The Cubicle Next Door (5 page)

I fiddled with the car radio, adjusting it from my morning talk-radio channel to NPR. Finally made it to the Garden of the Gods exit.

After turning south onto Thirtieth, I watched as Kissing Camels emerged from a background of striking red rocks. I imagined the camels to be bedding down for the evening, legs folded under them, humps in profile. Nuzzling each other before sleep.

I signaled and turned into the park.

Anyone who says rocks are inanimate has never visited Garden of the Gods. There, the rocks breathe life. They glow with energy. Flare with motion. Trees grow from them—roots exposed—using the formations as a dance floor. Birds build nests in them. Marmots and snakes scurry through their holes.

If Colorado Springs is built on the pathway to the plains, Manitou Springs is built on the trail to the mountains. Manitou marked the entrance to the land of dreams: gold and silver mines, ore fields. It was a leafy oasis on the journey to thin air, harsh landscapes, and frozen winter. Above the town, Pikes Peak projects up from the landscape like a fabled lone breaker at the ocean. The seventh wave. The big one.

I turned left off Manitou Avenue and climbed the hill toward home. Home is a turn-of-the-century two-story with an attic. Light blue with white trim. It has everything you’d imagine: a wide front porch overhung by a second-floor balcony and a cute dormer window in the attic. The house sits up from the street; the separated garage is on street level, burrowed into the hill. The front of the property is buttressed by a stone wall, with stone steps leading up into the front yard. And everything is surrounded by a white picket fence.

I pulled the parking brake and got out to push the garage door up. Then I inched the car in, rolled the garage door down, and locked it.

Grandmother was trolling the kitchen, looking for something to eat, when I came in through the back door.

“I have pork chops marinating in the fridge.”

She pulled the refrigerator door open and bent over to verify that I was telling the truth. “Oh. I hadn’t looked there yet. How was work today?”

I didn’t say anything.

“That good?”

“I have a new cubicle mate.”

“They come new every year, don’t they?”

“In general. But this one’s specific. He’s sharing my space. How was your day?”

She didn’t say anything.

“That bad?”

“No one wants the Rossis.”

“Oh.” Well, in the larger picture of things, it wasn’t a big deal. No one had wanted the Rossis for the past ten years. Rossignol was her own personal favorite brand of skis. And since she didn’t ski anymore, not since she broke her hip ten years ago, she tried to pawn them off on everyone else. The problem was that this particular pair of Rossis was just as old-fashioned as she was. In the nicest sort of way, of course. They used to be top-of-the-line, but technology had passed them by and she refused to mark them down. Which reminded me. “You could always mark them down.”

“A pair of skis like that? I’d sooner let my only child run away to India.” An inside joke.

“If you price them low enough, someone will buy them.”

“They’re not for just anyone. They have to be for someone who appreciates them.” She sniffed and crossed her arms, leaned against the counter, and watched me prepare to cook.

I shrugged. And that was it. We’d had the same conversation every day for the past ten years. Except for Sundays. She never worked on Sundays. Not for any religious reason, but simply because most tourists were on their way out of town at the end of the weekend, making Sunday one of the slower days in the shop.

“Is he nice?”

“Who?”

“Your new guy.”

“He’s not my guy.”

“Well, he is new, and until you tell me his name, I don’t have anything else to call him.”

Cranky, cranky. The weather must be starting to change. Her hip always ached when pressure systems shifted.

“Is he mean?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“Joe. His name is Joe.”

“Italian?”

“Irish.”

“Humph.”

My father had been of Irish ancestry. An O’Flaherty. Grandmother had nothing against my father, but everything against his family.

“He seems nice.” It wasn’t that I was defending Joe; it was only that he didn’t deserve to be in Grandmother’s bad graces just because his father had an Irish last name.

“Well then.”

Well then. Well then, I’d just have to bide my time until Greg’s extension ran out. And Joe left. Then I might get my office back.

I left Grandmother in the kitchen and let myself out the back door. I lit the hibachi out on the porch and then came inside to take the pork chops out of the refrigerator and make our salad. A can of black beans, a can of corn, a few snips of cilantro, and a couple heaping tablespoons of salsa. I took the pork chops outside with me and shook off the excess chipotle-lime marinade.

While the pork chops cooked, I went inside and opened all the windows. Like the vast majority of older houses in the Springs area, Grandmother’s didn’t have air-conditioning. There wasn’t much of a breeze, but at least the open windows would exchange the stuffy inside air for stuffy outside air. I turned on the pedestal fans in our bedrooms, positioning them in front of our windows to coax the air inside.

While I was upstairs, I pulled off my shoes and socks and left them in my room. Then I went back outside, flipped the pork chops, and walked off the porch to make a quick tour of the yard. I loved feeling the heat of the flagstones against my bare feet. The yard is a xeriscape. I’d done the work when I’d returned from Boston ten years before, when I’d come back home.

Home, and my life, had always been odd. By the time I was born, Grandmother was done cutting sandwiches into triangles, baking cookies, and training roses to climb her trellis. She’d dealt with her share of household pets. And she had long before resigned from the PTA.

She was happy to make grilled cheese sandwiches or heat up store-bought lasagna, but I’d learned if I wanted anything fancy to eat, I’d have to make it myself. Same went for the yard. For many years, we were the only house on the block with artificial turf substituting for grass. And plastic tulips in the flower boxes.

Now that I’d moved back, we were the only house on the block with xeriscape. But then we were also the only house on the block with an affordable water bill.

Xeriscape used to mean lots of rocks and little tiny plants. Or cactus. But a little research goes a long way. We do have pebble and flagstone paths, but we also have ground-hugging sprays of magenta poppy mallow drooping down over the garage. Spiky fans of chives and dusk-shadowed purple sage. Rounded drifts of lavender, clumps of fuzzy lamb’s ear, and square patches of spongy lemon thyme. I broke off a few leaves of lemon thyme and rubbed them between my fingers. Took a big whiff. Then walked back to the porch, took the pork chops off the grill, and went inside.

Grandmother was sitting at the table with a glass of ice water pressed against her forehead. “Let’s eat outside.”

We filled our plates and then took them out to the front porch and sat on the steps. Eating outside during summer heat waves had become a tradition, but we had never gotten around to buying furniture to sit on.

As we ate, we listened to the evening noises of Manitou Springs. Cars swishing past. Birds calling. Children shouting. The occasional parent yelling.

We were halfway through dinner when she said, “Your mother is fifty today.”

Happy birthday, Mom
.

I used to tell anyone who asked that my mother was dead. She might as well have been.

My mother had just finished her first year at Colorado College when she met my father. It was an interesting match: Vietnam War protester and Air Force Academy instructor. No worse than Romeo and Juliet. And it didn’t turn out much better.

They had one summer of love and then he got sent to Vietnam. He died before my mother told him she was pregnant. His F-4 was shot down. She was inconsolable. Practically catatonic. I was born seven months after his death. When I was less than a day old, my mother walked out of the hospital and ran away to India.

My paternal grandparents denied my paternity, so I ended up living with Grandmother.

I wrote a letter to my mother when I was 13, asking all of the “why” questions I could think of. She wrote back once. Said she thought about me every day. Sent good thoughts my way.

And that was it. I’d rarely thought of her since.

She might as well be dead…except for one small ember of hope that stoked my heart no matter what I told myself. The hope that one day, someday, she’d come home. And then she’d tell me how much she loved me and that leaving me had been a huge mistake.

Crazy, wasn’t it?

My church had a series of sermons on legacies right before I had stopped attending. It made me think long and hard about the legacy my mother had left me. And I’d decided then that her legacy was going to stop with me. I didn’t want to curse anyone else with it, so I made the decision to remove myself from the gene pool.

I decided I would never fall in love with anyone.

I never wanted to care so deeply for someone, depend so completely on someone, that I would go off my head and end up messing up my entire life. And everyone else’s.

As the product of premarital sex, I planned to stay as far away from temptation as I could. Because, as far as I could tell, losing your heart meant losing your mind. So I planned to do whatever it took to stay in control of mine.

I was not, God help me, going to be my mother’s daughter.

Happy birthday, Mom. Love, joy, peace, and other groovy thoughts
.

Five

W
e finished dinner in silence. Grandmother went to the living room with the newspaper to do her crossword puzzle while I cleaned up the dishes.

After I’d finished I hiked up the stairs and logged onto my computer. I knew from experience that trying to go to sleep before 1:00
AM
in such hot weather would be a wasted effort. So I changed into the boxers and tank top I would eventually fall asleep in. I brushed my teeth and washed my face in our tiny closet-of-a-bathroom that has never recovered from its aquamarine-blue 1950s phase. I leaned over the sink and poured a glass of water over my head. Evaporation is the poor man’s air-conditioning. I returned to my bedroom, shivering from the droplets of water making serpentine trails down my back. Repositioning the fan, I turned it to high and then sat down in front of the computer.

I needed to blog.

I’ve never been one for writing. Ask any of my English teachers. But blogging isn’t really writing. It’s thinking while you type, and I can do that. So the previous year I had started a blog. In place of those clever images people post, I took a digital picture of myself with a paper bag over my head.

Since it was mostly about work and the stupid things people do, I called it The Cubicle Next Door. I made sure there was no way anyone would ever trace it to me. And I always blogged at home.

Remember my theory about needing to vent regularly? The blog helped. Posting a blog was like screaming, yelling, and throwing a tantrum without having to utter one word. Same satisfaction, less energy required.

I blog nearly every day. There are predictable peaks of vehemence in my entries: around evaluation periods when I rant about the futility of overinflating everyone’s performance appraisals and just after the release of new rules that sound efficient but only end up creating more work for everybody. But, generally, I’m a “part of the solution” kind of person.

That evening, though, I was looking forward to writing about one of my traditional pet peeves: Waste.

The department was gearing up again for the school year. The new department Snack-O, the designated snack bar stocker, had replenished the shelves that day with all manner of junk food, each sealed in its own shiny, plastic-wrapped package. Said package was quickly thrown into the garbage after the snack had been consumed. It was just wrong. For all sorts of ethical, moral, economic, and health reasons.

After I blogged, I felt much better. I surfed the Internet for a while, trying to kill time. Logged onto the message boards I frequented and chatted with those who were signed on. Glanced at the computer clock in the corner of my screen.

Sighed.

Three more hours. At least.

I adjusted the fan so it would hit the back of my neck, blowing my hair up and to the side. It didn’t help much, so I picked it up and used it like a hair dryer, directing the air flow to different parts of my body. My arms and legs. The back of my knees.

Grandmother knocked on the door. “Goodnight.” She nudged the door open. Saw me with the fan. “Can I have some?”

She took off her reading glasses, closed her eyes, and motioned with her hands toward her face. She stood there a full five minutes, basking in the air like a cat in the sun. Then she opened her eyes, kissed her palm, and pressed it to my forehead. She’d been doing that for 30 years. “Goodnight.”

After she left I returned the fan to the floor and logged back onto my blog. I’d been meaning to jazz it up a little. All I had was time, so I went to work.

I played around with the colors. Played with background graphics and photos. Tinkered during those postmidnight hours when everything seemed like a good idea. Finally arrived at a combination I liked. Figured it would be a nice change for the ten people who read it every week. Over the course of six hours, I’d gone from having a no-frills black-and-white site to having graphics and color and a nifty background.

By that time it was 3:00.

I went to bed.

The next morning, heading out of town on Highway 24, I got honked at. After being stuck in the previous evening’s commute and watching everyone else do something illegal or immoral on the highway, I was hypersensitive about my driving. And I am a good driver. Really. I’ve never gotten a ticket or been in an accident, knock on wood. I always drive with the traffic, even if it’s ten miles above the speed limit, because statistics prove it’s safest that way.