The Cubicle Next Door (21 page)

Grandmother repossessed the aprons and returned them to the kitchen.

Again, Oliver waited until Grandmother sat down before he seated himself.

It started me wondering.

After the first rotation of food, Betty realized the cranberries were missing.

“I’ll get them.” I pushed my chair away from the table and stood up.

Across from me, Oliver did the same.

“It’s okay. Sit down. I’ve got them.” I found the can of jellied cranberries in the refrigerator, cranked a can opener around the top, shoved a table knife down to the bottom of the can, and shook it out into a bowl. Perfect. It stood on its end, the metal corrugations from the can intact.

Oliver stood again when I reappeared from the kitchen, and remained standing until I not only put the bowl on the table, but also sat down in my chair.

“More water, Oliver?” Grandmother still had the eyes of an eagle.

He began to demur, but I decided to get the pitcher anyway. I rose.

He rose.

“Will you sit down? I’ve got it.”

“If I sit down, then you will deprive me of the pleasure of standing to acknowledge your singular beauty.”

“He means, he’s standing because you’re a lady.” It might have come across more tactfully had Adele not shouted.

“Thank you, Adele.” I caught Joe trying to smother a laugh out of the corner of my eye. “And thank you, Oliver.”

He closed his eyes and inclined his head just exactly the way I’d seen actors do in medieval movies. Next, I’d probably start calling him Your Grace and kneel to kiss his hand.

Now that I knew what that was all about, I started an experiment. I waited until he was cutting a piece of meat, and then I stopped eating, put my fork down, and leaned slightly forward, as if I were about to get up. I wanted to see if leaping to his feet was some sort of instinct or whether it had more to do with how observant he was.

He put his fork down, placed his knife along the edge of his plate and leaned forward too.

I leaned back.

He picked up his fork and knife and resumed cutting.

Score one for Oliver.

The next time, I waited until his fork was halfway to his mouth. And I wasn’t eating at that point, so I didn’t put off any signals. I just leaned forward a little, tiny bit.

He put his fork down and leaned forward too.

Score two for Oliver.

So then I waited until he wasn’t eating at all. I waited until he was involved in conversation. Until he had half-turned away from me and was talking to Thelma.

And I leaned forward even less than before.

So did he.

Score three for Oliver.

The next time I tried, I caught him while he was in the middle of passing the butter to Betty. And I actually stood all the way up.

And so did he, butter dish in hand, waiting for me to do something.

So I bent over and picked my napkin up off the floor. Sat back down.

The next time I tried, he was laughing, a full-blown laugh. Head thrown back. But the minute I leaned, his head snapped forward and he pierced me with a stare.

I leaned away.

He leaned away.

I leaned forward.

He leaned forward.

I rose. One inch.

He rose two.

I sat back down.

He didn’t. He was on to me.

And so was Thelma. “Will you stop being so fidgety? You’re making me nervous.”

And that was the end of that.

Over pumpkin pie, the ladies got Joe talking about the Academy. From a cadet’s perspective.

Betty mentioned her daughter had once attended a cadet ball.

“When I was there, each class had a ball. I don’t know for sure what they do now, but I know they still have one at Christmas.”

“That’s the one she went to: the Christmas one. She said it was absolutely gorgeous. All those young men in uniform.”

Joe winked at me. “The Christmas trees are pretty nice too.”

Betty looked at Joe with narrowed eyes. Then she turned those eyes on me. “You said they’re having one this year?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiled. “Then you should take Jackie. You’ve never been to a ball, have you, Jackie?”

Adele answered the question for me. “No, she hasn’t. What fun you’ll have! What day is it, Joe?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to find out.”

“It’s a date! You find out and then Jackie will put it on her calendar.”

It was
not
a date! It was a total setup.

After dinner, Joe and Oliver went into the living room while the rest of us cleaned up. Theoretically.

I stacked, scraped, and washed the dishes while the others reminisced yet again about Thanksgivings past. Who among their long-dead friends had made the best pumpkin pie. Who had tried to pass off canned gravy as homemade.

At last, dishes done and gossip exhausted, we made our way to the living room.

Joe was in a chair, watching football.

Oliver was sitting, stick straight on the couch, knees together, hands folded on his lap. His head had fallen to his chest and he was snoring softly.

Grandmother shook her head and then went and got a blanket from the closet. Began to tuck it around his legs. Glanced up at him. She looked as if she wanted to plant a kiss in her palm and press it to his forehead. But she refrained.

At that moment, the crowd on TV went wild. Joe whooped and leaped from his chair.

Oliver stopped mid-snore. Blinked. Saw Grandmother smoothing the blanket and the rest of the women standing. He scrambled to his own feet, undoing all the work she had just done.

Score one for me.

Just before Joe left, Grandmother went into the kitchen to make a plate of leftovers for him. She came into the entry hall carrying a foil-covered plate in one hand and what looked like a bone in the other. “Is this yours, Joe? Or Oliver’s?”

Joe took it from her hand. “The wishbone! We set it aside.”

He held it out to me. “Take the end. We’ll see who gets to make a wish.”

Everyone was watching, so I took the end and pulled. The bone stretched, and then cracked, leaving me with the larger piece.

Adele clapped her hands. “Make a wish!”

I looked at Joe.

He was looking at me.

I dropped my eyes to the wishbone. I wished I were normal, wished I could just fall into a relationship without a second thought. It might not have been the first time I’d wished it, but it was the first time I really understood what I was missing.

We went to the Catholic church on Sunday.

Again.

People were starting to notice we never took communion. Asked, in the most roundabout of ways, whether we were Catholics.

We told them we were not.

They asked if we wanted to become Catholics.

We said we did not.

They weren’t quite sure what to make of us.

And we weren’t either.

There was no praise band at the church. They played music I’d never heard before. Had rituals I was not familiar with. But they kept talking to us before and after service. Mass. They knew who we were. They knew where we lived and where we worked. So we kept going back.

That Sunday, when we heard they needed someone to serve coffee and donuts after Mass, Joe volunteered.

THE CUBICLE NEXT DOOR BLOG

Thanks

It seems appropriate, at this time of year, to say thanks. So, thank you, John Smith.

For being an okay kind of guy.

For being nice to the people who make up my little world. Not everyone would take the time to do the things you do.

It hasn’t been nearly as bad as I expected, sharing a cubicle wall with you.

Posted on November 23 in
The Cubicle Next Door | Permalink

Comments

It is interesting to note that although the idea of a day set aside for giving thanks began with the Pilgrims, it was not an annual event with those first colonists in the New World. It was not until more than a century later, in 1789, during the American Revolution, that George Washington suggested an official day of Thanksgiving. New York was the first state to turn it into an annual tradition, but not until 1817. And it was left to Abraham Lincoln to appoint the last Thursday in November as the official date of celebration. He did it in 1863, like George Washington before him, in the throes of war.

Posted by:
NozAll | November 23 at 09:09 PM

And as the great Winston Churchill once said, “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.”

Posted by:
survivor | November 24 at 08:10 AM

I find most things in life aren’t nearly as bad as I expected. The imagination is sometimes much worse than reality.

Posted by:
philosophie | November 24 at 08:12 AM

To life on the cubicle farm! To us and those like us.

Posted by:
justluvmyjob | November 24 at 11:41 AM

Exactly what sort of people make up your little world? And how many of you…er…them are there? Should we just call you Sybil?

Posted by:
theshrink | November 24 at 11:51 AM

Twenty-One

A
n e-mail appeared, the first week in December, about the department Christmas party. A time for the faculty, staff, and their family members to invade the colonel’s home, drink spiked eggnog, and talk about the same things we talked about at work.

Everyone was supposed to bring something. I signed up for an appetizer.

I’d signed up for an appetizer for the last ten years.

I had a great recipe for a pesto-and-goat-cheese mold with roasted red peppers. I served it with crackers. As long as I’d been bringing it to potlucks, I’d never had leftovers.

That Thursday, on the way home from work, I stopped by Manitou’s taffy shop to see Adele. She’d owned it since the 1960s.

The taffy machine was turning, stretching out candy between its mechanical arms. I opened the door and was overcome by a wave of sugar-coated nostalgia. When I was younger, I had split my time between helping Grandmother in the ski shop and Adele in her shop.

“Jackie!” She flipped up a section of the spotless white counter, paused to sneeze, and came over to give me a hug. “When’s the last time you came to see me?”

“It’s been a long time.” I kissed her cheek. “You usually come to see me.”

“Here. Have a piece of taffy.” She took a piece of orange candy from the display box.

I took it from her. Unwrapped it and popped it into my mouth. Savored the smooth hard surface before it began to stick to my teeth.

“How’s Joe?”

“I work with him. We share an office.”

“And?”

“And that’s it. You probably know more about him than I do. You’re the one who plays poker with him every week.”

“But you’re dating, aren’t you?”

I shook my head. Relented. “Sort of. But not really.”

“But he’s asked you out, hasn’t he?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “It’s too complicated to explain. Grandmother told me you had a cold. I came over to see how you were doing, not to talk about Joe.”

“Well, he’s always talking about you.”

The next day, as I was working, I heard Joe clear his throat. And soon after I heard him speak.

“You don’t have to go to the Christmas Ball with me if you don’t want to.”

My fingers paused, hands poised above the keyboard. “I guess before I spent time and energy thinking about it, I’d want to actually be asked. Directly.”

“Would you go to the Christmas Ball with me?”

Joe’s voice came from high above my head. When I lifted my eyes toward the sound, I looked into his. His arms were folded on top of the cubicle wall, his chin resting on top of them.

I heard myself say yes before I remembered I couldn’t dance. Had never danced. Before I remembered I didn’t even own a dress. But I had to say yes. If I didn’t, I knew Adele would never speak to me again. And neither would Thelma or Betty.

His dimples flashed before he disappeared behind the wall.

A dance.

I was going to a dance.

With Joe.

The next morning, after having endured a sleepless night, I decided to let Grandmother in on the news.

“I have…a situation.”

Grandmother raised her eyes from the newspaper. “A situation? What sort of situation?”

“Joe asked me to a dance.”

“I know, I was there. At Thanksgiving. It was about time.”

“For what?”

“For him to take you on a real date.”

“It’s not a date. It’s a dance. And it would be silly to go to a dance without a…date. It really is a date, isn’t it?”

“It’s a date.”

“But I don’t have a dress.”

“Don’t worry about the dress. I’ve been fantasizing about seeing you in a dress for years. Decades.”

“I don’t want one with any…stuff on it.”

Grandmother lifted an eyebrow. “Frills and lace? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. Betty will have just the thing.”

Betty? I doubted it.

But then, I wasn’t a wearer of dresses, was I?

We went over to Betty’s house that evening after work. She brought dresses out of her closet by the armful. Among them was something simple in satin. Very plain. Very straight. It was strapless and had a high waist with the embellishment of a long thin horizontal bow. It was made of silvery-lavender material.

Betty shook her head as soon as she saw it. “You probably wouldn’t want to try this one on. It’s strapless. More of a spring dress, really.”

I nodded. She was the expert, after all.

We went through the rest of the dresses. There were several that were the right size, but the wrong style.

Adele looked at the pile of rejected dresses on the bed and sighed as she patted my hand. “I don’t know what to tell you. Guess you’ll have to go shopping.”

The other women looked stricken. They knew what that meant. While their definition of shopping meant boutique, mine started and ended with the local thrift store.