The Road to Santa Clara (Ch. 12): The Right Stuff
Ξ October 3rd, 2007 | → | ∇ Stories |
After leaving Nordstrom Rack, I was excited to have time at home. While many people enjoy the social dynamic of work and activities, I thrive on being at home, in quiet and solitude. The idea of getting to curl up in my slippers and sip tea while writing stories to my heart’s content just seemed too good to be true. Well, it was.When I had dreamed of a day when I could sit and write without the daily pressures of work, I think I’d probably imagined having a window. I’d read of writers who constructed small cabins or carved out a little space in their homes, and they’d always sit and look out a window, with some picturesque scene outside that would cultivate their creativity. I found myself far from this ideal situation. For about a week, I wrote. I wrote stories and emails and letters and even began jotting down things I’d learned from our time in Santa Clara. But very soon the silence became haunting, the walls began closing in on me, and the lack of windows made me crazy. If I had no errands to run, a entire days would go by that I never saw outdoors, never took a breath of fresh air, never saw a single person besides Jeff. At first I’d go to Starbucks and sit there with my laptop so at least I could see the sky, but then our laptop battery went kaput and I was stranded by the outlet at our dining room table. By then the apartment was too depressing for words, and for my own mental health I knew I had to find something to do.
So, by week three I was on Craigslist looking at jobs. I found several ads for a local women’s fitness center, and sent in an application, figuring that at least I could stay in shape. I didn’t hear anything for several weeks, but then, after we’d found out that we needed to pack up and find a new home, I got a phone call.
“This is the Right Stuff Health Club on De La Cruz, we received your application through Craigslist and we would like to conduct a preliminary phone interview; is now a good time?” The very young-sounding girl was obviously reading from a script. I smiled and sat down on the couch.
“Sure.” She asked the usual questions and I answered the usual answers—of course I was an enthusiastic team-player who worked well with others, paid attention to detail, and thrived in busy customer-service environments. Who didn’t? She concluded by setting up a time for me to interview in person and rang off.
The following week I followed Mapquest, expecting to easily find a large, shiny, mega-gym type building, like the 24-hour fitness facilities that polka-dotted the entire city. Instead, I pulled into an old grocery store parking lot, and saw a tiny, dilapidated strip mall containing an insurance office, a nail salon (there are millions in Santa Clara), and, under a dingy white sign with blue and white lettering circa 1985, the Right Stuff Health Club. I walked in and seemed to draw the attention of every woman in the place. A young girl at the front stood reading a book and another was vacuuming with one of those old push vacuums that don’t use power. They both wore dark blue t-shirts a size or two too big, tucked into sweats, with the sleeves rolled up and their hair in ponytails. They both also looked about fourteen. I immediately felt overdressed in my black jacket and pants, and felt a wave of thankfulness that I hadn’t worn my suit. They stared at me while I walked toward the desk and explained I was there for an interview. The girl at the desk seemed to take it personally, as if I’d just told her I was stealing her job, but I smiled and she finally shuffled off toward an office to alert her manager. I took a seat in on of the old wicker chairs with faded mauve cushions that comprised the waiting area, and picked up a fitness magazine. A few minutes later I saw a short, round Indian woman with black hair and dark skin, with very full cheeks and lips that hung down slightly, accentuating their fullness. She wore an old pair of sweats and a large sweatshirt, with her bangs curled tightly across her forehead. As she walked across the room, I saw her furtively glancing my direction, as if she didn’t want me to see her. She went behind the desk and approached the young girl, holding up a piece of paper over her mouth as she spoke to her—again, all very covert. I felt like there was a huge conspiracy going on somehow, and I’d missed out on it all.
Then, all of a sudden, she dropped the paper and broke into a huge smile, acting as if she’d just now seen me seated right in front of her.
“Oh! You must be Katrina!” She smiled broadly. I stood and smiled in return.
“Karina actually, but yes, that’s me.”
“Ooh!” She covered her mouth with her hand and giggled nervously, “Yes, Karina, I’m Minoto, the manager here the Right Stuff Health Club, won’t you come into my office?” So I followed her into a tiny low-ceilinged office piled floor to ceiling with papers and file cabinets, outdated fitness posters with women in leotards and leg warmers, and men in long socks and short shorts, and a large At-A-Glance calendar. I sat down opposite her and she smiled again. “So, tell me about yourself.” By now I felt like an interview pro, so I answered the questions as I knew I should and breezed through without a nervous moment, especially since I didn’t even remember applying for the job and didn’t have my heart set on getting it. This gave me a nice advantage, so when she asked what hours I would be willing to work, I could be picky, saying I’d only work 20-25 hours per week and nothing before 8am or after 4pm. She hired me on the spot; Monday would be my first day.
Monday morning, instead of perfecting my makeup and coordinating a matching Nordstrom Rack-approved outfit, I slipped on my yoga pants and running shoes and pulled my hair into a ponytail. I liked the job already. Once I arrived I was given my oversized blue t-shirt, which I obediently tucked in, and was introduced to Minnie, who would be my trainer. She looked fifteen, but informed me that she was seventeen and went to the local high school. She, I realized as soon as I heard her voice, had been the girl who’d called me for my phone interview. Though I felt a little silly being trained by someone almost ten years my junior, I reminded myself how comfortable my running shoes were and how depressing my apartment at home was, and immediately I was thankful again for the job.
Minnie gave me my employee handbook which I was instructed to read at home as there would be a review over the materials and I was expected to be prepared the following Monday. I smiled slightly, thinking she was joking, then quickly realized that she was not. This was very serious. We flipped to page seven where the training checklist was located and she took a deep breath.
“Ok, let’s start with checking people in.” Just then the phone rang deafeningly and she looked around, but seeing no one, sighed and rolled her eyes at the enormous inconvenience and slid past me toward the phone. “Thank you for calling the Right Stuff Health Club on De La Cruz, this is Minnie speaking, how may I provide you with excellent customer service today?” She ran off this entire greeting with astonishing rapidity, and my eyes widened. “Yes, we’re open Thanksgiving Day until 3.” She hung up the phone.
“Do you really have to say that entire thing when you answer the phone?”
“Yes. If Dave or Mike call—they’re the owners—and you don’t say that entire thing, you’ll get fired. And sometimes they just call to check up on us so you better say it every single time. We’ll practice it a bunch, don’t worry.” I stared at her. She turned back to our checklist and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Ok, where were we?”
Our training was thorough. I thought back to my training at Nordstrom Rack: a non-English speaker named Kobra basically saying, “Pad tree – you clean.” Here, I was taught, in excruciating detail, how to wipe down the seat of an exercise bike, how to put a Swiffer wipe onto a mop to clean the aerobics floor, how to enter a phone number into a blank space on the computer, and how to arrange magazines in a fan on the coffee table in the makeshift lobby. There were, of course, certain tasks that I was not allowed to do without further extensive training—such as writing a message on the dry-erase board, man the sign-up sheet for yoga class, or talk on the intercom. These, I guess, were level two employee tasks and would require more training.
The following day my training was completed with a new girl named Cora, who looked just as young as Minnie, but wore an old cardigan sweater over her blue t-shirt and cargo pants. I didn’t comment on the fact that I’d been told we weren’t allowed to wear either of those things. Cora apparently was second to Minoto, and was terribly inconvenienced by training me. She gave me an oral examination over all the material I’d covered the day before and was disappointed that I hadn’t been taught how to do the business.
“Do the business?” I was confused. It sounded like a code-name for some unmentionable task. “What do you mean, ‘do the business’?”
She sighed loudly and closed her eyes, as if exercising saint-like patience for the imbecile girl who stood before her. “Do the business. For the office. I’ll show you.” So, she proceeded to show me how to “do the business” which was nothing more than copying down the day’s totals for guests, sales, and personal training appointments onto a sheet of paper which was submitted to the head office. After her explanation I smiled and told her I thought I’d be able to handle “doing the business.” After we’d finished training and I had apparently satisfied her with my phone-answering abilities, we spent the last twenty-five minutes of my shift talking. I learned that she was seventeen, had dropped out of high school because she hated school, and was saving up money so she could move out of her mom’s house and buy a car. Her boyfriend had his own band and she was mostly doing publicity stuff for them. She also hated Minnie, so she proceeded to tell me why. I didn’t respond. When she’d finished, it seemed to dawn on her that she’d done all the talking.
“So, what about you?” She nodded upward toward me.
“Oh, my husband and I recently moved here from Oregon.”
She thought for a moment. “So, you’ve like never seen the ocean, huh?” I stared at her for a moment, unsure how to respond.
I just smiled at her and said, “I’ve seen the ocean,” then looked at the clock, announced my shift was over, and thanked her for training me. She smiled, for the first time, and I realized she was very pretty.
The Right Stuff Health Club proved to be a source of evening laughter for Jeff and me as I recounted each day’s events. When I started work there, I was definitely the oldest person, besides Minoto and the personal trainers. This meant that I heard endless conversations about school dances, boyfriends, marijuana, and pretty vicious gossip. Cora always wore her cardigan and usually worked when Minoto wasn’t there, which meant she spent hours in Minoto’s office with the door closed, doing what I don’t know. Minnie was usually grumpy and never ceased to complain about how much she hated working there. I think she felt like a mature 30-year-old trapped in a 17-year-old body, forced to endure childish inconveniences such as school. She couldn’t wait to graduate, get her fitness instructor certification, and become a personal trainer in some distant location. She always said “hella” which I deduced was some sort of slang word meaning “very” or “really”. Her mom, Kim, also worked at the gym as a personal trainer.
Each day I’d meet new girls. Marie was a large Hispanic girl who was very sweet and extremely hard working and could not spell to save her life. I loved working with her because we both worked hard and got the entire day’s checklist completed before our shift was over at three. Reading her notes was a challenge, sounding them out to try to make sense of the phonetic spelling, but eventually I caught on. Mandie was only sixteen and very pretty, but very insecure. She wore black eyeliner and always asked me how I stayed skinny. She had a twenty-five-year-old boyfriend who’d pick her up from work, and she unfortunately liked to talk about sex and smoking pot. She was very intrigued by my life, and wanted to know all about Jeff and if he was hot. I shared with her how God had brought us together and about our commitment to purity and how God has blessed our relationship. The conversation led to talking about Jesus and the gospel. She was very quiet after that day and I began praying God would work in her heart. A week later she got into trouble with the law and I never saw her again.
It was almost a month before I met Jeanette, though I’d seen her name on the schedule. I later learned that she’d seen my name on the schedule, sloppily written “Kari P”, so she thought for a month that I was an Indian woman named Karip. She was not a little surprised when we finally met. Jeanette was one of the personal trainers, and I marveled at her because her voice betrayed her age—it was deep and scratchy—but her figure was that of a teenager. She was scarcely five-foot-tall and teeny tiny, with perfectly defined arms and a nauseatingly flat waist. When she told me she’d given birth to twins via C-section at age forty I couldn’t keep my jaw from dropping—especially when she told me her twins were now driving. What was even more amazing was that I never saw her exercise. She loved to talk, and she always seemed to have energy. I loved when she’d work because she always brought her tall Starbucks coffee up to the front desk and talked to me. She told me that I reminded her of her niece, who now lived on the East coast, who’d been so close to Jeannette that she felt like she was her daughter. Jeanette was divorced, and confided that she’d just met a new man. She loved sharing her secrets with me like delicious little morsels. I didn’t talk much to Jeanette, but I listened a lot.
And then there was Nieve. Nieve immediately caught my attention but I didn’t know why. Obviously Irish, Her face was round, with very fair flawless skin and freckles and reddish blond hair that she always wore pulled back tightly into a messy knot at the nape of her neck. She was tall, my height, and thin, with long legs and arms. The black eyeliner was all that distinguished her as seventeen rather than thirteen. She was quiet and had a childlike innocence to her that was refreshing after spending afternoons with Minnie and Cora and Mandie. She often worked with me on the afternoon shift so we gradually became acquainted. She, like Mandie, wanted to know all about Jeff and how we’d met and what it was like to be married. I shared our story with her, emphasizing how God had worked in our relationship and inspired us to remain sexually pure until marriage.
“Really?! You didn’t have sex until you were married?!” She seemed innocently amazed.
“Yes, really. I know; it’s rare these days.”
“Wow. I mean, I think that’s really cool.” She nodded slowly, thinking. “I mean, all my friends sleep with their boyfriends. But I don’t. I don’t have boyfriends. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to stay a virgin until I was married, but I never met anyone who actually was.”
“Never?” I was amazed that this could be true.
“No, never. I mean, I didn’t think people did that anymore.”
“Do you believe in God, Nieve?”
“Yeah, I had to go to Catholic school so I know all about God.”
“Do you have a relationship with Him?” She thought for a moment.
“I don’t think I know what you mean.” Just then the phone rang and a line of ladies began to form for the yoga class that started in five minutes. Before I knew it her shift was over. She signed out and grabbed her jacket, then stopped for a moment by the front desk where I stood.
“It was nice to talk today,” she said and smiled, then turned and was gone.
—
Minoto was perhaps what made The Right Stuff such a peculiar place. I soon realized that the look I’d seen during my initial visit, that of a spy covertly creeping around like some conspiracy was taking place, was common. I also began to realize some things that made me feel very sorry for her. For one, she lived at work. She had no husband or suitors, was forty-two years old, and her family still lived in India, so she virtually just worked every single day. She’d call every morning at 7:45am and we’d have the exact same conversation:
Me: Thank you for calling the Right Stuff Health Club on De La Cruz, this is Kari speaking, how may I provide you with excellent customer service today?
Minoto: Hi Kari, it’s Minoto.
Me: Hi, Minoto, how are you?
Minoto: Fine, and you?
Me: Fine.
Minoto: How’s the club?
Me: Good.
Minoto: Are there a lot of guests today?
Me: Pretty usual.
Minoto: Have Dave or Mike called?
Me: No, not today.
Minoto: Ok, well I’m just leaving my house so I’ll see you in five minutes.
Me: Ok, I’ll see you soon.
And then, at about 9:40am she’d actually arrive, with her Starbucks cup in hand. After a few weeks she began coming without her Starbucks, but then around 10:15am she’d ask me to go run to Starbucks for her to get her coffee. The first time, I asked for her order and she paused, looking guilty. “You better write it down,” she explained. I grabbed a pencil and proceeded to write: A grande, nonfat, extra hot, no whip, extra foam mocha. I loved ordering it at Starbucks, where they’d smile and automatically write “Minoto” on the cup without me even giving her name.
During the day, Minoto would come out of her office and stand by the front desk, nervously tapping her fingernails on the counter and swaying front to back, as if trying to figure out what to say. After a few moments, she’d look up at me and say, “So, how are you?” I’d respond politely and ask how she was, and she’d say fine, then after a few minutes of awkward silence she’d return to her office. This happened at least ten times a day. I thought of her as my boss, so in my mind there was a respectful distance that should be kept, but I soon realized that perhaps she was just trying to make a friend.
Every time the phone rang, I’d answer it and deal with whatever the customer needed. Then, after I’d hung up, Minoto would come out of her office and ask who had called and what they’d needed. Thus, a majority of each day was spent in simply retelling every conversation I had on the phone. Minoto also wanted me to tell her about the performance of every employee. So, she’d call me into her office several times a day and ask if Mandie seemed high or if Minnie was leaving early or if Cora was talking on the phone to her boyfriend in Minoto’s office. Usually I had to respond yes to all three.
She also wanted my opinion on everything. She would spend excruciating hours slaving over a flyer, only to produce a cartoon stick-figure next to a neon colored Word art dialog balloon, and then want my opinion on whether I thought it would capture the attention of our members. This was painful because the truth was that they looked awful and everyone knew it. But what good would it do to tell her, after she’d spent her entire day creating it? So, mercifully, she began to let me make the flyers. She wanted my opinion on her clothes—did these leggings make her butt look big? Again, impossible to respond. She wondered if the girls at work liked her. I told her that the girls could see that she cared a great deal about the club. She was contemplating buying dining room furniture for her house and she wondered if I’d be willing to go shopping with her to help pick it out. I think I said that I wasn’t much of a shopper but if she wanted to describe what she was thinking of purchasing I’d give her my opinion. I became an expert in carefully constructed answers.
One of the biggest challenges of the Right Stuff was not giving in to gossip and making fun of Minoto. In my opinion, she was a lonely woman with some personality issues that made her life very difficult. She did make the job very difficult because of her insecurity and need to be a part of every single transaction and phone call and conversation that took place. I tried to understand that and be patient. But the girls were merciless, and I’d be lying if I said that I never got caught up in their wake. They made fun of her constantly, rolled their eyes behind her back, mimicked her peculiar mannerisms. She couldn’t pronounce the “v” sound, and instead it came out as a “w” sound. At first this confused me because she kept telling me that the wents weren’t being cleaned. I stared at her. “The what?” I’d ask. “The wents!” She pointed up to the ceiling at the large air-conditioning vents. Oh, the vents! Then she told me to call the repair shop because the winol was torn on the shoulder-press machine. “The what?” I asked. “The winol!” She took me over and pointed to the tear on the seat pad. Oh the vinyl! Eventually I got the hang of things and was able to understand. I wish I could say that I always acted patiently, always saw the best in her, always looked at her with sympathy and grace. More than once I’d recount Minoto stories to my husband, and more than once we’d laugh, but through my time there God slowly began to show me her heart, how she was hurting, and how He loved her, died for her, and wanted me to love her too. I had a lot to learn.
