I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Ruby positioned her nipples above the bra cups instead of inside them. It wasn’t for any seductive or provocative reason; she just didn’t know any better. But there they sat all day, every day: two brown, knobby silver dollars behind gossamer cotton, resting atop buckling bra fabric that bulged out almost as far as her small, perched breasts. She was a mousy Vietnamese woman with a thick accent and an online bachelor’s degree in business management, and she sat facing me in the desk five feet from mine. Somehow, at the age of early-30-something, she had never received proper instructions on wearing a bra.
There were two older women who worked in the small office with us, and neither of them had ever tried to correct our accountant’s camisole disclosure. And I knew they had noticed too; I could see them glancing at her visible nipples almost as frequently as I did. And I think the only reason they didn’t say anything to her was because our office didn’t receive any outside people—no clients, no customers, no walk-ins of any kind. It was just the four of us in that room, and they didn’t want to deal with an awkward situation like that if they didn’t have to. Or perhaps they thought it to be some type of Vietnamese couture.
I kept thinking about those nipples in that camisole when I should have been more focused on how I had departed the job. Because I just left. Never called, never emailed, never went back. I had showed up for work on Monday then disappeared on Tuesday. I had spent six months with that little family-owned fruit-powder company as their shipping and receiving manager, dispatching their delivery trucks to health-food stores across the state, and I had left without so much as a “good-bye” or an “I quit” or a “fuck this shit.” I had taken the coward’s way out, even with my own loose termination standards.
And it’s now been a week since leaving them without a word, and I vowed today would be the day I would finally extinguish that guilty, glowing red “14” on my answering machine by calling them and explaining exactly why it was that I left and never returned. But I had no explanation—a week later and I still hadn’t come up with an articulated reason for leaving. I knew why it was that I left. It wasn’t just a whim or a wild hangover; my disappearance was a premeditated action, debated for hours and hours in the mental courtroom. I had weighed the pros and cons countless times with coffee, with wine, with Friends on TV, and with friends watching TV, but the verdict never faltered—I had to get the fuck out of there. My life had changed due to the responsibilities of that job and I didn’t like where it was headed—something drastic needed to be done. There was a scalpel option and a machete option, and the courtroom voted for the latter. I was in my late 20s and saddled with a blossoming career that could have easily swept eight or ten years under the carpet in the blink of an eye, and I just couldn’t willingly let that course unfold.
Life had become the repetition of an average Wednesday, playing out over and over again. My psyche had actually ingested the workweek schedule into its natural body clock rhythm, and I would wake up seconds before the alarm clock rang and be shaving before I even realized what was going on. I had my Monday button-up shirt and my Tuesday button-up shirt and so on; don’t park on the south side of the street on Thursdays, bring cash for the taco truck’s breakfast burrito on Fridays. I would go into the same diner every day on my lunch break, watching the same unhappy faces watch me. I could smell their fat, unhappy families at home, their mortgage worries, their cholesterol problems, their restless leg syndromes. The faces always ordered the same Cokes in Styrofoam cups, the same chiliburgers and sandwiches, the same salads, and they always reviewed their checks each day looking for any discrepancies in the waitress’s addition of $5.49 + $1.69. I could see the quelled aspirations and dying dreams hovering above their chewing heads, crying out for me not to let myself become like one of them.
“It’s the Grand Trap.”
“Adult life’s not like it is on the TV.”
“If I could I’d do it all over again … and not have kids.”
“We tied our own nooses, boy. Fuck retirement.”
“Get out while you can. Disappear!
“This new Honda has replaced my soul.”
“My house is just a cot on a sinking ship called S.S. America.”
“I loathe my wife but I don’t know how to live without her.”
“Don’t strive to be middle class, strive to be middle classy.”
The “14” blinked brighter and brighter from the answering machine, yet I was still no closer to making that call. There was no way to explain to my boss about the epiphany I had had in the diner. There was no way I could sculpt into words exactly how I had felt when I heard a dozen imaginary voices telling me to quit my job and pursue a life that I believed in before it was too late. I suppose madness was as good a reason as any to terminate one’s own employment, but it wouldn’t explain why it took me a week to return their repeated calls asking for a simple reason why.
I should have been thinking about the hardships I had put upon those four people in the office, and all those deliveries that were due to go out and didn’t, and the disregard I had shown the boss who was just beginning to treat me like a son. But all I could think about was Ruby and those nipples poking up over her bra, and how I would never again see them glaring at me from across the office.