Murder Most Conventional

by Verena Rose (ed)

  I fold four sheets of the paper into a wobbly box.

  “Won’t stand,” the woman to my right says. She pushes her heavy eyeglasses farther up on her nose. “I think it’s got to be freestanding.”

  Baldy puts his chin on the table, stares eye level into the straws, pins, paper.

  “No way.” He sits back, folds his hands across his chest.

  Oh Lord, I’ve ended up in a group full of idiots. What does that make me? How were we chosen? Names in a soup bowl?

  Last night at the so-called reception/cocktail party, I tried to read the lower line on the name tags: university of something, college of something, school of something else. I felt very small. My two hundred-year-old university (ha!) of seven hundred students had miraculously just added a graduate program. One. So now we’re Podunk U. When we somehow got university status, all of the college’s monogrammed merchandise had to be changed to PU. Some of us snickered behind our hands. Why couldn’t our name be University of Podunk and our acronym be UP? But what did I know? I wasn’t a leader back at PU. And I certainly wasn’t here for brownie points from my cement-faced director. I was here for the excursion, two nights in a nice hotel, meals, travel. I could play at leadership. Anything for a day away from the mold and academic mire.

  Was everyone else on the same path that brought me here? Willing to do anything to get away from our weary, dreary, mind-numbing jobs, bowing to professors who never say thank you or please and who give you the stainless-steel eye if you dare address them as other than Dr. So and So? Even the adjuncts have to be called Professor with a capital P.

  In the morning light, my team looks half abed, brain dead. I hear the other two teams chattering away, laughing, giggling, heads together over their “houses.” The sounds sound like progress, like cohesion. Leadership. Teamwork.

  “Okay,” I say, being a bit serious. “We’ve got straws for corner posts. Pin the sheets of paper to them. Pin on the last two sheets for a roof. It’s not like we’re going to live in it. Voila. House.”

  Purple Eye Shadow raises one eyebrow.

  Baldy snorts.

  Miss Thick Glasses snickers.

  I try to pin a sheet of paper to a straw. A very resistant plastic straw. My thumb hurts. I push, push, push. The straw holds firm.

  “Wait,” Baldy says, taking the pin, the straw, and the paper and putting them together with seeming ease.

  “Wall one.” He leans back. I hate him.

  He pins a second sheet of paper. Purple Eye Shadow sneezes. The thing topples, lies flat on the table.

  “Oops,” she says. “Did I knock it over?” She half covers her mouth, suppressing half a schoolgirl giggle.

  Do we have a subversive in our leadership-building team?

  “Here.” Miss Thick Glasses picks up another sheet of paper, props up the other two. We now have a triangle, not a square. Could we lift it partway, call it a teepee, and get by? People once lived in teepees. Traveled with teepees, houses on their backs like turtles.

  “Gotta use all six sheets of paper,” Baldy says. He picks up the sheets of paper, pulls out a few pins from the roll, and puts together the fourth wall.

  Purple Eye Shadow silently taps her left palm with her right index finger. Typical libarian gesture of reluctant approval.

  I, alone, send up a small cheer.

  We have a house. Albeit a flimsy paper one, but it’s square and it stands. Who knew he could do it? Genius with a piece of paper in his hands. A roll of pins at the ready.

  Miss Thick Glasses blinks. “Two sheets of paper are left over.” She twists around to look at our captors who hold up a timer. They point. “Five minutes.”

  Purple Eye Shadow looks back, then picks up the last two sheets of paper, pins them together like a pup tent, lays them atop our “house.”

  “Voila,” Baldy says and raises both arms in the air as if he had done the whole deed himself, by himself.

  “Are we supposed to have a door?” I try to see across and over the backs of the other two teams. Do they have a door? Was that in the instructions? To door or not to door?

  “And windows,” Miss Thick Glasses says, suddenly perky. “But we need scissors.”

  “Aha!” I reach for my purse and my Swiss Army knife, which has a miniature pair of scissors. I carefully, artfully, creatively, cut a door in our pale, delicate, four-sheets-of-paper-and-a-roof house.

  “Windows,” Miss Thick Glasses repeats. She really sounds excited now. There is some life left in the old girl yet. Or is it that we are nearing the end of this stupid trial by paper and pins exercise?

  I cut windows. My teammates smile. We high five. TEAM.

  The timer dings. We are told to take our hands off the table and select a spokesman. Spokesperson, I correct her in my mind. Miss Thick Glasses and Purple Eye Shadow look at Baldy and nod. He puffs up. Mr. Superman. I don’t say anything. Of course these wimpy women would bow to the only rooster in the bunch. Well, let him crow. Hens lay eggs, but the rooster gets to crow.

  The team that goes first has used all its straws and pins. Overachievers. Their creation is a foot-tall swirl of a bird’s nest structure. They tore their sheets of paper into strips to line their bird’s nest. Well, bully. It wasn’t a house. It was a nest for God’s sake. Very mod. And it stood. Three dimensional. Workshop leaders can’t say enough about this team. Quite creative. What imagination! What teamwork! Why wasn’t I with this team? How had I gotten the dullards of the world straight from the academic dungeons?

  Team two presents their creation, which is much like ours. Had they peeked as we worked? Had they copied? They have a traditional box, roof, and windows, and a double door. All with ragged edges.

  The workshop leaders smile, nod. Ask how they made those darling doors and windows. “By hand,” one of them says. “We very carefully tore them.”

  “Nicely done,” Mr. Workshop Leader says. “Next.”

  Baldy points to our creation, which now looks like a copy except our door and windows have neatly cut edges. Ours is a much better-looking construction. I feel a shiver of pride. Maybe the workshop leaders will hold our construction up as an example. Precision teamwork, they’ll say.

  Instead they put their heads together, whisper.

  No one had mentioned a prize, but maybe there is to be one. A blue ribbon certificate of accomplishment. Something tangible to take back to our respective institutions. Maybe hang on some board somewhere to show that even the little people, the lowlies, have a brain or two and are more than simply their rinky-dink jobs. I’d take a blue ribbon with gold lettering or some other leadership award home to show my supervisor that my day had been productive, even rewarding—they weren’t employing some small gray mouse of a peon.

  “How did you make the door and windows?” one of the leaders asks.

  My team looks at me. “I did them,” I say with pride.

  “And did you use a tool?”

  “Yes.” I pull out my Swiss Army knife.

  The leaders gasp. The other two teams gasp. It’s suddenly like grade school. I am a criminal. A delinquent. I’d carried a weapon, a knife, into the classroom. My team only looks puzzled.

  “You’re not allowed to use tools,” the female workshop leader says. “Disqualified.”

  I slink down in my seat, suddenly alone at the table. My team members had just risen in unison and slunk silently from the room. No tools? If that instruction had been given earlier, my teammates hadn’t remembered. Or if they did, they hadn’t said so. Miss Thick Glasses even said we needed scissors, which is what prompted me to pull out my knife. Yes, we’d been told to use the materials on the table, but I don’t think they specified we couldn’t use our initiative. I mean, isn’t leadership thinking outside the box? Fearless? Going where others haven’t thought to go?

  For a long moment I sit there as the other teams and the wor
kshop leaders file out of the room. There is a big as an auditorium, stunned silence after everyone leaves. I, the brown sheep, the outcast, the unloved little peon of peons, sit alone.

  The room is so silent I could hear a pin drop if they all weren’t already pinned to leftover rolls and pages. Ha, I say to myself. You are a cliché among clichés. The last sheep in the academic librarians flock.

  On each table lay the discarded, unused rolls of pins, and on a table beside me, a stack of fresh paper, a whole unused ream, five hundred white sheets. Back at Podunk U library we write notes on the blank side of used paper. No budget for “stickies.” Fresh, clean paper, a whole ream, is trophy. I gather all these materials, go back to my room, sit on my bed feeling slumpy and dejected. I lie back and start to count the little dots on the ceiling row by row. I multiply the rows, then I pace until I am worn and weary, then I sleep.

  When I wake it is dark, a deep gray bruised night sky of dark. Outside the window and two stories down, various groups from the conference have converged around the pool, drinks in hand. Bitches. Baldy’s in a red Hawaiian shirt holding some electric blue drink. Purple Eye Shadow has changed to a long dress that matches her eyes. Miss Thick Glasses is still wearing a brown denim pantsuit. She sits at a patio table alone, head down like the loser I feel. I would be with her, but nobody asked me. I am a double loser.

  I reread the conference schedule, and no get-together is listed. On-your-own time, it says. Free time. I get just plain mad. Nobody had said you couldn’t use tools. Nobody had said don’t be inventive. They had said be creative. I was creative.

  I pick up one of the rolls of straight pins, begin to pull pins out one by one. I poke them back into the paper, saying take that, take that, take that as I prick the sheet full of a million pinholes. Each hole is a person. A pinhead in my life, in this conference, in this whole leadership seminar. Baldy, Miss Thick Glasses, Purple Eye Shadow, workshop leader male, workshop leader female. Poke, poke, poke. Stab, stab, stab. If this paper had blood, it would gush red.

  After a while I get more creative. What I had been doing was just making holes with pins. Now I pick up sheets of paper and begin to make origami people, fold and turn, fold and turn, male and female. I laugh. I giggle. I pick up a paper creature and dance it around on my extra bed. I make a whole conference of paper people. My leadership group is just a pin’s worth in the whole conference. I put my paper people in rows, I march them up and down and around the bed.

  Who says I’m not creative? I draw features on all the paper people. I draw hair and mustaches and beards, zits and freckles. I draw tits and penises . . . little dangles, squiggles on the front of some of my male paper people. I name them after everybody who had ever said or done a mean thing to me in my life, starting with today’s workshop leaders, then going back, back, back: my second-grade teacher who kept me after school, the uncoordinated girl who got to be cheerleader instead of me because she was sleeping with the football coach, the neighbor next door when I was a child who wouldn’t let me climb his apple tree, the rich woman I cleaned for when I was seventeen who made me iron things over three times, the music teacher who kicked me out of piano after whacking my hands with her metal ruler, the Girl Scout leader who stole my cookie money, the college professor who gave me a C minus, the meter maid who gave me a ticket, the banker guy who never smiles at me, my first husband, my second husband, the bitch who stole my last boyfriend, the bitch who cut my hair wrong, the bitch who held up the line in front of me at the food store, the bitch who got my parking place. I jumble them all on my bed and say, “Fuck, fuck, fuck you all.”

  I get giddy and take the rest of the paper from the packet, fold pieces into houses and stores. I make supermarkets and big box stores, little shops and schools, churches with steeples and apartments, condos. My extra bed becomes a city.

  I people my paper city. With ink and markers from my purse I draw roads and rivers all over the hotel’s white coverlet. I draw streets and trees. A park. A playground. When I have used up all the paper and my room is crowded with paper people, I have another idea.

  Only the rolls of pins are left. Lots of rolls of lots of shiny silver pins with very straight tips. Sharp shiny silver straight pins that can prick a person. Or a paper person.

  I grab a glass of water and several of my paper people and step out on my balcony. After taking a refreshing sip of water, I hold pins aloft and begin to poke them one by one into paper Baldy’s head, neck, shoulders, legs. Lots of pins, lots of poking pins in the paper person.

  Down below Baldy touches his head, rubs his arm, lifts his leg, then grabs his chest and falls over on the concrete.

  Miss Thick Glasses screams, runs over to where he’s face down by the pool.

  I jab pin after pin into paper Baldy’s legs. Then I stop. Down below, real Baldy is very still. The paper Baldy in my hand is as full of pins as a porcupine has quills.

  A crowd gathers around the real Baldy. Cell phones light up and numbers are pressed. Oh, this is all so touching.

  Music from some boom-boom band has stopped. Miss Thick Glasses runs toward the office area, trips, and falls into a second pool where she floats like brown debris, no one noticing. Her glasses float beside her. Can she see where she’s going? Will she be able to see when she gets there? If she goes to the bottom of the pool, there is only dark.

  Only moments before, my paper Miss Thick Glasses somehow managed to fall into my glass of water, float a bit, then get waterlogged and sink. Will the real Miss Thick Glasses keep floating or sink? Or will somebody pull her out?

  I pick up Purple Eye Shadow and dance her around the balcony. She was the only one who believed in me, my little paper house with the perfect door and windows. She did not scoff, nor laugh, only a little girlish giggle of support.

  I lean over the balcony and drop Purple Eye Shadow and watch her float down, down, down. She is rather lovely. I had colored her whole paper body purple.

  A gust of wind picks her up and lifts her over the tall pool wall, then she is gone. Out of sight. Same as the real Purple Eye Shadow, who I notice is no longer at the pool. She left. Did anyone notice? Librarians are supposed to be the quiet ones. We are known for speaking in whispers, shushing with our finger to our lips. Oh, the clichés.

  Now Baldy’s body lies on the pool deck, with a few unknown people beside him. Mrs. Workshop Leader, still in her black pantsuit, has come over and put a rolled beach towel under his head. “Is he dead?” some ask, their voices floating up on the breeze.

  Most of the gawkers don’t care. They’ve gone back to the bar. Baldy is not their concern. They are not my concern either, but I have made paper people to represent them anyway. All the convention goers are represented in paper, each attendee. I must be fair. Not single out only my own group. My group of dolts. So many dolts. Is there a single person at this conference who has an administrative job? I think not. We are the peons of peons. We are the librarians who are never seen in the libraries. We are the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the spines of the books, the computer cords, the mice. So many working mice.

  The boom-boom band starts to play again. So much for respect. How many seconds did Baldy get? Fifteen minutes. How much respect does any librarian ever get? “Oh Baldy,” I say out loud, “maybe you got more than most of us will ever get.”

  I make another paper Baldy, blow some warm breath on him. The real Baldy begins to shake, pulls himself up to a standing position, holds his hand to his head, and looks around as if asking, What the hell happened? People applaud as he walks back over to the bar. They’re probably saying to each other, “Too much to drink” and “It happens.” I go back inside.

  I have pins, paper rolls of pins unrolled in shiny rows. I pick up an unnamed, unknown paper person, a conference goer, an attendee. I stick a pin in the head and put it back on the bed. I only imagine I hear it groan. I pick up another paper person, and another, another. Stick pins
in their heads until I get bored, then I stick a pin or two in their backs, their chests, a leg here and there. I have a jumble of wounded paper people on my bed. Every one of the paper people gets a pin or two. Too bad they are not badges or awards to show what they learned at the leadership conference.

  Leadership. Ha. I show them what leadership is when I toss the whole batch, minus Baldy, Miss Thick Glasses, and Purple Eye Shadow, in the wastebasket. At my library we recycle. We must recycle as much as we can in these days of waste and worry and worship.

  Worship for facts and figures, for the bright and beautiful. None for the worker bees.

  I go downstairs to join the party that has grown so very much smaller. Odd coincidence. My group, my losing team, including Purple Eye Shadow, waves me over. Baldy holds another blue drink. Miss Thick Glasses pats her dripping wet hair with a bar towel. We laugh, we commiserate, laugh about the whole exercise of house building. The very idea. The stupidness of it all. We, who are the crushed croutons in the loaves of life. We who are nothings from Nothing U. Back we go to the ivy-covered boxes of academia to molder, molder, molder for all time to come.

  We know not only did we not get blue ribbons, award certificates, or even applause, but soon we will return to our dungeons to lick our wounds and hope we never, ever run into each other again. At some regional or state meeting, we escapees for the day will not smile and wave across the room, saying in jubilant greeting, “Hey, don’t I know you from such and such?” Not us. Not the disqualified. Not the D minus Disqualified Leadership Team.

  THE PERFECT PITCH, by Marie Hannan-Mandel

  This town, with its Victorian lampposts, chichi shops lit up as if to guide in planes, and restaurants with lines outside the door, is just as disappointing as the airport. I’d waited in line for my rental car hoping to see something quirky, unusual, typical of Maine, and instead I’d met nothing but strangers all visiting from somewhere else. Now I’m approaching my destination, and I could be driving down the main street of almost any shopping mecca. I see no quaint small-town businesses, crusty locals disparaging “blow-ins,” or seafaring folks fighting and smelling of fish. Everything’s way too modern and expensive—nothing like what I’ve seen on TV. This town is as much Maine as Disney World is Florida.