Free All about Skin by Jina Ortiz Page A

restroom to her left, two bottles of water too expensive to drink sit atop a cylinder table backed by a wide window and floor-sweeping draperies. To her right is a dresser with six drawers topped by a large flat-paneled television that she will not turn on—not even once—over the next three days.
    In the spacious room she does not have to share, she unpacks her interview suit, a basic black number with subtle shoulder pads. It is a serious suit; when worn, it will show no hint of curves. It tells one and all to focus on her mind and not her physical assets. It tells folks to get their minds out of the gutter.
    The suit is not her own, but a borrowed one from the graduate pool. She and four other women of similar height and weight pooled their resources to buy this Tahari from Burlington Coat Factory. She is a proud shareholder, owning one-fifth’s interest in the suit. In the early autumn, the department’s placement chair brought in two former graduate students to impart their wisdom. Just the year before, they had been preparing to go on the job market; now they were junior faculty members at important institutions who could look back and provide sage advice. They cautioned the group of job market hopefuls to provide themselves with every possible advantage. They told stories of brilliant job candidates who had flubbed their interviews because of inappropriate dress. “Clothes make the scholar,” they said.
    She has taken every possible precaution. She has come all the way to Los Angeles, all the way to the other side of the country, and she intends to shine. Like all of the other hopeful graduate students, she stepped out on faith, booking her hotel room and registering for the convention long before knowing if she’d have even one interview. She has been rewarded for her optimism and faith. She has one interview scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. She does not intend to blow it. She has done her homework, reviewing the university’s mission statement, the department’s website. She knows interesting facts about the two men interviewing her tomorrow and is conversant in their areas of interest. She is prepared to discuss possible courses she could teach. She has brought sample syllabi.
    At a time when others have been working for at least five years, she is just now applying for her first full-time job. She is twenty-nine years old and she is ready to put behind the meager graduate stipend upon which she has subsisted for the past six years, ready to begin repaying undergraduate loans, ready to design her own courses, to have her own students, and to teach her own material. She is tired of grading papers for professors, teaching sections of composition and correcting comma splices. She is tired of being addressed as Ms. She cannot wait any longer. There is no indication that next year’s job market will be any better and more reason to believe that it will be far worse. Originally, she’d had three interviews for the convention, but two have been canceled due to budgetary concerns. Universities were canceling searches and dropping new lines and hires without so much as a by-your-leave. She is in no position to be choosy.
    So easy to tell the candidates from the conference participants. The next day, she spots them at a glance, picking them out easily from among the other indistinguishable men and women in nondescript black suits. Candidates sit, lost in wide-backed armchairs the color of sand dunes, trying to pass the time before their interviews. They clutter the hotel lobby. They watch the elevator doors and the front desk. They time their calls upstairs to the minute.
    She waits among them in the hotel’s main lobby and calls up to get the room number five minutes before her scheduled interview, ignoring the twenty or so other conference interviewees dotting the lobby, conspicuous in their severe suits. She wears the same asexual uniform as the other female candidates. They