Dying to Call You

“Hi, Mr. Richards, this is Helen with Tank Titan Septic System Cleaner. We make—”

“Mr. Richards?” the man said scornfully. “You’re retarded. What are you, stupid? Mr. Richards doesn’t live here, moron.”

“Thank you, sir,” Helen said, and happily sent him to hell.

Two sales later, her shift was over. Vito looked at her sales figures and said, “I’m going to reward you, Helen. Tonight, you work the survey side.”

Vito was playing telemarketing God. He sent her to telemarketing heaven.

Helen walked out of the building and blinked at the harsh South Florida light. In the windowless boiler room, she’d had no idea it was a sunny November day. When she’d lived in St.

Louis, she’d dreaded November, the gray month that brought the first ice and snow. But winter in Florida was gorgeous.

Red impatiens bloomed in planters. Purple passionflowers rioted on garden walls. Palm trees rustled like taffeta skirts.

As she walked home, she tried to clear her head of the nearly three hundred phone calls that had pounded her ears in the last five hours. Tank Titan telemarketers worked a brutal schedule: The first shift was eight A.M. to one P.M. The boiler room closed in the afternoon, when many people weren’t home. Then the telemarketers came back to work from five to ten P.M. Each shift was five hours straight, with only one five-minute break each hour.

Helen worked ten-hour days, taking nearly six hundred calls each day.

For that, she was paid five dollars and fifteen cents an hour, plus a ten-dollar commission on each sale. Three commissions per shift were good. She’d worked there four weeks and made at least five hundred dollars a week. She sometimes earned more, but Vito helped himself to about fifty bucks of her commission each week. That was his reward for paying her in cash. Helen did not want her name in any company computers. She’d be too easy to trace.

She walked home quickly, stretching her sore arms, neck and back, reveling in the warm sun. Survey work was like a vacation after the slamming boiler room calls. She’d make ten to twenty calls an hour, instead of sixty. It was a reward for the top sellers. The well-spoken top sellers. Telemarketers like Taniqua, who started her spiel with, “I wanna ax you a queshun” could make a hundred sales a day, and they’d never get survey duty at a snotty place like Girdner Surveys.

But Helen had a college degree. Helen had once made one hundred thousand dollars a year in a St. Louis corporation.

Then she’d come home early on a balmy day like this and found her husband Rob with her next-door neighbor, Sandy.

They were buck naked on the sun-drenched deck. Sandy was wrapped around her husband like an Ace bandage.

Helen had picked up a crowbar lying nearby and felt the satisfying crunch! That crunch changed her life. Now she was on the run, reduced to dead-end jobs. She felt safe in these awful jobs. No one from her old life would look for her in a boiler room.

This job was a fifteen-minute walk from the Coronado Tropic Apartments, where she lived. Helen loved the swooping Art Deco curves of the old white and turquoise building.

On her days off, she sat out by the pool, drinking wine and watching the purple bougainvillea blossoms float on the water.

Her landlady, Margery Flax, must have heard her walking by. She opened her door and called, “Come join me for lunch by the pool.”

Helen was happy to forego the scrambled eggs she’d planned to eat. Especially when she saw the spinach salad on the picnic table. It had fat slices of chicken and avocado and lots of crumbled blue cheese. There were hot pumpernickel rolls and chocolate-covered strawberries.

Margery was opening a bottle of wine that had a real cork.

She always wore purple, but today’s shorts outfit looked positively royal. Helen’s landlady was seventy-six, with a face as wrinkled as a shar-pei puppy. She also had some of the best legs in Lauderdale. Today, she showed them off in jaunty purple suede mules.

“What’s the occasion for a real bottle of wine, not a box?”

Helen said.

“I’ve finally rented 2C, so we’re celebrating,” Margery said. “I swear that apartment had a weird magnet. It’s attracted one wacko after another.”

Helen wasn’t going to argue with her. The last tenant was a psychic named Madame Muffy. The one before that was still in jail.

“So who’s the new person?”

“Persons. A nice normal retired couple from New Jersey.

Fred and Ethel Mertz.”

“Like on I Love Lucy?”

Margery looked at her blankly.

Helen said, “Lucy’s sidekick was Ethel Mertz. She was married to Fred.”

“Before my time.” Margery poured Helen a generous glass of wine.

“Not too much wine,” Helen said. “I leave for work again at four-thirty.”

“You still have that worthless job? No, I shouldn’t have to ask. I can see you do. You look beat. Those coast- to-coast insults are taking their toll on you, Helen. Why do you work there?”

“For the money.” Helen took a bite of her salad. She hoped Margery would start eating and get off this subject.

“An attractive, hardworking woman like you should have no trouble getting a decent job. Why don’t you let your friend Sarah give you some good leads? She has lots of corporate contacts.”

Because I can’t be in a corporate computer, Helen thought.

“I make twice as much here as my last job. It’s good money,” she said.

“No,” Margery said. “It’s bad money, and you’ll pay a high price for it.”

Helen suddenly lost her appetite. She didn’t want this conversation. She didn’t like to think about her old life, or some of the things she did in this new job. She didn’t want to think, period. She was too tired.

She put down her fork. “Margery, I’m dead tired. I really need a nap before I go back to work. Lunch was lovely. Let me help you clear up and I’ll go inside.”

“I’ll do that,” Margery said. “Go get your sleep. Take your salad with you. You can eat it later.”

Helen was greeted at her door by her gray and white cat.

Thumbs looked like a stuffed toy, until you saw his outsized front paws. He had the biggest feet Helen had ever seen on a feline. He was a polydactyl cat, with six toes on each paw. She absently scratched his ears while she surveyed her two-room furnished apartment. It was like a fifties exhibit. Helen loved the turquoise couch with the triangle pattern, the lamps shaped like nuclear reactors, the boomerang coffee table. The Barcalounger was the best. Helen didn’t dare sit down in it this afternoon. She’d never get up if she did. She put her salad in the fridge and stretched out on her bed for just a moment.

Helen woke up at four-forty-five and ran all the way to work. She didn’t want to be late for survey duty.

Girdner Inc. was a company with a split personality. The Girdner Sales boiler room was on the first floor of the office building. Dirty, dingy, hidden from sight in the back of the building, its staff sold septic-tank cleaner from Maine to California.

On the top floor was their showcase, Girdner Surveys.

They conducted slick surveys for suits at the national ad agencies. Girdner Surveys looked like an expensive lawyer’s office. A rain forest had been cleared to provide its mahogany paneling. The carpet was expensively subdued, some color between blue and gray. It was like walking through a soft smoky fog. The dignified receptionist could have been a dean at an exclusive women’s college.

Helen thought there was something weird about the dual operations. Why was the survey side fit for corporate kings, while the boiler room was the most awful office squalor?

Couldn’t Girdner afford fresh paint and carpeting for the boiler room? Couldn’t they at least clean the place?