Is That All There Is?

When I was twice as young as I am now, I took a job in Disappointments. I had other prospects, so everyone was surprised. It was no use explaining my lack of ambition. At eighteen I was ready to be swaddled in the folds of a just-enough life. My peers resisted this reality. I didn’t want to wait. I thought it seemed soothing. When I graduated, I would give up. I could have been a doctor and a famous actress, but it sounded like a lot of concentration.

I was learning to drive, my mother next to me as we ambled down the outerbelt in my father’s big Ford truck. The steering wheel cut into my ribs. I was small and leaned forward to squint down country roads.

There was a building, were buildings, sort of a compound, on the far end of the creek, blowing friendly white smoke into the sky. I squinted harder. I didn’t remember seeing it before.

“What is that?” I asked my mother.

“Stay on the road,” she said, and I veered off the shoulder. I had been arcing towards the buildings in the distance, my hands and the truck drifting after my gaze. A moment passed and then my mother said, “That is the Disappointments factory.”

She was unimpressed, but this was news to me. Getting older means realizing how much is manufactured. We kept driving and that year I passed my driving test and graduated from school and bought my own big truck and drove it to my first day at the Disappointments factory.

At orientation they told us we were the biggest recruitment group the facility had ever had. There were twenty-five of us, and we had to double up on some equipment. I didn’t go in with any real plan, but it was easy to see what the most popular specialties were. All the men wanted to work in Sports Disappointments. I couldn’t tell if it was out of meanness, the chance to gloat when you knew your least-favorite brother would be watching his team lose, or if the men wanted a way to inoculate themselves against the repetitive sting of collective failure. I have never pretended to understand men.

The other really popular department was Infidelity Comma Heterosexual Relationships. There were regulations in place, of course, to make sure that no one on the factory floor accidentally processed their own heartbreak. Too many crimes of passion that started on the factory floor, which is tough to insure against. One woman from my orientation group was fired for hiding in a locker until after hours and trying to find evidence that her husband had someone on the side, ruining the week’s workflow. The work in ICHR fed everyone’s suspicions, so it was for the self-flagellating or very confident.

You would be reviewing a long list of large and small disappointments, double-checking declined phone calls and missed dinners, and you’d think: he’s done only three of the things on this order, so he must be faithful. Or: look at these rookie mistakes, I’ve got to keep my visits to business hours, I’ve got to buy her gifts in cash, I can’t end up like this guy. And, obviously, there’s gossip. You can run a pretty good side hustle on gossip. Infidelity Comma Heterosexual Relationships was not my favorite station, though I did cover split shifts there during the holidays. We were promised time-and-a-half for holiday shifts, but had to pay close attention to our paychecks, always on the lookout for a “payroll mistake” that put us at our typical rate.

Throughout most of my time in the Disappointments industry I worked retail. This was a big department, always growing. We encompassed a broad swath of expired coupons, confusing store layouts, receiving two left shoes, malfunctioning card readers, permanently out-of-stock, our phone menu options have changed, and my personal favorite, new store hours. It was easy to leave these disappointments at work when I went home in the evenings. They were transactional, impersonal, except when I had to handle the occasional we have discontinued our rewards program on someone’s birthday. It also made my own life as a consumer much more pleasant. When I received the wrong autumnal candle in the mail or discovered I had just missed the annual in-store-only bonus cash event, it was a little easier, knowing my disappointment put food on someone’s table.

My closest friend was Sheila, who went on to lead the Awards Season Comma Films and Television department. Hers was a particularly onerous workload as it required coordinating with Hollywood hotshots and production studio heads, carefully negotiating which projects would be commercial disappointments, which would be cultural disappointments, and which rare few would be both.

Sheila and I were happy to go where the foreman needed us. We started out in Mild Inconveniences. M.I. is the training ground for most newbies. Some were recruited from other feelings. Our foreman my first year in the factory was named Daniel, and he had been recruited from an Existential Terror facility in Nevada. It was a pay cut, but he was happy to make the change.

“I like Disappointments. I see my kids more,” he said, nodding along to the rhythm of the machinery. “Believe it or not, E.T. was pretty rote work, but damn, brutal hours.”

Daniel had a terrific eye for detail and was always happy to go over our work at the end of shift to point out areas where we could improve. People assume Mild Inconveniences are busywork, but I saw a lot of potential in small Disappointments. Daniel would pick up my log sheet and look over it, nodding until something caught his eye.

“This, right here,” he said, drawing a faint ink line under one section. I’d processed three incorrect coffee orders in a row. Those are pretty easy to rack up: often, one disappointment begets another. As I watched, Daniel drew a little arrow, threading two of the coffees together. “You switched the first two customers’ coffees, but this one needed to have hers made with a clean milk foamer, since she had a nut allergy. Do you see how if you’d issued that mistake after the second customer ordered her almond flat white, you could’ve made an extra M.I. for the barista, too?”

We didn’t earn commissions or bonuses for stacking Disappointments like that, but it certainly got you noticed. Sheila was great at this. She understood disappointment in a way many didn’t, and that’s why she excelled in such a competitive field. During our rotation, Sheila and I were paired up in University Admissions. We didn’t write rejection letters, but we did edit them if we thought they were unclear, and sometimes we held them for a while, or had them travel circuitous routes through the postal system, making applicants wait an extra week or three. When I saw an acceptance letter in my queue I thought it had to be a mistake. I called Sheila over and when she read the detail sheet, I watched something hard ease off her face.

“This is right,” Sheila said. Her voice was breezy, but on purpose. I squinted. I tried to pinpoint the thing in her that was pretending. Sheila lingered at my shoulder for a moment, then sighed, clicking her varnished nails on my workbench. Her face snapped back like a rubber band.

“Sometimes your disappointment is the best option available to you,” Sheila said, and walked away. I meant to ask her about it at lunch but we talked about TV instead. I meant to ask her about it after work but she left a minute earlier than normal, without waiting for me. I was walking to my big truck when I saw her station wagon pull onto the outerbelt.

Disappointments are like any other feeling. Sometimes they’re gone before you come to know them. And sometimes you just can’t stop feeling, or you can but you don’t. I liked Disappointments, I think, because when you found a really good one, it always felt new. Every time you think of a disappointment you’ve had, it’s like the first time.

When I fell in love with the most wonderful boy in the world, I started to get paranoid. I actually considered changing careers, for a while, because it got so bad. Sheila and I would eat lunch together and then I’d take the long route back to my station so I could walk past Infidelity Comma Heterosexual Relationships. I pretended to take up smoking but really I’d take two fifteen-minute breaks to investigate Bad Dates and Sudden-Onset Impotence Dysfunction. I told myself I was being proactive, just like everyone else who hung around Infidelity, writing down warning signs. But really I was not brushing up for the worst-case scenario. I was looking for it.

We did not meet at work. We met on a street corner, me waiting for the crosswalk light to change, him parked outside the bank. He was listening to baseball, and the crosswalk light blinked green three, seven, twelve times before we realized I was listening too. He invited me into his car, and we sat for several minutes, listening. I can’t remember anymore if he offered to drive me home, or if I just asked.

I wanted badly to marry him. He worked a job I didn’t understand, something nebulous like counting money, and on weekends we took our dogs for hikes. I loved his mother and she loved mine. One year at Christmas he wrote me a long, long card, and I thought it was hilarious, the idea of getting your girlfriend a Christmas card. He was confused. “They sold it in the store,” he said to me. “Christmas Card For Her. You’re a Her.” Why did I find it so funny? I guess just the idea that he saw something I never would have considered for myself, and thought it was a perfect fit. Even now, I think that was my best Christmas.

He was so good at counting money they asked him to do it in a coastal city and we ended things there. When he asked about it, I didn’t hesitate to tell him that the nice thing offered to us was not something I wanted. But I was shocked when he said he would just leave. I asked him how we would manage a long-distance relationship and he said we would not. That was all. We cried and he packed his things and we parted amicably, and sent long emails very often, and spoke well of each other and kept loving our jobs.

Sometimes, disappointment is the best option available to you.

When people don’t get what they want in movies, they throw themselves into something. I had Disappointments, so I threw myself into that. Over the next couple years I made a name for myself in Minor Inconveniences. I was no Sheila, but none of us were.

Daniel was a great influence on me. We had a ritual, Thursday nights, of getting drinks after work and talking about what our lives would be if we had chosen other emotions. Daniel had considered going into an Accelerated Nostalgia Program, but ultimately decided it wasn’t lucrative. He thought I would be well-suited for hope.

“You know, a lot of it is a balancing act,” he said, his eyes meeting mine as I sipped rum and cherry soda. “And you have an advantage, keeping on the tightrope, because you know exactly what’s underneath you.”

When I took a supervisory role in retail Disappointments, I wasn’t so rooted in the nitty-gritty of it all. I started to think seriously about my future in Disappointments. I loved retail because it was everyday: I knew what was disappointing the average American housewife. I understood the little ways that capitalism failed me and I couldn’t be angry about them. People have to make a living.

I met another man at work and he was fine. We went to dinner and I had too much cheese for a first date. My stomach felt oily and my breath was dairy-putrid when he kissed me. Too fast, like he needed to get the kissing done before I noticed it. The next day at work, we passed each other in the hallway but neither of us said anything. I went home early. I took half a day’s sick leave, and I sat on the couch with my hands on my lap. I thought back to when I was little, when my father and I were driving to pick up my mother from the airport and I asked him to tell the story of how they fell in love. They had been at a bar with friends and they made small talk and then my father asked for her number. After a few months of dating he sat down with her parents and asked their permission to propose. And they said yes.

We were both silent for a while, and my father squinted over the steering wheel. I waited for him to say more and he didn’t.

“Is that all there is?” I asked. I couldn’t have been more than ten.

He shrugged. We pulled into the airport traffic, just before the arrival gates. “Your mother seemed like a sweet girl, so I talked to her, and she was,” my father said. “ I just knew that I should keep a good thing while I had it.” On the drive home, I sat on my mother’s lap, and she told me all about her trip, and I fell asleep.

When my suitor from the factory asked me to marry him, I was not surprised. We were at that same restaurant where we’d had our first date, and this time, he had instructed me not to order anything with spinach, anything that might be embarrassing in my teeth. Embarrassment and disappointment are made from similar parts. He asked me without standing up, or kneeling down, and I nodded politely. Whether he asked my parents for their blessing, I never asked. Before we even married, he left the Disappointments factory to take a job at the Regret mill, which he loved.

I think it was just six months after we married that I got a phone call from the mother of my first love, the most wonderful boy. He had died in an awful and exotic mountain disaster. My husband was home when I got the call and I laid my head in his lap and let him shush me, but my eyes didn’t sting. I kept my tears, closed in my little shell skull. My grief made ocean noises behind my ears, and I kept them there, too. I did not want my husband to know just what he was holding.

When my wonderful boy died, I turned my feelings over and over like a stone, but I couldn’t find a single flake of disappointment. It just wasn’t there. It felt a little alien to me, that grief: for the first time my expectation had been met exactly. His funeral was beautiful, but I couldn’t muster up the courage to talk. His mother caught my eye from across the room and then caught me in her arms and held me for a long time.

“You know, he always thought you two would find your ways back to each other,” she whispered. “And I just wish—“

Like a coward, I let loose a great sob. I couldn’t stand to hear her wish for us. I had not fought hard enough for my life, and I did not want to hear how she prayed for something to show us mercy.

All of this soured me on disappointments. I loved the work, I really did. There was something reassuring in meting out those little wounds. Every day I got to measure out how much people could withstand. Every day, I could tell myself that these were inconsequential issues. But after I lost my wonderful boy again, nothing felt small at all.

When I left the Disappointments factory, Sheila put together a goodbye party for me. Daniel was retired by then, but he came back to wish me well. I know Sheila invited him, even though she was a higher-up, even though she was in Film, and she had no need to be kind to me. I think that Sheila noticed the moment I understood everything as she did.

After she packed up my cake and boxed up all the cards and helped me balance the flowers on top of it all, Sheila walked me to the door. She leaned against the frame and smiled crooked.

“If you ever miss Disappointments, I think you’d have a great second wind in book-to-movie adaptations,” Sheila said to me. We both knew it was a sweet, joking insult: I have never had any imagination. When I got to my truck I stood on the running board and blew her kisses.

My husband made enough money that I could do something quiet. My hands had always been steady, so I took a job at a tailor shop. All day, I fixed holes and made things fit the way they should. For the first few months my fingers would flex and twitch in my sleep.

This was long enough ago that most people in my life today don’t know about my time in Disappointments. I don’t make many excuses to talk about it. When we visit my parents, I always ask to take the outerbelt, even though they added a shiny new highway, because I like to see the plumes of smoke drifting over the trees, big friendly puffs thickening the sky. Even when it is out of sight, I can sense where the Disappointments factory is. I sold my truck when I took the job at the tailor, but if you dropped me anywhere in the country, I could find my way back to Disappointments, squint my way there over a steering wheel. My husband drives me anywhere I need to go in his compact sedan. I know that I was right about a just-enough life.

My mother laughs, sometimes, about my “Disappointments Phase.” I let my husband laugh along. I allow them to forget that I know the industry inside and out. We do not think about what I’ve lost. I don’t remind them that someday, disappointments will be all we have. I’m in no hurry.

Photo by Anslee Wolfe.