Memorial Day

Fitting that I finished rereading John Knowles' A Separate Peace on Memorial Day, as the novel's about the dynamic between two teenaged boys at prep school during wartime. I first read it in middle school, even though my copy states on the inside cover that it's Reading Level 4, age 12 and up, and it's always interesting to revisit a book at different ages because you might be wearing a different lens. Pick up something new about a detail or character, or identify with someone new altogether.

In the novel the narrator, Gene, indirectly causes the downfall and death of his best friend Phineas. The former is a "lonely, introverted intellectual" and the latter a "handsome, taunting daredevil athlete." At the risk of sounding like a fourth grade book report, I'm going to skip the summary, which I've never been good at doing - after all, don't we read for the details? The nuances? - and just point out what I think I missed altogether during my first reading.

There is no absolute good or evil, not even absolute guilt - we regret doing things, but sometimes the regret itself is not a complete emotion.

In elementary school, I made a girl fall and then kicked her in the stomach. Partly out of spite, and partly because I found myself standing in a warped moment possessing strange schoolgirl power that was so rarely in my hands. I forget why I kicked her - most likely for no reason at all except that I disliked her, her thick short hair, her crooked bangs, her dirty neck, her mass. She wanted to be friends with me and my friends though ironically, we were ourselves constantly on the fringe of breaking up. Factions. Fractious. Two words that sum up quite succinctly my elementary school days. We were playing some schoolyard game or other. Or perhaps she had said something and I had pushed her. She fell heavily to the asphalt, landing on the corner of an empty foursquare court and I took the opportunity, lunging forward to kick her in the stomach. Not hard enough to send her vomiting, but hard enough so that she felt great discomfort in the soft flesh of her belly. (I have never been kicked in the stomach, so I have difficulty describing the sensation. Perhaps it might be accurate to say it feels like an external stomachache?) She lay on the ground, clutching her stomach and moaning. I looked around for angry adults but saw none, more lax was adult supervision in those days, but still, she was taking her time rolling around the pavement and I feared a teacher would see this scene and think I had something to do with the girl's position on the pavement.

"Get up," I hissed.

She whimpered.

"Get up," I stomped my feet, threatening to kick her again, and like a beached seal, she rolled away from me.

"Why did you do that?"

"Do what?" I was prepared to lie through my teeth. No one had seen me kick her, I don't think. I had moved quickly and was now standing straight up, hands in my pockets.

"You kicked me."

"I didn't."

"Yes you did."

"Get up. Just get up." I reached down to help her up but she pushed my hand away, "Suit yourself," I said, putting my hands back into my pockets. The bell was about to ring. "I didn't kick you. You fell."

I walked away that day feeling tough in a shallow way. Was I a bully now? She never told on me - and why would she? She had no bruise to show for it, no proof except for the dried tears around her eyes. Physically she dwarfed me and had an anger management problem, an unfortunate result of being a poor communicator, easily frustrated and prone to cry. I recall many times wrinkling my nose in disgust as she cried over elementary school equivalents of spilled milk and wondered if she would still act this way if she could see herself in the mirror. Tall for her size and extremely muscular, she had one haircut for the entire time I knew her and dressed in boys' clothes, which I couldn't decide if her mother chose for her or were her own taste. And yet even at that young age I recognized something harmless in her - that despite her heft, she was utterly incapable of causing the harm I had caused her. I kicked her out of contempt, a feeling she felt towards no one - not that she was purely good, but that she had no high horse to climb up on while I, at the age of nine or ten, had many such phantom steeds.

We were friends and then we weren't, depending on how the winds were blowing from more powerful alpha girls - but even when we were "friends," I knew we wouldn't be for long. That was the nature of friendship in elementary school - ever changing, trend driven, material based. I was allowed to hang out with my friends if I dressed a certain way, used certain words ("bunghole" and "hernia" were class favorites, as in, "Don't have a hernia, you bunghole.") and sometimes, although extremely rare, I would find myself at the center of command, capable of making or breaking someone's social week because the girls had suddenly decided my opinion mattered.

Early on, I learned this lesson which takes some people a lifetime to unlearn, provided they have the opportunity: Caring is death. Nonchalance is queen. It wasn't until middle school that I consciously separated myself from these poison friendships and made other friends, open-faced people who shared my sense of humor, my (feigned) disinterest in boys, my love for BBC America and movie-hopping that I learned that nonchalance is death. Reciprocity is queen, along with caring, kindness and generosity. And I was lucky too that around the same time, the former queen bees of my elementary school were learning the same things, within their respective groups so that by the time high school rolled around we found ourselves sitting next to each other in our honors and AP classes, inches taller, emotionally smarter, ready to rekindle old friendships in a genuine, lasting way. We were, after all, girls who had grown up together - if we couldn't care about each other, whom could we care about?

But noticeably missing from our reunion was the girl I'd kicked in the stomach. Somewhere along the way she had fallen behind, or dropped out intentionally from the path we were traversing, choosing to take another road altogether and attend our rival high school, tucked in some canyon. I didn't look for her but I often thought of her and that day when I kicked her in the stomach. It was a good story to tell - I was then starting to know the value of being a raconteur- , but I always came up blank when people asked with incredulous faces, "Why?! Why would you kick her?" There was no moral to my story except that I had acted evilly for a few minutes, one school day afternoon. In the moment, as my leg was swinging and my mind blanking, I had felt the rush of illusory justice - she had annoyed, assaulted, angered me somehow and a swift kick was her just dessert.

Now I seem to be looking in the mirror as I read Gene's narration. He figured it out too late, while I had time to correct my world view to accommodate the various future Phineases that would appear in my life. 

"During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rock-like facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

"...He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had."

Frankly it's a poor comparison on one end. The girl I kicked is nowhere near as likeable a character as Knowles' Phineas. This is what I mean by incomplete regret. I kicked her, and to this day, I can't figure out why, nor do I really care. What bothers me, and what bothers Gene, is that I had it in me to move in such a way at all - with blunt, angry force directed at another human being; the briefest flash of evil, seen in a young girl of nine or ten in a school yard, a place for laughs and smiles. I gave up nothing but the possibility of a friendship with a girl I didn't like, but whose memory persists because I hurt her when she was incapable of hurting me. That is what I pay for.

This Toyota is Eternal Now

My first car (as well as my brother’s) was an ancient white Toyota pickup whose sole purpose, before my brother and I got our licenses, seemed to be random trips to Home Depot every couple months when my mother needed more fertilizer and in December, when we went to pick out our Christmas tree. The bed of the pickup was deeply grooved, molded out of heavy duty black plastic that made sitting in it for a picnic unbearable (though why I ever wanted to sit in the back of the pickup to picnic - aside from terrible alliterative purposes – has been forgotten). The radio hardly worked and rolling down the windows took considerable elbow grease. When I went to take my driving test (the first time around), the instructor attempted once, then twice unsuccessfully to roll her window down.

“I can’t administer the exam in this car,” she said, already unbuckling her seatbelt, “The passenger side window must be able to roll down in case I need to escape with my life.”

I wanted to retort that rolling down the window would be the LAST resort in case of emergency, but I nodded my head fervently, “Oh it does roll down,” I said, hoping that God would at that moment deliver some extra strength to my right arm. Before she could protest I leaned awkwardly over the instructor – a big, German looking woman with a too-tight blouse- and huffed and puffed the stubborn window down. I strained my neck but got the window down about three inches.

“See?” I said, releasing my grip and placing my twisted hand back on the steering wheel. I was sweating, “Easy.”

The woman looked dubiously at the knob, weighing whether it would be faster to break the window or punch out the door in case of an emergency. Rolling down the window seemed to be an invitation for a slow death. She cleared her throat in a way that showed me she would sue my family into the ground if she needed to get out and the window was stuck, then gripped her clipboard and told me to start the car.

I ended up running a red light at a busy freeway intersection not too long after we left the driving school. She didn’t say much, but the instructor must have been grateful for the open window (rolling it back up was something else entirely). She looked like she needed the air.

I passed the test two weeks later with a different instructor, a man this time, who seemed frail and weak but who rolled the window down with astonishing ease. He said nothing about needing to escape with his life and gave me directions from and to the driving school in a flat monotone.

“Left…now right….right again… left. Get into the middle lane. Yes. Good.”

When the test was over, he calmly got out of the car and shook my hand. “You passed,” he said, his eyes glazed over. I wondered if he was a driving instructor drone, “Congratulations.”

Ecstatic, I told him in a rush of gratitude how I had run a red light the first time. He shrugged.

“That’s dangerous. But it happens.”

The pickup was now officially mine. And even though my friends all drove various hand me downs or used cars, the pickup was by far the worse for wear and the most embarrassing to be seen in. No one ever pestered me for a ride, car-less friends preferring four-door sedans with CD players over my pickup and cassette-tape player (which I used briefly to listen to Spanish tapes). That was fine. I was loathe to subject my friends to my car’s fickle nature. Coy and temperamental, it ran on its own schedule like an ornery, retired stripper with rickety legs and stubborn ways, who was always eager to put on a good show when you least expected it. A few months after I got my license it began to sputter and stall whenever I stopped at red lights, leaving me stranded in the middle of the street for an agonizing twenty something seconds while it winked and waved at other cars (and drivers), who roared past me, lights flashing, fists waving: “Stupid Asian female drivers!” And I wasn’t even driving a Civic.

Regardless of its spells, it took me places. I was lucky to have wheels that could take me to and from badminton practice and school in a small fraction of the time it took other kids to walk or bike. Over time I came to know it well, establishing a certain grip on its thin, smooth-turning steering wheel and expecting the unexpectedly harmonious creaks and groans it emitted on every single one of my signature three-point U-turns, a byproduct of my often getting lost. I came to trust its bed with my belongings, confident that my books and papers, rackets and shuttlecocks would stay put and if suddenly I saw them take flight like a flock of seagulls from my rearview mirror, my backpack zipper would be more to blame than the truck.

It was, for a half year or so, my decrepit Pegasus – mythical in the sense that I would never understand its motivations for starting, for stopping. But it flew me to Cerritos to see my cousins, to the badminton club where, in a parking lot filled with shiny new Benzes and Bimmers, it stuck out like, well, like a decade-old Toyota pickup and to the library, which was located downhill (relatively easy) and back home, which was uphill (extremely grueling – each time I feared something would snap and I would be the first person to reverse down the hill, aptly titled Cannon Street). Most importantly it took me back home, where its worth to the family was indicated by its spot outside, under a tree whose dead leaves would fall and collect in the truck bed so that by the middle of fall I could have started a compost pile.

I never washed it – not once – and it never asked to be washed. Most likely though, it asked for a lot of other things: an oil change, a refill on the coolant, and a dozen other fluids and checks cars need to run smoothly, all of which, left unheeded, led to its tantrums on the street. But I had not yet learned its language and so its needs sat untended to. Like the little boy in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, I used and used it, and increasingly, it stalled more and more.

After one particularly long stall, (during which I feared for my life and buried my face in my hands while the whole angry world drove past) I complained to my father, telling him that the car was turning into a hazard.

“It’s dying,” I said, “I can’t go on driving a soon-to-be corpse.”

“It’s a Toyota,” my father said, “Everyone knows Toyotas are eternal.”

“Well, when it feels like an eternity when it stalls.”

“Read the manual,” my father said, forgetting for a moment that I liked to read novels and magazines, “Give your car a check up.”

 I never read the manual. Instead, I offered one afternoon to drive a friend home; she had asked me as a last resort as our other friends with better rides had already sped off at the speed of regular cars, and though in the back of my head I knew I might never get her home, I said, “Sure, hop in.” Though really, I ought to have said, “Sure. Hope.”

She, a tall black girl with long limbs, folded her legs into the small cabin and said politely, “Wow, a cassette player.”

I started the engine and rolled smoothly out our high school’s parking lot. She grasped her backpack tightly against her chest, thinking, correctly, that there was no such thing as airbags in my car. Left turn. Good. Stop at red light. Good. Green light, go. Good. Everything seemed fine and we sped down towards her house, located on the other end of town. Then we arrived at the Stop Sign right before turning into her house and I made the mistake of stopping rather than doing the California roll, and… ….Prrrrrrrggggsssssttttccccchhhoooooke. That exact noise followed by the terribly incorrect, albeit by then to me, familiar sound of one’s car sitting quietly in the middle of the road as other cars zoomed past.

            I waved my hand and smiled, “Oh ha. This happens all. The. Time,” then hastily turned and returned the key in the ignition.

            “Oh.” She said, clutching her backpack still tighter, “That’s…cool.”

            My Pegasus would not start. As I twisted the key harder and harder, it occurred to me that I was beating a dead horse. After a minute or so, my friend patted me on the back.

            “It’s okay,” she said, nodding towards her house a few hundred yards ahead, “I’m almost there. I’ll just walk the rest of the way.”

            “I’m so sorry,” I said. Then, glad that my father wasn’t around to hear me say it, “I should have read the manual.”

            “It’s fine. You got me home, pretty much.”

            She left while I turned on the emergency lights and called my father.

            “Are you hurt?” he asked.

            “No, but I’m still sitting in the middle of the road.”

            “You should have read the ma-.”

            “-Dad I’m in the MIDDLE of the ROAD.”

            “Okay, okay. I’ll come get you. Call a towing company.”

            A week later the car was fixed – something about a burnt rubber thing or other – and back on the driveway. I looked forward to spending time with it, like a friend who had recovered from a horrible accident, but my father announced soon after that I would get a new car. Thoughts of the pickup slowly snapped off.

            “Well, not exactly,” my father said, “I’m getting a new car, so you can start driving my old car.”

            My dad had taken pity on me and as a result, rewarded himself with a new BMW 7 series (a car that would prove to be far too technologically advanced for someone his age), thus leaving me his long-time pride and joy, a gunmetal Toyota Land Cruiser which looked to me like a submarine on wheels. 

            “It’s huge,” I said.

            “It’s a luxury SUV,” he said. “Your friends will admire you.”

            He mistook admiration for utility – upgrading to the seven-seater SUV meant that I now drove a bus, which meant that I was now THE RIDE of choice within my group of friends. It would certainly help with my social life.

            Around that time, a family friend needed a starter car and we swiftly dispatched the pickup to their home. I didn’t say goodbye, though I wondered if it really wouldn’t stall ever again.

            My father assured me that we weren’t sending some poor unsuspecting girl to an early death by vehicular accident, “You didn’t take care of it,” he said, “It was fine for all those years your brother drove it. Plus, it’s a Toyota. Toyotas are eternal.”

            I thought about the Land Cruiser in the garage, a T-Rex of a Toyota. My T-Rex. I dreaded driving it, not least because I wasn’t used to paying sixty dollars for gas. True, the Land Cruiser gave me a view above most other cars, boasted a better sound system, and had leather seats – though admittedly, on hot summer days I pined for the tweedy cloth seats of the pickup – but I had slowly become accustomed to the gentle hum of the pickup’s engine and the ease with which its steering wheel turned, the lightness of its (infinitely crushable) frame, and even its tantrums. Among the things everyone should experience once: standing still in the middle of a road while others rush by – there’s a lesson to be learned from that. And what about Pegasus, that hybrid lush/work-horse? My new old Toyota roared to life as Pegasus, now housed on another family's driveway, collecting different leaves, softly flew someone else to her daily destinations.

A Blog about Nothing

Recently, I've been more vocal about my blog (and you, dear reader, would do me a great favor by being more vocal about my blog as well :).

I dare now, to tell people I'm a writer. In today's world, it's perfectly acceptable to have just a blog to show for it... right?

"I write," I say.
"Oh?" They say, "Novels?"
"No no, essays and stuff."
"Where?"
"On my blog."
"What do you write about?"
"..."

Everything? Nothing?

When I was young, I'd cringe every time I turned the television on to find that "Seinfeld" was playing rather than "Friends" or "Will and Grace." I hated that show. I hated fat George, hated Ugly Kramer, and the whole ugly, outdated set. The reruns were particularly jarring. "People don't even dress like that anymore!" I'd scream, hurling the remote control into sofa cushions. Refusing to look past its aesthetic shortcomings, I couldn't enjoy Seinfeld because I didn't see the beauty back then, in the everyday. Or maybe I did - but only narrowly, in my own everyday. As a result, I didn't understand Seinfeld's very distinct kind of humor - the humor that can only be generated and sustained by a group of oddballs that don't belong together at all, except that they do. I never bothered to understand their dynamic because I could not yet grasp the dynamics I operated within. Until one day I was older, home from college, and decided on an uncharacteristic whim to give the show a try. It was quite funny - and really, like some critic said a while ago in some magazine, it was really about nothing. Jerry wears an ugly shirt. George tries to sleep with various women who find him repulsive. Elaine dates weirdos. Kramer keeps busting in, uninvited, always always looking as though he'd been electrocuted just seconds before.

I was laughing, though not to the point of tears or anything. At the end of that particular episode, I had a bemused look on my face, feeling like I had graduated from sitcom academy. I had studied my way up from the slapstick ("Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," "Family Matters," "Saved by the Bell"), supplementing along the way with real life situations and comedies, to the more sarcastic, biting, brain-enhancing ones ("Will and Grace," "Seinfeld.") Yeah, it's a lot to ask from a sit-com to enhance your brain, but the people in those shows were my earliest role models regarding wit and humor. Different characters showed me different ways to act, to bite back, to take an insult. I like to think so, anyway. Chandler taught me how to convey a multitude of sarcastic retorts using only my eyeballs. Elaine taught me how to be both blithe and sharp-witted. Kramer - sometimes I move like him, but that's more unintentional than anything else. 

So anyway that was a long tangent about television, but I realize now that I don't quite know how to categorize my blog - not in terms of genre. Anne Fadiman, a favorite author, has a collection of familiar essays titled At Large and At Small. She writes beautifully about crushes, moving across the country, chasing butterflies... I supposed that's what I ought to say I write: familiar essays about both unfamiliar and familiar things. Many of the subjects begin as strangers - but by writing them, I study them both as they stand or breathe in front of me as well as in my mind's eye. You, probably, have been subject to this. I turn you over and over and, more often than you think, inside out.

But don't be alarmed. It's just my blog.

Lunch Break

This morning, my father saw me packing my lunch.

“You don’t always have to bring lunch, Betty,” he said.

“I like bringing lunch.”

“Yes, it’s all very economical and all that, but you ought to be social. You should eat with your coworkers occasionally.”

I zipped up my baby pink lunch bag (my mother got it for free at a Chinese school conference) and pondered whether I should get going or stay and explain to my father that my coworkers weren’t exactly the type of people I’d eat lunch with.

I decided to play patience, a game I’m especially terrible at, especially with my father.

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t eat lunch with my coworkers because we don’t have that kind of relationship.”

This brought back memories of elementary through high school, when your closest friends (presumably) were those with whom you ate lunch. It’s not that the men and women here aren’t nice – they are: they smile and wave and managed not to confuse me too badly with the other Asian Betty, who referred me to the position. In return, I learned their names in a week (strangely, more than half of their names begin with J) and say “good morning” and “goodbye.” They are kind, but they are older. The women range from late thirties to early fifties, and the men too. They talk about kids, doctors, mattresses and garage door companies. They bring their lunch sometimes too, but in the form of salads, microwaveable diet boxes, leftovers that they made last night, rather than leftovers their mothers made. They are mothers now.

Before, I prided myself on being able to talk to anyone. And I still am, but my “office” is a converted conference room with a magnificent echo, the result of an entire ceiling of fluorescent lights. There is a long wooden table upon which heavy black monitors and computers have been set up, each bearing an intern’s email address (we’re quite official here, save for our status). But as I wait for the other two interns to graduate (this June), I come and work alone in this chilly back room. J1 walked in yesterday with that expression of his – as though he had been concentrating on squashing a bug or chasing a rabbit when his mother suddenly called him in for dinner, wiping his hands on his shirt as though they had mud on them. He stood in the doorway, looking up, down, then at me. “It’s like a sanitarium in here,” he said. I laughed, suddenly aware of how hollow the sound was. Then like a lost patient, he wandered back out.

I can hear the men and women talking in their cubicles at the building’s center – the corporate heart, if you will – though in the mornings, they too, are silent. After lunch their bellies and bodies are warmed up and they are sleepy. Anything to fight that mid-afternoon slump! That’s when the conversations begin. In my first week I was stationed outside in an empty cubicle. I kept my head down, not intentionally, but that is the nature of the cubicle. To see anyone, unless they hover over the wall, you must stand up. But I sat, pretending to read the same emails over and over again, my fingers scrolling up and down outdated messages and listened. I listened to their conversations and learned how relationships are built here. Slowly, with tidbits and dribbles. You ask me for a pen. I ask you for your weekend plans. You walk by and wave. I nod, say hello, smile, paving the road for future waves and hellos and nods and smiles. You compliment my skirt. I tell you where I shop. I stretch in my chair. I groan. You say, “Oh I have that same issue with my back.” Referrals for local chiropractors ensue.

They eat together because they have worked together for years, decades. And slowly, if you are observant (or if like me you have very little to do), you can begin to tie invisible strings around the people who get along and acknowledge those who don’t. Or more importantly identify the people that rub you the wrong way. (In the running: an intern in HR who didn’t know who Jane Austen was.) The women all seem to get along, though only two of them eat lunch together on a regular basis, sharing a large can of soup and a salad – the eternal office lady diet. The men are both new hires and have yet to hunker down and share a meal – they drive out to buy Subway, Carl’s, Jack, then bring it back to their cubicles. When you walk by, you can smell the food. When you look down, you can see their thinning hair. Paradoxical shoulders: meaty, but somehow weak and slumped. Too much sodium, I think.

The men and women I described are on the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. Apparently the rungs above them broke off long ago – especially for the women, who seem to have been “promoted” horizontally rather than vertically (as an intern, I am mildly concerned about where this leaves me) – but a few rungs ahead, near the top (the top rungs are in another country), there are some lonely engineers and elusive businessmen. They are too used to the loneliness and quiet of their own sanitariums to come out and eat lunch together. Too used to the business side of things to come in to the office at all and deal with the paperwork or the people work.

And then there is me. The new intern, slowly becoming an old intern, slowly becoming accustomed to eating along, working alone, being alone. But that’s just the attitude I adopt when I’m in the sanitarium. I get up often, use the bathroom. Stare at myself in the mirror. Ask myself, “What am I doing here?” Dry my hands. Open the door. Pour myself some warm water from the Sparkletts tower into a mug that changes pictures once it heats up. When it’s cold, you see a desk piled with messy papers and behind them, a harried, frenzied woman. Behind her, a menacing computer screen blinks “work! Work! Work!” But when filled with hot liquid (coffee, presumably), the woman’s frazzled look melts away and she is sitting straight up at a neat desk with fresh flowers, the computer screen blinking nothing but a smile. I feel neither like the woman on the hot mug nor the woman on the cold. I find little to identify with in my coworkers. But it’s not alienation I’m feeling. What is it?

Either way, or neither way, when the clock hits 12:30 (I stagger my lunch time with theirs), I clock out. I sit at the table outside with the strangely out of place vacation-themed Tommy Bahama umbrella and eat my lunch. They ground me to my work, that table and that umbrella. Thinking ahead, I know I’ll miss them.

Air Conditioning

I ought not to let this hiatus go on much longer.

Edward Hopper, Office at Night, 1940

It seems like months ago, when in fact it's only been a few weeks. But when I interviewed for the position, one of the J's asked me what I thought I would like most about the job. Idealizing it, I thought, and gave them a fitting answer.

"I hate sitting in front of the computer all day," I said, "I look forward to having a job that will let me exercise my creativity and interact with people.

They nodded, telling me that's exactly the type of position it was. After all, they were looking for a liaison of sorts, an organized and competent individual who could write the hundreds of emails it takes to get a video made and a website launched. I would spend time in front of the computer - that was inevitable - but I would be up and walking a lot too. Especially to the factory, where the windows are made, and perhaps up and down the smaller corporate building looking for my bosses, who are often away on business.

I'm not complaining. The work is challenging in a strange, good way.

"Reorganize our website," they said.

"I don't know anything about web design," I said.

"Just try your best."

Then they said, "Write a storyboard for a company products video we want to make."

"I don't...okay. I'll try my best."

"Yes, we know. That's why we hired you."

During the interview they had winked to let me know they acknowledged all the hard work that must have gone behind my GPA, a foggy indicator of ability to anyone who knows anything about English majors. They smiled pleasantly at all the other jobs (mostly unpaid) listed on my resume, which I had beefed up with English major embellishing skills. The day had been cold and the tiny conference room with an outstanding echo we were in was even colder. I shivered in my chair, wondering if my lips were as blue as my fingers. They took me on a tour of the factory and it too, was cold, but not quite. The machines, the people, the lights that seemed to hang so much further away than the plastic-covered florescent lights of the corporate buildings seemed warmer. People smiled at me as I walked through, perhaps because I was young, and perhaps because I smiled back. As I began my work, I realized that I preferred the factory to the corporate building.

This is not to say the corporate building is not a pleasant place to be. It is just cold. Too cold, with several of the offices kept at meat locker temperatures. I shiver at work. I sit, shiver and I type. My fingers turn blue and I find myself envying the men and women who work in the factory behind me, especially the guys in the tropical acrylic molding room. 

My bosses are kind, tall, white. Family men. J1 is fifty and frugal - a rarity for most of the white men I've met. He drives an old burgundy Mercedes, brings his lunch, and golfs with 25-year old golf clubs. Ten years ago, his wife couldn't stand to watch him play with the rusting clubs anymore and bought him a new set, which he promptly returned.

"I don't need them," he told her.

A few years later, he lost his job and a friend of a friend, knowing J1 to be a good, Christian man, hired him for the marketing department of his company that was like Groupon. Except it wasn't Groupon. It folded after a few months with the CEO closed the company down one night without bothering to tell any of his fifteen employees. J1 woke up the next morning unemployed. 
"Not even a phone call. Not even an email," he said, leaning on the edge of my cubicle with his face pointed thoughtfully towards the ceiling.
"But yes," he said, "Golf is important. I think my being hired here had something to do with my game. And my clubs." He's a humble player - doesn't lie about how many strokes he take - and it helps that his clubs are old.
"When your clubs are all shiny and new but your game is terrible, then people know you're all talk. An egomaniac. Most people don't like to make deals with egomaniacs."
People won't think he's all talk either way. J1 is blessed with an earnest face. A little too tan, but it's from riding his bike with his dog, six miles a day rather than lounging around in his backyard with a young wife. But frugal as he is, he acknowledged that 25 years had taken a toll on his golf clubs. A month ago he went to a tournament where one swing sent his club head one way and the golf ball another. He stood sheepishly on the green, a six-foot four man in neat, pressed clothes (he takes care of his things) holding nothing but a rusty shaft with a shabby grip.

"I think I'll get some new clubs this year," he said.

J2 in his early thirties and elusive like men in their thirties are. He's been at the company longer than J1 and his eyes have a mischievous twinkle. He was an English major too, a fact he mentioned during the interview, and I wondered what books he liked to read.
"They came looking for an engineer, but they got an English major instead," he joked. He seemed to be thinking many things at once, but it was he that put me at ease. He comes to talk to me less than J1, as J1 has seemed to make the video his pet project, which works for J2, because he travels more and attends more meetings when he is around, but when I poke my head into his office he, mouth filled with sunflower seeds, always waves with giant hands for me to come in, reminiscent of my professor. He comes in early and leaves early, because he has a toddler at home. These men in their thirties with their young kids, wives that still look good and want to go out and the energy to play with their kids, smiling and crawling after them with their Blackberries so they can simultaneously read their email and take baby pictures.

J2 brought his baby daughter to work one day, an 18-month year old angel with strong legs and caramel hair, who shrieked and ran in and around the product display area - a behemoth of history and transparencies, designed by the interns before me. She stomped around and under the glossy transparencies that hang from wires like stiffened, discarded alien placentas. She grabbed at nothing, as her small fingers couldn't possibly wrap themselves around anything as slippery as chemically strengthened glass and acrylic. I overheard a woman in the office say that she had her father's lips and because I could not see this or any other similarity, I said the same thing.

"She does have your lips," I said, wondering if he would think it were a compliment. Then the little girl turned her face at me and away again, in a flash. She had blue eyes, bluer even than J2 when he wears a blue shirt, and I thought to say this, but he spoke first.

"So, you have any toddlers in your family?"

I thought about my pregnant cousin and her husband, a guy freshly thirty who stands just as J2 was standing next to me now.
"Soon," I said. "August or something. We're an old family now."

He picked his baby up, settling her in the crook of his arm, her rounded pink bottom like a pillow on his elbow. I put my hand up to touch her hands, but then pulled back, wondering if it was polite to touch your boss' kid, especially when your hands are freezing. Better not burn her with the cold, I thought, and put my hands in my pocket. Walking away, J2 smiled at his baby, warm in his arms like a fresh loaf of bread.

First Day

Part 1 

On my first day of work the security guard asked me if I had watched the Royal Wedding. He was youngish, though with slightly thinning hair and a body that couldn’t quite fill the shabby uniform and as he spoke, leaned against the doorway of the small security office, a lone edifice in the company’s vast parking lot.

“I didn’t,” I said, “but I’ll probably catch the highlights when I get home. I like the British. And I like weddings.”

He smiled, taking the opportunity to tell me how long and boring the ceremony was.             

 “I don’t know why I stayed up to watch it,” he said.

“You watched the whole thing?”

“No, I fell asleep at two am.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say next. He had already buzzed the man I was to report to, but when I’d come for my interview, the man had taken his time to let me in. And now I waited again.

“Congratulations, by the way.”

I turned to the guard, “For what?”

He made a sweeping motion with his arm across the parking lot, as though I had inherited the company rather than just landed a small, temporary position.

“Oh, thanks,” I said, trying to project humility.

“I’ve been trying to get in there myself,” he said.

“Ah, well, I got lucky.”

It was true. I learned of the position by chance. An old classmate from high school had updated her Facebook status one afternoon when I happened to be reading the feed (something I rarely do, as I’m usually absorbed in my own profile page), saying that her company was hiring someone to work with her. I had been sitting on the floor of my room with another friend. We were twirling our hair while browsing Facebook and talking about our futures when the feed popped up. It seemed like the perfect time to apply for a job opening. A few Facebook posts and emails later, I found myself driving to Garden Grove (a city usually reserved for haircuts and Korean food) for an interview, during which I was given a long tour of the facilities. At the time I was still waiting to hear back from a Fulbright grant I had applied to last fall and was just looking for short-term employment in case I got it, as I’d be leaving in September – but I didn’t get it, not the Fulbright. What I did get was the job: an eight-hour a day marketing internship with a vague termination date in the quiet corporate building of an aerospace company.

            “Still,” the guard said, oblivious to my expendability, “You can tell people you work in aerospace.”

            I was about to say, “So can you,” but stopped myself short. I could tell he felt that working as a security guard at an aerospace company was akin to being a receptionist at NASA.

            “Yeah, it’s pretty random,” I said, “I was an English major so when I tell people what I’m doing now I get a lot of raised eyebrows and confused looks.”

            He demonstrated for me. His eyebrows were wildly thick. “Oh yeah I’ll bet they say, ‘How’d you get into that?’”

            “Exactly.”

            “Yeah. I’m keeping my eyes open for opportunities. I mean, I’ll do anything as long as I’m in there and not out here.” He pointed at the cement stoop he stood on, “I’ve been in security for way too long. Seven years. (Now it was my turn to raise eyebrows). Most of my friends are content doing stuff like this, but not me. I’m not gonna do this with the rest of my life.”

            “Yeah,” I said, wanting to add, “You shouldn’t.” I wasn’t sure what to say next. I mentally tested, “It’s good to have goals,” or “You should do something more productive with your life,” but they sounded both condescending and too close to home. I should have goals, I thought. I should do something more productive with my life. But it was still early in the morning and my mood was still dark and I was cold, even though the weather was warming. I get cold when I don’t sleep enough. I rubbed my arms and thought back to a few weeks ago, when I had jet lag and loved the mornings. I had felt as though the mornings were mine, and mine alone, but as the jet lag wore off, I let the mornings go. I settled for the later half of the mornings. Mornings after 9am. But I went and got a job and now I was forced to share my mornings with the million other people who drove on the same freeway and listened to the same radio stations and made the same awful, heart-jerking lane changes I did. Yet in a strange way, it’s lonely, that drive.

Where was my boss? How long does it take to walk out of your office and open the goddamn door?

            As if on cue Gary, a tall, athletic middle-aged man with a red-orange tan appeared in the doorway, waving for me to enter. I turned to say goodbye to the security guard, but he had already gone back into his hut and sat down, appearing to be busy with some logs.

            “Later,” he said.

            I smiled a thin-lipped smile and turned away towards Gary, who welcomed me with a warm, robust handshake. 

He smiled, showing a row of straight, corporate teeth, the glint of which told me he enjoyed his job immensely. “Welcome to your first day,” he said.