Once she was in a Broadway show
She wears her hair straight and dyed blond. It’s a decent enough dye job, a sort of strawberry straw. It falls to the middle of her spine like a teenager. The strands on either side of her face are always a shade darker, stringy with grease (she slides her fingers down them compulsively). When she asks you a question it takes her whole body. She’ll roll her chair out and lean over from her waist even though she’s sitting right next to you. Her staff shirt hangs off her tiny frame, its ridiculous size emphasized by skinny jeans pulled over record needle legs. When she places her hand on the printer that separates you to balance herself, the veins shift under rice-paper skin.
Now just inches from you, she asks her question — do you know about this discount, why do her yahoo emails keep deleting themselves, did you hear Mariah Carey is pregnant, can you believe it. You lean back slightly, trying to regain some lost personal space. Her face is forever glazed in a layer of sweat that seeps up through the cheesecloth of her foundation. Sometimes when she’s late she’ll sprint the five blocks from the subway to work. She’ll tell you this herself but she doesn’t need to, you can see it immediately. When she bursts through the door her face is a pie that has been wrapped in Saran Wrap and placed in the microwave.
She waits for you to answer, staring at you with eyes like ping pong balls dropped into egg cups. They quiver with the helpless anticipation of an amnesia patient. It makes you a little sick. You feel a pang of maternal responsibility for this woman until you remember that if anything she should feel that for you, if we’re going by years lived. You’re not sure how she’s tricked you in to feeling this way, which makes you angry at her for reasons you can’t quite hold on to. You want to tell her to act her age and you do. In your head. Loudly. It doesn’t do anything so you just stop looking at her.
Staring at your computer screen you take all the inflection out of your voice and answer her in a sentence. She nods like you’ve entrusted her with a delicate treasure, but you’re pretty sure she didn’t understand most of what you just said. Feeling a little guilty but mostly annoyed, you start a game of Tetris. She laughs uncomfortably and goes back to reading Allure.
