Who You Know

by Theresa Alan

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

In her wickedly funny debut novel, Alan introduces a trio of fast-lane friends trying to make sense of their love lives, the singles scene, careers, cyber dating, sleeping with coworkers, and everything in between.

Release date: October 15, 2013

Publisher: Strapless

Print pages: 384

Sample

Going into the job market armed with nothing more than a degree in English is like trying to fight a five-alarm fire when you’re soaked with lighter fluid—you’re just not going to get very far.

It had taken four months and forty-two résumés, but at long last I’d gotten called for an interview. Four months is a long, long time when your fiancé is busy with graduate school and all you have to entertain yourself with is daytime television and a massage wand, AKA the Magic Wand. (I’d had to invest in the Magic Wand despite our tight budget—it’s difficult to explain developing carpal tunnel while unemployed.) The sound of drills, blenders, and electric shavers now produced a distressingly carnal reaction in me.

The interview was an hour away, and every synapse in my body was twitching with nervous energy. I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. I got up from the table, paced, sat down again. I flipped through a Victoria’s Secret catalog. Wonder-bras. This is not something I understood. Maybe when I lost the thirty-five pounds that snuck up on me in high school and college, I’d get it. But right now, the idea of purposely making a part of your body look bigger? Incomprehensible.

I reached up to grab the cordless phone off the wall and dialed Avery’s number.

“Explain the concept of thong underwear to me,” I said when Avery answered. I made a face at the annoying Victoria’s Secret model who looked so pleased with herself.

“Rette, I’m afraid thong underwear is one of the great mysteries of the world.”

“I spend a good portion of my life trying to keep my underwear from nesting between my buttcheeks, and here’s a product whose sole purpose is to wedge its way between the fleshiest parts of my body.” I was dying for some coffee, but my nervous stomach couldn’t handle caffeine’s caustic effect. The months of unemployment had proved corrosive to both my ego and my digestive system, and I did not want to go to my interview with the gases in my stomach doing a miasmic tango. “Guess what? McKenna Marketing called yesterday. I have an interview today.” I padded across the wood floor to the sink to rinse out my cup. The floorboards creaked mournfully, straining beneath my weight. Greg’s cereal bowl was in the sink, unsoaked of course. How hard was it for him to rinse it out and put it in the dishwasher? Why did he not realize that after a few hours corn flakes and milk could produce a bond stronger than love?

I turned on the faucet and the ancient water pipes groaned with exertion. Our apartment was old and ill-tempered, and I absolutely loved it.

“An interview? That’s great. I had friends who looked for a job for six months before getting an interview.”

This was why I loved Avery. Unlike, for example, my family, Avery could always make me feel like slightly less of a loser. My younger sister, Jen, had majored in marketing, and even though she got execrable grades and her résumé was overflowing with grammatical errors, she managed to get a job two weeks after she got her diploma. She and my parents were astounded by my lack of progress in my job hunt.

“Are you nervous?”

“That’s an understatement. I’ve sent out forty-two résumés and this is the only place that called. Why did I quit teaching?”

“Because you hated it.”

“Oh yeah.” I walked back over to the table, collapsed into the chair, and started looking through the Victoria’s Secret again.

“You need to visualize yourself acing the interview and getting the job. I’m serious. You should look in the mirror and tell yourself you’re smart, you’re talented, and you’re going to get this job. You need to say it like you mean it.”

“Yeah, Ave, that’s pretty much just not going to happen.”

“I know it sounds corny, but it’s the power of positive visualization. It works.”

“Yokay.” This was short for “yeah OK,” which was short for “yeah right, not in this lifetime, nice try though.”

“I’m going to be late for work, I’d better get going,” Avery said. “You’re going to do great. Stop by my office when it’s over and give me all the details.”

“Will do. Talk to you later.”

Avery and I sometimes called each other six times a day to say absolutely nothing. I had begun to look forward to reporting my day’s events to her or, more likely, the nonevents—random thoughts I’d had, new ideas for the wedding I wanted to get her opinion on, new ideas about what I wanted from a career and from my life. Meeting Avery was the only good thing that had happened since the move.

When Greg asked me what I thought about moving to Colorado so he could get his master’s degree in engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I was torn. On the one hand, I liked Colorado and had been looking for an excuse to get away from Minnesota and its entirely inhuman winters. On the other hand, Jen had moved to Colorado three years ago to follow her ski-bum boyfriend, and I preferred my little sister when she was thousands of miles away, not a mere few blocks across town. It had a little something to do with her astonishing beauty, staggering self-centeredness, and the fact that any time I was around her I felt like the fat, frumpy older sister that I was. But I’d said yes, and we moved, and I’d spent the last four months marinating in feelings of failure and rabid self-contempt.

Things with Jen hadn’t been as bad as I had worried they might be. She was the one who introduced me to Avery, for one thing, and I was grateful to her for that. I can honestly say Avery is the only tall, skinny blonde I don’t despise. Avery was the kind of person who did everything spectacularly well, but somehow you didn’t hate her for it. Her meals, for example, looked like something that should be photographed for a gourmet cooking magazine. Can you imagine, taking the time to lovingly arrange a sprig of decorative parsley atop the entrée before gorging yourself silly?

Avery knew about stuff that was completely alien to me. She’s a vegetarian and cooked food I couldn’t even spell: Seitan, kreplach, kasha, avial, kabocha, aspic—these were not foods found at your neighborhood Denny’s or Village Inns back in Minnesota, I can assure you.

Avery was the one who told us that the apartment above her was for rent, which is how we found this place. Avery was also the one who let me know about the job opening at the company where she and Jen worked.

Which just goes to show you that the saying is true: Getting ahead in this world is all about who you know. But like an idiot, instead of spending my years in college networking and brown-nosing, I’d worked my butt off to get good grades, routinely pulling all-nighters to finish epic essays and making myself sick with stress every time exams rolled around. What had all my hard work gotten me? A career that paid about half the salary of the average construction worker.

Being a copy editor for a marketing company wasn’t my dream job, but right now I was willing to launch a career as a llama wrangler, a ticket taker at a movie theater, or one of those people who stands in the bathroom handing out towels (which begs the question: Is this really a needed service? Is it harder to reach an extra three inches to grab a towel yourself? I think not), anything to get my butt off the couch and some money in my pocket.

It would be cool to see Avery every day, but Jen? Every time I looked at her, I could feel my few remaining shreds of self-esteem wither. We looked like a set of before and after pictures: We had the same long, thick red hair and brown eyes, but she was two inches taller and at least thirty pounds lighter. It wasn’t Jen’s fault she was stunning, but she had a way of igniting my insecurities as no one else could.

Jen and I would never be good friends; we were just too different. I consumed books with the same voraciousness I attacked fattening foods, while she never read anything more substantial than a greeting card and was on a perpetual diet. Plus, there was the fact that Mom adored Jen, while I never measured up. Mom didn’t give a hoot about good grades (she’d never done well in school and found it odd that I could be content to sit still with a book for hours on end), and she was constantly giving me admonishing glances, explaining to me that I might fare better with the boys if I put on a little lipstick and maybe didn’t read quite so many books. Pardon my blistering resentment.

I mean I don’t want you to get the idea that Jen and I hated each other or anything. Jen’s beauty and sparkling personality were as intoxicating to me as they were to everyone else. It was a love/hate thing with myself, a fiery internal battle of jealousy, curdled self-esteem, and a burning wish to be a lot more like the person I aspired to be, a person with my kindness and intelligence but Jen’s looks and perfect figure (incidentally, my ideal self also had a dazzling fashion sense that would make my mother glow with pride rather than shake her head and roll her eyes and give me the kind of withering looks that made me want to promptly hurtle myself off the nearest cliff).

But if nothing else, Jen and I were good drinking buddies, and sometimes in a new town, all you need is someone who can help distract you from your loneliness.

I believe there is a certain order to the universe, an organized plan; I believe that from the chaos comes meaning. Just as the unruly spattering of notes of music on a page are transformed into a symphony when you interpret it and put it all together, there is a method behind the madness.

What the method to this current madness was, however, unclear. My horoscope this morning had provided no warning this was coming.

It was all the fault of my caffeine addiction. If it weren’t for my dependence on coffee, I would have been safe in my office right now and not standing here waiting for the coffee to brew and listening to Jim from the sales department tell me he was bringing over a bride from the Philippines. What was the proper response to such a statement? What was I supposed to say?

What I did say was “Well, that’s great, Jim.” I nodded and smiled and willed the coffee to brew faster while he went on about how beautiful she was and how they had such similar philosophies about life.

I watched the coffee dripping slowly, a caffeine udder. I couldn’t exactly leave now with an empty cup. Why did I ever get hooked on coffee in the first place?

I never would have poisoned my body with such a toxin like caffeine in my dancing days, but now that I worked in an office, coffee gave me that artificial jolt of energy I needed to make it through the day.

I looked at Jim, letting his figure blur. His aura was orangy red, a good sign. Maybe he really was happy. Maybe this would all work out after all.

When the coffee was ready at last, I poured myself a cup, told Jim I needed to get back to work, and bolted back to my office, feeling better than usual about being single.

If I let myself think about this poor woman who was going to marry Jim, I’d start crying. I couldn’t let myself think about it; I couldn’t let the toxic thoughts consume me. Everything happens for a reason, everything happens for a reason, I reminded myself.

Even though the whole thing was sad, I couldn’t wait to tell Jen, my officemate, about Jim’s overseas bridal shipment.

It was always rewarding to share gossip with Jen. She’d been cracking me up since our cubicle days when she’d hurl paper airplanes made out of pictures downloaded from bestiality Web sites across the walls of our cubicles. Several times a day she would wedge her way into my cube and whisper scandalous tidbits about coworkers: “Avery, I have such dirt to dish, you would not believe.”

Jen and I had recently been promoted from peons to low-level grunts at McKenna Marketing, and our promotions had been marked with a move from cubicles to a cramped, windowless, bathroom stall-size office we shared, making it easier than ever to share the latest rumors.

At 8:30, only half an hour late—unusually early for her—Jen came rushing into our office holding a liter of bottled water in one hand and her briefcase in the other. Jen always made a big show of taking work home with her. She didn’t do any work while at work, so I found her pretense of being a slave to her job hilarious.

“My day is ruined before it’s even begun,” she announced, dumping her briefcase onto her desk. She collapsed into her chair and swiveled theatrically around to face me. “I got trapped into having a conversation with Lydia in the hallway. I saw her coming, but I had no place to hide, and I had to hold an entire conversation with her.”

“How is our fertile co-worker?”

“Glowing as usual. You’ll be happy to know that the little fetus is an absolute Rockette. Lydia’s latest craving is for apple butter on melba toast. And the nursery is almost done, and it is just perfect, absolutely just so adorable.”

Lydia was a nice woman, but she was hopelessly superficial. Talking to her was like holding a conversation with a Pop Tart—there just wasn’t a lot of substance.

Jen turned on her computer. She stared at the screen contemptuously as the computer booted up. “It’s only eight-thirty in the morning, and I’m bored and ready to go home. Please tell me you have gossip. How is Art?”

“I haven’t had a chance to check my e-mail yet ’cuz, Jen, I’ve got some serious heavy-duty dirt. I’m serious, you are never going to believe this: Jim is bringing over a mail-order bride from the Philippines.”

She arched her eyebrows and looked at me. “No way! That is hilarious!” she roared. Her hysterical laughter was contagious, and I couldn’t help but laugh right along with her.

Jen did nothing halfway. When she laughed, she really laughed—a knee-slapping, head-thrown-back kind of laugh. She made this aah-aah-aah noise that was really more of an absence of sound—all you could hear was a few choking breaths between convulsions.

“I can’t believe he’d tell you about it,” Jen said when her laughter had abated enough for her to speak. She dabbed at the tears in the corner of her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “You’d think he could at least lie and pretend he met her while traveling. We’d still know she was marrying him for his money, but at least it wouldn’t be quite so obviously gross.”

“You know something? I read this article that said the whole mail-order thing became popular in the seventies, which just happened to be when American women discovered a little thing called feminism.”

“Here’s to being single,” Jen said, raising her bottle of water. I clinked my coffee cup against it. “Speaking of, check your e-mail already.”

I logged on to my Yahoo! Personals account. For a moment, I felt guilty about laughing about Jim when I, too, had turned to such unromantic means of finding a date. The moment passed.

At least people using the personals knew what they wanted and weren’t selling themselves to escape their grim socioeconomic plight. I didn’t really think I’d find my soul mate online, but it had been nearly two years since the divorce, and I hadn’t gone on a single date that entire time. I’d been wary about getting into another relationship. I knew from experience that marriage was highly overrated, but Jen had more or less forced me to try to get back into the drama of dating. She created an account on the Yahoo! Personals and would respond to guys’ ads, describing what I looked like. When they wrote back detailing the salacious acts they wanted to perform on me in unlikely locations, she’d forward their responses to me, cackling with laughter.

She thought her ruse was hysterically funny, but I thought it was sort of mean, or at least in bad taste, and definitely creepy.

To get her off my back, I made up my own account and even browsed through the ads every now and then. I hadn’t really planned on responding to one, but eventually I found the ritual of reading them somehow therapeutic—it was nice to have constant confirmation there were other single people out there. At work, absolutely everyone except Jen was married. Or, like Jim, getting married, no matter what it took. We single people were a freakish minority.

Of course, the ads could be depressing, too. Most were not particularly appealing, and not everyone posting an ad was single. Many of them were along the lines of “I want to have sex with someone who is not my wife. If you respond, you could be that person!” Others said things like, “ISO a woman who enjoys golden showers. Must enjoy being urinated on.” A little repelling, no doubt, but, on the other hand, this was not the kind of information you want to find out about a guy late in the game, like right before you’re going to get peed on, for example. This is the kind of stuff you want to know right up front.

This being Colorado, a lot of the ads were guys in search of women who liked mountain biking and skiing and skydiving. I liked working out, but I wanted to be firmly on the ground when I did it. Before marrying Gideon, I’d dated my share of sports fiends, and I’d learned my lesson. I didn’t want to spend my vacations rock climbing and mountain biking and camping with only a stream to bathe in, if, that is, I could fight my way through a fog of mosquitoes and gnats. With the personals, I could make my desires known right away.

Over the weeks, a few ads had mildly interested me, but only one made me feel like maybe there was hope of meeting a decent guy after all.

He went by the moniker “ArtLover,” and his profile said that he was a 6-foot, 170-pound nonsmoker with hazel eyes and brown hair. His ad read:


He seemed modest yet not lacking in self-esteem, funny but not trying too hard. And there was something so endearing about a guy with dogs. He would be caring yet firm, playful yet responsible. (All those walks on freezing cold winter nights!)

We’d been e-mailing each other for a couple weeks, and I was falling for him a little more each day. I was surprised how much I’d gotten to know about him in our daily e-mails. He’d told me all about his travels and his parents and his brothers and his friends. He told me about his frustrations at work and what he enjoyed about his job. He was a good writer, and he always managed to put a smile on my face. He hadn’t demanded my measurements and my picture as some other guys insisted on, which suggested a certain depth of character. Plus, we had a lot in common. Though I’d grown up in Colorado and he’d grown up on the East Coast, I’d gone to New York for high school and college, so we could talk (write) at length about the cultural differences between the turbocharged East Coast and laid-back Colorado.

I loved that he was an artist, but not a starving one. I imagined him immortalizing me in one of his paintings. It would happen like this: He would ask me to pose for him. I would feign resistance at first, then relent. In his dusty, ramshackle studio above his garage, I would lie naked on a velvet couch, my legs extending across the couch, my blond wavy hair fanning out in soft wisps around my head. He would position my body just so, his fingers lightly grazing my skin . . .

My e-mail let me know, with an excited exclamation point, that I had new mail.

I loved that he thought I would discover all the details about him someday, that our relationship would last long enough to extract every last one of his secrets. I smiled and hit REPLY.

I read over what I’d written. Why was I telling someone I didn’t know about my failed dreams and my annoyance at my mother’s lack of faith in me? For all I knew, he could be lying about everything. He could be a twelve-year-old boy or an eighty-year-old woman. Somehow though, I trusted him. We hadn’t talked about meeting in person yet, but I sensed we would meet one day. Part of me didn’t want to meet him because I didn’t want reality to interfere with my fantasy, but then again, it would be nice to have someone to go out to dinner with, to snuggle and laugh with. I already knew I liked Art’s personality; after that, everything else would fall naturally into place.

Just before I could hit SEND, I heard Jen say, “Good morning, Sharon!” I quickly minimized my browser, feeling guilty, like I’d been caught surfing porn sites. I turned to face my manager, the other pregnant woman in the office. It was a fertility epidemic around here.

Her smile was fake as usual, so perhaps she hadn’t seen the bold Yahoo! Personals banner at the top of my screen.

“How is the Expert project coming?” Sharon asked, rubbing her belly ostentatiously. She’d begun wearing maternity clothes in her second month. Jen and I made it a point to never bring up the baby because it amused us to see how she always managed to work it into every conversation. Also, knowing she was dying to talk about it made us even less interested. I realized pregnancy was a big deal, but let’s be honest here, she was not the first woman to do it.

I feared, irrationally, that she would want to use my computer to show us something, and my secret would be discovered. I’d only told two people about being reduced to surfing the personals: Jen and my neighbor, Rette.

“Right on schedule,” Jen said brightly. Jen was always extra bubbly around people she didn’t like.

I’d read in studies that good-looking people succeeded faster than average-looking and ugly people, a fact that rather wounded my ego since Sharon and I had started at McKenna Marketing at the same time, and she was making her way up the ranks far faster than I was, yet she wasn’t what you’d call good-looking. She had a round face, limp hair parted down the middle, a long nose, and a chin that had no discernible end but just sort of faded into her amorphous neck. She was bottom heavy, with thick legs like Doric columns. She was wearing a dress with large yellow sunflowers that ended midthigh.

Though she wasn’t beautiful, Sharon knew how to play the game. How to kiss up and brown nose and schmooze. For some reason, I kept believing that if I worked hard, somebody would eventually notice and reward me. But my chance to prove myself once and for all was finally coming. When Sharon went on maternity leave, I was a shoo-in to fill in for her.

I had to look to the future, because if I kept thinking about the past, all I’d get was bitter. I’d start thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad if Sharon had a degree in marketing or there was some understandable reason she’d gotten promoted above me, but her degree in elementary education was as irrelevant to this job as my degree in dance. All of our experience came on the job, with the occasional training seminar thrown in once or twice a year. She wasn’t particularly good at her job; I knew I could do better. Back when she was a grunt like me, she often pawned her reports off on me to do and then she’d take the credit for my work. Yet she’d gotten three promotions by the time I’d finally gotten one.

I had trouble paying attention to what Sharon said in the best of circumstances, but right now I was too painfully aware of the browser minimized in the corner of my screen to hear a word she said.

“So you’ll have those reports ready by the meeting tomorrow?” Sharon asked.

“Of course!” Jen said.

This was an audacious lie. There was no way we’d have those reports done.

Expert Appliance had hired us to revamp their product line. To determine how to market the products most effectively, our department was doing the research to see what features consumers wanted in appliances like refrigerators, dishwashers, and washing machines. Our marketing department was producing marketing and sales collateral, and IT was designing Expert’s new Web site.

This was the biggest project McKenna Marketing had ever done. We were staffing up to meet the demand, but even with the new hires, we couldn’t meet our deadlines, and we were falling hopelessly behind.

“Great,” Sharon said.

As soon as Sharon was out of sight, Jen said, “God! I thought she would never leave. Let me just say now that women with cellulite-ridden elephant thighs have no right whatsoever wearing those kind of dresses, particularly ones covered in gigantic sunflowers.”

I stifled a smile. Jen said out loud all the bitchy things I felt guilty for even thinking, which was precisely why I loved her. I opened my Internet browser and finally sent my message to Art.

“So how is Art?” she asked.

“Wonderful, as usual. His dogs are named Holden and Phoebe.”

Jen looked confused.

“From Catcher in the Rye, one of my all-time favorite books. I just like him more every day.”

“Ooh, he’s literary, too. And you’re such a big reader,” Jen said.

That was true, though these days my tastes hardly ran toward the literary. I’d become more of a romance novel kind of girl.

“I need to find a man, too. I can’t let Dave think I’m a spinster. But I don’t think I’m ready to try the personals.”

Dave was Jen’s on again/off again boyfriend. They broke up about every other month. He’d move out and stay with a friend for a month or two; Jen would go out with several new guys, find them wanting, and welcome Dave back into her . . .