In the summer, Kat bought a dress, her first in many years. She had begun walking to work, and eschewing the elevator for the five flights of stairs to the office where she temped. She declined dessert, and sometimes even bread, too. Once she tried sticking her finger down her throat — it was another temp’s idea — but she couldn’t go through with it: that heat, that gag. This was in June, when the skies were gray until noon, and the smog cut the lungs.
By August, she was wearing dresses almost every day. She’d earned the privilege. She wanted to show off her legs — gams, her father called them. After high school, Kat had moved out of her mother’s house and into the guest room at the back of his place. There were cacti outside her window, meant to ward off intruders, should there be any. Kat was nineteen now, without many prospects, career or otherwise. But those gams!
Her father worked a lot, sometimes rising before dawn to get to the set and take care of everyone else’s crises. He was the producer’s little bitch, was how he put it. When he got home, they microwaved frozen food for dinner: ravioli, pot pie, Thanksgiving in a box. They ate in front of the television, and they rarely argued about what to watch because it didn’t matter enough, or at all.
Kat enjoyed her father’s company, mostly, but she still refused to be seen in public with him. As if, Pops. “Grow up!” he’d say. Her father had a point: she wasn’t thirteen anymore, high school was in the past, not the future. Why should she be embarrassed by him? “It’s the other way around,” he said. Kat could understand that. After all, she had barely gotten through school, she was lazy, she was terrible at making small talk. Whenever her father’s friends came over, she retreated to her room with a plate of rice cakes, maybe a bottle of seltzer. Her own friends had moved away to college.
Sometimes, Kat felt alone, forever stuck in the past. Perhaps she was trapped in adolescence, at the cusp of eighth and ninth grades, that cruel chasm. She knew if she didn’t grow up, her lameness would eventually kill her. Death by pathetic.
But here she remained: irresponsible, sometimes petulant, snubbing her father when he invited her somewhere. For the time being, she was protected by cacti and the insipid lull of the television, and the dresses, which she looked terrific in.
In the fall, Kat had to get a new job because the insurance company no longer required her services. The employee she’d been replacing had returned from wherever he’d been. Not that she could stomach answering phones for much longer, and she left feeling relieved, as if the possibilities were limitless. As if.
Turned out, Auntie Anne’s was the only place hiring. It was a pretzel stand, located in one of the sadder, indoor malls, a mall badly in need of renovation, its marble floors scuffed and ugly, a Gap without a Banana Republic, a Target instead of a Bloomingdale’s. Kat had applied as a kind of joke. Hilarious. She was Auntie Anne’s oldest employee, aside from the manager, who was twenty-three. He liked Kat right away, said, “You know what a loss leader is, I bet, right?” and Kat had nodded, even though she didn’t, not exactly. The stand was at the outskirts of the food court, across the way from a store that sold baseball caps and athletic jerseys. Sometimes Kat was asked to stand in the flow of traffic, and offer samples. The tongs with which she passed out the cut-up pretzels were sticky with sugar, but she refused to wear the plastic gloves. Her father liked to say she was now “Rated PG.” PG stood for Pretzel Girl.
By Christmas, Kat’s legs were no longer toned and tan. She’d eaten too many pretzels, she couldn’t stop herself, the cinnamon ones especially, and when her father baked brownies for New Year’s Eve, she ate half the batch in one sitting. If only she were woman enough to be bulimic, she thought.
By March, she’d left the pretzel job for a more respectable gig. Her father’s friend was a divorce lawyer, and he needed someone to file the paperwork. The job was dull, but she could take the stairs again — this time, to the sixth floor — and even afford a gym membership. She did like her windowless compound of filing cabinets, and her chair, which rolled so smoothly across the floor, it floated. Occasionally she imagined herself a partner at the firm: a slick ponytail, a pert ass, and a look that conveyed, “I’ll take you for all you’re worth, you swine.”
Of course, by May, she was fired. Too many mistakes, HR told her, and an attitude that more than one lawyer had complained about. “But I’m partner!” she’d wanted to cry. Just the night before, her father said she seemed to be getting some life back into her. Now that life was being yanked away. She would have to give up her gym membership, maybe become Pretzel Girl again.
So, finally, she did it. That evening, when her father came home from the set, she said, “I’m ready for college.” She watched him try, and fail, to suppress a smile.
In the fall, they agreed, she would enroll in community college. Her mother, as promised, would pay. Her mother, as promised, would finally start speaking to her again.
In this way, Kat became an adult.
