The Insatiables Read online

  She paused to eyeball me. There were complex rituals to be observed. I could tell she was desperate for the job, and she knew I was desperate for it too, and the perennial symbiosis of our friendship restricted all possible forward motion to one narrow, conciliatory path.

  “I’m sure Gus will end up giving it to you,” I said.

  She smiled, a burst of excitement making her shoulders shudder, and didn’t say another word.

  Bitch.

  2

  I was a Level 1 at home too, and this new potential advancement—to be someone not just at work, but in life—began to dominate my thoughts. I became aware all too quickly of the strange escalation of desire that occurs as you get closer to the things you want. Something that was ungraspable yesterday, and therefore stored in the “pipe dream” section of your mind, suddenly becomes distantly attainable, and then it’s all you can think about. What if? What would it feel like? Who would I be then?

  The box of Slim Jims had been wrapped in chintzy green paper with big gold circles on it. My mom had pulled the plastic ribbon into loopy curls with her kitchen scissors so that it was camouflaged among the normal presents. Loretta Lynn’s “Country Christmas” echoed from the kitchen stereo as my family sat under the sparkly-white glow of our artificial Balsam spruce, watching me unearth a year’s supply of mechanically separated meat sticks. Courtesy of Sam’s Club.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

  “Need some meat on your bones,” my dad replied matter-of-factly. “Thought you could pack them in your lunches for work.”

  “You know, your aunt Eileen got diabetes as soon as she stopped eating meat,” my mother said. “I’m telling you, Halley, this veganism is not healthy.”

  “I’m not a vegan; I’m a vegetarian,” I said. “Or maybe it’s pescatarian since I still eat fish sometimes.”

  “Wasn’t Hitler a vegetarian?” my brother said. Grandpa’s eyebrows went up.

  “Hippie fad diet, that’s all it is,” my mom said, looking away. “Like that Atkins craze. Of course, you won’t listen to us. Gotta be different.”

  It was true, I suppose. I was different—you might even say I was the black sheep of the family—although I wouldn’t have said I wanted to be. At work I wanted to stand out, move up. At home there was no possibility of moving up, so I tried to keep a low profile.

  My mom looked at her watch again, and then looked at me as if I was holding things up. “We should probably get a move on,” she said.

  My parents’ beagle Guthrie lay at the foot of the coffee table, gnawing a new rawhide in the shape of a pretzel, as my mom opened a “Beagle Puppies” wall calendar from my sister. We went around the room from youngest to oldest, taking turns unwrapping while Grandpa snapped photos with his old Kodak. He and Granny always spent Christmas morning with us because, of the four of their children, my mother was their favorite. This wasn’t something anyone ever said out loud, of course. But it had always been that way, always giving us this inkling that we were supposed to be exceptional.

  Soon there were hugs and chatter and Coca-Cola-glazed ham, counters filled with pull-apart rolls and casseroles covered in gravy. Guthrie released a deep, protective howl whenever the door opened. Aunts, uncles, and cousins streamed through while the nine-year-old neighbor girl stood outside smoking a cigarette, traces of her smoke wafting into my parents’ living room with every cold burst of air.

  “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I feel sorry for that girl,” my dad said, peering around the corner. “Those people haven’t cleaned their gutters in years.”

  It wasn’t dirty gutters that made him feel sorry for the girl, though. It was her lack of spirit that bothered him. The same lack of spirit that my mother lauded.

  “That kid has the good sense not to expect much,” my mother said as she pulled another tray of rolls out of the oven. “She probably didn’t get anything good for Christmas. But do you see her crying about it? Nope.”

  I looked back at the girl again. She cupped her smoking hand in a weird sort of way, cigarette tucked between her middle fingers like a Vulcan salute. Maybe she’d seen someone else cup it that way—a boy down the street, perhaps, or some lead singer from a band—and taken that as her model. It occurred to me as I watched her that I could have been her, if a few basic things had been different. If my brand of aspirationalism had been rockabilly instead of pop, I could be out there practicing my cigarette grip and daydreaming about whether to get an anchor tattooed on my shoulder or my inner thigh. We were all aiming for something.

  The Disney parade, and then the football game, blared from the TV while my weird uncle Levi, burned out from doing too many drugs in the seventies, stared from the corner in his googly-eyed way, falling in and out of sleep. My cousin Jade—known to everyone as the one who used to steal money from my dad’s wallet—apologized for being late; she’d lost her three-year-old and spent twenty frantic minutes searching for her, only to find her standing naked on the bathroom sink in front of the mirror because “she wanted to see if her butt looked like Barbie’s.” I sat at the counter eating a bowl of Granny’s marshmallow-topped fruit salad and was startled out of my mental hideout by the last few words of a conversation my mother was having with my Aunt.

  “. . . like the time Halley sodomized that poor billy goat,” my mother said.

  “What?” Granny shouted at full volume. She couldn’t hear very well, but she refused to get a hearing aid.

  “Can we not go a single Christmas without bringing that up?” I said. “I was just petting it!”

  They all laughed as if they hadn’t heard this story every year for the last twenty years.

  “For god’s sake, I was four years old,” I said. My exasperation felt real but also rehearsed, as if I was playing myself on a stage. This was the fixed identity from which I would never escape as long as I stayed in Dayton, in this family. The girl who sodomized a billy goat.

  “Language, Halley,” my mother said.

  I frowned.

  Soon my sister came home from her boyfriend’s parents’ house, all smiles, flashing a trendy pavé diamond ring, and all attention was refocused. In the Faust family, this was the very definition of “exceptional.” This was the way you lived a good life—by replicating the lives of those who came before you. The kitchen was hot and noisy, and my mom cried, even though she’d gotten advance notice of the engagement when Justin asked my dad’s permission.

  “Lindsay will make such a beautiful bride,” Granny shouted.

  “Seems like just yesterday I was the one getting married,” my mom said, wiping away tears with a red poinsettia-print paper napkin. “Now my girls are all grown up.”

  “Halley’s not,” my brother Luke chimed in from behind the refrigerator door, the stench of his Axe body spray surrounding him like a protective shield. “She doesn’t even have a boyfriend.”

  “I thought you did,” Aunt Lois said. She took another bite of pecan pie. “What was his name? Mike?”

  “We broke up last fall.” I shrugged an apology. Such high hopes I’d had of my first serious boyfriend, and in the end, I’d spent the first half of the relationship wishing he’d show up and the other half wishing he’d leave. I didn’t know how to explain to people, without sounding arrogant and pretentious, that the ordinariness of it all had been suffocating. All my life I’d dreamed of fairy tales, but what I’d gotten with Mike had been a distant, basketball-obsessed fart machine who assumed that fidelity, half-priced appetizers at Applebee’s, and the occasional red rose was the same thing as love. I could never quite put my finger on what was so dissatisfying about all of that, just like I could never quite put my finger on what made me feel like an outsider in my own family. So when I finally broke it off, they took his side over mine and prodded me about it every chance they got.

  Aunt Lois paused to lick a crumb off the tip of her finger. “You’d
better get a move on, Halley. Before you know it, you’ll be my age.”

  “Halley says she doesn’t want to get married,” my mom said, side-eyeing me. “I don’t think it’s true though, I think she says it just to torment me.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to get married?” Aunt Lois said. She half-smiled like you would if you were asking a little kid why he doesn’t want to wear pants, knowing he’ll say something cute in response.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Every woman wants to get married,” Aunt Lois said. She looked over at my sister, who was picking a piece of lint from one of the prongs of her ring. “Right, Lindsay? Or else who’s going to take care of you when you’re my age?”

  “What?” Granny shouted.

  “She said every woman wants to get married, Mother!” my mom yelled.

  Granny nodded.

  “I might be moving,” I blurted.

  My dad looked up from his conversation with Uncle Larry. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Where to?”

  “France,” I said.

  They all turned in my direction.

  “Like France, the country?” my brother said.

  My mom opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Why?” she said, preemptively annoyed, as if this might have been a tiresome joke.

  “Well nothing is decided yet,” I said quickly. “A few of us are up for the position; they’re telling us after the San Francisco meeting, I think. So I probably won’t even get the offer. But they’re sending a team of people to Europe for a year to work on a product launch.” The words “product” and “launch” seemed to echo through the room like a gunshot. It was a loaded phrase, not only because it was the fodder for my strange announcement, but because I knew what a product launch was, and they didn’t.

  My mom started to speak but my sister interrupted her. “What does that mean?”

  “You know, when they release a product for sale, they have to tell customers about it before it comes out so people want to actually buy it.”

  “It’s too bad they’re going to France,” my dad said. “Germany would’ve been better. At least they have Oktoberfest in Germany. Why France?”

  “I’ll never know how you got to be like this,” my mom said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like this,” she said in a world-weary voice. “Never satisfied. Nothing is ever good enough.”

  I went to the sink to wash my bowl and spoon in the gray dishwater. Our conversations always ended the same way. With me hungry for something I couldn’t get from them, the futility of returning again and again to suckle at a teat that couldn’t bear milk. This had never seemed to apply to my siblings; it was only me who’d been born under strange stars, full of some foreign energy that couldn’t be used. It was in these moments that I clung most desperately to the belief that somehow, somewhere, life must be better than this.

  3

  After Christmas, I wanted more than ever to explode out of my life, to flood out and experience everything there was to experience in the world all at once. That’s when I started to notice the little betrayals. I began to measure our friendship by them. Celeste, describing the perfect French Riviera bikini she wanted to buy. Me, daydreaming about French cheese. Celeste, smiling surreptitiously at Gus in the hallway. Me, working extra hard on my portion of the San Francisco meeting. Celeste, talking about how ready she was to move up. She probably thought she deserved it more than I did. Okay, she was better at organizing meetings than I was, better at navigating the corporate world, but only because she’d had more practice.

  While I was in college, Celeste had gone to technical school. Her degree had only taken two years while mine had taken four, giving her a two-year head start. Except she didn’t think of it as a “head start”; she referred to it as “doing her time.” When I finished college, she helped me get hired at Findlay too.

  But I started at the same level as Celeste, a Level 1, even though I’d studied for two extra years. Not to mention, she’d started at Findlay with almost no debt, while I started with $60,000 in student loans. I sure as hell wasn’t buying any Tumi luggage. And regardless of all this, I’d been prepared to concede to her anyway, until I found out she wasn’t going to even pretend she’d do the same for me.

  The frizzy head of Molly Barnes—another Level 1—prairie-dogged over the top of our cubicle wall. “Halley, can I talk to you about these agenda booklets for the San Francisco meeting?” she sang. Her lopsided grin gave you the feeling that if you got too close she might pull a knife on you.

  I stopped typing and walked around the partition that separated my desk from hers. Hers was dominated by an unironic display of squirrel memorabilia—squirrel finger puppets, porcelain squirrel figurines, and a big stuffed squirrel holding an acorn embroidered with the words “I’m nuts about you.” She pulled one of the finger puppets off its pencil home and attached it to the end of her finger before she spoke, one of Sun Tzu’s lesser-known Art of War tactics.

  “Fire away,” I said.

  “Well,” she began in her best squirrel voice, shaking the big-eyed puppet at me, “we aren’t going to be able to create the agenda booklets. There just isn’t enough time!”

  “Time?” My eyes darted between Molly and the squirrel, unsure where to look. “You’ve had the work order since October.”

  She grinned at my implication. “You know, believe it or not there are other things going on around here besides the sales meeting.”

  I bit the inside of my lip. “But if I don’t have the agenda books, everyone at the meeting will be all lost and confused. Can I make them myself?”

  “You’re so funny, Halley,” she said, conjuring a little squirrel laugh. “You know you’re not allowed to do it yourself. We can’t have just anyone making print pieces, they won’t be on brand!”

  “But . . . they’re just meeting agendas,” I said. “They’re for our own people . . . Surely nobody is going to care what the font looks like.”

  She smiled. “Sorry,” the squirrel said. So we were playing hard-ball then. She must be gunning for the France position too. Molly was a Level 1 like the rest of us, but she had a slight advantage as the coordinator for our division’s graphic designer. Our success was, to a large extent, dependent upon her good will—she had the power to delay, reroute, “lose,” and otherwise botch our projects if she so chose. It was a delicate balancing act; she couldn’t screw things up so badly that it would make her look incompetent, but within those bounds were hundreds of ways she could make us look incompetent, so we had to be careful to stay on her good side. Which was difficult, because she was an evil goddamned demon, and only those of us who worked directly with her on projects—other Level 1s—actually knew it. To everyone else, she was just sweet little Molly with her weird squirrel fixation. I tried telling Gus once that Molly was evil, and he stopped speaking to me for a whole month. How could anyone who loved squirrels so much be evil?

  “Okay.” I rubbed my hands together. “Are you still going to be able to send my box?”

  “Box? What box?” she said.

  I sighed a little too loudly, and she smirked, and we both knew she was getting to me.

  “The box. The box of materials we talked about that has to be sent to San Francisco. You said the welcome packets won’t be done until the last minute, and I’ll already be en route to the meeting by then, so you were going to box them up and send them.”

  Molly cleared her throat. “Oh yes, that box. If I told you I’d do it, then I’ll do it.”

  “Okay, but it’s really important. It’s the most important box of the whole meeting. Name badges, instructional materials from Gus, presentation booklets. It will make all of us look bad if I don’t get that box.”

  This was the only way to get Molly to comply—to convince her that it was in her own best interest.

  She deployed t
he squirrel finger puppet a final time. “Of course I’ll send your box, Halley!” the squirrel sang.

  “Thank you.” I backed away, turned the corner, and collapsed into my swivel chair. Phil Collins swam to the side of his bowl, looked up into my tired eyes, and blew me a “hang in there, buddy” bubble, before retiring to his castle.

  Later that day, Jamie Aaronson—Level 3—invaded our cubicle.

  “I hope you can manage it this time, Celeste,” she said. “Tell them it comes directly from the president if you need to. The company is not going to foot the bill for all these canceled activities just because people are too hungover to show up.”

  At Findlay, Jamie was known for three things: her disciplined approach to scheduling, “The Rachel” haircut she’d maintained since the mid-90s, and the glamour shots of herself in a cowgirl outfit that she kept on her desk. The very fact that these were the things she was known for, that she was rendered so small in her daily life so as to have an email signature that only took up four lines, made her all the more determined to insert herself into every situation simply to put her thumbprint on it, a constant battle with the brand of insignificance that administrative staff were supposed to accept as a given. The only real power she wielded was in her proximity to the president as his executive administrative assistant, and she stretched it as far as it would go.

  Celeste looked her right in the eye. “For all the activities, or just for golf?”

  “All of them.”

  “Got it.” Celeste scribbled a note to herself, although she didn’t need to. She remembered everything.

  “Repeat it back to me.”

  “If anyone cancels an activity during the San Francisco meeting,” Celeste recited, “they pay for it out of pocket.”

  Jamie tapped a red fingernail on the top of our cubicle wall and stared at something outside our range of vision. We weren’t sure if we should continue looking at her or mind our own business, so we shuffled papers around and alternated looking at our desks and looking back up to see if she was looking at us.