The Lattice Group - The Contents Of Our Workplace

The Contents Of Our Workplace

"those last fifteen minutes before six o’clock moving like molasses"

The door. This is where we enter in the morning, having left behind our lovers in their beds, our husbands and wives, our sick children, our aging parents, our stoned roommates, and our one night stands. This is where we leave in the evening, those last fifteen minutes before six o’clock moving like molasses, I swear I actually saw the minute hand go backwards once, and finally it’s time but still we wait, an extra minute, or two, or ten, until another person—an intern, an assistant—makes a move to gather her things, casually to glance at the clock as if the thought is just occurring to her: Oh, I really should be heading home now. And then one by one we all rise, shake the day from our shoulders, walk slowly to the door. Beyond which we are free.

The desks. Our workplace is small. There is just one office and the rest of us have desks. These are our homes, our luxury accommodations, when we are at work. We tape up pictures, arrange figurines from last year’s vacation to the Yucatan or Mikonos or London, replace the standard issue dirt-gray mouse-pad for one with a photo of a boyfriend, a baby. We eat lunch at our desks, digging into salads and pastas and melted cheese sandwiches from the deli downstairs. The most exciting hour of the day comes when the new intern takes our orders for lunch. Should I put goat cheese in my salad today? Can we use petty cash to pay for cookies? We work while we eat, but the chatter is looser; we call across our desks and pretend to fight over the cookies. We act like we are close friends sharing a meal—we laugh and gossip—but all we can think about is elementary school, high school, college, weekends, and how we used to be able to eat lunch with our real friends, the people we’re doing this for. The people waiting for us on the other side of the door.

The computers. These conceal our secrets, they are our portals, our way out of here and into the real world. We have ten Internet windows open at once. We chat with our college friends and email our mothers and play Scrabble online and make lists for the party we’re throwing and when someone walks over we frantically minimize and block the screen with our bodies and hope they didn’t notice that we were shopping for purses.

The bathroom. This is where we take breaks, where we linger in the stalls, where we stand before the mirror and examine our faces for new changes, new wrinkles, new gray hairs to pluck with a satisfying yank. We wash our hands, we reapply lipstick, we hope all at once that no one will come in, and that someone will. Several of us have quietly vomited in here—still hung-over from a night of drinking, or racked with morning sickness. Sometimes we chat in here, but never for too long. There is a sign above the toilet, “DON’T THROW ANYTHING IN TOILET.” And under it, a different, smaller sign: “Toilet Paper is Okay.” Someone has scrawled on the door of my stall, Get out while you can.

The walls. The décor is tastefully generic -- art prints on the walls, and one large stuffed bluebird hanging from the ceiling. The bluebird is one of us; she does not belong here.

The people. Janey works the phones. She sits at the desk closest to the door. She answers the phone with a chirpy, “Bluebird Marketing, how may I direct your call?” and we are so used to this, so sick of hearing her, that even when we are safe at home the words get stuck in our heads like a song and echo in our dreams. Margaret has the desk near Janey; she handles event coordination. She has a son with cystic fibrosis and every spring she Walks for the Cure with her husband, a loudmouth out-of-work sports writer who she’d never have stayed with so long if it weren’t for the kid. Jeremy and Leslie do publicity. They share one big desk and are the only people in the office who have legitimate reason to talk to each other all day long. Their low laughing voices irritate us, but they are good people. Jeremy is engaged to be married, and Leslie is in love with our boss. That brings us to Melanie, one of the assistants, who is actually sleeping with our boss. They take long lunches in his office with the door closed, and he is too purposeful in avoiding her gaze during meetings. The interns, Jemma and David and Andrew, are wide-eyed, gum-smacking know-it-alls who are correct in their rude assumption that in a few years they will be sitting where we are. They wear jeans and sandals and seem almost to mock us with their innocent faces, their happy agreement to do whatever we ask. They lean on one another’s desks and take long lunches. Delilah, another assistant, has a husband who stays home with her twin baby girls. Her phone is always buzzing and it is always her husband. Delilah’s eyes are ringed with wrinkles, and no one expects her to be working here past the end of the year. Douglas has the desk closest to the boss’s office, and he has been working here the longest. He is fat and gets drunk at all of the office parties. He loves this job, and is often the last one to leave. And finally, there is The Boss. He has an office with a door that closes. Parties are the only occasions we are allowed to be in there, and we smoke cigarettes out his window. He is in the midst of a messy divorce—we do not know if his problems with his wife have anything to do with Melanie—and he is not quite as young as he once was. But then again, neither are we.