September 19, 2002
My mother crossed her legs. "Well," she said. She picked up the "Living" section of the paper and cracked it into position. She tilted her head back and dropped her eyelids. Her upper lip became hostile as she read. She picked up her green teacup and drank. "I'm dependable. I could answer an ad for somebody dependable." "You are that." We wound up in the car. My toes swelled in my high heels. My mother and I both used the flowered box of Kleenex in the dashboard and stuck the used tissue in a brown bag that sat near the bump in the middle of the car. There was a lot of traffic in both lanes. We drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop. They still hadn't put the letter Y back on the Amy sign. Our first stop was Wonderland. There was a job in the clerical department of Sears. The man there had a long disapproving nose, and he held his hands stiffly curled in the middle of his desk. He mainly looked at his hands. He said he would call me, but I knew he wouldn't. On the way back to the parking lot, we passed a pet store. There were only hamsters, fish and exhausted yellow birds. We stopped and looked  at slivers of fish swarming in their tank of thick green water. I had come to this pet store when I was ten years old. The mall had just opened up and we had all come out to walk through it. My sister, Donna, had wanted to go into the pet store. It was very warm and damp in the store, and smelled like fur and hamster. When we walked out, it seemed cold. I said I was cold and Donna took off her white leatherette jacket and put it on my shoulders, letting one hand sit on my left shoulder for a minute. She had never touched me like that before and she hasn't since. The next place was a tax information office in a slab of a building with green trim. They gave me an intelligence test that was mostly spelling and "What's wrong with this sentence?" The woman came out of her office holding my test and smiling. "You scored higher than anyone else I've interviewed," she said. "You're really overqualified for this job. There's no challenge. You'd be bored to death." "I want to be bored," I said. She laughed. "Oh, I don't think that's true." We had a nice talk about what people want out of their jobs and then I left. "Well, I hope you weren't surprised that you had the highest score," said my mother. We went to the French bakery on Eight-Mile Road and got cookies called elephant ears. We ate them out of a bag as we drove. I felt so comfortable, I could have driven around in the car all day. Then we went to a lawyer's office on Telegraph Road. It was a receding building made of orange brick. There were no other houses or stores around it, just a parking lot and some taut fir trees that looked like they'd been brushed. My mother waited for me in the car. She smiled, took out a crossword puzzle and focused her eyes on it, the smile still gripping her face. The lawyer was a short man with dark, shiny eyes and dense immobile shoulders. He took my hand with an indifferent aggressive snatch. It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let go. "Come into my office," he said. We sat down and he fixed his eyes on me. "It's not much of a job," he said. "I have a paralegal who does research and legwork, and the proofreading gets done at an agency. All I need is a presentable typist who can get to work on time and answer the phone." "I can do that," I said. "It's very dull work," he said. "I like dull work." He stared at me, his eyes becoming hooded in thought. "There's something about you," he said. "You're closed up, you're tight. You're like a wall." "I know." My answer surprised him and his eyes lost their hoods. He tilted his head back and looked at me, his shiny eyes bared again. "Do you ever loosen up?" The corners of my mouth jerked, smilelike. "I don't know." My palms sweated. His secretary, who was leaving, called me the next day and said that he wanted to hire me. Her voice was serene, flat and utterly devoid of inflection. "That typing course really paid off," said my father. "You made a good investment." He wandered in and out of the dining room in pleased agitation, holding his glass of beer. "A law office could be a fascinating place." He arched his chin and scratched his throat. Donna even came downstairs and made popcorn and put it in a big yellow bowl on the table for everybody to eat. She ate lazily, her large hand dawdling in the bowl. "It could be okay. Interesting people could come in. Even though that lawyer's probably an asshole." My mother sat quietly, pleased with her role in the job-finding project, pinching clusters of popcorn in her fingers and popping them into her mouth. |
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Commentarium (21 Comments)
I dont know if this story is true or just another letter from Penthouse Forum. The only time I have ever playfully spanked a woman is standing next to her while playing around after showering, standing together at a nude beach before plunging in or when she is on top of me as I grasp and slap her buns to push her over the top to climax. BDSM is not what my girlfriends were enthused about other than light swatting. Nipple tweaking and kissing is great, and I am pretty good at it which I am well rewarded. Oh yeah, light spanking over my knee for being so naughty, naked, in heels, excites some babes, but I never come on too strong or kinky. I guess my sex life is well within normal. Some women love to squeeze and spank their mans buns too!
feedback
I think the lack of feedback on this story speeks volumes.
Horrible story. Long. Bad plot. Author should consider becoming a street sweeper.
I liked the honesty.
to be totally honest.....this sstory sucked.it failed to capture this reader's interest and i did try and hopethat it might but it was totally a wate of ink....unbelievable that someone was paid to write this.
more feedback
The above feedback folk sure did get excited by the story...He/she certainly used it to talk about all their sexiness. Nice.
The story had all the quiet and awkard descriptions to make it interesting. Debby became a believable and likable character through the author's making. I liked the complex view of someone's first encounter with a different kind of sex.
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do most of the commenters not know what this story is? it's not some flash-in-the -pan first time attempt from an unknown author who "should become a street sweeper", and it's not a letter from penthouse forum. mary gaitskill is an amazingly talented and very well-known writers, the above story was excerpted from her first book of short stories, published in 1988.
anyways, i love the secretary, i think it's incredibly well-written, and i, like gatskill, felt the movie version was just awful.
I disagree, I thought the movie was far more deep and interesting than the short story. The lawyer here is totally flat and gruesome. There is a very real element of beauty in bdsm, an element which is captured and explored in the film and totally absent here.
This is a great short story. Mary Gaitskill has a unique talent and I do enjoy her writing. The collection of short stories this comes from is called Bad Behavior, it is still in print in paperback and even now available as a kindle book. I think its a shame that the entire story is reprinted here without it being clear that this is a piece of contemporary fiction that has been published, and actually it is a disservice to the author to have it entirely available for free here. But if it leads to futher interest in the work of Mary Gaitskill then it is useful. There is new interest in this short story because of the similarities between the movie Secretary and the 50 Shades of Grey novels. The man is named Grey, he has copper colored hair (like Spader), he is closed and complicated, and the woman is brunette and in the end it turns into a positive relationship (in the move and 50 shades, not this story). I am a fan of the movie and this story and 50 shades just to see what all the fuss was about. The memoir that 9 1/2 weeks was based on was worth reading as well...