The Summer Job
Dorothy Dean Walton
Word Count 1020
For my send-off to college at the University of Chicago in 1981, my parents gave me an electric portable Smith Corona typewriter in a brown vinyl case.
The gift was particularly kind, given their initial determination to keep me from leaving Georgia. But toward the end of my freshman year they changed their minds again, urging me to quit college. My father needed to placate my mother, a severe manic depressive.
I’d lose if I tackled that issue head on. So I ignored the real reason they wanted me back and declared I could cover any and all expenses by working in Chicago, as if it were all about money. The only piece lacking in this plan—the source of the money.
I scanned the jobs board at the university recruitment center daily for a full-time summer job. The perfect opportunity appeared on an index card held by a thumbtack—waitress at the ultra elegant restaurant Mallory’s on the top floor of the Hyde Park Bank Building, a tenth-story view of the world.
A real job, not like summer temp agency work back in Georgia. Two potential problems presented themselves. Because my family never went to restaurants—it was decadent—I had no idea what to expect.
Second problem—a slight limp due to my left leg measuring over half a centimeter longer than the right. You might think this slight difference wouldn’t matter. All of us are somewhat asymmetrical. But in fact, it’s a lot—imagine walking in circles, in the long run, when what you really want is to walk a straight line.
My new employers may have been unaware of problem number one, but they spotted problem number two immediately. As politely as possible, they told me I had to learn to walk more gracefully. Before my first shift, another waitress agreed to supervise me pacing back and forth in the courtyard of her Hyde Park apartment building, imaginary book balanced on my head.
I could finally walk properly. But my rural Southern accent returned with a vengeance when I got nervous. Which was always. I said “Sure!” a lot to my tables and smiled warmly, drawing blank looks. Then I’d ask patrons to repeat their orders.
Mallory’s had a French menu I couldn’t pronounce. Vichyssoise? Vicious Oz, maybe. Salade Nicoise? Salad Knees Was, probably.
I couldn’t for the life of me understand this food. The soup was cold ? A chunk of cold tuna fish on top of the lettuce? Dandelion leaves? They charged money for dandelion leaves?
But there was worse. They dropped both ks in the word for their most popular after-dinner beverage, Cog Knack, and they smashed that all together, too, probably to hide their atrocious spelling.
I thought I must have passed muster my third night when they told me to eat all the freshly baked bread I wanted in the kitchen. “Really?” I said, reveling in the smell of yeast and warm butter. Turned out, they were letting me down easy. I got the boot later that night.
The University of Chicago, to protect its students from the crime that plagued Hyde Park at the time, provided escort service after a certain hour, but not rides. You just called a number and a patrol car followed you back to your dorm as you walked. I limped back to 57th Street that night sobbing loudly. The security officer idling beside me rolled down his window and said, “Gee, kid, sorry we can’t give you a ride.”
The next day I applied for another opportunity, summer secretary at the Loop law firm Sidley Austin—future meeting place of Barack and Michelle Obama.To get my typing speed up to snuff, I locked myself in my dorm room, managing 24 words a minute if I stopped thinking about Wite-Out. Over the weekend, my speed crept higher.
Sidley Austin used these beige IBM Selectric typewriters, the best thing since movable type itself. They contained typeface balls which tilted and rotated as you pressed the keys, skittering across the paper like golf-ball-sized Death Stars. At the interview I did 60-something per minute.
My new supervisor pointed out where I could buy pantyhose if I got a run, sighing “This store is a lifesaver.” Was she saying they’d fire me for a run in my pantyhose?
My first day walking to One South Dearborn Street, a city bus powered through a puddle and splattered my legs with mud. I frantically tried to wipe it all off with a Kleenex in the elevator. A man in a workman’s hat said he could help if I wanted. Everyone laughed.
In the office, the atmosphere was congenial, especially among the secretaries, all women. The lawyers were mostly men.
Most of the secretaries made life-long careers at Sidley Austin. Jackie, maybe in her forties, with a nasal Chicago accent and a pear-shaped figure, wore horn-rimmed glasses on a chain and chewed gum. She’d been at the firm some twenty years.
But one day she was gone. Fired, I was told. She’d put a client’s correspondence, including the legal strategy, in an envelope destined for the opposing party. You couldn’t just trigger the corrector tape when you made that kind of mistake. The client demanded her head.
I was lucky. I’d found my niche—the typewriter. I’d never again do what I just wasn’t cut out to do. I’d stick to pressing keys. My new motto: to find your place, find your niche.
We all know what happened to the typewriter. It was fired in every office across America. The last time I saw anything remotely similar to an IBM Selectric was in the course of my last full-time job, at Mexico’s central bank, where I spent some 20 years shifting between roles, planning meetings one year, writing speeches or website content the next.
A niche is not enough, I’d learned. My father, a minister, was dismissed by his last church in his fifties and never really found another career, later doing stints as a substitute teacher.
At the time, I had no way of helping him. Except to learn versatility myself, adapting again and again and feeling my way forward.
Dorothy devotes most of her time now to writing screenplays, personal essays, and short fiction. An incorrigible cafe enthusiast, she also writes and publishes the blog Third Place Cafe Stories (https://www.thirdplacecafestories.com/).