workingfortheman.com

The inside of the up-town bus was blue. Like the inside of a mouth after sucking on a grape or raspberry lollipop or whatever the manufacturers ascribe as blue in candy language. I hesitated before squeezing between two large women with brittle, hair sprayed tsunami bangs and the suit/sneaker ensemble - like army issue fatigues. It's company issue. They all work for The Company - all companies will eventually merge and blend and melt and boil into one monopolous steaming shitpile of unwieldy greed - so they all get company-issue attire. Company-issue lives. Company-issue husband.

I am not one of you. I am just on the same bus.

Pausing (not to gauge whether I'd fit but) under the assumption that all women like that knew each other and sympathized with each other.

The reception area was a hollowed out scoop of peach sherbet. A cream wall-to-wall carpet and peach foam couches. The rest was white plastic. Save for the local museum print of Botticelli's Venus above a dusty dried flower arrangement, I would not have survived the padded pastel tedium. But that print gave me a different bother.

I was 22. I knew I was young. But my soul was a sea cucumber under attack - bloody and full of paper cuts and dry toner. I was waiting. On hiatus. Pivoting. The words "long-term" and "goals" made me cringe and I clung to buffers that temporarily stopped up the leaks in my life plan like "just" and "like" and "whatever."

The Venus was there floating in the oyster shell from which she sprang. The putties with garlands and Crab Tree and Evelyn accouterments. Like a trick. Showing me one man's idea of beauty frozen in time. A kind of non-committal ecstasy that isn't available in the material world, not even in books or self-imposed day dreams. Venus is perfect and she never has to go to the bathroom. She is pure and defined by the things around her - even the air around her is perfumed with her coveted rarities, her goodness. She wears her goodness, her habits, her decisions, her mother, her job with an endemic mysterious godliness. As a girl she is a pretty puckish thing. As a woman she is in a long red dress with nude stockings, long and voluptuous with shiny curls tickling bare shoulders and her high heals in her hands with controlled coquettish playfulness.

Like a trick.

The fluorescent lights flickered and my boss, Francine, came through the revolving door along with the hurricane that followed her to work early and home late in the evenings. She joked: "I haven't seen my husband in ten years. Which just might not be a bad thing."

(laugh cue)

"My husband still has all his hair for all I know - which isn't much - his hair, that is."

At the interview for this job, the H.R. lady told me that they "split apart" the position of assistant to the v.p. into two separate positions.

"That sounds violent." I responded. Whoops, I mean, "Ah, yes, I see."

However, she continued, both positions are a kind of entree into editorial, possibly the downtown office.

That's where I belong and you know it. Just look at me, I'm a pretty puckish thing.

In the bathroom.

Francine sprang from the stall in a whirlpool of movement, spinning water droplets from the sink to the paper towel dispenser. "Elizabeth, how are you this morning?"

"Fine. And you?"

"Well, it's Wednesday. That's how I am."

"Oh, okay." Hinting polite sarcasm in case it was a joke.

"Yep yep yep." Out the door with a shove.

Francine commanded and refracted politeness at once. I couldn't read her. She was simple but fettered. The day that I understood her was the day I reassessed my life. Only one person could concoct the right proportions of delusional optimism, hyperbolized extroversion, and ordinariness that appealed to Francine...

Michelle was the other half of the previously unified atomic position. Michelle was The Man's cog at 23.

Work. Work. Function. Crank out work and toil over The Man's profit. Her personality ranged from heathered gray to tuscan brown.

After the first week, I'd stopped arriving at 9 sharp and I let little glimpses of my real self show through my clothes. Once I went too far and wore a shirt with a Chinese dragon on it. "Well, Elizabeth, that's some dragon you got there." Wink wink.

Well, Michelle, that's some mid-life crisis you got to look forward to real soon there. Slap slap. Spit. Whack. Snap. Smack.

Michelle steadied a piece of letterhead in the communal printer with her pipe cleaner fingers and warned us with her sing song soprano, "Letterhead!"

"Fuckhead!" I retorted under my breath.

The intern, Quincy, guffawed from behind the cubicle wall. Quincy was another tightly screwed jar of dysfunction. An obsequious rat content with nothing more than wheezing through his (constantly) parted, chapped lips and playing with the magnetic paper clip dispenser since his nepotistic relations rendered this runt of the upper echelon's litter unfireable. Quincy came to work everyday with his unctuous hair slicked into a ponytail. Even after he broke his arm, he came to work with that oilslip moored by a rubber band. And I shivered to think who had the misfortune to have that job.

"Elizabeth?" Francine summoned from her blazoning eastern-exposed office. I peeped in like a serf in a Lord's manner. Always tiptoeing, extending pinkies, biting lower lip, putting a discretional hand to my lips when something crossed beyond the thin lines of Francine's cannon of proportions.

"I need you to distribute Brian's samples by 11 since Anna - I mean, Anna's samples since Brian is downtown till 10."

"Okay."

She continued playing cards with the papers on her desk. I waited for some kind of explanation. Like who the hell is Brian or Anna? Samples of what? And distribute where?

She looked up like a woman at the end of a commercial, about to say "Simple as that. It'll change your life. It changed mine!"

"Okay? Oh, and come see me when you're done. I have some copying I need you to do."

It was always need, want, require, necessitate. But for Michelle she had words like please, could, possible, fantastic, great.

"Okay, so distribute Anna's samples..."

"Yes. Yes. Oh and I have lunch with downtown people today so call Brian."

"Brian..."

"Yes."

"Brian of Brian and Anna?"

"No, my Brian."

"And, tell, him..."

"Yes. And tell Michelle to come in here."

"Oh-kay..."

I pivoted and debated whether or not to ask for some clarification. Too late anyway.

I grabbed the pencil out of Michelle's hand - that was the lowest common denominator when it came to our respective senses of humor. So I did it often.

"Bosslady wants to see you."

"Oh, that's right. Today's the downtown meeting. Are you going to the lunch afterwards?"

"Downtown?"

"Yeah."

"No. I brought. I brought soup."

I had forgotten to bring my soup, but I wasn't prepared to tell her that I wasn't invited to either event.

Michelle had somehow weaseled her way in. She hurriedly snatched up her filofax, pierced her pen behind her ear, and stuck on her character glasses with her idea of corporate quickness. She was one of the many who mistook her bitchiness for business savvy.

It was clear: Francine was training Michelle for editorial. And she was training me to what? To read her fucking mind.

I was fuming. I spent my whole lunch hour madly scribbling a letter to my friend about quitting - "I am corporate America's FORCEMEAT! with atrophied muscles given a convenient life with nothing but aluminum-sided adversity. Half-dead stuffed with byproducts."

I faxed it through and ripped it up.

Next day: I listened to 45 minutes of static before a migraine woke me from my tortured half-sleep.

My face in someone's armpit again on the up-town bus. The static of the radio remained in my head.

The bus decided to go express and I felt happy. I felt happy. How can this make me happy? It was an inexplicable elation, just underneath the morning haze in my head, unrealized. Like the subtle encroachment of corporate cells over my own corporeal cells.

I got to work 30 minutes early and I heard Michelle's voice from inside Francine's office. Laughing? They were laughing. An empty brown bag on Michelle's desk meant they were having breakfast together.

I sat at my cubicle without the energy to remove my coat. I unfocused my eyes and sat. It is a very dehumanizing thing to ask, "Is there anything you need me to do?" more than 10 times a day. It is even more so to ask, "I'm making copies, do you have anything of greater priority?" Especially if they answer, "Can you get some coffee for me and Mr. Asshole-in-a-Suit herethaaaaanks."

Michelle sprang from the office continuing her automatic affirmations "Okay, right, ha ha..." and halted upon seeing me. "Okay, thanks ha ha..."

"I didn't know you were always this early?"

"We were just having breakfast." She answered as if I was accusing her of an affair.

To spite her, I went in to Francine's office, pen in hand. "Morning Francine."

"Elizabeth, getting an early start?"

Strange. Strange. I felt her eyes glaring at my skirt, my boots, disapprovingly, and almost like a faint radio signal I could hear her denigrating me. I could hear her conversation with Michelle minutes ago, deriding me, musing about my strangeness.

I could almost smell the echoes vibrating through me like cramps but it wasn't time yet.

"I distributed Anna's sample book covers. We were one short for Sales, so I gave them our copy and ordered some from the printer."

The lines on each side of her mouth twitched, 2 hours, it took you more than 2 damn hours, you incompetent freak, she signaled and I could hear it! I heard it as if she was shouting, but in my head like radio static. Her lips weren't moving, but I could hear her yelling. I could read her mind. Jesus H. Christ! I could read her!

Great.

Silver pin pricks dotted my retinas and I felt hot with anger, hot with panic. I tried to act calm, normal.

"It took me 2 hours because no one could tell me who Anna was or what department she was in."

"Oh well, Elizabeth, no matter really. You'll learn. Just try to be a little more conservative with your time." among other things... forcemeat, what a weirdo.

Forcemeat? FORCEMEAT? How did she know that? Could she read my mind? No, she couldn't even read a thermometer. Then I saw, in her brimming waste paper basket ("no time to recycle"), a copy of the fax confirmation with a shrunken version of my inflammatory letter. My arms shook in anger. I forgot. Damn fax confirmation copy! Confirming my fax, confirming my hatred for this damn place and everyone in it. That bitch Michelle must have shown it to her. I felt the floor of my stomach drop away like that amusement park ride. Spinning torrents of rage in my head. And this bitch laughing at me. This lying, artless, no-life bitch trying to intimidate me?

"Francine, I'm in early today because I have to leave early." Restraining myself. And I could still hear her bitterness. High frequency now, she thought: Does she think she can make these decisions for herself!

"Oh, really," she replied. "Well, you know solicitation is coming up and you really do need to get a jump start."

"No. I have to leave early today."

She thought: What could this insignificant little idiot possible have to do that is so important? But she said: "Well, if it's a doctor's..."

"No."

She thought: If I have to be miserable here till 8, so do you, bitch. Now you better get out so I can order some crotchless panties from the catalogue. That better be enough to turn Quincy on or I'm quitting! Bastard! Bitch! All you people!

But she said: "I'm sorry, Elizabeth, but you have obligations."

"Crotchless panties are so eighties. Besides Quincy strikes me as a buttman."

And I walked out.

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