Bright Shards of Someplace Else (7 page)

It was only when I let my thoughts stray to my new apartment (alert distraction is what we'd called it, think of something else but still pay attention to when and how you're served) that the woman
herself began to disappear. The heavily furnished rental, full of antiques and personal baubles from the owner, made me feel like an intruder, and I was careful not to take up too much space, sitting on only one of the easy chairs and never opening the second bedroom closet. This woman was like all that musty furniture—oppressive while ostensibly offering hospitality and comfort. That was my first, and longest, interaction with Mol before I was told to fire her.

I was hoping to leave a message on her voicemail, rather than having to do it in person, but Mol had inexplicably shown up at work, dressed sharply and full of heretofore unseen passion and competence for the job. All day I heard her answering and making calls in a crisp and comforting tone—a must in the business of memorial videography. All of us were supposed to use a list of euphemisms for death, funerals, and the bereaved, but few of the workers I oversaw bothered. Yet all day I could hear Mol using the key phrases: “memorial gatherings,” “remembrance festivals,” and “celebrators.” I even heard her refer to funeral-goers as “loving reminiscers”—her own inspired creation.

But Mol was terribly unreliable and had seemed, in the few exchanges I had had with her, to not even register what she was doing wrong. “Mol,” I had said to her, “you've come in late for the last three days. Do you want to tell me about that?” We were in my office, which I had taken over from someone who had papered the walls in complimentary notes from happy customers. Many of the notes were written in the same hand; I suspected he had written at least a quarter of them himself. “You really made Harry's passing a wonderful memory in and of itself,” I read over Mol's head as she replied. “Have you ever just had one of those days when you feel like you're still living in the previous day and you have to spend half the day convincing yourself that there is a noticeable enough difference between yesterday and today to warrant going through it?”

Mol was clearly a clueless woman, but from what I understood she needed the job and expected to keep it. It fell to me to revise this belief.
Like anyone, I stalled. I found work that I convinced myself was more pressing; I watered all the plants in the office, de-headed all the dead flowers, shuffled papers, then steeled myself to do it. I saw Mol bent down at the copy machine, her curls shiny from some kind of spritz, the back of her pumps slipping off her heel as she crouched and spun a knob to dislodge a paper jam. Introducing a dramatic new element—the sadness, questions, and finality of her firing—into the blandness of a workday struck me as needlessly disjunctive.

“Mol,” I began, and she turned to face me with a torn piece of copy paper in her fist. “I wanted to ask …” Her face—unawares, guileless, scrubbed—stopped me up short. “How has it been going with the Halson account?” Halson was a particularly difficult client who seemed to have an endless string of aged, distinguished relatives, one of whom seemed to die each year. His dead relatives were invariably sour-faced and sickly in all the source materials he provided us, yet he expected us to conjure up a video program that showed them as hearty, hale, and good-natured. In all the pictures and home videos he left us, the most recent loss, Great Aunt Halson (a “deeply respected cartographer”) had been mostly slumped in a wheelchair or bedridden. In every image, the corners of her mouth were pulled down by deep ruts, and her forehead was wrinkled in an expression of affronted confusion, as if blaming the viewer for her befuddlement. Mapping evidently had taken a hard toll.

“It's going good,” Mol replied, straightening her skirt and smiling. “I found this one video of the aunt being lifted from her wheelchair and lowered into a carriage ride in Central Park.” The collar of Mol's white button-down shirt was yellowed like the soiled cloud a head makes after years on the same pillowcase. Her skirt, which looked so sharp when I glanced at it earlier, had a broken side-zipper, which Mol had remedied using a row of small gold safely pins. “Sounds great. Like a wonderful moment with the grand old dame seeing the city.” I was enthusiastic out of guilt; I saw nothing praiseworthy in her find. Mol gave me curious look, then went on to say that during the moment
the aunt was being lowered onto the carriage seat, she had winced broadly in pain. That wince, Mol continued, looked a bit like a smile when spliced against taking-off doves and crashing waves, common motifs we used to transition from scene to scene. “It really looks like a real smile,” Mol insisted. “Halson will be so happy.”

As Mol jabbered on about the Halson video, explaining how she planned to integrate a map graphic to represent life's journey and kept absently crumpling and flattening out the paper in her hand, I could feel a tightening in my throat. I began to yawn, like I always did when nervous. Once, twice, three times in a row. Mol looked up at me and crinkled her eyes, sucked on her lower lip. “It's not too much, is it?” I shook my head and Mol kept talking. She had a thready bit of lunch around her left incisor. Her right eyelid drooped. The part in her hair was askew. She looked like somebody who was born to be fired. I gave her a little wave with my fingers and excused myself.

I walked toward my office, pausing every few steps with the idea of turning back and giving her the news in mind. I was transfixed by the sheer idea I was on the cusp of action. Whenever I was young and had a boo-boo, and a Band-Aid had been in place for, say, a week, and it was time to let the wound breathe (as Ma would say), I would sit and stare at it, readying myself to remove it. My breath would get short. “At the count of three, I'm going to do it,” I would say and then become dizzy with adrenalin as I watched my own hand sitting inert. Moments of truth, as I considered them back then, came and went. It had nothing to do with being afraid of the pain. It was the thrill of knowing that with a single jerk of my wrist I would go from the condition of being deeply Band-Aided to irrevocably without. That was what held me in thrall. Then my mother would invariably walk by. “Wake up, kid.” Still walking, she'd snag the Band Aid and rip it off mid-stride. “Go outside and play already.”

I hovered around for a while, trying to work up the courage to ask Mol to see me in my office, but then I decided to change tactics. Better to leave a note for Mol and let her approach
me
, rather than seeking
her out. That way, I would be ready, and she would be ready. I headed toward her office, which was at the end of a long hallway that very slightly narrowed the closer I got. It was like being drawn down a chute. I had pointed this out to the building manager, who said it was an optical illusion from the old wood paneling warping, but I didn't believe him. Her office was open. I stepped in and shut the door behind me.

Her office was a mess. The desk was covered with papers, some of which looked as if they had been used to clean up a spill. There were flowers everywhere and in everything—some fresh, some dry as old boutonnieres, some thickening into a soup after being left in water too long. She must have collected them from the various funerals she had been assigned to attend. They were in every kind of container—coffee cups, cereal bowls, single flowers in pen shafts with the ink pulled out, a few clipped blossoms floating in an open eyeglass case. Gladiolus spears with their blooms long gone collected thirty deep in one corner, knobbed and curling like a stand of spines. Clouds of fruit flies cycled around the more rotted specimens. A file drawer that was specifically required to be locked was open, and the files were covered with dry, shredded petals and dropped flies. I sifted through Mol's papers for a scrap to write her a note on. Among her papers were reprimands from the former boss, complete with comments Mol wrote in to amuse herself—Windbag, baloney!, over my dead bod, schlub—up and down the margins of perfectly reasonable requests to show up to work and keep company property unharmed. I found a clean sheet:
Come see me at your earliest convenience.—H.F
. I figured I should add something sterner to foreshadow the news that was coming her way.
Please clean out all dead florals from your office, as they constitute a fire risk
. I seemed unable to strike an authoritative enough tone so I added
by 5:00 p.m. tonight
. Then, to soften it, I added that it was because the fire marshall was coming to inspect the property tomorrow in the a.m., though this was untrue. I stood the note up in the keys of her computer and went back up the widening hallway to my office.

I started when Mol knocked even though I was expecting it. I closed the door and asked her to sit down. Though she usually shambled around the office in a casual, tripping manner and threw herself down so loud the springs could be heard in my office, this time she smoothed her skirt and lowered herself primly into the chair.

“I'd like you tell me about how you think your job has been going these past few weeks.” I cleared my throat in an officious way as I cast around for how to proceed. “I think I need to hear about how you're perceiving your role here. I know you've missed quite a few days …”

Mol leaned forward in her chair and cracked her knuckles. She looked at the ceiling and blew a breath out of her undershot jaw and up her face, causing her bangs to momentarily hover. “The thing is I've …” A floating network of her frizzed hair fell between us like a scrim. “I've had a death in the family.”

I had prepared for every possible excuse but this. Despite my considerable training in addressing the bereaved, I found myself stammering, full of guilt over my readiness to fire her even though a recent death in the family no way explained the months of unexplained absences and spotty performance.

“I'm … so sorry. I had no idea. I mean, you were working so well earlier … if I had known. Who—who was it? I mean, if you don't mind me asking.”

“It was my great uncle. Just a few days ago, in fact. We were really close. It was totally unexpected. There he was and then—
poof
—he's gone.”

Mol put down her head and her shoulders shook. I looked around the office as if for some clue as to how to react. I knew I should go to her and comfort her in a way befitting of my expertise, but the dynamic had shifted so quickly from resolute boss and about-to-be-fired worker to a sheepish boss and grieving worker that I was utterly thrown. I eventually walked over to her and patted her shoulder.

“These are some of the most intense moments in a life,” I began,
falling back on stock phrases out of my repertoire. “Nothing can prepare us for it.”

Mol's shoulder jerked up and down under my hand. She sniffed and made gargling sounds. I wanted to move my hand away from her shoulder, but I realized I would have to say something at the moment I moved my hand to somehow wrap up the encounter, and I had no idea what to say. I obviously couldn't fire her at this moment—that would be cruel. The reprieve was honestly a relief, but I had to still fire her. Her great-uncle dying made her no better worker. The other staff had begun to murmur about who would get her computer, office chair, and shelving—the inevitable was in motion.

I couldn't bear to look down at her, so my eyes were fixed on the clock on the opposite wall, which was in battery-dying indecision: the second hand ticking between the same two seconds. Mol's blubbering petered out with nerve-wracking gradualness, like a roulette wheel ticking to the next number every time it seemed to have stopped. My palm was sweating to the point that I worried it could be felt through her shirt. I pulled away and wiped it discretely on my pants and walked back behind my desk.

“Mol, I think you should take the rest of the day off and regroup.” The thought was I could then call her and ask her not to come back. She looked up at me with a sort of wincing panic with one eye half shut as if expecting a blow.

“I want to work. I want to make up for the days I missed. It will help me get my mind off things …”

“If you think you can handle it, that's fine. However—” I had to somehow regain my footing. “You need to clean those flowers out
ASAP
.”

Mol looked up and met my eyes with an unnerving steadiness. She rose from her chair and took a low crouching step toward me, as if I were a wild woodland animal, easily startled. She stopped in front of my desk, lifted her right arm, and drew the whole length of her sleeve
across her eyes. When she pulled her arm away, a black streak of mascara linked her eyes duct-to-duct, giving the impression that she was peering down at me through a tiny pair of opera glasses.

“I've been saving those flowers ever since my uncle got sick,” Mol said, her voice steadying each word so the last phrase sounded so certain as to be a challenge. At the mention of the uncle I let out a syllable of understanding, even though I saw nothing reasonable about saving flowers from strangers' funerals for an ailing relative. “And I've been spritzing them with water. So no worries.” She smiled in a poignant sunbeam-through-the-storm manner and tapped my desk with her forefinger as if her next point warranted special emphasis. “Nothing wet can burn.”

I began to protest but cut myself off with a grunt that probably sounded like a concession. There was no way to exert power over her at this moment without seeming brutish. I would simply wait until later in the day for her to recover, bring her into my office, and fire her then. These few hours would be a magnanimous offering on my part, a mercy, really, and there was no need to dilute that by harping on the flowers. Let her enjoy her flowers for her last few moments, I rationalized, as I repeated my condolences and saw her out with the requisite pat on the back.

The rest of my day would be busy, and there would thankfully be few opportunities to interact with Mol until I had to call her back into the office for our final conversation, which I mentally slated for four p.m. I spent the rest of the morning in the editing room, watching rough cuts of videos and jotting my comments down on the evaluation forms.
Good work, trim down family's narration, adjust color palette—subject looks sallow in last frame, music too dirge-like, work on youth-to-adult transition
. Mol's video was last in the bunch. She had made the unfortunate choice of overlaying an image of a map over Great Aunt Halson's face so that the roads and streams lay precisely on her deep frown lines, creating a moment where her wrinkles were made monumental and grotesque before her face receded and the
video ended on the map alone.
Needs to be reworked
, I wrote for whoever would take over her caseload.