Bev removed the empty clip and drove home. While she waited for the police to arrive, she prepared the next day's meals for her children. She wrote an elaborate note for Arnold Junior explaining the situation. Finally, she sat down and watched late night TV infomercials. When she finally went to bed in the early hours of the morning, she was convinced that her plan to apply for social security disability due to mental problems had gone awry. Although bitterly disappointed that no police had showed up at her apartment, she finally transited into sleep.
Friday, she reported to work at the usual time, prepared for anything, although she did leave her .25 at home. The women crowded off the elevator onto the 15th floor but were uncharacteristically greeted by the owner, Dick Richhead. He escorted them all into a conference room where he introduced their new supervisor, Meredith Sharkey. Like Athena, she was fashionably dressed, young, and a cigarette smoker.
Bev, now the senior telemarketer, asked, “Where’s Athena?”
“Athena checked herself into a mental health center last night. She really wasn’t cut out for this business,” said Dick as he departed, turning the group over to Meredith.
Meredith took a deep breath and said, “Ok, ladies. We need to get a few ground rules straight. If you don’t make your daily, weekly, or monthly quotas, you’re outta here.
* * * *
After work, Bev met Duke for dinner and drinks at a local lounge.
About the author: My short story publication credits include: The Princeton Arts Review, The Rockford Review, George and Mertie’s Place, Nebo, The Missing Spoke Press Anthology, Struggle, The Oyez Review, Writer’s Corner, Short Story Bimonthly, Slugfest, Tarpaulin Sky, Mobius, Jack the Daw, whimperbang, the seventh annual issue of Cooweescoowee, Thunder Sandwich, and Plum Biscuit, the magazine of the New York Writers Coalition. Additional credits include poetry in The Chicago Seed and non-fiction in Sunrise, a former alternative Midwestern monthly. A collection of my short stories, An Infinity of Days in the Psychotic Atomik Empire, was published by Plain View Press in Texas.
See more of Gregory’s work on his website.