4.17

Somehow, Susan hears me through the closed office door and pokes her head in while I'm talking on the phone. She has the sort of eyebrows you might find on a caricature chalk drawing at Disneyland, somewhere between a faux-Bavarian brat wagon and an equally fake waterfall over polystyrene rocks. Susan, my word, what could you possibly want? Is it that you heard me in an important conversation with the boss and you don't trust that I have the company's best wishes at heart? Oh, no, that was February and now the intrigue of the month is a constant suspicion that I'm for some reason pocketing office supplies to take home for what--my four-hundred square foot apartment? How many post-its do you think it would take to cover the walls, anyway? Thanks, Susan, for interrupting this solitary moment in which I might have been happy, this single moment in which my employer calls me not for a status update or a change in schedule that totally destroys the work of the last week, please, Susan, come on in and make yourself at home, ruin the five minute interval between last project and next project in which the boss calls (not visits, mind you, but calls) to tell me what a pleasant surprise it is that the work I've been slaving over for months is actually somehow adequate and possibly even good, yes. Yes, Susan, my favorite face to see. Just squeak your way into the office I've worked so hard to get, set your crocked feet down on one side of the couch and your yoga-pantsed junk on the other and just breathe the rarified air of the only walled office on the third floor. Please, Susan. I couldn't think of anything better to do than look at your four-month old roots while I struggle to hear the seven or eight positive words of feedback that are my only payment for my every waking minute since November.
Susan doesn't sit down. She leans in and mimes a plate and fork and arches one perfectly-manicured eyebrow up for a half second or so. I blink like an idiot and then nod. She smiles and I hate how white her teeth are in the brief interval before she carefully closes my door and the boss says "--and that's why we pay you the big bucks," solidly ruining the carefully-manicured sense of self-righteous indignation I was manufacturing and instead soaking me with sudden guilt-shivers. Somehow I managed to just as effectively ruin my phone call reward as Susan ever could. God, when I'm forty five, give me the confidence and bravado of Susan, because who else can so effortlessly be sweet to everyone and wear crocks to work?
I hang up and grab my coat. It's lunchtime.