Perfect on Paper

by Destiny Moon

  Just then another rumbling came and some bouncing then it felt like their downward motion had stopped. The floor of the elevator lift bobbed up and down a little then it was still.

  “Don’t worry,” Nadine said. “This thing never gets stuck.”

  “I’m not worried,” David said.

  Nadine had reassured him as a form of projection. She was the one who feared small, enclosed spaces. She hadn’t liked them ever since she was a child. One time she got stuck in her grandfather’s tool shed out behind his shop. Another time, her brother locked her in the furnace closet and went out to play and several hours passed before anyone came home. In the end, it was her father who found her, balling her eyes out, in wet pants that had dried again, but smelled bad. Her brother was punished, but not enough in Nadine’s view. She still secretly resented him for scarring her for life.

  “It’s okay,” Nadine said. “We’ll get out.”

  “Of course we will,” David replied.

  “I just need to pull on this rope here,” she said, trying to open the doors. We might be between floors and we might need to crawl out, but it’ll be better than waiting for someone to come.

  She heaved with all her might but nothing happened.

  “It’s supposed to open no matter where we are,” she protested.

  David grabbed the rope from her. “Here,” he said. “Let me.”

  He pulled hard—the sweat on his brow indicated it was as hard as he could—but nothing seemed to budge.

  “Press the emergency button,” Nadine said.

  David pushed it and it lit up. “Oh good,” he said. “It works. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

  Nadine searched her pockets. “I knew I should have brought my cell phone.” She shook her head, making it obvious that she was mad at herself for the oversight. “Do you have yours?”

  “No. It’s in the employee room in my backpack.”

  “Crap. What if no one got the emergency signal?”

  “They did.”

  “You don’t know that.” She set the lever to their floor—Receiving—and the floor wobbled again but the elevator didn’t go up. “We’re really stuck.”

  “It’s okay,” David said.

  “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “It’s okay,” David repeated. “They’ll get us out. It won’t be long.”

  “How do you know? You don’t know.” Nadine fought back the urge to cry. She couldn’t afford to lose her cool in front of a student.

  She hit the emergency button again and, unlike David, she held it in. There was a ringing sound, like they were phoning a security desk somewhere.

  “See?” she admonished. “They didn’t get our call before. They have to answer.”

  “They’re getting our call now,” David said in a controlled tone. He spoke slowly and calmly as though he wanted to put her at ease.

  The phone rang and rang. Four rings then five.

  “No one’s there,” Nadine said, sounding panicked.

  “Someone will answer. Give it a second.”

  “No one’s there. No one’s coming. We’re stuck.” Nadine’s voice cracked as she spoke.

  David took charge of the situation. “Here. Let me.” He took her finger off the button and pushed it.

  “That’s not helping. I was doing it right, but there’s no one there,” Nadine yelled at him.

  “Shhh,” David said quietly. “No need to raise your voice or worry. We’ll get out.”

  “Easy for you to say.” There were tears in her eyes. “I have to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t follow procedure.”

  She kicked the wall of the elevator with her lacquered high-heeled foot. “Ugh! The one time I deviate,” she said to herself.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m supposed to tell Hank every time we use the freight elevator.”

  “So, why didn’t you?” David asked. It was the first time she had heard concern in his voice.

  “I just wanted to get this done. I didn’t want to get slowed down by having to go find him and go through all the rigmarole. It’s never been stuck before.”

  “Um, so, hold on. If it’s procedure to tell Hank, and there’s no one on the other end of the security line, then that means we’re down here but no one knows we’re here.”

  “We’re gonna die.” Nadine burst into tears. “They’ll find us curled up in fetal positions, starved to death—or suffocated. Oh God. What’s worse?”

  David put his arms around her and let her cry it out. He held onto her and patted her back. He repeated, “We’re not going to die. We’re not going to die.”

  Nadine’s fears seized her. She relived her childhood trauma all over again, just as she had on carnival rides or that time her friends took her hiking and they went into a cave. Small spaces caused her to panic.

  “Help! Help!” they both yelled at the tops of their lungs. It was the only plan that made sense. But no one answered their calls, and after a few minutes they grew tired. Nadine started to cry again.

  When the sobbing stage wore off, Nadine got angry. She berated herself internally first. How could I have been so stupid? But then her anger turned outward.

  “What the hell kind of crappy building is this, anyway?” she called out.

  Finally, she’d had enough and couldn’t hold her temper in any longer. She flung off her heels and kicked the side of the elevator with all her might. The ball of her foot ached.

  That did it. The floor wobbled and the little box they’d been in shook back and forth a little and finally began an upward ascent, letting out a screeching sound.

  “You saved us,” David said, sounding his usual chipper self again.

  They stopped with a thud. Nadine pulled the rope and, this time, the doors came apart quite effortlessly and revealed that they were a mere step away from freedom. It was about two feet up to the floor. David leaped out of the elevator and turned around to offer Nadine a hand.

  “Thanks,” Nadine said, taking his hand and heaving herself up out of the deathtrap that she vowed here and now never to set foot in again.

  Once on the outside, she hugged him again. There came more tears against her will. They were tears of relief.

  “I must look a total mess,” she said.

  “No,” he replied. “You made it through and that’s the important part. And, hey, you saved us. If you hadn’t kicked the side so aggressively, we’d still be in there.”

  “I got us into the situation. I can’t take any credit for getting us out. I’m sorry. I’ll never stray from procedure again.”

  “Well, I’m not going to keep you to that. Life is about straying from procedure.”

  “Not for me, it isn’t. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “So, you don’t want to go down to the basement anymore? What about the stock down there?”

  “There are better ways of getting a bonus. Let’s go back inside.”

  They walked through the double doors and Nadine promptly took her seat again and opened her drawer, got out a mirror and examined herself.

  “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “Frightening.” She was red in the face, her eye makeup had smeared and there were dark stains streaking down her cheeks.

  “You got scared. Could happen to anyone.”

  “I wasn’t scared. It was a panic attack. There’s a big difference.”

  “Okay,” David conceded.

  “There is,” Nadine insisted defensively. She tensed up again. She went from being a discombobulated mess to resuming her collected demeanor. There was a compact mirror in her top desk drawer that she used to get herself together. Once she had fixed her makeup stains, she dug through her purse, found some mascara and applied it.

  She looked up from her desk and caught him watching her. Why is he looking at me like that?

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” He shook his head. David smiled. “So, I guess it’s
time to get back to work now.”

  “Well, yeah. Still a couple more hours left before quitting time.”

  “Nadine, I think you’re in shock.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are. You don’t realize it because you’re obviously under a lot of stress, but you’re in shock. You might want to call it quits early today.”

  “No.”

  “No?” He approached her desk. “Ten minutes ago, you thought you were experiencing the last precious minutes of your life. You can’t tell me that you’re eager to get back to whatever it is you do at your desk.”

  “Work, David,” she said in a condescending tone. “It’s called work.”

  “Okay,” he said with a tone of absolute non-belief. “If you say so.”

  “I have to get my bonus this year. It’s the only possibility. I can’t settle for anything less.”

  “All right. I’m not arguing. Back to work it is.”

  David took up the price gun and began to lay out more textbooks.

  * * * *

  A little before the afternoon shift was over, David approached Nadine’s desk. She was so engrossed in the spreadsheet she had on her computer screen that she jumped when he entered into her peripheral vision.

  “Shhh,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  “You could have me fired for endangering you and not following procedure.”

  “I’d never do that. Don’t stress out.”

  “Is it that noticeable that I’m a total stress case?”

  “Probably not to others,” he said, trying to put her at ease. “But I saw you face your own mortality this afternoon, so you can’t fool me.”

  Nadine looked directly into his eyes.

  “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.” Her delivery was simple, as though she was merely stating fact.

  “Anything I can help with? I did used to deal with distributors in the past.” He motioned to her computer. He would do anything to be useful to her.

  “It’s not work,” she admitted. As though she was thinking it out loud for the first time, she said, “Sometimes I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “At the bookstore? Or on planet Earth? Work problem? Or existential crisis?” This was the moment he’d been waiting for, a chance to get to know the vulnerable part of her that she kept behind her brave veneer.

  “It’s not the job,” she said. “Well, it is. But that’s not all. Do you ever get the feeling that you’re wasting your time, that you should really be someplace else doing something completely different?”

  He examined her like she was a cartoon turning into a human being. He was surprised that she spoke so softly with a complicated blend of powerlessness and strength.

  “I think everyone feels that way sometimes,” he offered.

  He didn’t know whether he should go back to work on the organizing task that Nadine had given him. She didn’t seem nearly finished, but he wasn’t sure whether she was going to say more so he motioned toward the stack of books that he needed to put price stickers on and reached for the pricing gun.

  Nadine came out from behind her desk. This was the most casually she’d been dressed in the whole time David had worked at the bookstore but in her pin-striped skirt and black knit turtleneck, she looked like a runway model to him. Against all David’s expectations, she took a seat on the table where he was working, right next to the stack of books he was about to handle. She looked like a kid sitting on a kitchen counter, waiting to watch an adult make a tasty snack.

  “I can’t concentrate anyway,” she said, as though reading his mind. “And who’s kidding who? We’re a dream team down here, light years faster than Hank even needs us to be, so let’s just take a breather, shall we?”

  “Sure,” he said apprehensively. Until the words came out of her mouth, David never would have imagined that Nadine would ever ‘take a breather’.

  “I know,” she said, “let’s do something fun. I have an idea.”

  She got up off the table and went to her purse. Change purse in hand, she made a dash for the door. “I’ll be back.”

  David shook his head at the absurdity of it all. He wondered where she was off to and figured that he’d better hurry up and price the books in front of him while he had the chance. Even if Nadine was pretending to be a slacker, he knew that there was nothing lazy about her and that she valued being miles ahead of Hank’s expectations.

  She came back only a couple of minutes later. Whatever she had with her must have been from the vending machines right outside the store.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a brightly colored wax paper package.

  “A Popsicle?”

  She nodded. He laughed. “So this is your idea of a fun time, eh?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded, tearing open her package. “I live on the edge. I know.”

  He opened his. “Oooh. Orange. My favorite.”

  “Really? Because I gave you the underdog,” she said, smiling. “I wanted to keep the pink one for myself.”

  “I’d have given you pink if it were up to me.” David held up his Popsicle to hers, as though it was a cocktail and he was about to say ‘cheers’. Instead he said, “To Popsicle compatibility. It’s a rare and beautiful thing.”

  Chapter Six

  David crammed his book bag into his little locker in the staffroom and took his place at the cash register on the textbook floor of the university bookstore on the first day of classes in September. The line up snaked around the building with students holding spots for each other while they ran to the coffee shop for lattes and muffins to endure the interminable process of buying course material. David had been lucky to get this job as he was only in his second year. These union jobs were coveted and only a select few students got chosen to make such a sweet hourly wage. Today was the day he had trained for. This was it. The next four hours would be the longest of the entire semester and if he could make it through today, he’d be able to handle the rest of the three-week contract, no problem.

  By ten-thirty, his brain was mush. There were so many numbers and codes to remember. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a delicate hand reach through the crowd with a cup of steaming coffee that had his name on the outer cardboard sleeve. He looked up to see the stunning Nadine smiling at him.

  “I thought you could use a pick-me-up,” she said.

  Never had he been so grateful. “Thanks.” He wanted desperately to follow that one word with something witty or enthusiastic but he couldn’t muster it. At noon, on his fifteen-minute break, he wanted to reciprocate but he couldn’t make it to the coffee shop and back unless he skipped lunch, and he was famished.

  In the staffroom, he got out his sandwich and crammed a corner into his mouth, feeling like a rabid dog. Once his blood sugar level was balanced and he had calmed down enough to not be dizzy from numbers and voids and answering all kinds of inane student questions, he realized that he should write her a note. But what could a lowly cashier say to the woman everyone at the bookstore thought of as the goddess.

  He wrote—You made my day. I am eternally thankful. David. He folded it in four and drew a happy face on the front. Before giving himself time to rethink the manliness—or lack thereof—of the smiley face, he marched into her department, saw her at her desk talking on the phone, quietly walked over to where she was sitting and slipped her the note. She signaled for him to stay.

  He only had another minute left but when a goddess asks you to stay, you stay. So he waited for her to get off the phone then told her, “I’m so sorry but my break is up and Hank will have my neck on the chopping block if I’m not up there on time.”

  “Well then, you’d better hustle,” she said.

  “Yeah,” David said, feeling incredibly shy. He didn’t know how to talk to women like Nadine, women whose flirtation and energy were effortless. Why had she singled him out with the coffee? The question permeated the back of his mind for the rest of the shift. There was the obvious explanation, of c
ourse. He had helped her achieve her goal. In the time he had worked in the basement with her, he had done a good job. Could it be that there was more to it?

  He was off at one in the afternoon and hurried to his first class, but as the professor waxed on, David found his mind returning again and again to Nadine Baxter. He didn’t like to admit it—especially to himself—but the cup of coffee she’d given him was the most action he’d gotten in a long time. Guys who don’t do well with girls in high school are supposed to thrive at university. That’s what his brother had said. But this was not David’s experience. If anything, high school proved superior because at least in high school he had a lot of friends who were girls from his year’s book club and extra-curricular activities. Since arriving at UMich on a full scholarship, he’d found himself in his dorm room alone a lot, surfing personals ads of tons of supposedly horny women, although the online community didn’t offer a lot of prospects. David concluded that he was just not compatible with most women.

  He tried to let go of the image of Nadine Baxter, dressed in her sexy form-fitting cream cardigan and black skirt with her hair tied back in a chignon. She was the perfect naughty librarian. On the surface, everything about her was professional and confident, but there was also a softness about her, an unspeakably feminine trait that had every young buck at the bookstore in knots whenever they found themselves in her vicinity counting and pricing the textbooks—whether they admitted to it or not. She controlled that operation and everyone knew it. Technically, the manager was in charge, but he had long since perceived that Nadine knew exactly how to whip a crew into shape and that she was far more successful at getting the bookstore lads to clear and shelve entire skids of books in record time than Hank or anyone upstairs. It was really something to get to work for her. She was a bossy perfectionist and it was a pleasure to appease such a stern mistress. David was grateful that he’d swapped shifts with Chrissy for those glorious weeks before school had started.

  * * * *

  When his philosophy lecture was over, David headed straight for the coffee shop to buy a gift card to present to Nadine, as a way to keep the exchange of offerings alive. From there, he went to the bookstore, still buzzing with students on the textbook floor. He took the stairs down to Shipping, marched into her realm and went right up to her desk where she was filling out paperwork.