The New Me
penguin books
the new me
Halle Butler is the author of Jillian. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10019
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2019 by Halle Butler
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Butler, Halle, author.
Title: The new me / Halle Butler.
Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028609 (print) | LCCN 2018029312 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525505402 (e-book) | ISBN 9780143133605 (pbk.)
Classification: LCC PS3602.U8716 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.U8716 N49 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028609
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Jerzy.
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
Later
Acknowledgments
chapter 1
It’s winter in Chicago.
In the windowless back offices of a designer furniture showroom, women stand in a circle, stuffed into ill-fitting black jeans, gray jeans, olive jeans, the ass cloth sagging one inch, two, below where the cheeks meet. They don’t notice this on themselves, but they notice it on each other. They wear cheap suede ankle boots and incomprehensible furry vests that flap against them as they talk, pushing their voices out an octave too high, lotioned, soft, gummy hands gesturing wildly. One of them wears a topknot, another checks her pedometer.
Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” plays in the background. They are allowed to choose their own music.
They shift between subjects with a rapid ease, words spilling out of their mouths. One of them is explaining something from her real, nonwork life, something about returning something she bought online—the frustration and indignity of the experience.
The one in the topknot and a tunic looks down and laughs. “Oh my god you guys look at me I’m such a hipster.” Another smiles, barely containing her disgust, and says “No, you look cute” with her words and “Oh my god shut the fuck up” with her eyes.
One of them leans over her immersion-blended meal, laughs with strain, and says, referring to a chandelier on the showroom floor, “Where I come from you can get a house for twenty thousand.” A glob of green puree hangs from the fuzz on her mohair sweater, right by the boob. No one responds.
They start talking about a woman who works down the hall. She used to work here, and they all hate her. Apparently she really likes chrome and has no friends. One of them slides an open catalog across the table and says, “Isn’t that so trashy?” It’s a chrome coffee table, indistinguishable, to me, from the rest of the wares.
The whole scene is a bitter cliché, the expectations and ego barely hidden behind the flimsy presentation of friendliness.
My pits are slick, and my face smells like a bagel.
I wonder if I should chime in, tell them that I also think the table sucks, but the words catch in my throat. Impossible to join in, even if I wanted to, which I don’t, not really.
I’m the new temp, ten days into my assignment here. I’ve been getting better temp assignments lately, and my rep writes to tell me things like “I’m so excited for you, this one has possibility for temp to perm,” but so far perm hasn’t come. I wonder how I would have to behave, how many changes I would have to make, to tip myself over the edge into this endless abyss of perm.
* * *
• • •
I walk home in the dark, in the snow. My tights sagging. A hole in the side of my shoe.
I open my dark apartment and turn on all the lights, like there might be someone who needs to use a room I’m not in. Like I’m expecting company. Like I still share my life.
I light a cigarette and open my laptop. I turn on an episode of Forensic Files, my favorite of the serialized murder documentaries, to comfort myself.
There’s someone in the house!
I wish.
chapter 2
It’s a new day. I’m on the train, 8:45, still dark outside, hot, shitty outfit, hole in my underwear from scratching too much, an aimless bile rising at the back of my throat already, as usual, for no reason, like it always does, like I’m in an experiment, my face inches from a short woman’s stupid hat, the poofball of the hat a clown’s nose for me.
She’s completely hogging the train pole, oblivious.
Her hat almost touches my face.
It’s a Chicago Bears Breast Cancer Awareness stocking cap. Hideous on every level. The rest of her outfit another fuck-you disappointment, thick purplish tights, a knee-length down parka, boots with fur detailing that looks like a dead dog’s stuffed down in there, the whole thing a real carefree snugglefest, a real assault, a real declaration of who this woman is, draped in death and violence and completely unaware of it. The perfect mix of compliance and violence.
I sigh, lean into her, give her the signals that she should look up, say oops, move to the side, but she stays there, lumplike, the brass placard of her mini backpack catching on my cheap secondhand coat. I imagine the mindless ease of her life. I imagine her thinking about that show she likes on ABC where adults pretend to be fairy-tale characters trying to make each other horny, and I imagine her referring to it as a guilty pleasure, like that’s somehow radical or somehow makes her interesting. Will Rumpelstiltskin be able to trick Peter Pan into betraying his relationship with Snow White by reminding him of his long-ago love with the Little Mermaid? I don’t know, baby, will he?? I want to use my hands to redirect her face to a fucking mirror.
I make a decision, rare these days, and my arm goes out, right angle from my body, and I grab the pole so hard my knuckles turn white.
We ride like this for a second, my arm pres
sed firmly into the side of her head.
Inside of her idiotic hat, I can feel how small her skull is. I’ve been told that my skull is exceptionally large. I don’t usually touch strangers’ heads, and the feeling is intimate, thrilling. Her small, thin skull taps against my forearm. She’s still not accommodating me. I press harder. I try to loom. She bends her head awkwardly out of my arm’s way, making herself look even more innocent, even more compliant, like a good little girl, confronting me by not confronting me.
A man across the train looks at me like I’m the villain, and then he looks down. Now he’s my enemy, too, how does he like that? I think the phrase “a symphony of bullshit” and I get off the train. On the escalator, nobody stands on the right and walks on the left, and everything is wrong.
* * *
• • •
I enter the showroom, they’re playing Coldplay, and I say “Morning!”
Karen, the senior receptionist, and technically my supervisor, smiles at me like I can’t tell that she’s faking, and says “Hi, Maddie” and I say “Hi!” but that’s not my name. It’s Millie, not Maddie. I want to go up to her and prostrate myself on her desk, my ribs activating her shitty gold stapler, the one I know she loves so much, over and over, by thrashing, spending staples all over her desk, while I explain to her the difference between Mildred and Madison. I want to press my nose into her keyboard and tell her that my parents both went to grad school, I was raised correctly and in a good home, and it’s an insult to my mother, the professor, to imply that she named me Madison after the mermaid from fucking Splash, when I was named after my great-great-grandmother, a suffragette, you fucking thankless cunt, and in this fantasy, I become insensible and start crying, deep from the gut, which isn’t much of a fantasy, as far as fun and variety are concerned.
I smile at Karen again, leave the front desk, and walk through the showroom, past the re-created, tasteless living spaces, to my station in the back offices.
* * *
• • •
There are donuts in the break room, and I eat one. No one is talking to me or looking at me, as usual. I say almost nothing, almost all the time. Obviously, I recognize, in a grander sense, that I have a tendency to alienate myself and blow things out of proportion, and that these women are basically guiltless from a certain perspective. I fully recognize the concept of perspective. The donut is down in my throat, a disgusting bolus, after two bites.
I recognize so much that it bores me. I recognize that the Formica is covering a slab of cheap wood pulp, and that, among the snacks in the refrigerator, some of them contain wood pulp. I know that the woman checking her phone in the corner, pretending I’m not here, is wrapped up in some distraction so utterly meaningless that it should, if she reflected on it, shake her to her core.
She takes a small piece of bread out of her pocket and places it in her mouth with two fingers, surgically precise.
I saw a woman at the Pret A Manger by the museum tear off tiny pieces of bread and place them at the back of her mouth once, almost putting her entire hand inside her mouth. It looked like it was supposed to seem elegant, and I wondered where she learned it. This reminds me of that.
None of this thinking does me any good, obviously.
As I walk back to my desk, a woman barges past me into the break room. We almost touch crotches, and I say, “Oop, sorry!”
My dirty coffee cup from yesterday is next to the dead bamboo plant from my predecessor. If I thought I’d be here more than a few weeks, I’d throw the plant away. Maybe go buck wild and get a desk calendar.
A woman, heralded by the clattering nuts in her snack-sized Tupperware, walks up to my cubicle and tells me she likes my shirt—a pure bluff, it’s a pit-stained silk J.Crew affair, too tight and five years old—and asks me if I need any help, but all I do is answer phones and assemble packets of junk mail, so I say, “No, not really, I’m all good,” and smile and wait for her to leave. Her name is, I think, Lindsey. Possibly Rachel.
Everyone takes a long time explaining simple things to me, like they’re afraid of me, like maybe I’ve never seen a landline before, like there’s something I’m going to do to fuck this up, even though, of course, I’ve had jobs before. Many of them.
On my first day, Karen showed me how to turn on a computer, then looked at me with kindness and said that it could be kind of tricky, so maybe I should write it down. I nodded, and while I was writing it down, she said, “You’re the front lines here, and our phones are an important part of our business, so if you could try to time your bathroom breaks with your lunch break, that would be great. Unless it’s an emergency, of course.”
Yes, of course.
* * *
• • •
I’m drinking burnt coffee and googling foods that reduce stress when the phone rings, a real asshole on the line.
“Lisa Hopper, how may I direct your call?” I say.
“I’m outside!” he says, shouting in a distracted way.
“I’m sorry?” I say.
“I’m standing outside,” he repeats, slowly. My confusion about what he means is genuine, “outside” is a broad set of possibilities, but my understanding of where this is going is clear. He’s going to yell at me.
“Are you outside of the Merchandise Mart?” I ask.
“What the fuck is the Merchandise Mart?” he asks.
“It’s in Chicago,” I say. “Are you looking for the New York office, maybe?”
“I’m not looking for it, I’m standing outside of it,” he says.
I ask if he has the name of someone I could transfer him to. He says “Jesus Christ” and hangs up.
He calls again, and we repeat our performance. I ask again if he has the name of someone I could transfer him to, and he says, “Look, this is Tom Jordan, I’m just trying to get in.” He still won’t tell me if he’s in New York or if he’s in Chicago, but I know he’s in New York. I tell him that I’m in Chicago but that I’m happy to transfer him to the New York office line, and he has a little more verve and says “Can anybody in this shithole let me in?” and I say “Maybe, just one—” and he sighs and hangs up.
While waiting for the steamboat of time or whatever to lurch me forward unto my death, I google “Tom Jordan” and learn he’s one of the showroom’s top designers. I find an unsurprising portrait on his website. I look at his sweater, at his pink face, at the restaurant-grade Twombly knockoff behind him in his summer home, his smug gaze, stack of magazines on his coffee table, legs crossed at the ankle like a proper Edwardian lass, and I imagine a violent home invasion. His gasping, girlish shouts.
I fold my hands in my lap and re-create him in my mind, ordering his underwear online (Barneys), bringing a picture of a cool haircut to the salon, his young girlfriend’s jaw setting compulsively when she smells his breath, his dog’s apathy when he walks in the door, his father’s dying words (I wish you had been less of a dick), a group of high school kids mocking his outfit, him throwing away his new glasses, that vest, hand tailored, even though it had all looked so cool the day before, pure Johnny Depp, all the times people had put up with him for his money, his jokes and his advances tolerated with tight smiles, no one to confide in but nothing to confide, spending a little extra to get the teak on the boat, to impress who, though, I ask, his fortunes flagging, suddenly everyone yelling at him, all the time, what the fuck, pooping more frequently than usual, wizened butt cheeks hiding behind $200 khakis, his ulcer growing, wondering which of all these fuckers is going to fuck with him next, and preemptively fucking with anyone anonymous and servile, not taking into account that maybe, somehow, psychically I—we, together—by the power of wishing real hard or whatever, are making his ulcer grow, the solidarity of our energy coming together to mess with his bod and its functions, like in that book Thinner, and it is with ease that I imagine his colleagues doing impressions of him when they’re drunk at parties
he’s not invited to, rolling their eyes behind his back, nailing that lilt in his voice when he thinks he’s being profound, and then my supervisor comes up behind me and asks if everything is okay.
The timing is enough to make me paranoid, I wasn’t able to help Tom Jordan, the Tom Jordan, and now I’m going to get fired, oh well, so it goes.
I release my cheek from between my teeth and tell her, “Yeah, totally, what’s up?”
She asks if she can see my junk mailers, or, formally, “welcome packets.” I stand and walk to the copy room, show her the mailers. She opens them, judges my work. She’s very slender and a few years younger than I am. It’s easy to imagine her complaining about her neighbors and being uptight with waiters, the terse snort and widened downcast eyes when they interrupt her with the water pitcher.
She shuffles the papers and sighs, trying to make my job seem more important, so that her overseeing of my job can seem more important. I stand behind her, painfully uncertain of what to do with my hands, remembering being asked not to pee, Tom Jordan still in my system, watching her shake her head no, well, this isn’t quite right, like any of it matters, talking to me but I can’t hear her over the ringing in my ears. She seems to be showing me how to use a paper clip. She holds it in her hands, demonstrating both the right and the wrong way.
Holy absurdity, little side on top, big side on bottom, I guess I did it wrong. I say, “Oh, okay, that makes sense.” “It’s a matter of style,” she explains. “I totally get it,” I say, speaking in low tones, soothing and reassuring, nodding, and to keep the indignant scream from leaving my lips, I imagine that she needs to poop, all the time, but can’t.
She asks me, “Do you think you’re okay here now?”
I say, “Sure, of course, yeah.”
“Any problems?”
“No, none that I can think of.”
Neither of us, I guess, knows how to end this momentous and important tête-à-tête, so we stand there in the copy room for a second that, as they say, stretches, until she breaks and says “okay” and we both walk back to our desks.