I decided to go to grad school on a whim. I hated my dead-end retail management job (Hollister, anyone?) and felt like doing something nutty. So, I quit, applied to schools and ended up in New York City eight months later. I gave all my furniture to Big Brothers, Big Sisters and packed two suitcases. I arrived at JFK with two bags and $2000.
Little did I know how difficult the NYC job market would be. After a stint as a server in a pretentious restaurant with a rat problem, I ended up doing temp work. Not administrative temp work. Pretty much anything temp work. My first job was spending a Saturday helping two young girls move out of their apartment on the Upper East Side. It was harmless, I got some exercise and they gave me a Coke.
Others followed. I sorted a rich guys bills that he'd collected in a giant cardboard box. I ran an errand here or there. Then I accepted an afternoon gig that truly threw me for a loop.
The agency described the job as "An elderly woman whose husband had passed away and needed help packing up the apartment." No problem. It paid well, it was mindless, and I could wash my hands of it after eight short hours. Only the description had been muddy at best.
I arrived at the Tribeca Tower to see a morose, frail woman speaking harshly with a doorman who was avoiding eye contact. She knew who I was right when I walked through the sliding doors and she greeted me with a warning in a broken Russian accent. "I don't know what the agency told you, but..."
The "but" was a big one. It wasn't her husband. It was her son. And it wasn't just a death, but a bloodbath. When we arrived at the door of the apartment on the 52nd floor, the door frame still had yellow police tape that had been torn off, but left frayed pieces behind. Then the odor hit me like a wall of smoke. Though every window in the apartment was open, the smell of decaying blood was startling. As I looked around the room, I noticed several bath towels on the floor with dried brown blood stains seeped through at the entry way to the kitchen. On the stainless steel dishwasher, there was a bloody hand print that slid down to the floor.
Dutifully and with limited verbal interaction, I began to pack up what she put in front of me. When she placed female clothing and jewelry in front of me, she said cryptically, "If it wasn't for her, he'd still be here." I nodded with my best attempt at empathy over the vague, but grotesque circumstances.
At this point she started to offer his possessions to me. Not the cherished ones. She asked me to go through his closet and take anything I wanted. I did to humor her, but he was an extra large and I would have looked like a kid playing dress up. By the time she'd unloaded all she could on me (and all I could carry on the subway back to Queens), I had some lingonberry juice, 2 bottles of champagne, 2 bottles of Cabernet (which forced me to have to step on the bloody towels), and a $400 kindle which I packed up nicely for the ride home.
Toward the end of the day, we had everything packed up and taken what we could to the Fedex downstairs She refused to ride the elevator alone or stay in the apartment in solitude, so she made every trip with me, though she carried nothing.
I gathered my freebie box and stood by the door as we prepared to leave the apartment for the last time. She then said, 'I need five minutes' and walked to the bay windows that looked out onto a stunning panorama of the city with the Empire State building standing tall not far away. She clasped her hands behind her back, bent her head down and sobbed uncontrollably for a good ten minutes. The deep, hard kind.
Frozen, I just stood there. She had had such a harsh demeanor and seemed uncapable of such frailty. I walked toward her to offer a hug, but she just held out her hand and said bluntly, 'No.' I went back and stood by my box at the front door. We then rode down the elevator in silence and I left her forever.
I got a text from her several weeks later simply asking for her FedEx receipts to be mailed to her. Which I did. I don't remember her name. God help me, I will never temp again.
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