Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single

by Heather McElhatton

  “I don’t know,” she says, “just spin it.”

  “But how?”

  “How should I know?” she shouts like a silverback gorilla. “Just fix it!”

  There’s no fixing it. She knows it and I know it, but now it’s my responsibility, so when we’re left with three hundred unsold units, I can do the explaining.

  I check my cell phone and e-mail just in case Brad sent another message. He hasn’t and I’m still waiting to send mine. So what? No big deal. They aren’t supposed to call or e-mail twice, not before you respond. I shouldn’t even be expecting that and I’m not, only those rules are for people who don’t work in the same building. If you work in the same building, you would normally run into each other. Why don’t I know what Brad does? How can you spend an entire night with someone and find out so little?

  I’m dying.

  I try to meditate at my desk, but when I close my eyes, the slow tide of ceaseless co-worker chatter and Xerox machines and elevator bells and high heels clicking and people eating and gossiping and bitching and moaning expands to fill every molecule of space in my brain, like someone stuck one of those air-compressed cans of Fix-a-Flat foam in my ear, and shot my head full of sticky, gross goo. I can’t get away from it. I want to stand up and scream at everyone that now I understand what going postal really means.

  After lunch I decide to mill around the executive suites upstairs and come up with a reason for running into Brad. After all, I work here, right? I could have a very legitimate reason for being on the top floor, only my mind is blank and I can’t think of one single reason, so I grab a clipboard and go upstairs, where I spend a painful forty minutes roaming the halls examining a blank piece of paper. I don’t see Brad, or Ed, or any Keller executives. Only their executive secretaries. They’re apparently all running the company.

  I go home and send the e-mail to Brad. Then I turn my computer off, because I have better things to do than drink wine and stare at my computer screen waiting for him to respond.

  Please.

  How totally lame.

  No, I’m going to drink wine and impose some law and order in the Tinkertoy home. I clear out Little Wife’s harem and install a new God. Two new Gods, in fact. I found two plastic smoking monkeys in my drawer, the kind that smoke little paper cigarettes, which you light with a match. I’m going to name them Depression Monkey and Apathy Monkey.

  Depression Monkey will threaten the Tinkertoys with an unholy downpour of plagues and pestilence if they don’t offer the new Monkey Gods complete devotion and a steady supply of Wellbutrin, but Apathy Monkey will tell them he doesn’t care.

  The next day at work Brad has still not responded to my e-mail and I’m in a ferocious mood. I accidentally knock someone’s coat off the hanger when I’m hanging my parka up in the employee closet and I don’t even pick it up. Instead I stare coldly at it on the floor and think, that’s right, life’s a bitch. You get knocked down and nobody picks you up, you just lie there in the dark, damp and alone.

  I get to work on the “Great Do-Over,” a promotion we’re launching to revitalize stagnant cosmetics sales. Free makeovers, in-house stylists, makeup artists, and color consultants will be provided at no cost to the customer. They just have to drag their hideous carcasses in here so we can patch them up. These campaigns are easy because it’s the same old barrel of switch words. Renew, revive, refresh, revitalize, retrieve, rethink, re-do. They would be easy anyway, if I wasn’t Bitterina Bitter-son, as Christopher calls me. I don’t really feel like writing about anything that’s fresh or new right now.

  I feel like writing about the pointlessness of trying.

  At noon Ted brings me a sandwich from Cecil’s. “Feeling any better?” he asks.

  “No, not really.”

  “Christopher told me to make you eat more. Here, a Reuben with extra sauce. Nobody likes a skinny Santa!”

  I glare at him. “It must be nice,” I say, “to not care at all how you look.”

  He shrugs. “Yep. Wanna sit with me during the employee-bonding seminar?”

  Employee-bonding seminar? Crap. I forgot about the lousy seminar. A great day gets even better. I trudge downstairs with Ted and all the other Keller drones to the cafeteria for a mandatory employee-bonding seminar. What joy. I absolutely hate these stupid seminars. They used to be offsite and it wasn’t so bad, like when we went to the Holiday Inn and everyone stayed and got smashed in the hotel bar. Now, whenever they have all-staff meetings we have to use the cafeteria, because it’s the only room big enough for all of us when the store is open.

  The bonding-seminar leader guy, who looks like Gene Wilder outfitted from an L. L. Bean catalogue, welcomes us and tells us we’re going to get going right away. I casually look around for Brad. The seminar guy says to pick a partner and turn your chairs to face him or her. There’s a wave of quiet commotion as everyone in the room starts knocking into everyone else as they scoot chairs around. “Here we go,” Ted says and turns his chair toward me.

  I hate this cheer-up corporate crap. If they want to cheer us up they should pay us more and let us work less. The seminar guy says we should look directly into our partner’s eyes and reveal our biggest dream. Ted automatically starts talking.

  “Once, I had a dream of becoming an emergency room doctor,” he says. “Did you know the number-one emergency-room visit is for something stuck up the butt?”

  I roll my eyes and look away. I know he’s just doing this to make me laugh and what’s irritating me is that it’s working.

  “Seriously!” he says. “You wouldn’t believe the stories I’ve heard. My cousin worked in an emergency room in Houston and she says men will shove anything up their butt.”

  “Right,” I say, “especially their heads.”

  “And flashlights!” Ted says, eyes wide with intrigue. “Some that are still on. She also said they’ve extracted maple syrup bottles, whole light bulbs, a peanut butter jar, and once, an egg timer.”

  “And what do they say when asked how an egg timer got in their ass?”

  “That’s the best part. They say they slipped in the shower or fell down the stairs. One guy showed up with a Barbie doll up his ass and said he fell down the stairs and landed on his daughter’s Barbie doll. I mean, how does a Barbie doll accidentally go up your butt? She said they had to tape his ass open and use forceps to get it out.”

  “So all this is part of your big dream?”

  “Sort of. These are the things I need to see one day. My cousin said one woman came in with a Doberman pinscher on top of her. She was having sex with it and the dog got engorged.”

  “Engorged?”

  Ted nods. “Sick, right?”

  “Don’t ever say the word ‘engorged’ again,” I warn him. “Seriously. I’ll vomit.”

  “They had to give the dog sedatives to get it off her. The ambulance drivers were on their knees laughing.”

  The microphone shrieks with feedback as the seminar guy steps up to the podium. “Okay, people,” he says, “now switch it up! Make sure each person has a chance to share their dream!”

  I look at the clock on the wall. “Okay, Ted,” I say, “I never thought I’d say this, but my dream is for you to keep telling up-the-butt stories. I didn’t know it was my biggest dream, but it is.”

  Ted doesn’t miss a beat. He pulls his chair closer and says, “The worst thing she ever saw was a cement enema. This guy came in saying something was in his ass, and she says it took half an hour before he admitted he and his boyfriend mixed up some patio grout and poured it through a funnel right into his ass.”

  “Okay, people!” Seminar Guy says again, “now tell each other one thing you could do to get closer to that dream.”

  Ted thinks for a second. “I know. I could shove something up my ass and go to the emergency room, where I could fill out a doctor job application. It would be a touching, come-full-circle kind of story.”

  “Any idea what you’d shove up there?”

  “
The options are endless. I think I’d start with something small though. Like a Q-tip.”

  “You know what we’re learning here?” Seminar Guy asks. “We’re learning our co-workers aren’t just our co-workers, they’re people, too. People with dreams that might be a lot like yours. See? A lot of you probably just found out you have something in common with your co-worker that you never knew about before.”

  A screen lowers from the ceiling and Seminar Guy kicks up a PowerPoint display. His helpers pass out little white wallet-size plastic cards that have acceptable emotions for the workplace listed on them. He tells us that at any given moment in the day, we can locate the emotion we’re feeling on the wallet-size emotions card and then we can work up to the ideal emotion, which is apparently “Satisfaction.”

  “So, if you’re feeling angry,” Seminar Guy says, “then you look here and find angry on the emotions card and you work up from there. And you know what the absolute most useful emotion there is? The one that can turn everything around? That’s right. Curiosity. When we become curious about something, even if we’re mad about it, then we start to look for answers. Like you might say, ‘Hey, I’m mad about this recent pay cut I got, or at least I think I’m mad. I’m curious to know if I’m actually mad or not.’ And then you could look at your emotion-investigation-technique card and try any one of the suggested ideas for investigating your curiosity. You could try this one, and ask yourself, is this event life-threatening? Well, no, it’s probably not. Sure, there’s a pay cut and that’s going to count for some quality-of-life points, but those points might be like giving up your daily doughnut! In that case you turn it into Weight Watchers points, right? I’m kidding, but am I right?”

  He drones on and on about transforming something into something and avoiding something so we can all something-something more effectively. About this time my eyes are wandering around the room and I spot the back of Brad’s head. I think it’s his head. He’s sitting in between two blond women; I think they’re from cosmetics. Is that Brianna? Why would he be sitting next to women from cosmetics? Everyone knows they’re total sluts who give STDs to the tester makeup when they touch it.

  “So when something overwhelms you,” Seminar Guy says, “you have to chunk it down. You guys know what I mean by that? Chunk it down? Of course you don’t, that’s why I’m here! If you already knew how to chunk it down then I’d be out of a job! Then I’d have my own quality-of-life points to worry about! Then I’ll have to give up my daily doughnut!”

  He picks up a doughnut and whips it over his shoulder. A special effects whoa-oh! sound blares and the doughnut hits a woman standing by the Tastee Freeze machine in the chest. “Chunking it down means you break the task or problem or co-worker into chunks and deal with each chunk individually. Like pieces of pie. You guys like pie, don’t you?” Everyone nods and mumbles yes. We all like pie. I like pie. I’d like to smash pie in Brad’s face. That is totally Brianna he’s sitting next to. I think.

  A picture of a cherry pie pops up on the screen behind the podium and a piercing prerecorded “Chunk It Down” song comes on over the speakers. “That’s the real key to solving your problems,” Seminar Guy shouts. “Chunking it down! I can’t stress that enough! I can’t tell you how important it is. Chunk it down! If I can get one thing across to you—it would be that. One thing and everything else will follow! So the next time you’re overwhelmed at work,” Seminar Guy shouts, “what are you going to do?”

  “Chunk it down,” the room mumbles.

  “What was that?”

  “Chunk it down,” the room says again, slightly louder. We close the bonding seminar with a “Personal Achievement” pledge and we each get a magnet that says: CHUNK IT!

  On the way out I’m wondering if I have any sick days left when someone tugs on my arm. It’s Brad. He’s standing there flanked by two cosmetics girls.

  “Hey,” he says to me.

  “Oh, hi, Brad!” Ted says loudly. “How are you? You are just doing a super job!”

  I give Ted a little shove and I must have used more force than I thought, because I almost knock him down. “All right, already!” he says, brushing my arm off, and he sulks away.

  Brad winks at me. “Wanna have dinner again?” he whispers.

  I peer over his shoulder at the two cosmetics girls behind him.

  “With me?” I ask.

  “Of course with you,” he says. “I’ll cook you dinner at my place.”

  “I don’t know,” I sniff. “I’ll have to check my calendar.”

  “Come on,” he says, “I insist. I won’t take no for an answer. This weekend. Let me cook you dinner.” I look up at him and he’s still the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.

  “Sure,” I say, smiling like a lamb on her merry way to slaughter. “Of course.”

  “No, no, no!” Christopher protests. “Why is he cooking for you? At his house? No. Too soon!” I tell him he seems to forget we’ve already had sex, so Brad couldn’t be trying to get me in bed. We’ve already been there.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “You see a horror movie on a second date or go feed ducks. Cooking you dinner at his house? That’s too personal, too soon.”

  “One, I hate horror movies. Two, it’s January and any ducks still in Minnesota are frozen to death, and three, I think we crossed over into ‘too personal’ when I was on my knees in front of him. You know?”

  Christopher shakes his head. I get irritated with him. He’s crapping on my parade. Then when I ask him what I should wear he gets all huffy and says it’s my funeral, I can wear what I want to.

  Sheesh. Some people just can’t be happy for you.

  At my desk, I have two new e-mails from my mother. The first one is the latest mind-numbing layout of the seating arrangement for my sister’s wedding. You cannot imagine how many times this seating arrangement has been changed and rechanged. Winston Churchill himself would be impressed at the tenacity, intricacy, and strategy these women have put into who should eat chicken Kiev next to whom. I don’t know why I get these updates, they have nothing to do with me and they further agitate my barely suppressed anger at how much money my parents are spending on the stupidest day of my sister’s life.

  By the time Hailey is done with her requests for silver chopsticks and releasing imported butterflies instead of rice, my parents will be broke and whatever chance I had at a decent wedding will be shot. I’ll have to win a free wedding on one of those Mississippi gambling paddleboats. Wedding, reception, and honeymoon all in one location. We can get married on deck, tear up some pull-tabs in the minicasino and vomit over the side of the boat when we drink too much complimentary Champale. It will be beautiful.

  The second e-mail is a forwarded list of “stress-reducing tips for the office” from Woman’s World, the magazine for women who love being bath mats.

  According to this article, it’s easy to “Let go and Let God!” All you have to do is:

  1. Do something you’re really good at!

  They recommend I bake cupcakes for a sick friend or garden in my yard, but having neither an oven nor a rake at work, I settle for knocking over Big Trish’s fern.

  2. Look up!

  I think they mean this as a general piece of advice, a “look on the bright side” or even “straighten your posture” idea, but I choose to actually look directly up at the ceiling and stare at the fluorescent lights and the three pencils stuck in the drop ceiling Peg-Board. I wonder if one will fall out one day and pierce my eyeball and if they have workers’ comp for that. Okay, step two done.

  3. Put on some baby powder!

  They say applying baby powder brings back fond memories of a simpler time, when you were cared for, except one of my mother’s favorite stories is about the time she was changing my diaper and the doorbell rang. “I just went and answered the door!” my mother says. “I left baby Jennifer right there on the changing table and when I came back, she was on the floor! She was perfectly all right, not a scratch on her, a
nd she was just smiling down there, looking at me like she enjoyed her trip!”

  Right. I enjoyed my trip.

  I have no memory of the event, but if it’s true I wasn’t crying, I was most likely in shock. I don’t see why she thinks it’s a funny story. It’s probably why I could never learn my multiplication tables. So, forget number three.

  4. Water or feed something.

  Oh, what the hell. I’m hungry anyway, so I go to the employee break room to root around in the refrigerator and steal somebody’s frozen Weight Watchers dinner. I actually find a baked ziti, the holy grail of the Weight Watchers dinner collection. It’s the only one that doesn’t taste like moisturized sawdust, and it’s hidden in the back of the freezer under a big ice-fuzzy tub of vanilla ice cream. Somebody hid their stash, but not well enough! Baked ziti is only five points. Sure, it’s chemically enhanced, reduced, boiled down, and reformed into known foodlike shapes. It’s probably all made of soy-based kerosene, but I don’t care, it’s only five freaking points!

  I heat that baby up quick in the microwave before anyone sees the crime, and on my way back to my desk, I chuck a single piece of pasta into the fishbowl on top of the microwave. There, I’ve completed the last tip, I’ve fed Ryan Seacrest, the office goldfish, and by the looks of his furious nibbling, he was hungry. Damn. That article might be right. I do feel better after pissing off Big Trish, contemplating the plausibility of workers’ comp, and being kind to an animal with a brain the size of a cardamom seed. Go figure.

  Saturday Brad picks me up and tells me I look lovely. I toss my head back and say I only had a few minutes to get ready, even though it was another grueling all-day affair, not to mention I am officially bankrupt now because I scheduled an emergency dermabrasion session.

  “Are we going somewhere first?” I ask.

  “First? No, straight to my house!” he says. “I didn’t tell you over at your place, it’s no big deal, but I’m allergic to cats. I had hives for three days after I stayed over.”