Marcia walks to the kitchen for the 380th time that week, it feels like, and there she stands doing nothing, her lower back against the countertop’s edge, and the brown cabinets she paid a fortune for looking too bougie even for her.
Work from home? More like eat from home.
And nothing happens until she forces some thought about work out of her mind, and then in the blessed silence of her own cranial library—a wood and marble affair—she finds the attention to hear some words spoken by the neighbor through the open window. The evening light is blocked by buildings, but what she hears sounds sunny somehow. She’s eyeing the clothesline draping from the upstairs window to tree branch of a scrubby alley tree. There are kid’s overalls and collared shirts, long sagging socks.
The voice says: “Just fuck it.”
She thinks it must be Raymond, from 301. Yes, there was something in the sound of the voice that had avuncular charm. Raymond is in his sixties, lives one floor up, and is always making inappropriate offers to share his grape brandy with the youngsters of the block. Marcia doesn’t mind him terribly because, Aren’t we all shameless in our own way? Marcia had been for much of her life.
She thinks of the red booths of Calenzo’s, remembers her time managing the Italian restaurant, and liberties she took in the “back of the house,” as the owner, Dale, loved to call it.
There she stands, in her moment, having it, a full reverie about a past boss who railroaded her out of the department—setting her up to fail. It was a self-pitying reverie that she felt entitled to. She had not initiated the affair with Dale, but she had put a stop to it and threatened to expose him.
What Raymond’s says tickles her. Yes, fucking it is clearly the best option in regards to her persistently invasive thoughts about work. It is Friday, the end of a shitstorm of a week. Dinner is eaten, and she’s cleaned up and used the restroom. In the cupboard now she looks slowly at the tea boxes in the cabinet. She could go for something stiffer to shake off the tension. But she prepares earl gray.
Raymond talks on. It sounds like he is talking to his son, a quiet, clean boy of about 12. But the rest is not as clear, and there is no point eavesdropping any longer, as nothing he can say will be more applicable. Her neighbor had inadvertently altered her mood, and she would have to thank him the next time she bumped into him in the hallway or the garage or the laundry room. Though on a daily basis she hopes precisely not to run into him.
With her head in the cupboard again to find that old jar of gritty honey, her view of the open window is completely blocked—the open window past which Raymond now soars—or, more correctly, plummets.