Welcome to International Forms,” my assignment sheet reads.
”International Forms permits pantsuits or pants with a blazer. Should you arrive for work in dungarees, you will be asked to return to your agency. Report to:—————-”
The personnel director writes ”Mr. Moehl” in the blank with a ballpoint pen. She has a regressive, insecure personality, according to my handwriting- analysis class. I thank her–I`m in my silk blouse and pearls, my pencil- slim wool skirt. I don`t swing my hips on the way out her door. I save that for Mr. Moehl.
The elevators look like giant brushed-chrome refrigerators. Chimes announce each opening of doors; the effect is narcotic. My car fills in an orderly fashion and shoots up 42 floors before I can figure out who`s wearing Joy. The halls are carpeted and flourescent. Everything`s manila, the color of file folders.
Someone in a pleated plaid good-girl skirt is waiting for me. ”Hel-lew,” she sings. Her name is Aster. She shows me to my work station, an empty steel desk next to hers. Mr. Moehl`s walnut door is locked. ”He`s not coming in until 10,” she says.
”Fine,” I say. So far, so good.
I watch Aster water her plants and pick off the dead leaves. She has forgettable hair and a forgettable face, but her manner is measured, authoritative. She pours a bag of candy–cinnamon balls and peppermints–into a glass jar.
”What`s that I hear going clink-clink-clink?” says a tall woman, trotting up to Aster`s desk. The woman`s makeup is fresh; she wears a scarf over a passive angora sweater.
”Grace, this is the temp,” Aster says.
”Pleased to meet you,” Grace says to me. They suck on cinnamon balls and complain about someone they refer to only as ”she.” I look around. International Forms has decorated the walls with four-color nature prints:
rushing blue streams, a paranoid fall reeling with orange and red, a male and a female cardinal perched on separate boughs in a tree. I think of all the birds evicted to make pink While You Were Out notepads.
”Good morning, Jesus,” Aster says in a cootsy-coo voice as a stainless steel mailcart rolls past my desk, propelled by a very handsome Hispanic. He wears a green polyester service coat, as if he needed identification or we needed protection or something. He slips a stack of pink, blue and yellow envelopes into my IN box, another stack into Aster`s. She offers him the candy jar. He thinks she wants him to take it somewhere. ”No, dummy,” she says in the baby voice, ”have one.”
The pink, blue and yellow envelopes contain priority-coded interoffice memos. Pink is urgent, so we open it first; then we open blue and last, yellow. We throw all the envelopes away. I`ve never seen such a waste of paper.
From 9 to 10, Aster sits at her desk reading a contemporary romance, and I sit at my desk writing one. My romance features a spirited and intelligent woman between the ages of 18 and 30, as the Publisher`s Guidelines specify. She is beautiful, maybe not to everyone but at least in the eyes of the hero. He should be tall, dark and handsome, but I`m making him blond. She has personal problems, but they are limited to jealousy and stubbornness. She isn`t a virgin, but her sexual encounters with the hero are the best she`s had. I`m supposed to use euphemisms, especially when referring to below the waist. I don`t care if I publish it. I write the way some people chew gum.
Mr. Moehl trips on a wave in the swollen carpet as he bolts past my desk, smiling at me. He`s on the heavy side, his face is red, his eyes friendly. Aster`s boss is younger and meaner. He wants Aster to get Mr. Moehl on the phone, though their offices are side by side. I watch them talk to each other, their feet up on the desks as they look out their big Park Avenue windows.
Mr. Moehl buzzes me in to take dictation. Dictation makes me feel subversive. I know what I look like in my silk and pearls. My skirt falls open at the knee when I cross my legs. I sit there with licked lips, pencil poised over pad, trying to get a rise out of Mr. Moehl. He dictates the usual ”It has come to my attention that–” to inferiors, ”I am pleased to report that –” to superiors. His word ”operationalization” looks ridiculous in shorthand. He is a nice slow dictator; whenever I look up, I seem to catch him in some awkwardness, pulling up a droopy sock, poking something in his eye. Mr. Moehl is beyond rises, and he knows I know it. He tries to make friends by showing me his wife and his boat, both framed on his desk. I let him off the hook, give him an extra swing of the hips on my way out his door, which I regret when he calls me back in, coughing apologetically.
He hands me a legal-sized table filled with numbers, a sheepish look on his face. He needs the table retyped and 50 copies by 2. ”Fine,” I say. He makes a few more calls, then bolts out of his office, just missing the wave in the carpet this time, smiling at me gratefully, late for a meeting.
Aster hears the slow tick-tock-tock of my typewriter and knows I`m typing numbers. ”Did he give you that inventory table for Cleveland?” she asks.
”Don`t do it.”
”I don`t mind,” I say.
”Don`t do it yet,” she explains. ”He`ll change it five minutes after you`re done, and you`ll have to redo the whole thing.”
”He`s one of those?” I ask.
”He never gets anything right,” she says in the cootsy-coo voice.
”He`s a dodo bird.”
”I`ve got nothing better to do,” I say. I`m sick of my romance. Jesus comes down the hall with more mail. He delivers the new Cosmopolitan to Aster, and they take a few minutes to thumb through it.
”How to spot a potentially cruel lover,” Aster reads aloud.
”This I must know,” Jesus says.
”Thirty-six women who were repeatedly attracted to a cruel lover,”
reads Aster, ”said to look for a curiously erect posture that makes him seem remote from all those around him. They said to look for a surprising hostility in the first encounter.”
I stop typing numbers. I feel myself turning white. I bend over to hide my face, pretending to put some order in my lower right drawer.
”Ask him about his friends,” Aster reads on. ”He won`t have any. Ask him about his childhood. He will never have a warm or funny anecdote to tell. Ask him about his philosophy of life. `Dog-eat-dog,` he`ll say.” Aster looks at Jesus thoughtfully. ”Poor guy,” she says in her baby voice.
”Poor girls,” Jesus says. ”You don`t know these types.” Aster`s boss comes out of his office with work for her. Jesus moves down the hall behind the mailcart, his sinewy shoulders rippling under the synthetic coat.
”I may be a little late back from lunch,” Aster warns me at noon. The Pope is in New York today; she wants to try to catch a glimpse of him and his entourage parading down Fifth. She buttons up her coat, pulls on her mittens and winds her scarf around her neck with charming decorum, as if she is going to church.
”Take your time,” I say. I get out my container of coffee yogurt and my stainless-steel spoon. As soon as Aster is gone, I dial 555-6110 and let it ring. And ring. And ring. My chest is heaving. The tall blond man who isn`t home has left little bruises inside my thighs. It was the party of a friend of a friend. His blue eyes were like floodlights. He assumed I recognized him from his TV commercials, but I`d never seen him before. We ended up in the coats, the furs piled on the loft bed. I try again; no answer. All day Sunday I waited for him where he told me to wait. Don`t these actors have answering services? What if this was an audition call?
I take a message for Aster while she is out. When I slip the message in her stork message clip, I notice the miniature kingdom that surrounds her chair–a hanging koala in the philodendron, a butterfly paperweight, an orange rubber cat perched on the Kleenex box. I don`t want to be like 36 other women who were repeatedly attracted to a cruel lover. I don`t want to be like anyone.
Mr. Moehl does change the numbers. I`m whiting out and typing in new digits when Aster comes back. She saw the pontiff, I hear her tell Grace. I traipse down the hall to the copy center, push my way through the glass double doors and stand in line. I feel happily hypnotized by the smooth, precise clicking and feeding noises of the Xerox 7000, pumping out piece after piece after piece of hot paper like some tireless Formica heart. Down goes my original on the glass plate. PRINT, I command, pushing the biggest button green. I plop the 50 immaculate copies, still warm, on Mr. Moehl`s desk and pause–he`s still out–to enjoy his view of the skyscraper across Park.
I don`t enjoy it. I`m glad I`m only spending one day in this corporation. The new chart is completely wrong. I sit at my desk crestfallen from 4 on, putting Mr. Moehl through to our office in Cleveland 20 times, and 20 times changing the numbers. I resent obeying. I resent typing 769,100,322 in a column only wide enough for 8,433,581. I look at my fallen high heels lying on the manila carpet where I have kicked them off. They have lost their sleek manufactured form and have adopted the bumps of both my big-toe joints. I don`t know whether to loathe them because they show my true shape or respect them because they no longer lie. I think about my college bio-lab partner, Galen something. He wrote me interesting letters from the Arctic, which I never answered. He treated me like the wild one who could be patiently tamed. Usually it was the other way around. Tick-tock-tock. I`ve reached the zombie stage, making as many wrong entries as correct ones.
Mr. Moehl asks me to call his wife. I surprise myself and Aster, who is listening, by first dialing my old happily married friend, Charlie. It`s funny –I only meet Charlie four times a year and I never know until I pick up the phone when the next of those four times is going to be. ”Hi, it`s me,” I say, picturing both of us naked on my fake-fur rug. In three seconds I have a date. I feel so much better. I feel like a hell of a lot more than a set of 10 fingertips.
”She`s not finishing this tonight,” Aster yells into Mr. Moehl`s office without getting out of her chair. ”She has to come back tomorrow.” At 5 to 5, her desk is clean, her OUT box empty, her hands folded on her blotter. I fold my hands on mine.
While we are waiting for the elevator, Aster tells me the story of her dachshunds. The first one, Winky, she had for 11 years. He got cataracts and had to be put to sleep. She gave him a special cremation. Aster`s second dachshund was a girl, Missy, who died, too, but after only three and a half weeks. Viral encephalitis. Her new Missy is doing fine. She follows Aster from room to room. She runs. She forgets to slow down on the kitchen linoleum. She slips and slides and makes Aster laugh. Aster shows me a snapshot of a lampshade. Offcenter in the greenish dark are two ruby eyeballs. ”Cute,” I say.
The elevator chimes. ”See you tomorrow,” we both say in the lobby. Sometime between the revolving door and the subway stairs, between a red light and a green, between my right foot and my left, I begin to need a true and lasting love.
