My One Rebellion in Fundytown!

A chapter that didn't make it into my forthcoming book "With Strange Fire"

My new car (2 years ago!) in Costa Rica where one must pay a huge import tax and there is zero wiggle room for negotiation at the dealership! Too bad my vanity plate wasn’t in yet because it references “Homicide Life on the Street” 11 cent robbery!

This post is a chapter that I ended up removing from my upcoming book because it didn’t fit the flow of what I was doing. It’s about the time I worked for a local car dealership selling new cars for some months. I was good at it, but I wasn’t good at being around “worldly” people. How I truly sucked at working thing.

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Towards the latter few years of our time at Possum Creek Church (Ed. note: The fictional name in my book for my old church also PCC) I started a job that I can only see as pure rebellion against my life, well, parts of it at least. Mostly the religious parts of it.

During our entire time at the Creek women were taught to stay home, care for the children, clean the house, cook, coo over the man, I think you get the picture. Our pastor never taught this from the pulpit, it was just part of the expectations and things taught in every single womens group and Bible study.

This thinking just had me screwed up in knots for years. To this day my mind tries to go to the not working thing as the epitome of womanhood, at least until it hits me I’m doing it again, allowing cult thinking to invade my thinking. More in another chapter about how to evict cult thinking once it rears its ugly twisted little head.

It always made me feel guilty. I enjoyed working, I always did. Getting out of the house, being around adults, having adult type conversations, feeling like you’d been a productive member of society at the end of the day, accomplishing things and going home to house and hearth happy. I’d worked off and on much of our marriage, knowing that many times it took two salaries to pay the bills. But the guilt was there during my years in PCC, and it turned into a guilty situation no matter what side I chose.

Other women found ways around it. Almost everyone pitched at least one, sometimes two different MLMs, or worked another home based business. One made cheese and hawked during the weekends at fairs and trade shows. Another did these elaborate quilts she sold through the quilt shop in Albemarle County.

I tried to do just that, join the work at home brigade by making stained glass items to sell at the local flea market/crafting/art market. But while I sold a few things I bumped up against another cold hard reality – chicanery. More than once someone switched a price tag off a low priced item, say a candy dish or window hanging, and placed it on a lamp shade or large window piece. Stained glass was too expensive of a hobby to have your best pieces walking out the door for ten bucks. So I closed my stall at this place and took my lumps sadly enough.

Once my husband Jim started making noises again about needing me to work again I started the job hunting slog. I hated it, hated interviewing and sometimes had some funny things happen. Like the time I was parking my car to go into an interview. I banged my shin on the car door causing a run in my stocking and blood dripped down my leg. As I stood there I snapped a heel on my old pumps. Leaned down to dabble at my leg and ripped my jacket. Hobbled in looking like some weird kind of vagrant. Needless to say I did not win that position. Guess it was the universe telling me it the wrong job for me.

This time I cast my net far and wide, shooting off resumes to places I’d never considered before. One of which was for a position working on paperwork at a car dealership. After going in for an interview with the dealership manager it was suggested I try my hand at auto sales instead.

I thought about it exactly about ten minutes and jumped in. I’d had a very brief spell working at a car dealership in college that ended when I broke my ankle and had to have surgery. I wasn’t seeing much out there in the job market that appealed to me, and it was a chance to make a whole big pile of money, that thing in short supply, in a short amount of time. Considering we were close to the time when we would have two kids in college at the same time being able to rake in huge piles of mammon appealed greatly to me.

Okay, so I admit it now, just a little bit of my decision involved doing something I knew would be so highly frowned upon, doing a man’s job. There wasn’t another person working the sales floor that was a woman in our tiny town. I like a challenge of that very thing. I’d tried the whole complementarian thing and seen what a jerry-rigged piece of nonsense that it was. Mental spiritual bird flipping.

So I spent about two weeks watching such scintillating car sales videos like “Used Car Gold” featuring tubby guys in leisure suits and wide ties from the 1970s frozen in their eras. I came away with a lot of knowledge on cars and sales, and the realization that the 70s and 80s weren’t the most attractive times for fashions. Familiarized myself with the car lot, the guys working there and I felt all the simmering tensions between folks selling. Learned about the dreaded upside down, about financing options and other things.

By the time my official State of Virginia motor vehicle sales license arrived I got to join the guys at the picnic table outside. The picnic table was where the sales staff sat around holding conversations, smoking, and drinking copious amounts of coffee when it was slow. My first afternoon on the sales floor I sold an expensive truck to an older couple. Sweet people. It was validation that I’d made the right choice, sadly it didn’t live up to expectations of that first afternoon.

It was a very short lived experience. Why? Couple of things caused me to quit. The first thing was that going from the high demand religious group I was part of to the cut-throat environment of the sales floor was too much of an adjustment. I got the spiritual bends from the adjustment even if just about everyone I worked with held similar views of women as the church. Here women weren’t even held with even the slightest respect, here it was the bad old early 1960s and I got to hear every sexist remark one could imagine.

I remember a number of cruel actions taken by the other sales staff towards me that would have been difficult for anyone to take. Once I was sent to McDonald’s with a long list of food to get. Once I did that, came back with the food for the sales meeting only to have the sales manager hand out the items and say to me in front of everyone else, “There’s nothing here for you. We didn’t get you anything. You aren’t a real salesman!” Not that I was asking for food, but it seemed a particularly cruel twist to buy everyone in the building breakfast and deliberately skip me, particularly when my sales numbers were great. It was the daily things like knowing when I hung up my leather coat in my cubical, put my purse up that I’d come back ten minutes later and my coat would be balled up under a chair and my purse dumped out on the floor. The constant death by a thousand nasty cutting remarks at the picnic table of doom, the exclusion of me from everything one could consider.

You see I had the one thing the men at the place held against me – I was a woman. No one there was a Christian, certainly not the flavor I was, and the added pressure I was under at the dealership was hard to take. At least at the church the men paid lip service to the notion of women were to be treated decently, at least some of the time. It was unnerving to see the worst aspects of Christian fundamentalist ideology about women writ large at the dealership. Patriarchy perverted even from the twisted ideas at church in my small Southern town.

It was particularly hard to take as I’d not been around ‘worldly’ spheres of work in quite a long time. I jumped every time one of those guys said a crude joke, or cuttingly coarse remark, or if the sales manager called me names for refusing to take a test drive alone with a customer giving me major creep vibes. I felt like there was a huge pink target on my back. I was getting the spiritual dry heaves daily from coming into this hostile work environment after having being living in fundytown too long.

Oddly enough I received very little push-back or complaints from anyone up at church. Not even Pastor Thomas said a word about my job. Granted it was likely most up there thought I was working some sort of pink collar support job, helping the men behind the scenes instead of actually being on the sales floor. I didn’t disabuse them of their notions.

I sold a decent number of vehicles in that short six month span. But in the end I could no longer cope with the daily harassment I suffered at the hands of most of the guys on the sales floor. Nothing is worth that. I knew my own dignity was worth more to me that this.

My first foray into rebellion was something less than successful. But once I’d seen there was something over the wall I was never able to stop myself from thinking that working wasn’t such an awful thing. There was benefits to be had by ditching what the church deemed suitable for women.