Sheldon would lean against her desk and talk about all the world events he had studied in the New York Times on the shuttle van ride from Jersey City to the World Trade Center. He talked about famines and wars while on the verge of tears. Whenever Israel would retaliate against the PLO, bombing one of their settlement camps in Jordan, Sheldon had a pinched look.
“When children die it’s a sin,” he’d say as if he’d been the one to give the go-ahead for the slaughter.
“Don’t you ever wonder if it’s all real?” Kiki once asked.
“What did you say?” Sheldon’s lips were large and wrinkled like those of some black men she had known.
“Nothing. I mean, we never hear any bombs or see a million starving bodies or anything. We just get on the bus or the train and come to work and go home. It’s kinda like stuff on the news is just another TV show. Something somebody made up.”
“You mean,” he said, “that there’s more to life. That if I really cared about all this I’d be out there doing something about it.”
Kiki let her hand slide across the desk until her fingertips pressed under Sheldon’s thigh.
“I mean,” she said, “that we feel bad for all those people because they don’t have a chance to enjoy life. You got to enjoy life.”
They sat there, barely touching, for minutes before Sheldon broke away and went into his office.
But then he came in one morning and told Sarah (he didn’t even have the nerve to tell Kiki) that he was engaged to some woman that nobody in the office had ever even heard of. A Jewish woman who Sarah said was from New Jersey and who didn’t eat shellfish and who had to cut off all her hair after the wedding. But when Kiki saw a picture of her with their first child she could tell that it wasn’t any wig that she was wearing.
Her name was Sury, but Kiki always asked Sheldon, “How’s Sorry doing?” It hurt him, she could tell, but he wasn’t the kind of man to say anything or even correct her. He was a coward actually, and Kiki was ashamed at herself for ever liking him and coming in at eight-thirty and bringing him coffee, even paying for it with her own money sometimes.
After that she never came in before nine-fifteen and sometimes not until nine forty-five. She dressed in sharp business suits but under the jacket she often wore a spaghetti-strapped silk blouse that tended to fall open at the breast. She’d bend over Sheldon’s desk so that he couldn’t miss the curve of her small breasts in the half-cup bras. The coward would have to look up sometime, and then he’d have to see what he gave up for that skinny Jew girl.
Kiki didn’t have anything against Jews, not really. But she knew that Sheldon talked to her before work in the morning because he wanted a date. He wanted to have some fun, but when it came to something serious he went back to the fold. No Christian girl for Mom and Dad.
So she’d lean over and flash her tits, sometimes she’d let her nipple stick out. She never came in early to work again.
A woman was seated behind Kiki’s desk. A woman the size of a refrigerator. Moles, not freckles, festooned her pasty pale fat face. She had a jelly doughnut, a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and a cigarette, burning in an ashtray, set before her. There were crumbs and ashes and burnt-out matches scattered across the blotter.
Rawna McPherson. There was even a name plate for this temp! She must have brought it with her. One of those people who come for a week-long visit and bring their pets.
“Yes?” the refrigerator said.
Kiki just stared.
“Can I help you?”
“This is my desk.”
“Excuse me?”
“Excuse you? You’re a pig. How do you expect me to excuse this shit on my desk?”
“Oh.” When Rawna McPherson raised her head her jowls hung down the sides of her neck like curtains bunched open to expose a stage. She must’ve weighed three hundred pounds. “You’re Waters. Oh no, you got it wrong. They fired you and hired me to take your place.”
How long had it been? She’d been taken to the hospital on Tuesday, the Tuesday before last. She worked that day and got stabbed that night. And this was Thursday, so that was, that was... There was no mail from Sheldon. Nobody came down to the house...
“You’re supposed to go down to personnel. They have your check — hey!”
Kiki had forgotten about Rawna and the mess on her desk. She went straight for the closed door behind the secretary. Rawna didn’t try to push herself up from the chair. She just turned her head and said, “Stop!” in a voice that was used to being obeyed.
Kiki slammed the office door open and then slammed it shut behind her. Sheldon had been lying back in his chair, putting bottled tears in his eyes; his ducts didn’t make enough tears. He dropped the little bottle and lurched forward, squinting through the drops.
“Oh God!”
“What the hell do you mean by firin’ me? You think I’m just some piece’a-shit temp that you don’t even have to talk to? Huh?”
Sheldon looked up at her. His shoulders were so small that no off-the-rack suit fit him right, but nobody in his family had ever had a suit tailored except for funerals or weddings.
“I’m waiting. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”
“Mr. Meyers? Mr. Meyers!” Rawna barked over the intercom.
Even little-necked Sheldon had some pride, some backbone. He used that little bit and stood up shakily. Kiki admired his spunk, but she was still mad that she’d ever shown him anything.
“Your, um, your check is... is down at personnel, Miss... Waters. We don’t run the kind of ship here...”
Suddenly Kiki understood. She could see that he was forced into this terrible position by the others, the people around the office who laughed at him. It was probably Marilyn Walsh from down the hall in the auto division. She was always laughing at Sheldon, always sneering and cutting him off when he was trying to make his point. She’d done it, turned poor Sheldon into this gibbering thing.
Kiki had dressed well that morning; burgundy pants suit with a cream blouse and a shoestring tie. When she unbuttoned the jacket, Sheldon fell back into his chair.
“Wh-what?”
She said, “I was stabbed and unconscious and in the hospital, Mr. Meyers.” She tore open the blouse from the bottom, popping fake nacre buttons all over. Then she ripped off the bandages. The jagged line of holes went down toward the pelvis, so Kiki pulled down her pants a little. She never wore underpants with trousers, except with her period, so a line of orange pubic hair blossomed out around her pale thumb. The stitched slits were puckered, still moist with blood and healing flesh. Each one had a flat white rubber tube sticking out, dripping pus and fluid from the internal wounds.
She held the blouse up and the pants down and Mr. Sheldon Meyers couldn’t take his eyes away. He swallowed like some fool in trouble in a bad comedy, his pudgy lips hanging open. When Kiki saw that she had him, she pulled the pants up and shoved the shirttails back in. She was just buttoning the jacket when Rawna McPherson came rumbling through the door.
She wasn’t only fat, she was tall and lardy in the arms and legs. Her skin was pocked with hard cellulite. She was fat everywhere except her hands, which were small and delicate. If Kiki’s mother had liked a woman like this she would’ve said, “Oh, Rawna, yes, Lord, she has beautiful hands.”
But Kiki didn’t like her. She thought that her rainbow-patterned dress might have been a tablecloth last night. Her makeup hid acne that put Kiki’s wounds to shame.
“Mr. Meyers?” Rawna asked. “Are you okay?”
Sheldon was gasping like a fish. His eyes were wide and he breathed through his mouth.
“Yuh.” He nodded and went on gasping.
“I told Miss Waters to go down to personnel, sir. But she...”