Low Pressure
You are driving into the mountains. This is the first thing you notice as you move deeper into Western Pennsylvania. The second is the message on the dashboard: Low tire pressure. A patter of rain starts. The sky darkens; the sun retires early in January. It’s probably best to pull over. Call someone, but who? You don’t know anyone in the Pittsburgh area. Scroll through the contacts in your phone; dial the first number that makes sense. Don’t bother asking yourself what this person will be able to do for you from New York, three hundred miles away. Take comfort in hearing a familiar voice on the other end. From the rest stop where you park the car—the tire could use air—gaze out over the mountains, thinking about how much farther you must go. Check the tire again when you get to the hotel, satisfied it has not gotten worse.
Tomorrow, ask about the terrain in the job interview. Say, “Do a lot of people walk this golf course? It seems kind of hilly.”
When Pete, the head golf professional hosting you, laughs and says, “Yes, they do; this course is actually flat for Pittsburgh,” express surprise. You can easily look out the large bay window of the clubhouse’s dim, empty dining room and see a rollercoaster of grass painted various shades of green. How much hillier can it get? The golf course where you work in New York is as flat as your car claimed its tire was, and a lot of golfers there hop on a cart anyway.
Say, “That’s good,” and nod your head. Note that you are a caddie, and golfers who choose to walk a round of golf rather than ride in a cart are your lifeblood.
Perform a postmortem after the interview, as you are driving through the mountains again, this time away from Pittsburgh. What could you have done better? Make more eye contact. You feel like you spent most of the interview staring at your shoes. If at any point Pete
had asked you to describe the floor in detail, your response would have been spot on. Think about the answers to various questions he did ask.
“Why are you thinking about leaving your current job?”
You were thinking about the thirteen-hour days, back-to-back-to-back in the summer heat when you said, “I’m looking to cut back a little bit. I don’t know how much longer I can maintain the same hours I work now.” That a boy. It’s every employer’s dream to hire a thirty-year-old with aspirations of being semi-retired.
Grip the steering wheel tighter as you think about how you handled his last question: “Would it be possible to get a couple of references?”, to which you immediately said no. Why the hell did you do that? Does it make you feel better that he continued, taking one last look at your resume, “It’s okay. Nobody keep duds for thirteen years.” He was just trying to be nice. Ask yourself: in the history of interviews, has anybody ever answered a single question worse?
Your car still warns you about low pressure. Either the system hasn’t recalibrated or you don’t know how to put air in a tire. Find another rest stop. Check the tire again. Let your mom know you are on your way home, or to Delaware rather, to visit your brother and his family.
How did it go?
Good. While that’s not altogether true, you have sent resumes, cover letters, the works to courses in Kansas City, where your sister lives, and Baltimore, where your other sister lives, and Philadelphia, close enough to where your brother lives, and since you have decided that you will not stay at your current job—all the standard reasons: money, workload, change of scenery—and that Pittsburgh is too far away from everything you hold near and dear anyway, you will simply take one of these jobs.
You have moved past the horses and buggies of Amish country and are closing in on Wilmington, Delaware when you notice your phone vibrating in the cupholder. The number on the screen has a 412 area code. This is the call, you decide. You hadn’t expected the rejection to come so quickly, but you do understand it has to come some time.
Answer the phone, just to get this over with. Say, “Hello?”, then listen.
“Stephen?” the voice on the other end responds. “Pete from Edgewood Country Club.”
“Hey, Pete.”
“How did you think it went today?” Speak positively, lie a bit if necessary, then let him continue,
“What do you think about living in Pittsburgh?”
Say, “Wow,” and stammer for a few moments, stating nothing intelligible or of note. Say “Wow” again. Listen to him explain the details: he is emailing you the job offer—outside golf operations manager, salary, benefits. Think it over. He will give you until the end of the weekend; he knows this is a big decision.
Remember that today is Thursday. The end of the weekend is three days away. Convey your gratitude, hang up, and call the first person who comes to mind.
Your mom doesn’t speak for several seconds. Finally, she exhales. “Pittsburgh, huh?” she says, like it’s a new word she’s trying out, like it’s already been decided.
If it’s the hilly golf course Mom is worried about, she needn’t, since you’ll be supervising caddies now rather than caddying yourself. Maybe it’s this: that you are the last of her four kids in New York, and by moving to Pittsburgh, you will become the second farthest from her. This represents a genuine but not especially noteworthy maternal worry. But don’t you both know it’s more than that? Don’t you remember the last time you tried something like this? Recognize that you are at a crossroads; now is not the time to be coy.
Refresh your memory. It is six years ago. The place is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The situation is as follows: you are in your second semester of graduate school. There are no hills or mountains, at least not in your apartment, where you spend most of your time. For the last seven months, since the move from New York, social interactions have been few and far between. At one point, there is a girl, but this is not about her; good thing, too, because it would be a very short story. Like, “You fucked up; the end” short.
You sleep too much, and at odd times. Excessive sleep causes you to miss classes in chunks, which mostly merits attention because school starts at four-thirty in the afternoon. You miss the same class three weeks in a row. When you visit the professor during office hours, you are wearing sweats and offer a note from your psychiatrist as an explanation for the absences.
Whereas work comes to define you in New York, in Myrtle Beach you have no job. Your savings are grains of sand spiraling toward the bottom of an hourglass. Your unemployment leaves ample time for homework. For the most part, you struggle to finish any of it. You go days without leaving the apartment. When you do, it is for one of three reasons: you have worked up enough ambition to attend class, or you are out of food or, more importantly, beer.
Returning to New York is an option. To some, or at least one person, it seems like the only option. You drown your mom in bottomless talk of what the exclusive rank of loneliness you have achieved feels like. “Come home,” she says, and when she finds out you’re not taking the pills anymore, she talks to the psychiatrist, who tells her she should stop giving you money, if this is indeed how you are getting by, until you are forced to come home. You always demur; your financial situation is not yet so dire. Your mental state cannot be as clearly delineated. Fear of being branded a failure convinces you to stay in South Carolina through the end of the semester.
You feel better now, confident about some things. You are unquestionably good at what you do, an introvert excelling at a job characterized by constant interaction with other people. You have received a viable job offer hours after your first interview. But you have doubts—most people do—and these doubts ride shotgun to Pittsburgh, they leave the car with you to check the supposed flat on the Turnpike, and they nag you all the way to Delaware, where your sister-in-law has set up the guest bedroom in anticipation of your arrival. When the rest of the family retires upstairs, stay in the den to watch TV and try to let these doubts tire themselves out.
Find yourself still in the den when you wake in the morning, wearing the same clothes from the day before. Feel your nephew poking you, probably thinking, What the fuck is Uncle Stevie doing curled up on the couch in a shirt and tie, if four-year-old’s are capable of such observational skills and candid thought. Quickly realize he does not care about how you are dressed or the thoughts running roughshod over your mind. Allow him to shove the TV remote into your hand, and watch him plop onto the couch beside you. “Number seven,” he says, directing you to select his favorite episode of his favorite show. How many times have you seen it now? You’re beginning to wonder if this series has a one through six.
Watching anthropomorphized airplanes save the planet in twenty-minute intervals does not bring you any closer to a decision. Wait for your nephews to go to day care, for your brother and sister-in-law to leave for work, then carefully plot the pros and cons of this potential move.
You want the job; for once, you are not ambivalent about something. But you will miss caddying, you tell your sister via text. You have time to get another job, you say. It’s only January, and the golf season won’t start in earnest for a couple of months. Pick this job up and drop it in Kansas, Maryland, or Delaware and you will take it like that, you’re sure. Tell a coworker you are fifty-fifty, sixty-forty, thirty-seventy. Let another coworker advise you to use the offer as leverage at your current job, though you know this will be an exercise in futility. Try to enjoy your time with your brother, sister-in-law, and nephews. You don’t see them often.
Hear nothing from Mom. Imagine her sitting up at night, dozing off and on in the den, making the same imprint on her couch at home as you are in Delaware. Think of her tossing and turning, saying “No, no, no” like this is a bad nightmare from which there is no waking up. Is this what your time in South Carolina was like for her? Think of it this way: do you really want to put her through the same worries again? It’s probably totally different now. You can do this, maybe. You are not the same person. You are wiser, more mature, and some mountains you didn’t even know existed until two days ago certainly won’t keep you from taking this job.
But no matter how your thoughts twist like strands of DNA, you cannot take them over the mountains. You worry they will close you in, like the walls of your apartment in Myrtle Beach. Track the change in the trajectory of your breathing as you consider getting a flat tire in this setting, help so far away.
Wait until Sunday morning to call Pete. The last line of his email reads, I look forward to hopefully working together for years to come. Understand that three days is not a lot of time to make a decision involving years. Consider using this call to ask for more time.
Feel your body shake and your voice tremble before you start talking, signs you may be making a mistake. If this is the way you want it to go down—will you ever really be sure?—explain to Pete how this was one of the hardest decisions of your life. Listen to him on the other end, calm, patient, and understanding, as you pace the half-finished basement in Delaware. Steady streams of cold air only exacerbate your nervousness. Don’t fret. It will all be over soon. You are convincing yourself that this move is not for you, at least not the you of the present moment.
Let the call be short and to the point. Pete clearly has other things to attend to. One of them is starting this search all over, potentially.
You’re thinking of what of you want to say, what you feel you have to say, whether Pete needs to hear it or not. So you go, “I don’t think I’m ready to leave New York.”
Oh God. Listen to what you’re saying. You’re talking yourself right into it.
Stephen Pisani is an MFA candidate in fiction at Adelphi University. He spends his spare time caddying at a golf course, where he chases a little white ball around a big patch of grass.