Bright Shards of Someplace Else

Key Phrases

40 keY Phrases I had to fire Mol. Today was the day. The regional director had called me and told me, apologetically, that they had received enough complaints about Mol over the last six months to necessitate it, and that the previous person in my position had issued her several warnings, none of which had made any difference. “I’m sorry you have to be the one to do it so early in your employment,” he had said, “but at least you don’t know her too well yet. That should make it easier.” He was right; I did not know Mol at all. She was simply an unkempt and increasingly occasional presence in the office next door. I’d been working for Journey’s End Memorials for only two months when I heard from the director. Our company made videos of deceased loved ones to play at funerals or wakes, but I was assured, during my interview, that the workplace was nonetheless “youthful and upbeat.” To demonstrate, I was invited to a family fun picnic by the upper management the first weekend after I started. I’d been to enough company fun days in my working life to know this could be a cheerful drunken group-vent or a snake pit of office politics, where every ketchup pass represented a subversive uprising or an affirmation of an inexorable power dynamic. But the picnic was, instead, a desperate counterbalance to what I would discover was as morose a workplace as it sounded. The paper plates were cut to resemble gravestones, and different managers roasted each other by delivering mock eulogies; the speaker with a beer in hand and the roastee standing on a picnic table, a bedraggled funeral wreath about his neck. Key Phrases 41 During this display of forced gallows humor and impenetrable inside jokes (“Paint the dove, Georgie. Paint it!”), a youngish woman, laughing and splotched-faced, stopped to say hello. “Isn’t this a riot,” she said, as she unwound a piece of corn silk from her teeth with her pinky nail. In truth I found the proceedings disheartening—I was hoping Journey’s End might feel different from my old job, more real and involving. I had just left a job managing a team of secret shoppers , a group of six men and women who practiced being invisible, the kind of customers a business would mistreat with impunity, since their personhood seemed in question. As I coached them on how to be ever more unobtrusive (while still making enough demands to put the supermarket or whatever through its paces), they would move down the scale of presence—from coworkers, to strangers, to movie extras milling in the frame, to flat images, to simply thoughts. Even when I had their attention, I found myself tapping shoulders and grazing forearms to confirm all of us were there. I hoped to get away from that. The woman began glossing the jokes and references. “You see, George once dumped a live dove in a bucket of food dye, since he needed a clip of a cardinal flying . . .” She asked me where I was from (downstate), if my family liked it here (I lived alone), and then she asked how that was working out, and it was here that I began heeding the training from my former job. I let my eyes focus on a middle distance , past her face but short of the snorting, bald manager wearing the wreath like a puffed-up Cesar. I hunched my shoulders slightly, and pulled my arms inward, compressing my physical presence. When I told her living alone was fine, my preference really, I flattened my slightly eastern dialect into that of a bland midwestern, midcentury broadcaster. It was only when I let my thoughts stray to my new apartment (alert distraction is what we’d called it, think of something else but still pay attention to when and how you’re served) that the woman Key Phrases 42 herself began to disappear. The heavily furnished rental, full of antiques and personal baubles from the owner, made me feel like an intruder , and I was careful not to take up too much space, sitting on only one of the easy chairs and never opening the second bedroom closet. This woman was like all that musty furniture—oppressive while ostensibly offering hospitality and comfort. That was my first, and longest, interaction with Mol...