HOME again, though I can’t seem to break from work. The D-20 is for requisition and the B-20 is for back order and the Service Order is for the copy machine and the T-sheet is for time off and the PTO sheet is for paid time off and the P-sheet is for parts order and the O-sheet is for order-in-stock. I’ve seen this episode a thousand times. I know all the dialogue by heart. Helen called again and her voice is. . She hopes I’ll call her back, hopes I’m still talking to the counselor woman at VA. The box says that in seven and one-half minutes my sirloin steak will be perfect. Yet I know the mashed potatoes will be icy in the middle. It will take a precise balance of extra microwave and stirring to get them just warm enough to eat without completely ruining the steak itself. I realize at about six minutes in that I am going to kill myself. At seven minutes, I determine that I will not die with the guilt of making anyone feel bad. I must start writing my notes.
The potatoes are not done. The extra minute ruins the sirloin.
FATHER—
I cannot begin to describe how sorry. My action is against everything you believe, and I know. . I think of your lifetime behind the desk, in the office. Honor and strength and poise — and you never once complained. I love and envy you. I am not strong. I am not obliged. I am not. .
Jesus Christ, the shows are on.
YOU must adore digital cable. The search options have revolutionized me and everybody. Technology marches, no matter. You can be groped inside the hot metal gut of a troop carrier, or you can see things die and see pieces of dead things. I promise you it will not affect the remote control. Though I forgot to write down the name of the pop singer, with digital cable I can see into the future, and I will find her. This is amazing. She will come back to me.
SUPERVISOR yelled at me today. So close I could smell his cologne. He barked that I wasn’t “into it” the way I needed to be. Sandalwood. As consequence I couldn’t finish my first note, to my father. What if everyone counted on someone else to locate the clerical errors? Supervisor demanded. What if everyone produced reports whose pages crinkled because of a stupid copy jam? What if the whole damn order of things broke down?
Before he escorted me into his office, I was thinking about the salty taste of frayed baseball glove. After the Little League coach lets you on the team but still won’t play you — save once, two innings in right field — things get quiet. In the corner of the dugout, wrapped in chain-link, your cleats sucking into mud and mangled seed husks, sometimes you chew on the leather strips that welt your glove. Dad realized things about me real early, and he showed me how to field with two hands, how to keep my elbow up when I was batting, and above all how to always run over and back up the throw on any given play. We knotted my hair under my ball cap. He said hustle was supreme, beyond even talent or background, and told me I could get past anyone’s expectation of who or what I was supposed to be, if I could just keep up the hustle. So I was going to revise my note to him from those principles of ambition, of compassion. Conviction. I want Dad to know that I believed in them, that I learned.
Inside the supervisor’s office is an L-shaped hardwood desk and a plastic Ficus benjamina tree in a dark wicker pot. He has no windows, but he does have three titanium-white walls and a white drop-ceiling and fluorescent overheads, and one glass wall that faces the general office. On the wall behind his desk is a diploma for business administration, alongside a membership certificate of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and a Kiwanis Club award and a Young Entrepreneurs of Birmingham Intramural Softball group photo. As he screamed I stared past him, to those certificates — at least until he yelled the words “copy machine,” at which point I made the mistake of snapping into focus. I then remembered my baseball glove, and realized how fucked everything was. He says they’re also going to check and see who’s doing what online, and deal with that, pronto. He left the mini blinds open and the office could see everything. I thought of Helen, who, when she worked here, would have been waiting for me in the break area. I guess he saw my eyes start to water, because he eased his tone, and said something about everybody’s respecting my time in the service and all, etc. This prattle allowed me to again focus on the certificates. I have got to finish my notes immediately. I have got to finish my notes.
HELEN called my house four times. She’s coming into town this week and Really wants to see me and says I Need to stop worrying, etc. Her box-dye auburn hair is dry to the touch. Her eyelids sag and have tiny folds. I wonder if I should add her to my list of notes? Dad, Mom, Carla and Ray, and Helen. Maybe. What can I say? Can I say that she shouldn’t worry about those road-to-nowhere veins on her legs? That I feel like I’m breathing under the ocean when she’s around? I don’t know. Just call me back, she says. The shows are on in seven minutes and I’ve got a broccoli and cheddar that must sit for 120 additional seconds before the cellophane can even be removed.
MOTHER—
How difficult for you. Chocolate milk on the yellow sofa? Sabotaged cotillion? But you taught me so much. I’m sorry I was. I am proud at least that you would be proud of my home. Perhaps you can. .
HEART-RED, quivering sun on white talc sand. Crimped emerald blade of fern. Chocolaty plowed earth. Ice-sheet blinding, sun-lit snow traversed by knotted tree shadow. Salty gray ocean smashes rocky shore in fall.
The phone on my desk rings. I pray it is Helen. I answer, and our West Coast rep yells that I was supposed to get a boxful of promos to Brendel’s, then asks where the hell they are. I tell him that I sent them two-day; he calls me a dumbass for not overnighting. I tell him that the Employees’ Handbook says No Overnight Packages Are To Be Sent unless either (A) an error has been made by the supplier’s (our) end of things, thus causing a delay in shipment, or (B) the recipient provides their personal shipping account code for forward billing. He tells me that I should fuck the Employees’ Handbook, because, as I very well know, Brendel’s sells approximately 29 percent of all of our merchandise to all of the United-fucking-States, and that if product sales and revenue and placement like that is not important enough for overnight promos, he’ll suck my dick. We fall silent. Seconds later he says, Well, you get my point anyways, Evie, and then tells me he’s calling my supervisor, and hangs up.
These phrases are no kind of note for Helen. I’d been looking at the nature photos of my screen saver, desperate to list something pure.
THE thing is, was, Helen and I sat Indian-style on that glazy wood floor, the window light gentle and lemony. The house was clean and bright and empty. We stared at each other, and into our own laps, her thumb and index finger gently kneading my knuckles. And that’s when the memories blitzed the surface. I had never told her about the war. I’d been going so long with the men down inside me. For years I’d been shoving them into my gut, hustling past them best I could. Yet it, they, were all there again, their hands, their sweat, their greed. In memory, I had even sought their comfort, when my unit first arrived in-country, when missiles sliced the sky. At first, at marshaling, the terror had driven me to abandon myself to them. When all there was on the horizon was death.
I trembled. Helen scooted over to me. As her hand slid over my back, I realized that the episode would be so easy for her to dispatch. I understood then that the shame was only mine, the terror and ritual, and that Helen would embrace it, and take it, and send it off in a truck. All I had to do was confess.