When I was twenty-three and fresh out of college — your typical apple-cheeked, idealistic idiot — I got my first job, working for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I’d spent the months following graduation interning at a political foundation in Berlin. It had been my first time living away from Kentucky, and I learned a lot — including that, apparently, I sounded like Elly Mae Clampett’s left tit. You’d be surprised at the stupid faces people make when they feel no need to impress you.It was not Germans, but other Americans in Berlin who introduced me to that face: the shrinking back, the infinitesimal rearing of a single nostril.

These reactions irked me. Kentuckians are notoriously fond of their home state; I was, and am, no different. It’s often said there is a magnet inside each of us, tugging us back home. There’s much to recommend the place: a natural and congenial warmth, a rich history, and, in the people, a specifically-contoured wit. It is also lavishly beautiful, almost offensively so — the greenest place on earth. Yet people in Germany felt entitled to publicly excoriate the state: it was blanket-statement backwards, conservative, wanting. When many politically-informed people thought of Kentucky, they thought of our Senator, Mitch McConnell, and more than one person assumed that my politics swung to the right — surely, I had an NRA membership card tucked into my wallet! Face-to-face encounters were arrogantly, self-consciously civil; after I’d speak, an uncomfortable silence, some shifting and clearing of throat, a roll or two of eyes from the most brazen. A well-connected superior once scanned me after I’d taken part in a group introduction, then followed it up with the most pointed, public “Hmmm” I’d ever heard.

My personal philosophy was, and is, that every place deserves the dignity of being marbled, of containing a complex blending of values and viewpoints and experiences. And that’s exactly what my home state was, and is, despite the electoral map. Every time I lost an opportunity or the good opinion of some worldly superior because of my accent, I would compose a searing rebuttal, only to mutter to myself later: what was the point? I absorbed the hurt, went home, and practiced my German vocabulary. Arschlӧcher.

After less than a year, I returned home. When I snagged a job interview for a proofreading position for the state government, just ahead of the General Assembly session, I was ecstatic. Here was an opportunity to learn about the inner workings of policy — what made the place run — and to do so in the name of my personal philosophy.

During the interview, I was told two things: one, I could be fired at any time for any reason. Two, all admin support staff were expected to be non-partisan. “Not an issue,” I responded, and I meant it. Admittedly, I was a Democrat, but one from a red state at a time slightly before the partisan divide in our country began to run poisonous. If I’d chosen friends and associates based on political affiliation, I’d have been forced to retreat to an undisclosed cave with only cows and kudzu for company. My heart housed no venom, which may very well have been the job’s primary stipulation.

I ironed my hair, removed my nose ring, and walked into my first day on the job in the most austere Ann Taylor skirt-and-blouse combination on offer at Goodwill. I’d packed a ragged copy of The Elements of Style, a dictionary, and an MLA Handbook I’d never use. The session was still days away, so only support staff buzzed between desks. There were typically at least four admin workers serving twelve to fifteen officials. Most of the officials in our corridor, I’d find, were male; the support staff was almost entirely female. When I was taken on the typical first-day rounds, my introduction was met with smiles both clenched and polite, a few open and glad. Dry handshakes. And a few cycles of:

“How old are you?”

A couple of you’re not from around here, are yous and, following my befuddled but I am. “Well, you don’t sound like it.” Apparently, I only sounded like I was from Kentucky outside of Kentucky.

At the end of the month, they came.

The officials traveled in big, hallway-spanning packs. You could hear their movements before you saw them — the brush of trouser legs; the jangle of change in pockets; the lyrical grousing or whistling; the thud of mahogany loafers or cowboy boots, sharp enough to gut a pig, on industrial carpeting; a yip or two of mornin!

The officials’ voices were always the loudest in the room, accents played to the absolute hilt. No wonder I didn’t sound like I was from around here. Say, boze, who’s a-goin to Cattleman’s?

Certain corners of certain floors were tinged with the yellow air of cigarettes or cigars. It smelled like 1975. “They’re officials,” a secretary whispered. “Who’s going to tell them no?” To step into a crowded elevator was to open yourself to an assault of English Leather.

Daily sessions were broadcast to support offices on closed circuit. Much of the staff paused their work to watch; officials became de facto celebrities and were venerated as such. One janitor would literally press himself against the corridor wall, breathless with awe and fear, as the groups of men strode past. A certain kind of official relished this status; they inhabited their space grandly, hugely. The overall sensory experience was beginning to make me uneasy, but I didn’t admit the uneasiness to myself. Not yet. I did, however, begin to take the stairs.

Now, this cut of official wasn’t the only kind of offering, of course. Sometimes, the clash between an official’s voting record and affable disposition was jarring. A kind, soft-spoken official, who was a rabid opponent of reproductive rights, tapped on my door a few times to request help with a printer snafu. I always helped, and only later would it occur to me that he favored the kinds of measures that, were I ever to encounter life-threatening complications during pregnancy, made it more likely that I would die. Yet he greeted me with a sheepish knock: “We gotta jam on our hands, and it’s no raspberry jam, neither!”

The work itself was not a challenge; the challenge was figuring out how to occupy the space as a person. Now, I’m a woman from the rural South. I know how to make myself invisible. I know it’s often in my best interest to do so. Wearing any intelligence or talent on one’s sleeve is a liability. But I was beginning to feel the knowledge in my body: I needed to operate with a new kind of caution here. A reedy member of upper party management said gooo-oood mornin to my chest at least three times a week. I could have mugged him and he wouldn’t have been able to give a facial description. I began to welcome invisibility. When others brushed past, it was a relief.

An acquaintance once whispered, “You know if one of them hits on you, and you report it, you’ll get fired, right?”

The first man to ask me on a date was seventy-five years old.

The second man to ask me on a date was seventy-three.

I no longer left my office unless it was absolutely necessary.

I also avoided Expert Secretary, a woman with brassy, sky-high hair who microwaved Hungry Man dinners with half a bag of frozen peas dumped in when the office worked late, giving the entire wing a scorched, brown smell. Expert’s solitary joy was telling nasty stories about the other workers on the floor: that one’s a flirt; oh her? She’s work-shy.

She saved direct barbs for me: “What do you know?” she once giggled. “You just graduated from college!”

Upon learning that my birthday was looming, she insisted the occasion called for an event. I remembered my first day: How old are you?

Something smelled off. My age meant vulnerability here, and she knew that as well as I did, likely better. I didn’t know what she had planned. I didn’t want to find out. “Please don’t.”

She blinked. “Oh, come on now.”

On the morning of my birthday, I arrived early, but not as early as Expert Secretary, who’d posted a big, neon sign on my door:

Happy 24th Birthday!!!

To this day, I believe that sign was what brought the official we’ll call Foghorn Leghorn to my door. I was hunched over a letter about road construction, twiddling my red pen, when he strode up to the doorway and bawled, “I need three copies a this.”

He was the kind of official that admin warned one another about. He would cruise past the desks of secretaries and, casually, pluck up and read budget proposals or private correspondence written for other officials. He was a holy terror, known for flashes of anger when districting lines were redrawn; the slightest mid-county tweak could mean a defeat in the next election cycle. He was one of many officials fond of quoting the Bible during meetings. And if you heard the chunking dirge of the IBM Selectric from the copy room, you could bet the task was for him; he liked issuing cumbersome citations assembled for anyone and any milestone, however minor — kudos to C students, or the county’s third-place little league team — sheerly for the joy of affixing his signature to an official document. Years later, when I received my first stimulus check, delayed in order to include the sharp scrawled “Donald J. Trump” in the lower right-hand corner, I thought of him.

He was another figure recognizable by smell: Aqua Net, gales of it, escaping his office and filtering down the hallway. It’s unnerving to smell what you imagine will be a high school junior approaching and to encounter, instead, an aging politician with Chiclet-sized veneers and, when not being photographed, a scowl.

Perhaps most memorably, he had a habit of taking the newspaper from the common area to the bathroom with him, tossing it back onto the table upon his return.

He was also a fixture: there, for decades. And suddenly, he was standing in the hallway, peering at me, hair utterly crisp.

Then I rose and gave an involuntary touch to the place where my nose ring had been. “Yes, would you excuse me for a moment? Let me just —”

Biggest lesson I’d learned thus far: don’t step on anyone’s toes. Foghorn’s secretary had seemed to take personal offense at my answer to how old I was, and now gave a small, saucy head-waggle whenever I walked past: well, la-di-da. If it looked like I was trying to curry favor, she could make trouble for me.

I took a few steps, looked around the corner. Her desk was empty. Okay. I was in the clear. When I turned back, Foghorn’s mouth hung open. When he spoke, his voice was an octave higher. “Are you a intern?”

“No,” “I said, I’m new, I’m —“

“Lemme tell you somethin. You don’t talk to a legislator thatta way.”

“Sir, I was —“

“You don’t talk to a legislator thatta way.” Shook his head. “Why, in all my years of workin here, I ain’t never seen disrespect like that. Ever.”

Hands out. “I’m sorry,” I said. “How many —“

“You was real mean,” he said. “You was real ugly.”

And with that, I stopped breathing.

It was early. Most of the admin wouldn’t begin trickling in until 9:30 or so. Officials tended to arrive later. The suite was nearly empty.

“Just pure ugly,” he fumed. Hands on hips. Chest hitching. Cord standing out on the side of his neck. “When I tell you to do somethin, you do it. You do it.”

Insult on injury. For all the time I’d spent grousing about Southern stereotypes and their falseness, here was Foghorn, more caricature than man. I write fiction, and I would never use this dialogue in a novel or short story, because it holds the tone of a cartoon: banal, blunted, factory-line dull.

“Ugly,” he repeated. “Mean.” Hitched another breath. In a high D flat: “You don’t talk to me thatta way, no you don’t!”

A few people had filtered in. A murmur: what’s going on? And here, Foghorn’s jaw twitched: an audience. He relaunched for their benefit: “Why, I ain’t never seen such disrespect. Just real hateful. Just real ugly.”

Footsteps approaching. His secretary cruised through, eyes trained to the floor, slowing only to pluck the paper from his hands and disappear into the copy room.

He took a deep breath. At high volume: “What’s yore name?”

A few days prior, I’d received my first name placard. It was on my bookshelf, next to my ridiculous copy of the MLA Handbook. Foghorn spotted it, leaned over, and mouthed my full name to himself before straightening: “Well, mebbe I’ll go have myself a little talk with your supervisor.”

I know enough now to know that if I’d simply broken down and cried for him, it might have satisfied him enough to have saved me from what was to come. My mistake. I have a rotten poker face.

Once my immediate supervisors made it clear that I was about to be fired for whatever he had reported I’d done — raping puppies, burning the KJV, who knows — and I understood that I had roughly enough money in my checking account to keep me in my apartment for only a couple more months, then I cried. I was twenty-four. I was almost broke. Someone had just screeched the word ugly in my face for a solid sixty seconds. No one’s too good to limp, after that.

It took one morning to learn for myself the tacit state of affairs here. For a person on a certain kind of income, the distance between momentary stability and scrabbling helplessness is approximately an inch. And no one knew that better than these ever-faithful public servants. In the sixth-poorest state in the country, at-will employment meant that these officials could gag you by your purse strings, if it suited them. It’s the kind of power most people don’t see in a lifetime.

Years later, I would realize that mere invisibility wouldn’t have given me much leverage in this situation. Women in these spaces often find themselves an accessory to someone else’s achievement or feeling — an emotional custodian, of sorts. This man wasn’t asking for acquiescence. He wanted me to break, for his gratification, and he wanted it to be a production.

Foghorn required an apology, I was told. If I gave him one, and it was good enough, I might keep my job. Maybe.

I worded my response carefully, hoping to find out what he’d reported. “How would you suggest I phrase this apology? I am sorry for…what, specifically?”

The supervisor suggested a dry, measured vagary: I am very sorry to have offended you. I am new, and I am still learning. I am here to help in any way I can.

“Now go find him.”

Foghorn was reclining in the common area, feet kicked out in front of him, shooting the breeze with the only secretary who would console me later. “I know he can be conderscending,” she would tell me, “but it’s a lot of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ with these guys.”

More officials had arrived. Nearly every office door was open. Foghorn’s brows twitched, but he did not turn.

I cleared my throat. “Sir?”

He opened his mouth. Sang, “Yeee-eees?”

I took a deep breath and, dead-faced, repeated the apology I’d been given. Foghorn looked on, head cocked, mouth warbling strangely. As I finished, I realized that he was trying not to smile.

“Wee-eeell,” he sighed, “I appreciate that, I surely do.” Pointer finger up. “And maybe — just maybe — you learnt yourself a little lesson.”

A pause.

“Cause you was real ugly.”

The secretary stiffened. She and I traded a look. In one of the offices, someone coughed.

“Ugly.”

The secretary tapped her palm softly on the desk. “Now, Foghorn, she did say she was sorry.”

He leaned back, deflated a bit in his chair. Finally let himself smile. “Well, all right,” he said. “I reckon she is.”

For a few months thereafter, Foghorn toyed with me. I spotted him glowering at me from around corners, or plowing his way through the suite, baring his veneers. A time or two, he strode as close to me as he possibly could, taking pains to almost step on my shoes. Or, hurrying past my office door, he would yell things, seemingly to himself or to others:

Well, I need to get me somethin to eat and that’s all there is to it! or a general Well, well, WELL.

I got to keep my job. I had to take out a loan to afford a root canal and crown. My savings were nearly wiped out when I needed to purchase a new car transmission. When a coworker gave me a plastic bag of cooking apples, I survived off them for nearly two weeks and couldn’t look at an apple for a year afterward. But it was a job. I thought of the people I’d known, in my time after college — those who’d attended schools I could only dream of, who could simply flick down a credit card for dental work, who unknowingly lived out the luxury of an identity and sense of self untouched by how much money they had. They would never have to beg for their job from a man who tried not to smile as they did so. They would never have to block the thought that this man had a hand in making the laws that ruled their lives. This menial job was all I had, and I fought to keep it. I was forced to do so.

After a while, he got bored, or he just got tired, and he stopped.

I was done with politics. I spent the rest of my time there hiding in my office. I became the person flattening themselves against the wall as crowds of officials strode past. Later in my life, I’d hold jobs I would dislike, and one or two I even hated. Most people do. But that was the last job I actually feared going to, every single day. Even now, I cannot abide the smell of English Leather without gently retching.

For a long time, I didn’t know quite what to do with this experience, other than hover over the memory and the hurt. I’d had one narrative of the place where I was from, and I’d used it to counter the dismissal of others, out there in the world. I wasn’t sure if my time in politics complicated this narrative, or negated it altogether. I’m not sure whether that job gave me my cynicism — it had likely resided, blurry but extant, before — but it did seat that cynicism in an awful, crystalline anger and fear that gave it shape and venom. And grief. What I do know: when I got a scholarship to a graduate program in New York, that job convinced me to take it, convinced me that leaving the home I once longed to return to was a step in the way of survival. It was a chance to flee, with my acid reflux and political faith both beyond repair. There’s a horrible value to convincing an electorate of its smallness; I had been effectively excised.

Before I left, one of the more seasoned admin confessed, “When you started, I thought to myself, she ain’t gonna last very long, is she?”

It requires no special talent to take a punch, I thought. You just have to need the money badly enough.