More Than A Maybe

by Monte, Clarissa

  I’m currently shivering in front of the tall office building housing Rogers Custom Floor Mats Incorporated. Jayla has let me borrow her peacoat, and it helps keep out the freezing cold winds of the Windy City. I try not to think too much about what I’m wearing underneath the coat — it’s the same skirt and blouse combo I’d worn on that night when I thought I was going to meet Xavier’s clients.

  When he’d asked me to live with him.

  The memory begins to tug at me, at my heart . . . pulling me back there . . .

  No.

  I don’t allow myself to go there. I tell myself that this time the clothes don’t mean anything more than one simple thing: I am in need of a job, and I am ready for my interview.

  I walk inside the spacious lobby of the office building and over to the bank of elevators that will take me to Rogers. My heart is thumping, and I straighten my skirt and double-check the folder containing the printout of my resume.

  Getting the interview had been surprisingly easy — the job description on the website said the company is expanding, and they’re just beginning to increase their staffing. While my original resume had been a hodgepodge of waitressing jobs and part-time tutoring, Jayla had managed to punch it up with what she’d called The Creative Truth.

  “Sometimes,” she’d said, giving me a knowing look, “you gotta let them know what you know you can do, and act like you’ve already done it. Then, once you’ve worked there for a bit, you will have done it. So it’s not lying.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a textbook example of lying,” I’d said, the doubt thick in my voice.

  Jayla had just laughed. “Well, listen to Miss Textbook Expert! Just trust me — you’re going to need to do something to put yourself ahead of the competition. That means massaging your resume a little bit, you heard?”

  And so I had . . . but now, here in the warm elevator, suddenly sweltering in my borrowed peacoat, I’m beginning to wonder if exaggeration had been the best idea.

  The elevator doors open onto a large office lobby that seems like a conscious effort to blend the modern and the traditional. White leather chairs are arranged around low tables; the ceiling is done in steel panels, lit with recessed lighting. The whole place seems unfinished — I notice several of the chairs are still wrapped in thick shipping plastic, and there are some twists of cabling poking their way out of the ceiling here and there.

  There’s a reception desk at the far side of the room. There, a bored and greying woman in her late fifties sits, tapping a pencil absently against the side of her thick glasses as she pores over a computer monitor. My pace slows as I near the front of her desk — the woman seems just a bit familiar to me, as if we’ve somehow met before. I’m not sure why. I try and push the thought aside.

  She looks up as I approach and gives me a strained smile. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Alice White,” I say, realizing how long it’s been since I’ve introduced myself using that name. “I’m here for my 3:00 interview.”

  “Just a moment,” the woman says, taking a look at the screen in front of her. “Ah, right. Thanks for coming, Ms. White. You can go right back. Watch your step!”

  I walk around the desk and down a hallway — past office doors, past a half-completed cubicle farm. It looks like enough to support a small but bustling enterprise of maybe a few dozen. There don’t seem to be that many people around, though. A few workmen install light fixtures here and there; a couple of employees in business shirts chat over scrawls on whiteboards.

  I arrive at last at a large glass door marked PRIVATE.

  Here we go, I think. I give a tentative knock.

  “Come in,” says a voice from behind the door. I push it open.

  I step into an office in complete shambles. Multi-colored binders and reams of wrinkled papers are piled on what might well be a desk. There’s almost no room to stand. Cardboard boxes are stacked floor-to-ceiling in precarious towers of office clutter. Cut rubber floor mat samples lie strewn about, tucked into every spare crevice.

  In the middle of it all is a man.

  He’s an out-of-shape lump of a person — possibly fifty, definitely bald. His red-and-blue power tie circles his neck tightly, like he’s recently made a half-hearted attempt at hanging himself. It adds absolutely no style at all to the wrinkled short-sleeves and frayed khaki Dockers that make up the rest of his work ensemble. His wispy black comb-over is a sad, feeble coda to a haircut that’s long out of style.

  He looks up from a wad of paperwork with dramatic irritation, as if he’d been expecting someone that he didn’t like very much . . . then he notices me, and his eyes dart from my face to my chest and back again. His face and demeanor change in an instant — he’s excited now. Animated.

  He stands and gives me a nicotine-based smile, shaking my hand in a way that can only be described as greedy.

  “Please come in! My name is Bob Sorrows, you must be . . . ”

  “Alice. Alice White.”

  “Good! Aliccccce!” he says, putting a lot of stress on the s-sound. “Yes! Well, you can call me Bob,” he says, gesturing grandly to a pile of papers. I frown at it, not really sure what he expects me to do. Should I be organizing these? I wonder. Is this part of the interview?

  Bob looks at me expectantly for a moment — then he shrugs, walks over, and scoops up the pile of papers in one big armful, revealing a brown vinyl chair.

  “Have a seat, Miss White,” he says. “Let’s get started.”

  I scootch myself into the chair. Bob dumps the papers on the floor and sits across from me, putting his worn wingtips up on his desktop in a big show of office machismo. The corner of his shoe sends a ballpoint pen off his desk, and it goes skittering across the floor. Bob doesn’t bother to pick it up.

  “So,” he says, “I assume you’re not just here to brighten up my day, though you’re certainly doing that. You’re here about the data entry job. Correct?”

  “That’s right,” I say.

  “Okay. Right. So I have taken a look at your resume, and I’ve got to say: it is a very impressive skill set you’ve got here. You seem like quite the little typist! So let me ask you, first of all — what exactly do you know about our business, Alice?”

  I try to remember what I’ve read on the website. “Well, it’s about . . . mats for cars, I think?”

  Bob smiles. “Correctamundo! As the Fonz used to say. But I digress. Anyway, yes. We deal with floor mats, for cars, trucks — RVs at one point, though not so much . . . uh, now. And we used to have to stock thousands of these things, you understand? Had ourselves a big warehouse, guys up and down on forklifts, the whole thing.”

  I nod, hoping I look more interested than I really am.

  “But that warehouse is now history, you understand? Rust In Peace. Because now — drumroll, please — we are computerizing the whole kit and kaboodle. We shoot the car interior with our proprietary laser sizing system and cut them to order. Which is where you come in, my dear.”

  The words my dear slide off his tongue in a particularly nauseating way.

  “I won’t be running the lasers, will I?” I ask, forcing a smile.

  “What? Ha! Funny and beautiful — today’s my lucky day!” he says, cracking a hand against his khaki-covered knee. “But, well . . . no, actually not. We’ve got big scary gentlemen with tattoos to do that for us, so — no. What you’ll be doing is helping us get all the old records into the computer. We have a lot of archived paperwork related to the previous system — as you might well imagine,” Bob says, smacking one of the box towers. It shifts, teetering, threatening to fall at any second.

  “That’ll be the job then, pretty much! We’ll get you a desk in here, and you can sit there looking lovely and we’ll both just type away until it’s done. Which will be a while, believe me. This is just the first batch of boxes. We’ve got storage units full of these things — so we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  His eyes drift lazily down to my boobs, and as th
ey do I realize that I do not want this job.

  At all.

  I do not want to sit in here with Bob, with his smells of grease and copier toner and the stale sad ghosts of his week-old tuna sandwiches floating up into my nose.

  I do not want to feel my joy and my capacity for happiness drifting away with every dull keystroke.

  I do not want to be the perpetual office eye candy for this unpleasant and condescending floor mat salesman.

  I want . . .

  I want to be eating sourdough brioche from a picnic basket on the beach, and smelling the sunlight, and watching the sandpipers scurrying to avoid the tidal wash.

  Bob takes his feet off his desk suddenly and stands up. “So! When can you start?”

  I blink at him. “Start?”

  “Start! Begin! Commence with the typing and the inter-office dramas! Not that there’s very much of that to speak of — old Crabface at the front desk out there doesn’t usually manage much more than a Hello to me once a week.”

  He extends a hand in my direction. Despite myself, I find myself taking it.

  To my absolute horror I have landed the job.

  I’m stunned. Bob mistakes the look on my face for the shock of happiness. “Exciting, I know. Congratulations! But, seriously — when can you start?”

  I blink at him. “Ah . . . I suppose I can start . . . soon.”

  “Okay!” says Bob. “Just let me check the old calendar here . . . okay, so officially we’ll be open on the 3rd, but getting you a desk and a computer is gonna be a problem with the holidays and all. Shall we go ahead and say . . . the 10th, then? Monday the 10th?”

  I nod slowly and repeat the words. “Monday the 10th.”

  “Great!” he shouts, giving me one last yellow grin. “I expect big things out of you, Alice. See you next year!”

  I put a plastic smile on my face and exit the office as quickly as I can.

  * * *

  In a moment, I’m back in the lobby.

  “I got the job,” I say to the receptionist.

  She looks up from the glow of her computer monitor and gives me a long, sterile glare.

  “I’m sure you did,” she says. “Twenty-two years ago, so did I.”

  * * *

  My interview is over and it’s getting on towards lunchtime, so I get a sandwich and walk across the street to the park to eat it.

  I try to cheer up. I can imagine the sound of Jayla’s voice already: See, I told you, bitch! You went out there and you got yourself a job, and it took you all of — what, two days? I am so happy for you, and blah blah blah blah blah . . .

  Her voice in my head is upbeat and cheerful, and I know that it’s how I should actually feel right now. I try to force myself to get into the moment. I’m employed and I can take on the world. It’s all straight up from here. Nobody’s going to stop me now . . .

  Twenty-two years.

  That phrase clangs around in my head, wiping out any forced efforts at joy, and I suck in my breath. I suddenly realize who the receptionist had reminded me of:

  My mother.

  My mother had been a woman like that — a woman who’d spent her entire life on hold, trading what she wanted to do for what she needed to do. Her work with the dogs — it was one of those jobs that was endless, endless . . . an unstoppable infinite tide of pooches that needed walking. A tide that began before she was born. One that would continue after she died.

  I’d hated that she’d wanted to make me her dream — all those endless armfuls of thick medical texts that I’d memorized just to please her, the endless quizzes, the endless tests . . .

  Maybe that was it, though. Maybe my mother had seen all work as endless. The world of medicine would certainly have been no different — people would always be sick or broken, require care. That endless tide . . . maybe she’d just wanted it all to matter. Maybe she’d thought that if I ended up doing work that mattered to others, then somehow her work would matter to her . . .

  And then there was what she had told me in the hospital. About finding my Book.

  That simple confession had told me so much about about her life. About her regrets.

  The realization she came to in the hospital — her final dream for me. It had nothing to do with medical school. It was that I’d become what I wanted to be.

  Whatever I wanted.

  My thoughts have taken my legs aimlessly along the park’s wide path, and I find myself now right in the middle of everything. I look around at the dusting of fresh-fallen snow. Here and there, little bunches of brown scrub poke through the powder, marking the days till the rows of flowers arrive to take their place. Only the evergreens, heavy with their white mantles, give any hint of the green of far-off spring.

  I wipe the snow off a bench with a gloved hand, and then sit down to eat. As I take the first bite of my sandwich I notice a woman.

  The woman is very old. I’m immediately worried for her, because of the snow and the fact that she’s pushing a battered aluminum walker. The front feet of the walker has been fitted with a couple of frazzled tennis balls, and she just barely manages to lift them enough to clear the snow as she scrapes the walker forward in front of her.

  “Hello!” she says to me, as she shuffles by.

  “Hi,” I say. “Need any help?”

  “I’m fine,” she says . . . and then she pauses, seeming to reconsider. “Well, maybe. You could help me feed, I suppose.”

  For a moment I think she’s asking for some of my sandwich. I hold out half for her to take.

  “No, no — not here,” she says, shaking her head. “Over there. Not me. Them. Come on.”

  My curiosity peaked, I stand to walk along beside her — down the wintry path, matching her pace with slow half-steps of my own. At length we reach the edge of a small pond. The reflection of the grey sky makes it decidedly desolate. It’s frozen at the edges, its banks white with the December snow.

  The woman takes a large wadded-up plastic bag of bread crusts out of her coat pocket. She drags out a handful with an old gnarled hand, throwing the crusts in a wide arc with a surprisingly graceful motion.

  “Ducks!” she shouts, the commanding sound of her voice echoing across the surface of the pond. “Ducks!”

  I look around. There are no ducks.

  The woman pushes the bag of bread in my direction. “Go on. You can help me feed them.”

  I reach an uncertain hand slowly into the plastic bag and pull out a fistful of bread, then throw it onto the lake. This seems to satisfy the woman, and we take turns like that together, tossing the pieces out over the water until the bag is empty. She crinkles it up, stuffs it back into her pocket.

  I look at all the pieces of bread bobbing on the surface of the frigid water.

  “They’ll be along soon?” I ask. “Won’t they?”

  “What?”

  “I just mean . . . I don’t see them. The ducks.”

  The old woman frowns. “Don’t you worry about them. I know they come. The bread’s gone every day when I come back, so . . .”

  I pause.

  Part of me feels like I should let it go . . . but I don’t.

  “Okay,” I say, looking at the soggy bread, “except that maybe it just gets wet and sinks. I mean, isn’t it too cold for the ducks right now? Don’t they go south or something?”

  The woman seems to consider this for a moment — then she shakes her head.

  “Little girl,” she says, “I come here every day except Sunday, because that’s when I go to service and that’s when God takes care of the ducks for me. And I know the ducks come here. Because I see them sometimes. And even when I don’t see them I know they come because the bread is gone.”

  She looks at me, opening one eye very wide. “I think you are maybe a . . . logical person,” she says. “I used to know a lot of logical people. You can find them everywhere in this city. But let me tell you this: if you aren’t careful, you can logic your way out of a perfectly good routine.”

&nb
sp; With that, she turns away. She steadies her walker, and then begins to shuffle her way toward the path, a bit faster than before.

  I look at the bread until I can no longer hear the sound of her footsteps.

  Then I head back to Jayla’s.

  * * *

  Just as I expect, Jayla is entirely thrilled about my new position at Rogers. As soon as she’s back from her afternoon class she attacks me with hugs.

  “Damn! This girl right here knows how to get a JOB. That is what this girl knows how to DO.”

  Jayla doesn’t have to dance that night, so she insists on taking me out to dinner to celebrate. I’m not exactly in the mood, but Jayla looks too psyched up for me to protest. We end up going out for vegetarian Chinese, and we talk for hours over big steaming plates of moo goo gai pan and broccoli-tofu.

  “So,” she says. “Christmas coming up. You got plans for that?”

  I shake my head. “Not really.”

  She points at me with her chopsticks. “You do now. You and me. Yuletide cheer, bitch.”

  I frown between heavily sauced mouthfuls of broccoli. “Oh, come on — I don’t want to mess up whatever your plans are . . . ”

  “Like I said, you’re my plans. Let’s just say I don’t really come from a Yuletide cheer kind of family. We’ll leave it at that, okay?”

  She’s not taking no for an answer — so I just agree, and shovel more Chinese food into my mouth. Jayla picks up the check again.

  “Come on,” I protest. “You have to let me pay for dinner one of these days.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry. I know you’ll get me back,” she says. “First paycheck you get, you are gonna feed me something amazing. Steak. Some of that 3-star Gold Coast shit.”

  I laugh, and I promise her I will — but for now, on behalf of my wallet and my stomach, I’m incredibly grateful.

  Chapter 19

  At first Jayla’s constant encouragement and enthusiasm are a source of power for me — a rock I can grab onto in the midst of all the chaos. For a while I can’t help but feel buoyed by her endless store of cheerfulness. But those feelings quickly begin to fade.

  I still have weeks and weeks before my job starts. I honestly don’t know what to do with myself.