Writing Exercise 1 - Jenni Moody

The window across from her desk did not show the world. No trees, fabrics of blue, or slivers of natural light were admitted into her office. She did not know whether it was raining or not. Day after day she sat at her desk and felt cheated by the false window that looked out into a dimly lit hallway and the people that sometimes passed through it. In the mornings, before ten o’clock, her main daydream was that she could knock the walls down. Take out the elevators and the women’s restroom; bring back the wind and eyes that understand the sun.

The sign beside her desk stated her position as “office associate I.” The word hummed in her ears with a cruel resemblance to all of the other customer service jobs she had slogged through since earning her undergraduate degree. It had been “sales associate” at the chain bookstore and “senior clerk” at the library. And though she was making twice as much money as she ever had in her life, her body and mind were miserable.

At noon the smell of Lean Cuisines filled the office (the windows in the kitchen did not open). Baked chicken, white rice, swirls of vegetables, pastas, and pizzas for the lucky ones. It was an office of pediatricians and all of the doctors were female and on a diet. After waiting for someone else’s chicken stir fry to revolve for four minutes in the microwave, she gave the same treatment to her pepperoni French bread and then took it back to her desk so she could answer the phone if it rang.

The phone calls were the worst part of her job. She was an office associate I, not a nurse. Every day a parent would launch into a detailed description of her daughter’s sexual habits and why it was vital that her daughter be tested for HIV today. Or a mother would begin the story of how she had not noticed the anorexia at first but now she knew it was bad because she could hear her daughter vomiting at night and it pained her to see such a young, beautiful girl too exhausted to attend her prom. She would listen to these calls and then break in at a breath pause or a wandering thought to explain her position and offer to transfer the call. But the nurse’s desk was usually busy or turned-off during their lunch break, and the same people who had appealed to her humanity as a doctor the moment before would call back to harangue her as an office employee.

She picked up a stack of papers, turned in her chair to the exit door of her two-panel cubicle, and headed for the copy machine. The maze of beige, 7-foot tall walls beneath a Wal-Mart sized roof of fluorescent lights depressed her even more than the lack of outside connection. On these trips through the maze, she would let her imagination take over as the mechanical swishing of her opaque black pantyhose carried her along. The most common daydream was of the spear – or a curtain rod – suddenly turning the corner and greeting her by sinking through her chest, in the upper-right corner, near her shoulder.

She didn’t wonder how the spear had come to be in an office full of doctors, or why they would use curtains in a place where windows were highly valued (only the heads of departments who had been in the office for years inherited them). But she felt, at the moment the spear pierced her imagination that something wonderfully new was happening. It would be carried by the maintenance men, who would gasp and bend over her after her injury. Their hammers would clink against their retractable measuring tape as they asked her in their maintenance vocabulary if she was able to function properly, if everything was working on its own or gently bumping up against its coordinating part. She turned the last corner to the copy machine, and as usual no one was there.

In the mornings, she walked into the office from the remote parking lot that cost $5 every month. She refused to park in the deck beside her office that deducted $50 from each paycheck – especially since there was a rumor that this would soon rise to $60. On her walk to the office from the parking lot, she would pass by the Department of Health every morning. Most of those days, the air quality flag flapped on a pole beside the stars and X’s and strips of color. She thought often of buying a gas mask to wear – more for her lungs’ safety than anything else – for on these days her lungs genuinely ached. When she told this to her friend, this desire to wear a gas mask on the days that the air quality flag was raised, her friend mistook it as an act of social commentary. “It’s beautiful. It could really start something.”

But she didn’t want to start anything other than her car.