She couldn’t talk about it, and so she lay awake at night, thinking about the idea of worldwide revolution. If she could just figure it out, if she could just slot the right people into the equation, then she could do something useful for this company she had so ably served for six years.
Her back really hurt a couple days a week — a throbbing, disquieting pain — and she couldn’t seem to find a desk chair in the catalogue of office furniture that had the right kind of lumbar support. There was a trainer at the gym she kind of liked, and he would have recommendations for an ergonomically designed chair, but she hadn’t spoken to him about it, and she kept imagining something was going to happen to her on the StairMaster. She would be ground up in it. People got swallowed whole by escalators, after all. People who’d just gone to the mall to buy shoelaces.
She called her father, told him she was looking forward to coming home, though this was not true. He told Ellie that he’d heard her mother had been released from the detox. And she hadn’t answered his telephone calls, he said. While this was not an unusual situation, since they were unmarried and separated, it was worrisome. Ellie told her father she just wasn’t getting what she needed from her job. Her house, she said, was fully outfitted with furniture that you assembled from kits. She bought foods that were low in calories, and she tried to eat only organic things, and everything was straightened up, she had straightened everything up, she liked to have the magazines on the coffee table at right angles, she told her father, she understood that celebrities were marrying and divorcing at alarming rates, and that people would do anything to be on television. But this was not, it turned out, enough.
“Honey,” he said, “try volunteering.”
Everyone had stayed in the Southwest except the youngest child, and in the interrogative sun, the unrelenting sun of the desert summer, they had their upheavals and their difficulties, rarely regretting. Meanwhile, she was here in this state where she was always expecting to round a corner and find a scorched valley below her, empty as far as she could see. She was expecting vistas of cacti and the sounds of coyotes, but in the East everything was claustrophobic and heartbroken, especially after the third suggestion.
Bonnie Stevenson announced that she was going into business with Angie Roehmer. The two of them intended to start a boutique that competed directly with K&K on some large accounts. They had a catchy name for the operation, which was Reconstruction Inc., and they had a really great logo, sort of an antebellum southern porch in a pale blue, on the top of the letterhead. The business plan had been in place for some time. Maybe the insurance sector needed to be reconstructed, the way these two campy entrepreneurs saw it. Rates spiraled upward and drove everything in the region, drove the way people did everything they did, the way they walked through a building lobby or played on a swing set. You could easily trip in a mall stairwell and disfigure yourself. A scary ride at the amusement park might cause you to go into a tailspin of depression and affect your earnings potential.
It was Bonnie and Angie, and they were in it together, they had taken the whole office for a ride with their negative attitudes and their hatred of men. Ellie Knight-Cameron wasn’t one of those people; she kind of loved men. At any rate, the women’s conspiracy was figured out, or it would have been all figured out if Ellie had not found yet another suggestion in the suggestion box the very next day, the first full day after Bonnie left the firm, having been ordered out by Duane, ordered off the premises and her laptop taken away from her and her pens and paper clips impounded.
Still, when you tallied only these dramatic incidents at K&K, you missed the rhythm of work, the flow of how people lived, which was in eight-hour increments, or really in four-hour increments because of lunch. Everyone went out for lunch at a place up the block, even if the cappuccino machine was on the fritz. The women of K&K, back when they were in it together, they all went out. It looked bad if you stayed at your desk for lunch. It looked like you were showing up the other women of K&K by working harder than they were working. This was the unspoken agreement. There was a rhythm of work, and it was all about insuring against the unpredictable. Of course, there were other things that were as difficult as office life: church, local politics, the playground, high school dances, but all Ellie did was work.
Among her interviewees on this particular day was Chris Grady’s friend with the sideburns, one Noel Goodrich. The guy she’d met at the bar. He was dressed in khakis, blue blazer, loafers without socks. He had a cyst or something, some kind of permanent skin blemish beside his nose that she hadn’t noticed in the light of the bar.
“What are your hobbies?”
“What are my—”
“We feel that hobbies are indicative of keen appreciation for life’s—”
“Well, I guess I like to—”
“Cooking?”
“Cooking, hell no!” Noel said. “Well, I like to grill. I like to wear the chef’s hat outside. Really my hobby is. . my hobby is, uh, professional sports memorabilia. Shoulder pads, for example. I have signed shoulder pads. Sports have come a long way, you know, in terms of neck injuries.”
“You’re concerned about neck injuries?”
“And fire prevention.”
“What kinds of insurance do you carry?”
“Paternity insurance?” Sensing it was an ineffective joke: “Actually, I don’t have any insurance.”
“You don’t have renter’s insurance? Dental insurance?”
His eyes were bloodshot. His future was in the bag. Almost immediately after Goodrich left the office, Chris came over to Ellie’s desk. Somehow she had failed to notice earlier that his fingernails were a bit longer than a guy would normally wear them. And there was a strip under his nose where his razor had not performed effectively. Not to mention the damp spot on the elbow of his shirt.
“I can’t live with the coffee around here.” Maybe he blamed coffee for the spillage on his elbow. “Could you go out and get me my half-decaf mochaccino? With whole milk? And, uh, don’t forget a receipt?”
She watched his trim figure bob away. His foppish Hollywood hair. The floppiness of this coiffure elicited contempt in the majority of K&K employees. Ellie would beat on Chris Grady with a stick in the puppet theater production of dreams. Now that the office was really shorthanded, Chris had no natural predator. He didn’t have to worry about the office manager. He’d been waiting most of his short, privileged life for this turn of events. He’d sat in the stands at various athletic contests, as though he had webbed feet, cheering his pathologically narcissistic brother, and now was his chance to shine. At last he could begin upbraiding waitresses and using the phrase “Don’t you know who I am?”
On the way out the door she stopped in the office lounge and she decided, just because, to check the suggestion box. In retrospect, questions could be raised as to her timing. Had she checked the box on some other day, maybe the result would have been different. Had she been more willing to get Chris’s half-decaf mochaccino. Maybe the suggestion box was some kind of context-dependent prognosticatory device. If she’d approached it when feeling upbeat about things, then the box would have provided her with quite different advice.
Because, on the day in question, what the suggestion box found to say to Ellie Knight-Cameron was All of you should be lined up and shot.
The first death threat in a person’s life is so memorable. Ellie Knight-Cameron had never received a death threat before. In fact, the worst verbal abuse she had experienced in her life involved her brother telling her he was going to kick her ass. She had also, in her youth, been called fat. Yo, caboose! Everyone had an opinion: Was your mother eating for four? The worse things got — the more weight she put on in high school — the more she was told that this was not going to be tolerated. The more her parents remonstrated with her, the more she snuck downstairs in the quiet part of night and raided the larder. Night was the time when the clamoring in her skull was silenced, when there was no soap opera of her appearance.