Census Summer Susurrus: She Sells Sea Shells

“So, you don’t have any babies or foster children you forgot to tell me about?” This joke comes more than midway through the questionnaire, if at all. The majority of time I’ll make it, but there are two instances where I won’t: when the respondent—what we’ve learned to call them—doesn’t speak English well or is in a rush. If either of these are the case, at this point I reassure them that it’s almost over, and ask them what their phone number is and the best time to call.

I always finish the same way: “that’s it! You’re done! Thanks so much for your time.” As I turn away, less than one percent of the respondents, at this sudden conclusion, don’t look surprised.

I’ve been working for the census for over a month, to the point where all the letter and number combinations—D308, InfoCom, EQ—link together seamlessly from my mouth. I know, at least by face, all the baristas at the Starbucks we meet in daily, and I can recognize everyone in my division, which was originally 0608 and is now 0607.

Our title—“enumerators”—always brings to my mind the Blade Runner pseudo-robots, “replicants”, and though the government’s dress code would not permit Joanna Cassidy’s sequined body suit, we share truncated life spans. The bizarre thing about this line of work is that everyone’s a temp—during training, one of the teachers had been hired two days before, while the other had been working for a month. When I was fingerprinted, the young woman expertly pushing my inky fingers onto the chart informed me she’d been there for two weeks. The peculiarity of working in an army of temps far outweighs the strangeness—and inspiration—I’d been hoping for in the respondents.

Everyone I talk to about my census job suggests that behind each door I knock on lies a fantastic story to be told. I had hoped this would be the case, but, in fact, the only respondents I remember are the two who were rude and the 80-year-old Armenian ballerina who told me I was pretty and insisted I take a cherry for the road. When pressed, more come to mind: the overweight man who answered the door in his underwear, the extremely polite Canadian who spelled his name, Zimmerman, with a “zed”, the young woman with a tattooed chest-plate who made an appointment with me and then never answered the door again, and so on. However, not one has had just the right Miss Havisham, Grey Gardens quirk I was looking for. After each day on the job, I feel a disappointment akin to the one I felt at the lack of radical change in my former high school classmates—initially, I’d hoped for extreme obesity, but by the end I’d have settled for at least a boob job—at our five-year reunion.

I live in Hollywood, technically Little Armenia. My house is one of three in what my landlord dubs, the “Gemini Manor”—a whole other story that will be told the minute I stop seeing red every time I imagine my landlord’s face (60-year-old man with long white hair and a half-mast lazy eye who is a hoarder). An ally runs along the side of the house—my headboard rests just six inches through the thin walls from the dusty ally air. Neighborhood kids like to hang out there, boldly and unapologetically smoking weed from foot-long bongs. Recently, in the house alone, I realized the teens were at it again as marijuana smoke made its way into my room through the open window. I walked over to close it, seeing two girls leaning against my house as if it were a parked car, and one of the girls screamed and ran away. The other girl followed her, asking, “What??”

“There’s someone IN there,” the startled girl whispered, looking fearfully back at my bedroom window.

“Freak!” said the other.

Incensed, I tried to think of something clever, or at least vaguely threatening, to yell at them before a harrowing but undeniable truth suddenly hit me: I took in my appearance—a long, tie-dyed dress I refer to unironically as ‘my muumuu’; facemask (there’s no explanation for this apart from the fact that when you’re unemployed, or “freelancing from home”, throwing on a cucumber peel in the middle of the day isn’t a big deal); and wildly unkempt hair tied in a bun directly on top of my head (in order to avoid getting my hair in the facemask). All this time I’d spent working for the census looking for freaks and here she was, Miss Havisham herself in my bedroom.