City of Angels

Young awkwardness and invisibility cloaks

When I was so young it was apparently hard for me to have a normal conversation if I was nervous, I interned as a reader in the fiction department of The New Yorker. If that sounds intimidating, let me say up front that there was no way anyone there could have been any nicer to me. The general atmosphere of the office was the opposite of buttoned up; for example, there was an active contingent of “South Park” superfans who convened in the cafeteria, where a small television hung on the wall, to watch the latest episodes and laugh their asses off. Roger Angell, still alive then, would circulate the halls just being funny and adorable and giving compliments to people. It was a humane and unpretentious place to work, is what I mean.

Still, the kindness I encountered on my days there, reading slush at an unassigned desk in my Ann Taylor separates, could never fully penetrate my thick armor of awkwardness. One particular encounter encapsulates this so accurately that it’s really all I need to include here:

Cool, funny, cute, not-quite-thirty-yet male poetry editor who I’m sure didn’t have any idea what my name was, being conversational and friendly: So what’s on for your weekend?

Me: Actually, I’m going to see a friend in L.A.

Poetry editor: Awesome!

Me: Yeah. City of angels.

Poetry editor: What was that? Didn’t catch that.

Me, suddenly short of breath, realizing I’d mumbled, incensed and bewildered at myself for saying city of angels, questioning my right to exist: Oh, nothing.

Poetry editor: No seriously, didn’t hear you?

Me, longing for death: cityofangels.

Poetry editor: City of…what?

Me: Of angels. You know, Los Angeles.

Poetry editor: Oh yeah! Sure! City of angels, yeah.

A small moment, sure, but it packed a punch. A sweat-drenched, wake up in the middle of the night, thinking about it years later punch.

Another job I had was as an assistant to an editor at a publishing house. True, my boss at this job was legitimately mean to me, but even then I understood that it was only because of the trickle-down effect of my boss’s boss, i.e. the head of the company, being so legendarily mean to her and to everyone else working there that they lived in terror and any poor behavior was a reflection of that terror. My boss went through assistants like rolls of paper towels and the person fired just before I was hired was named Leslie. One day I found myself alone in the elevator with the boss’s boss, the company head. I had already developed a stress-related skin condition by that stage of my employment and remember angling my face slightly away from her so that, if anything flaked or appeared unsightly, it wouldn’t happen where she could see it. I was holding a bag of leftover chicken salad on a croissant from Au Bon Pain, which was probably fragrant for the elevator. For the purposes of this anecdote I’ll remind the reader here that my name is Heather.

Scary C.E.O: You’re Leslie, right?

Me, without second thought: Right.

Scary C.E.O. Just got married, right?

Me, definitely not married: Yes, sure did.

Scary C.E.O.: Where?

Me, scrambling for a name of any geographic location in the world: Michigan.

Her: Family there?

Me: So much family there.

Her. Nice. You have a lint roller at your desk, right?

Me, understanding dimly now why Leslie kept a lint roller in the drawer of the desk I inherited from her: Yes.

Her: I’ll swing by. The napkins at the Four Seasons shed all over everything. See?

It did appear her Chanel skirt had some specks of white on it, and one minute later I would be on my knees, rolling the fabric against her waist and thighs until we were both satisfied the garment was lint free.

Why, as young women, are we afraid to take up space? To have names? To claim identity of any kind if it means correcting or potentially offending a person with power over us or to whom we’ve assigned power? To make dumb jokes that don’t quite land? To tell the most innocuous truth? To be someone other than Leslie for an entire year? To be visible? Is it patriarchy? Common introversion? Psychosis? Of course it’s some potent cocktail of the first two, and hopefully not the third, though we may be driven to the third by job number four if enough shit goes down. Talk about potent cocktails, ba dum pum.

Or maybe it was just me? Wanting to assume invisibility in moments of distress, or to prolong stretches of private thought and time that feel like necessary resets so ongoing engagement with life and people can continue, has felt necessary to me at least since high school, and probably was well before then but I didn’t know it because we lived on a farm and periods of isolation and quiet are built in to that experience for a kid. And I loved and needed them. Maybe like some other people crave being near water, or love the sun, or need to be moving their bodies to feel okay. The invisibility cloak in Harry Potter? That you could just choose to put on, and temporarily disappear inside? Oh my god, I can’t think of any possession that would be more exciting to own. As a child I loved a book called Morris’s Disappearing Bag; same concept. To crawl inside, collect oneself, be present but unseen, then emerge when ready with a perfect quip, or the right information, or just energy for more lint rolling…sign me up. Wandering around as a girl on the farm, free from anyone’s view and out of anyone’s thoughts but my own for hours at a time, served that purpose for me. I could be my own ghost, beholden to no one, out of sight and sound and mind. The best!

There was this one other time. I was starting my car at a remote, snowy train station near my remote, snowy Vermont college, and mine was the only car in the parking lot and night was falling, and a student I’d never seen before who looked like a freshman, innocent and sweet and without other options in an age before Ubers or ubiquitous cell phones, approached my car with a rucksack and a look of desperate hope and asked: Hey, do you go to X?

And I said no before I even registered what I was doing. Why? Because not only was I looking forward to the solitary drive to campus, swaddled in the invisibility cloak of my car before the roommates and hellos and din of the dorm, I felt I NEEDED it in order to deal. I am ashamed to admit this, just as I’m ashamed to admit my stupidity in that moment because I’d forgotten there was an X sticker RIGHT ON my back windshield. At least I recovered my manners and told the guy to get in; I’d give him a ride, sure, I might not go to X but my SISTER totally went there, and I was indeed headed that way.

(Reader: no sister exists, as I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear.)

Time, a certain amount of built-up self-esteem, practice, being 53…who knows what makes awkwardness and moments of wanting to disappear incrementally easier to bear over the course of a life? Maybe by the time I’m 80 I will crave company like I crave the lack of it now, and know in my bones what is true: that it’s only through human interaction, however halting and torturous it is in certain circumstances, that your skin can thicken, your voice can take on resonance, and you can stop pretending to be someone you’re not in order to get by, for goodness sake. Until then, I can still wish for a cozy invisibility cloak sometimes. Or maybe a hoodie like Kenny’s, with the drawstrings that pull it closed. That would be so perfect.