Cubbies

This story is so old...I'm trying to place just when I might have written it and seriously can't. I was trying to place old boyfriends, former long term jobs...nothing. It seems to have sort of been before any of that, but you remember so well your first ____ that you ___ and this one just was. About 3 months? I think I might have been around 21? Maybe? Which makes me think this little ditty should be better, but it isn't. It is what it is. And I still like it, really. I think I've come to love it the way I've learned to laugh internally at my day job. It's funny when you watch it on The Office being played out by one of the funniest and most talented guys in the world - not so very when it's real and he IS your boss and he's the furthest thing from funny. I had an assignment working in finance at some huge corporation, and the CFO, I just remember he looked like a rat. Full anthropomorphic shit, or whatever it is in the opposite, a human looking like a giant rat. The man was about a full foot shorter than I am. I towered over him. They hate that. He would pull me into his office and hope to capture my...god only knows. Attention? Adoration? Respect? He couldn't possibly have hoped for my respect. Or maybe more just to stare at me and see himself reflected in someone young, female, beautiful. For. Hours. I had the instinct very early on that if this guy caught so much as a whiff that I was about ten times smarter than he was, he would make my life miserable. So I took it on as another kind of assignment. I was going to play dumb. Really dumb. Playfully, endearingly dumb. I adopted a higher voice and a giggle, I played it off for him, for all my co-workers, the whole act. I would widen my eyes and go "noooooo!" as if everything entertained me the way a mobile entertains a baby. Years later I ran into one of the co-workers at another job at a restaurant and had to slip back into the voice hoping none of my current co-workers would overhear and ask what the fuck was wrong with my voice. But I played it off, to the hilt, took home a paycheck and avoided the onslaught of misogyny that surely would have been headed my way if I was just me, and laughed all the way home. And in the in-between moments, I wrote this.

Cubbies

Cubicles. Standard issue gray burlap-covered cubby dividers. In Kindergarten, in Pre-School, even, we had cubbies remember. Now she was sitting in one, calling it her desk. You can come by my desk later. I should go back to my desk soon. Yes, I have that waiting for your signature on my desk. Fuck off and leave me alone at my desk.

She arrives at 8:37. Enough minutes to make them think but not enough minutes to make them think twice. Enough time to assure she wouldn’t be taken for granted. Enough time, just enough, to drink a second cup of coffee on her way in. She sits down, she logs on, she gets up and she gets Cup #3. She tips the Non-Dairy imitation-style cream-flavored substance in a canister upside down for a five-count and adds seven packets of Sweet-N-Low because she is trying to cut back on calories. She adjusts her pantyhose at the waist where they are rolling and attempting to separate her legs from the rest of her body (and who isn’t these days) once again and heads back to her desk/cubbie to hide until somebody makes her turn around and pay attention to them.

The intercom goes off. She picks it up but there is a grotesque echo because her boss, who is invariably trying to intercom her before she’s even had Sip #1 from Cup #3, her boss is right over the little cubby wall from her, sitting behind his ersatz replica imitation style desk, and his voice ain’t no Mickey fuckin Mouse. It’s the real deal with hems and guffaws and throat clearing and long drawn-out guttural ahs. She is trying to decide which voice to listen to, the one that sounds like it’s coming from inside an old coffee can or the one coming over around and through her alleged wall. She chooses neither, gets up, leaving the intercom on, and goes click click clicking her heels into his office. Janice is sitting there on the other side of his desk, waiting with that vapid subservient look in her blue-eyelined, tarantula-lashed eyes. Dark blue eyeliner. Circa 1984 when she was probably a rollin mama in her Jordache jeans and frosty feathered hair driving to drill-team practice.

With that look in her eyes that flashes like a neon light going on! Going off! Going on! Prozac! Prozac! Prozac!
“Yes.”
“Oh. Grace. I tried to intercom you.”

Grace does not respond because she is trying to avoid saying the obvious I know you idiot why do you think I got up and came in here.
“What we’re trying to do here. You see this document. We’re trying. How are you this morning.”
“Whatcha need.” If she kept her eyes bright and attentive he could sometimes actually finish a thought before the hour was up. But don’t stare too long, she knows, because his eyes will only wander to that third button all the ladies know what she means. That button they’re always looking to undo or question or ponder or challenge or beg, “Why? Why you gotta stand in my way?”

And Janice wants to bond. “Morning, Grace!”
“You have lipstick on your teeth.”
“Oh!”
“See, this document here...”
“You need a copy.”
“Well -”

Because if he concedes that even she can give herself orders better than he can, then, well, he shouldn’t be the Vice President and she shouldn’t be the secretary, right? “Well what we need is for Janice - I’m just trying to clarify here - Janice needs to see these, O.K.? What I’m trying to say is. Do you think - “

And she snatches the paper out of his hand anyway, knowing that she’ll have to pay for it later. Just like playground.

She has a coaster that says: Dow Jones Delivers. She has a travel-sized tube of hand lotion on her desk. She has voice mail, e-mail, a fax number and a printer and still nobody ever calls her on Friday nights. She works for two men and one woman. And what a woman. If wrestling wouldn’t be seen as totally out of line and completely professionally arresting she would love to take her on, red leather 4.5” pumps and all. Full body slams. How you like that, Mary Anne. Maybe not so very funny how a woman will abuse another woman shamelessly in the face of so much ordinary quotidian misogyny. It’s an eat or get eaten world, right. Kill or be killed. Fuck the cause. I didn’t burn any bra, I don’t owe you courtesy, even. You’re my hired servant and don’t I love it. I’ll abuse you just so I feel as big, bigger even, than the Big Boys. Just like playground. She belongs to an e-mail group that sends out low-fat, high-protein recipes to her e-mail address. She goes to lunch and wanders the mall and comes back and does the whole routine over, except it’s closer to the 5 o’clock hour, which means everything. She contributes two dollars a week to the ladies’ lottery pool. She wants to win that money and wave buh-bye to all these nasty slavedrivers. Just working for a living, what else can she do.

When she returns from lunch she has a pile on her chair about a mile high, she will say to herself, about a mile high that she scoops up and puts into her FIFO in-box. First In, First Out. If I feel like it, she should add. It should be her FIFO, IFIFEELIKEIT box. Show ‘em who’s boss, which of course she is. She checks her six voice-mail messages and 4.5 e-mails. Some have attachments. And Mary Anne comes around the corner, all 105 tightly-wound up Southern pounds of her. She can feel Mary Anne over her shoulder, just over her shoulder, as Mary Anne is just pushing five two even in those pumps she tinkers around in, feel her menacing darkness like a pure force of evil in her presence.
“You’re back.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I came by your desk earlier. You weren’t here.”
“Whatcha need.”
“This form here.”

Mary Anne, she thinks, just leave the god damn form. I’ve seen the god damn form forty thousand times and just because you have no idea what it is or what to do with it doesn’t mean I don’t I know what this god damn form does from beginning to end Mary Anne, just leave the form and I’ll deal with it as usual.

They go around and around. Phrases like: just to clarify and, so, to reiterate, are flying over the cubicle walls. Lil’ ol’ Gracie is losin it. She is analyzing every atom of Mary Anne under her searing gaze. And then it happens. She says it and it’s too late to take it back.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Mary Anne, just leave the god damn form.”

The look is utterly how should she say. Mary Anne looks just exactly like a chubby toddler whose fifth Twinkie for the day has just been snatched away by their military-disciplinarian father. Shocked, horrified, indignant, humiliated. Now she’s ready.

Gracie attempts a syllable. It is all she is willing to offer.
“Don’t.”
“It’s been a really hectic -”
“Even.”
“I’ve been working on -”
“START. With me.” A look of threat. Pure blood threat.
“Sorry.”
“I’ll bet you are.”

But she isn’t. Grace is sorry about one thing, and that is that she didn’t have a camera handy for the occasion, to snatch a shot of lil old Mary Anne in a fit. She’s screwed for good now; the least she could do was capture the occasion for posterity’s sake. Something to show her children being raised on the welfare of the state.