UGLY

Abstract

8 6 Y U G L Y M A R Y G O R D O N The company was sending me to Monroe for six weeks. Of course, professionally it was a good thing, a sign of their regard, their trust, and that was a relief. Because I was always afraid that one day – and it might be soon – they’d realize that I didn’t belong. That my place at Verdance, a company that manufactured herbal remedies, was really stolen and its relinquishment might be demanded, and with perfect justice, at any moment. My background was neither in science nor in business. I’ve never had any idea whether what they called ‘‘the product,’’ or ‘‘the products,’’ or sometimes, foreswearing articles altogether, ‘‘product’’ really worked, or if I’m involved in the sale of snake oil. I take on faith the CFO’s assertion that we – by ‘‘we’’ I mean the company of course – are making a handsome profit. My background was in literature, and my time spent attending to niceties of language made me unhappy every time I had to say the sentence ‘‘I work for Verdance in Human Resources.’’ What was a human resource? I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that the phrase had about it a tincture of slavery. And Verdance . . . a ridiculous name that the founders took a boyish pride in . . . ‘‘It’s 8 7 R like Verd . . . from verdure, you know everything green, but we add a dance to it, so we make our business a dance.’’ I have left English literature behind me. It’s been five years since I told everyone I was quitting. I stopped just short of finishing my Ph.D. The problem was my dissertation. I’d set my heart on a topic but I couldn’t find anyone willing to be my adviser. I wanted to focus on three poems about roses, Thomas Carew’s, Edmund Waller’s, and William Blake’s, using the poems to examine larger questions – questions of time, desire, beauty, death – and see how the image of the rose could illustrate the cultural di√erences these questions raised. I was told that my topic was both too small and too large. Three short poems, but three large historical periods. The Renaissance people wouldn’t venture into the part of the seventeenth century that moved into the eighteenth, and the Romantics felt they had no access to the earlier periods. And in the end, after months of fruitless arguing with intransigent professors, I began to feel it wasn’t worth it. Where would I end up, if I finished my dissertation? An underpaid peon at a third-rate institution God knew where, fighting with other overquali fied, underpaid cohorts for the scraps left on the table of the dying liberal arts? Which, I had begun to fear, would no longer be economically viable at the end of a decade. Fifteen years, I reckoned , at the very best. I gave it up, with a little sadness, but not without a riven heart. Sometimes, coming in and out of sleep, lines of the poems still come to me. ‘‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows / When June is past, the lovely rose . . . Go lovely rose / Tell her that wastes her time and me, / That now she knows, / When I resemble her to thee, / How sweet and fair she seems to be . . . O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / in the howling storm.’’ I began working for Verdance as a ‘‘technical writer,’’ translating scientific or New Age scientific jargon into readable prose. But I got bored with that quite early on, and I was glad that they transferred me to Human Resources because I was told I had ‘‘really good people skills.’’ What they meant was that I was good at calming some people down and revving others up. That I could 8 8 G O R D O N Y settle o≈ce conflicts somehow, I don’t really know how, better than anyone else in the department, and that when some workers had to be warned that they weren’t ‘‘quite up to...