The Curve Ball
THE CURVE BALL
BEANIE
The pessimist complains about the wind.
The optimist expects it to change.
The realist adjusts the sails.
—WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD
1980
“Are you humming ‘On the Road Again’?” Ollie Burns asked Beanie Rosen, who sat in his outer office waiting to be interviewed.
She nodded, smiling as he invited her inside.
“One of my favorites,” Burns said, escorting her inside.
Oliver Burns, head of Personnel, was an odd sort: friendly, officious, with an oversized desk that made him look small. There was a signed Willie Nelson picture on the wall just behind him, and a Willie Nelson bobblehead on his desk. He could have been in his late thirties or forties, hard to tell with his thinning hair and paunch Buddha belly, partially hidden by a white button-down, but instead of a tie he wore a lanyard, fastened by a large piece of turquoise at the neck.
She looked at the bobblehead on Ollie’s desk. “I love Willie Nelson,” Beanie told him, adding that she didn’t know much about his music but would surely love to.
Beanie’s father had taught her to always get the client talking about something they love. “And then hang on every word like it’s gospel,” he’d said, “like it’s air, like it’s the missing piece to a puzzle you’ve been working your whole life. And if you can,” he’d suggested, “take notes, like you’re memorializing every morsel.”
And that is exactly what she did. For fifteen minutes she sat enthralled as Ollie Burns waxed poetic about all things Willie Nelson, which songs he loved the most, the least, which he recommended she listen to first, and which, while still worthwhile, were less important. “Hawkeye was right,” Burns said, impressed. “You are special.”
“Who?” asked Beanie.
“Debbie Hawkins, the receptionist. We call her Hawkeye,” he told her. “She doesn’t miss a trick. And she didn’t miss you for sure.”
Beanie smiled, hopeful, until he finished the sentence. “But I’m sorry, I mean I’m really sorry to say the two openings we have just don’t seem like a fit. Besides,” he said, “you went to college, you’re not going to want to be a secretary.”
Barry had been correct. Her résumé had betrayed her, and she hadn’t had the time to change it. So instead, she pivoted. “I don’t really have ambition,” she said, “beyond working at the Light office.” If Beanie was a pitcher, that was her windup. “What I really love,” she said, throwing a perfect curveball, “is organization.” She paused for effect, and then added, “And filing. I love to file.”
He looked up, but she pretended not to notice, lost in the euphoria of a Dewey Decimal fantasy.
“I organize everything in my stepfather’s medical offices: papers, invoices, files ,” she said, hitting the word, then circling back. “I really love to file,” she reiterated, just in case he’d missed it the first three times. “In case there’s no secretarial position available, I’d be open to doing something else…”
His eyes lit up.
And just like that, Beanie Rosen swam through the wave of no fucking way and landed a job at the Sylvan Light Agency.
She could not have been happier.
Barry Licht, on the other hand, was furious. “Fucking furious,” to quote him. He hadn’t even left for his messenger run when she sought him out in the parking garage to tell him the good news. Only he didn’t see it that way.
“I take my lunch hour and give you crib notes, advice, good advice, all the things you’d need to know, things most people never hear, and what do you do? You take the one good job I’d found, the one job that kept me close to Lonsdale. Now they’re going to have me doing runs from eight in the morning ’til eight at night, and all the work I’ve put in is going to fucking mean nothing.”
He was mad. Spitting mad.
And she was sorry, genuinely, but he had laid out the odds so clearly that she didn’t have a choice.
“If there was any other way,” she told him, “I’d have done it, but I couldn’t accept no. It’s just not who I am. Which is why,” she continued, “I’ll be a great agent.”
“Not here,” he said, getting in the car to go on another Dispatch run. “You’ll never get out of Central Files.”
“I want to be friends,” she said, ignoring the rules of a game she was determined to rewrite.
“Fuck you,” he said, backing the piece-of-shit car out of the piece-of-shit space.
But when he drove past her, she saw a half smile that didn’t exactly let her off the hook, but at least gave her an opening which Beanie knew she could noodle. Eventually.
Barry wasn’t as cute as Fish, but he was taller, smarter, and her only friend at Sylvan Light.
“You’re going to have to forgive me someday!” she shouted to him as he headed to the valley, flipping her off.