Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (7 page)

At work, when I was still going to work, I spent most of my time underground, in a room adjacent to a parking garage, in a basement, actually, though they did not call it that. They called it “Level B” instead—the way it appeared on the buttons in the elevator—or “the lower level,” thinking, I suppose, it sounded more elegant that way, less like a damp place with cobwebs, though it sounded to me like a district in hell, though in fact it was pleasant down there and tranquil most of the time, except at the beginning and end of the day, when the cars roared in and out. They had put me in the shipping room at first, directly across the hall from the cafeteria on the second floor, but the constant clatter of the machines in there, the intrusive chatter of the people working with me, and the collective roar that jumped out of the cafeteria every time someone opened the door proved too much. I did not go up and complain about the noise in the shipping room, but I did, I think, say out loud, in the presence of people standing near me, several times, perhaps saying it louder than I ought, than I would have said it had everything not been so very loud around me, that it was proving too much, and they moved me to the basement. I had half a room down there. The other half belonged to Brodt. They had built a partition across the middle of the room, separating his side from mine. The partition was made of glass, so it was not difficult to keep an eye on what was happening on the other side of the room, even if one could not easily go there. There was no furniture to speak of in my half, just a long Formica-topped table against one wall, a swivel chair, and a mail cart, if a mail cart is furniture. Mine resembled an ordinary shopping caddy but with metal racks instead of a wire basket, and bigger wheels. The door to the whole room was on my half, and Brodt had to pass through that and walk behind where I would be sitting with my back to him, hearing his footsteps, to reach his half, where he had a long table and a chair identical to mine, a filing cabinet, and another taller metal cabinet with padlocked doors. A row of video monitors hung on metal brackets from the wall above his table, and in those he could see everywhere in the building, even inside the elevators. He would spend hours a day just sitting in the chair, a can of Diet Pepsi in one hand, manipulating a bank of switches on the table in front of him. A great many places seemed to need watching, and by fiddling with the switches he could make one or another flash up on a screen. The rat is scratching at the lid of the tank, standing on top of its little wheel and reaching up to pluck at the wire. Brodt was not a tidy person and his table was piled with all manner of stuff—fax machine, telephone, paper punch practically buried under heaps of official documents and forms and security-related catalogues and magazines—especially car magazines—candy wrappers, takeout boxes, and so forth, and shoved off to the side of all that trash, at the very end of the table, the pale-green IBM electric typewriter I mentioned earlier, for typing up reports, I assumed, though he never typed anything while I was present, either because he was ashamed of being a two-finger typist, as I think now, or because he did not want me to see what was in the reports, as I thought at the time. I don’t know that there were any reports. Maybe the typewriter was just there. My table, on the other hand, was as bare as the Gobi, except for an hour or so in the morning, when it was heaped with mail. I pulled handfuls of mail from big post-office sacks and tossed them on the table and then walked up and down the length of the table distributing the envelopes among brightly colored plastic totes that I then loaded onto the cart and pushed from office to office. The arrangement of our tables, jammed against opposite walls, meant that Brodt and I worked with our backs to each other, with our backs
facing
each other, I want to say, to capture the feeling I had of his broad back pointing at me constantly,
jutting
assertively in my direction, I might say as well, to capture the intensity of my consciousness of his being there, despite not being able to actually see him unless I turned around in my chair or turned my chair around (it had wheels), which I did not often do. When I did turn I saw only his shoulders and the back of his head. He might have been sleeping for all I knew. Sometimes I could tell he was awake, when a monitor jumped from one spot in the building to another or the soda can rose slowly, absently, in the direction of his mouth, and at other times I knew he had nodded off, when the Pepsi can slipped from his fingers and hit the cement floor with a dull thud and
phfft,
if it was nearly full, or a shallow clatter otherwise. Our room was usually very quiet, the sound would cause us both to jump, and we would turn and nod. In the afternoon there was usually nothing for me to do but wait for four o’clock and time to go home, and I would prop my elbows on the table, rest my chin in my hands, and doze, or I would work a crossword puzzle. Sometimes, if Brodt was out on his rounds, I might turn around and watch his travels on the monitors. I have not, as I said, been to work in several months. Months and months, and all the trees have leaves. I wear plastic clogs now that the days are warm again, so I don’t have problems with laces. I have two pairs of clogs, a green and a purple. I like the purple better and seldom wear the green. I wore them with socks on St Patrick’s Day, because that was all I had, even though they are not the right green and I did not go anywhere on that day. My earmuffs are green and black. I left the blue ones at work. When I was a child no one wore green or purple shoes. In that way things are better. Potts said it likes to be taken out and allowed to ride on one’s shoulder, hinting, I suppose, that I ought to do that. “He loves to ride around up there,” she said. “Just set him down and he’ll scramble up your pants and sit on your shoulder.” Oh, shudder! More pages on the floor.

I seem to be making progress. Yesterday in particular I worked steadily, starting early in the morning, with the sun practically, and not pausing for lunch. When I finally stopped, I took a step back and contemplated the pages, some on the table behind the typewriter, a great many others scattered on the floor, and then I walked to Starbucks. On my way over there, strolling in the warm spring air, I had a sense of “knocking off,” a pleasant feeling of being on my way somewhere to “take a break from work,” as opposed to my usual aimless wandering. I sat by the window, near a table clustered with chattering young people. I had a latte and a croissant. A dirty bearded man came up to the window and stared at me through the glass while I was eating. I turned my back. When I turned around again he was gone. And after that I walked over to the park and sat awhile, and then I walked home. Whenever I think of taking a walk it is something like this that I have in mind—perhaps just circling the ice cream factory, which occupies an entire block, or strolling to the diner or to Starbucks, sometimes just walking over there without going inside, or trudging the three blocks to the little park and back. Passing a store window I sometimes look over and see someone I don’t at first glance recognize; and then I do, suddenly, and think, Mother of God. I don’t actually say those words, even to myself—it is more that I experience a shock of recognition and surprise that I might, if there were someone with me when it happens, express in that way. I have been visiting the park more often since the weather turned warm again, walking over at all hours of the day, when the mood strikes me, it is so close, though never after dark, because of the men who are on the benches then, sullen or juiced up when they are not asleep. As a small child I often took long walks with Nurse through the neighborhood beyond the fence of spears, sometimes up our street and around a curve in the road to a park at the very top of the hill, where I was allowed to climb on the monument to the soldiers who had perished in the war—that would be the First World War—Nurse lifting me onto the pedestal and holding me tightly by the ankles while I looked down through a gauze of yellow-brown haze at the midsized industrial city below—row upon row of nearly identical houses running right up to the base of our hill, to where the trees began, and dimly in the smother beyond the houses gigantic tangles of soot-blackened brick and steel, which were the mills and factories, tall brick chimneys rising out of the heaps, where sometimes I saw a burst of orange flame, indicating, Nurse said, that someone had opened the door to a blast furnace. Our house was on the upper slope of the hill, not entirely on top though, and not quite on the park. Nurse told me Papa had wanted us to live quite on the park, but none of the houses there were suitable, while our house, though not on the park, was suitable, being far bigger than any of the houses up there. The monument to the dead soldiers was a tall granite obelisk in the center of the park, on the very peak of the hill, and was, Nurse said, four times taller than Papa. The names of the battles the soldiers had perished in were inscribed in angular letters on the four sides of the pedestal: Argonne Forest, Marne, Château-Thierry, Meuse, and others I have forgotten, the letters cut deep into the stone. I spent our first visit to the park digging dirt and moss out of the letters with a hairpin, disturbing small white insects that rushed out to be killed with the point of the pin. On other visits we played a game in which I closed my eyes and pretended I was blind, palpating the grooves with eyeless fingers in order to guess the letters, and in that way learned to spell the names of all the battles, though Nurse could not tell me how to pronounce them. Meuse in particular was baffling. Mama told me “château” was how French people say “castle,” and Château-Thierry in the picture in my mind got mixed up with the castle in one of my books, but since the First World War was a thoroughly modern conflict, it was the wrong picture. Château-Thierry in my picture was a castle made of pure white stone, like the castle of Mad King Ludwig, standing on the absolute pinnacle of a perpendicular mountain so high birds soared below it. It had conical red-roofed towers with red and blue ribbon-like banners floating from the finials. It was Papa who told me it was the wrong picture. A cannon stood next to the monument, supported by enormous wood-spoked wheels that I was not to touch because of splinters. The long barrel jutted obliquely skyward, at its lowest point just inches above my head, and one day I jumped up and encircled the barrel with my arms, intending to swing there, and it was hot from the sun. Nurse shouted and I let go. She rushed, grabbed my arms and twisted them wrist-up, hurting.
“Now
look,” she said, and I looked: my fingers, my palms, and the undersides of my forearms were orange-brown with rust. Clarence was fond of wars and owned a great many books about them. When he was eighteen he had tried to join the army, in order not to get drafted later, he said, but was turned down on medical grounds—he was missing the tip of his right index finger, his father having dropped the hood of a car on it when he was six. It was his trigger finger, is the reason it mattered to them, I suppose, though it did not prevent him from being a perfect shot the rest of his life. Even when his hands shook so badly the ice in his glass rattled, he could still go out in the yard and shoot cans off a tree limb with a pistol. It was a disappointment to him, I think, to be rejected, though he told people it was a lucky break. And once during the period in Philadelphia when we were still undecided about whether we liked each other after all, he threatened to join the Foreign Legion. He meant this metaphorically, of course.

Two days of drizzling rain. I typed my way through them. And I have moved the rat tank, placing it on top of the bookcase. To clear a space for it I have transferred everything, all the photographs and ribbon boxes, to the sofa until I can think where to put them, and in the process one of the pictures slipped from my grasp, struck the floor, and shattered—the glass covering the picture shattered, not the photograph. The rat watched while I swept it up. It seems interested in what I do. The top of the bookcase is, as I mentioned, layered with dust. I wiped it off with a bath towel, not a proper dust rag but the only thing I could find, before placing the tank there, all my dust rags being dirty, odd as that sounds, and then I sat on the sofa next to the stack of picture frames and carefully wiped each of those. The ribbon boxes, of course, don’t have any dust yet, but I wiped them anyway. No sooner had I finished doing this than I noticed the dust on the lower shelves and a gray fuzz as thick as mouse fur on the tops of the books, obvious from where I was seated on the near end of the sofa, an end of the sofa that I don’t in the normal course of things sit on. I usually sit on the other, far end, because that end is against a wall that serves as a prop for cushions in case I want to recline, as I often do when I sit on the sofa instead of in the armchair. I moistened the towel and wiped the books one at a time, top and bottom and sides, and placed them on the sofa too, and then I wiped the shelves. The mouse fur formed black cylinders when I wiped it. On the floor they look like droppings.

Still raining this morning, a halfhearted, senseless drizzle of the sort that always makes me depressed and cross. “Her small rather dingy apartment is plunged in despondency and gloom” is how it feels, how the light feels, seeping through the dirty rain-streaked panes. After pushing the fern out of the way, I more or less forgot about it until this morning, when it occurred to me that I ought to water it—reminded by the rain, I suppose. I carried water from the kitchen in the tall glass vase that I used to put flowers in when I had visitors, which would have been before I came to this apartment, as I have not had visitors here to speak of—to speak
to,
I should say, since there have been window washers and plumbers and Potts, of course, and one or two others, briefly, when I was still going to the library, though those petered out rather quickly—I could not find much to say to any of them. I sometimes bring flowers home from the park, but the stems on those are too short for the vase, so it just sits in a kitchen cupboard, good for nothing but pangs. I thought it would make a suitable watering can, but it turned out to have the wrong shape for that: no matter how cautiously I poured a steady trickle ran down the side of the vase and dripped onto the floor. Abandoning caution, I tipped it straight up, but that did not work either—the water rushed out in a single gush, ricocheting off the fronds, and most of it splashed onto the floor again. So I decided to mist instead. I pumped until my fingers ached, emptied the bottle, refilled it, and emptied half of it again, until the fronds were fairly dripping, as if they were in a rain jungle, I was thinking at the time. The pot stands in a wide puddle now, and some of the spray has gone on the wall as well. I should have thought of that before pushing the fern against it. Since I was still holding the bottle, I thought I would spray a window, just to see. I chose one that does not have notes stuck all over it, the center one of the three in front, as I think I mentioned. I did not spray the whole pane—after soaking an area about the size of my head, I stopped and rubbed with my sleeve. The result was a roundish spot slightly cleaner than the rest of the window. Looking out through it as through a porthole, I saw that most of the dirt was on the other side of the glass. The dirt on the inside seems to be mainly finger and palm prints, due to my habit of pressing my hands to the glass when I stand there looking out. I write that, and I get a picture of myself from the outside, as I must appear to someone stopped in the street below: an elderly woman standing at a window staring out, arms raised above her head, palms pressed to the glass.