Sinister: What would you say?

[Jesse Chanin]

Gail drives to work in a practical, sea green car and always gets the best 
parking space, right next to the back door as if to assert the prominence in 
the company she doesn’t possess.  She waits a moment behind the wheel, runs 
a hand through her graying hair, and enters the through warehouse with a 
purpose.  Some women in marketing and PR always wait for her and they form 
an outspoken caustic group in the lobby while the secretary eyes them 
warily.  At 7:15, the other women return to their desks, their coffees, and 
their red chairs on wheels, and Gail walks back to the warehouse where I see 
her for the first time from my self-conscious perch on the counter next to 
scattered exact-o knives and styrofoam.  She smiles.  “’Mornin,’” she drawls 
in the typical Maine accent and I wince.

“Hi,” I say shyly and the day begins.

We spend eight hours a day on a concrete floor picking books off shelves and 
standing at a counter putting them into boxes, and she tells me all sorts of 
things.  We work quickly and efficiently but she pauses every time someone 
enters the warehouse to say Hello & bestow a brief wave of her hands, sickly 
white things flaked with layers of dry skin from the cardboard we fondle all 
day.  There is always pop music on the radio.  I start to think about the 
upcoming break.

“I was a coke addict for twenty-six years,” she says.  “But I can’t for the 
life of me quit smoking.  My husband can’t either, and he did heroin.”

(Around here the woman from the packaging office on prozac interrupts us 
with something inaudible, bumbling about around the computer with the air 
somehow of a confused rabbit.  “She used to get really angry before she went 
on the prozac,” gossips Gail.  “Once I accidentally took her pencil outside 
and she *exploded* at me, threw a stapler at my head.”  We speculate over 
how she managed to smash up the driver’s side of her car by hitting a “pole 
on the side of the road” while not having been driving on the *wrong* side 
of the road.)

“I once got poison ivy on my ass,” she tells me.  “You want to know how?”

I don’t want to know how.

“Well, my husband got it on his knees, let’s just put it that way!”

I wish I were reading.

Hours are lost, hours pass forever.  There are company meetings where 
everyone makes fun of the Arabs across the street & Gail leans over in her 
God Bless America t-shirt and tells me about how she used to live in that 
building and “those Arabs” had been through five different refugee camps 
before finally coming to the US.  And they didn’t do coke or nothin’.

They play Jewel on the radio, some song that my dad loved and I stop working 
and listen.  It reminds me of too much.  I make a mental note to buy the 
album for pure nostalgic value.  “I always listen to this station,” Gail 
says.  I wish I had headphones.

We talk about Steinbeck, spina bifida and Oprah.  She tells me about how she 
accidentally singed off her eyebrows and bangs once when she was really high 
(“And that’s why I don’t do drugs anymore!”).  She grew up in Western 
Massachusetts.  I tell her I have cousins in Massachusetts, from Rockport 
and Cape Cod.  “Oh,” she scoffs.  “Rit-zeeey.”

I blush.  “We don’t visit them much.”

I’m only eighteen.  I’m going to college in New York City next year.  I 
needed a summer temp job.  She’s in drug rehabilitation, therapy, and AA at 
forty-six and has been working at the book warehouse for going on five 
years.  Her whole body looks defeated, all her joints out of proportion, 
silver caps on her teeth, and a wrinkled-in sneer.  She talks politics 
without mentioning Chomsky.

“What?” she exclaims suddenly one day.

I turn.  “What?”

“Oh, I thought someone was behind me.  But it was just my mom.”

“Your mom?”

“Yes, well you see, there’s a history of witchcraft on her side of the 
family and since she died she comes back to visit me often.”

“Oh.  Er…”

“She came a lot right after she died, but now it’s much more periodic.  Just 
sometimes.”

“Oh,” I say.  “That’s, uh, pretty crazy.”

I blush and hurry away on any errand.  But what would *you* have said?  (I’m 
taking suggestions.)

She doesn’t talk about ghosts after that.  Instead she tells me how she 
loves cross-stitching and always has since she was a child.  I zone out to 
Matchbox 20 on the radio…

“What’s *this*?” she accuses suddenly, pointing skeptically at a 
particularly high stack of textbooks.  “The leaning tower of -- *BOOKS*??”

“I get bored just piling them neatly,” I explain.  “This is more uh artistic 
and it adds—”

“You won’t think it’s very artistic when you’re picking them all up off the 
floor.”

“Well that adds adventure, don’t you think?  An element of *risk*?”

She eyes me warily.  I’ve also arranged the boxes in a carefully 
orchestrated jenga-esque pattern on the table & had been getting absurdly 
angry at co-workers when they mindlessly ruined it with hasty & 
thoughtlessly placed boxes & I pray she doesn’t notice.

I shrug.  “It gives me something to do.”

*I’ve got my eggs, I’ve got my pancakes too/ I’ve got my maple syrup, 
everything but you* sings Jewel on the radio and everything feels so heavy 
suddenly: Gail’s eyes on the red welts on my arms and hands caused by the 
cardboard and walking into various pointy metal things around the room, my 
ripped sneakers, my hunched shoulders, my simultaneous need for her approval 
and disgust at her situation.

She shakes her head & dispels everything.  “You’re so weird.”

Oh yes ma’am.

I laugh.  Maybe I won’t buy the Jewel CD after all.


*****

that's all sinister.  have a nice saturday.
x
jesse

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