“I said, Ailey, I was just telling Belinda here that you were looking for a job.”
“I am?”
“Yes, sugarfoot. You are. You said you really need a job because you’re bored.” The old man patted my shoulder, his smile sweet. Cajoling, but I’d seen his charm on display enough times to know that I was being played.
“This is such luck!” Dr. Oludara clapped her hands and the bracelets sang. She couldn’t pay me too much, she told me. Only gas money plus fifty dollars a week, and Uncle Root told us he thought he saw some of his former students across the room. He would leave the two of us to work out the details.
As he walked away, I threw invisible darts at his tweed-covered back. Damn that old man’s time. I should have known this was a trick.
*
As chairperson, Dr. Oludara had access to two offices. Her administrative office was large and neatly pristine. The other, smaller office was down the hall, and that’s where she kept her research materials. When we’d talked on the phone, she’d told me that, as her research assistant, it would be my job to organize the books and articles that she’d collected.
Early that Monday, Dr. Oludara gave me a key to the smaller office, and told me she’d check on me at lunchtime. She’d paid for a semester meal ticket in the refectory, in case I didn’t want to bring lunch from home.
When I opened the door of the office, there was a space about three feet square that was free of clutter. I walked inside and shut the door behind me. The clean portion of the floor was sparkling with sunshine that came from the window. As for the rest of the floor, it was taken over by banker’s boxes. Many, many banker’s boxes. On one wall, a tall bookshelf coughed out stacks of books and papers. Along the adjacent wall, a table covered with other stacks, along with small wooden boxes filled with blank index cards. I was being paid less than minimum wage to organize all this shit.
There was a phone on the table, and I picked it up. Uncle Root was going to hear about this, but when I dialed “9” to get an outside line, I was informed that I needed a code to make a long-distance call.
Dr. Oludara knocked on the door. When I didn’t answer, she opened the door slowly.
“I’m very sorry. I know it’s a mess. You’re not going to quit on me, are you? Please don’t quit.” She sounded like a little girl.
“This is a lot. Like, a whole bunch.”
“Can I buy you a plate of ribs for lunch? Would that help?”
“Sure. Okay.”
I didn’t do any work that day. I stuffed myself with too many ribs, French fries, and white bread, and then I drove back home early.
At the old man’s house, he raised his eyebrows and made a production of looking at his watch, but I sighed as I flopped beside him on the settee. I complained for an hour, until Uncle Root stopped me. Every job had its problems, but I’d committed to Belinda Oludara, and I couldn’t back out now. He’d promised her that I’d stay on for six months, and if I did the math, that was twelve hundred dollars plus the money for my mileage. Think of what I could buy for myself with all that money. Also, I would embarrass him greatly if I quit, and it might cause him to have a heart attack and keel over from stress.
The next morning, I was sitting in the middle of the office floor when Dr. Oludara came in. She made enthusiastic noises—how happy she was, how grateful she was—but I didn’t answer. I made a show of dumping boxes of their contents, until she told me she’d let me get back to work. As I made my way through the mess, I was amazed to realize that the woman that I’d been in awe of back in college had horrible organizational skills. There weren’t any file folders, only uncollated pages inside the banker’s boxes. When Dr. Oludara made copies of articles, she threw them in a box. Ditto for the books.
Each day, I cleaned in two shifts of three hours each. I’d sit on the floor sifting through piles of papers and books and decide which of them corresponded with each of the nine chapters of Dr. Oludara’s book. Then I labeled banker’s boxes for each set of materials. The materials I was unsure of, I placed into boxes with no label. For each article, I made a file folder. I turned the radio on low, singing inappropriate rap songs as I worked, skipping over the curse words. After my first shift, I’d break for lunch, head to the refectory, and sit in the corner reading my own book, a mystery or romance.
At the end of my day, I’d knock on the door of Dr. Oludara’s other office and give her a neat stack of unassigned materials. I’d ask her to make a handwritten list of the proposed chapter that each article and book corresponded to, and to fill out an index card with the bibliographic information for each source. I’d already begun filling out cards for the materials in the banker’s boxes, and placing each one in the little, wooden box.