"I have a movie in my head of my near future. It’s very detailed, in the beginning anyways, influenced by the layout and atmosphere of my father’s office and by Aunt Verna’s stories of her years working downtown for the president of a large brokerage firm. The opening scene has me taking dictation. My boss in his forties. He is a good-natured, portly man, not the brains of the company, but in no danger of losing his job. Its winter, the end of the day, the streetlights have just come on. In the windows of the building next door you can see the secretaries putting the covers over their typewriters. In the office where we are, there’s a cozy feeling, a winding down of efficiency. My boss loosens his tie. I uncross my legs. I wear a tweed skirt and white tailored blouse. I close my notebook and say, “I’ll type these up first thing in the morning.”
He waves his hand. “No hurry.”
On the way back to my desk, I pass the desks of other secretaries. We say goodbye to each other. A few of us regularly eat lunch together at the snack bar of a department store. Grilled-cheese or clubhouse sandwiches, apple pie a la mode. Afterwards we shop at the cosmetics counter and slash our wrists with lipstick and say, “Is that too red?” “What do you think?” Occasionally one of us breaks down and buys a tube. To buy almost anything aside from food and nylons is to splurge.
I take the subway home. I am an expert at origami folding that keeps the pages of my newspaper out of other people’s faces. I read “Dear Abby” and do the crossword. Near my stop there’s a fruit stand, and every evening I buy a fresh navel orange for tomorrow’s breakfast. The walk to my place is about ten minutes, not long. I live on the top floor of a Victorian house, two rooms plus a bathroom with a clawfoot tub. There is a cat—grey, fat, shy. There is an asparagus fern on top of the refrigerator. A two-burner stove. For supper I scramble eggs or heat up a can of spaghetti and meatballs. The kitchen table is an old wooden drop-leaf pushed into a corner.
Suddenly, in this movie, it’s summer. I have changed out of my office clothes and into white shorts and a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. I wash the dishes listening to classical music on the radio, then make a cup of coffee and take it out onto the fire escape. The view is of the roofs of other such houses and of treetops and stars coming out.
One night the new guy in the second-floor apartment also happens to be on the fire escape. We start talking, and he invites me down for a glass of wine. He’s a medical or engineering student, or he’s studying for the bar. He’s about five foot nine, nice looking, not too handsome, not too straight but not a hippy, either. Brown or sandy-haired. Maybe he wears wire-framed glasses. His friends are few and close. His interests lie outside the visual arts and music and science. So he’s not a medical student, then. A law student, that’s better. The kind of person who takes sides, who fights for what he believes in.
You see what I’m driving at? He isn’t Abel. He can’t be anything like Abel, and most of the time he can’t even exist. I finish my coffee and go back inside and sit in a wingback chair and read a Jane Austen novel, or it could be that I’m already at Dickens. (I’m working my way through the great literary works in alphabetical order according to author.) The odd time that I do keep things going with the guy from downstairs, that I accept his invitation and let the night advance until we’re kissing, the movie always flaps off the reel."
He waves his hand. “No hurry.”
On the way back to my desk, I pass the desks of other secretaries. We say goodbye to each other. A few of us regularly eat lunch together at the snack bar of a department store. Grilled-cheese or clubhouse sandwiches, apple pie a la mode. Afterwards we shop at the cosmetics counter and slash our wrists with lipstick and say, “Is that too red?” “What do you think?” Occasionally one of us breaks down and buys a tube. To buy almost anything aside from food and nylons is to splurge.
I take the subway home. I am an expert at origami folding that keeps the pages of my newspaper out of other people’s faces. I read “Dear Abby” and do the crossword. Near my stop there’s a fruit stand, and every evening I buy a fresh navel orange for tomorrow’s breakfast. The walk to my place is about ten minutes, not long. I live on the top floor of a Victorian house, two rooms plus a bathroom with a clawfoot tub. There is a cat—grey, fat, shy. There is an asparagus fern on top of the refrigerator. A two-burner stove. For supper I scramble eggs or heat up a can of spaghetti and meatballs. The kitchen table is an old wooden drop-leaf pushed into a corner.
Suddenly, in this movie, it’s summer. I have changed out of my office clothes and into white shorts and a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. I wash the dishes listening to classical music on the radio, then make a cup of coffee and take it out onto the fire escape. The view is of the roofs of other such houses and of treetops and stars coming out.
One night the new guy in the second-floor apartment also happens to be on the fire escape. We start talking, and he invites me down for a glass of wine. He’s a medical or engineering student, or he’s studying for the bar. He’s about five foot nine, nice looking, not too handsome, not too straight but not a hippy, either. Brown or sandy-haired. Maybe he wears wire-framed glasses. His friends are few and close. His interests lie outside the visual arts and music and science. So he’s not a medical student, then. A law student, that’s better. The kind of person who takes sides, who fights for what he believes in.
You see what I’m driving at? He isn’t Abel. He can’t be anything like Abel, and most of the time he can’t even exist. I finish my coffee and go back inside and sit in a wingback chair and read a Jane Austen novel, or it could be that I’m already at Dickens. (I’m working my way through the great literary works in alphabetical order according to author.) The odd time that I do keep things going with the guy from downstairs, that I accept his invitation and let the night advance until we’re kissing, the movie always flaps off the reel."
-B.Gowdy
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