Every morning this week, after the first mail run, my task has been to go to all the copying and printing machines in the office and fill them up with paper, as well as leave packages of paper next to them. Moving around the office with a cart full of mail or paper for the copying and printing machines is my least favorite task. Inevitably someone will say something to me and I have to respond.
Small talk. I know all about small talk. I studied small talk at Paterson and have a number of set responses to small talk initiated by others, as well as a number of small talk questions for those times when, for whatever reason, I feel called upon to start the small talk. In Social Interaction class, we learned to formulate four or five questions from the day’s events. By reading the paper or by searching in our computers, we memorized questions about the weather, about sports, about the latest happenings. Every morning this week, I have gone to a Web page that reports on local events and have written down a few questions just in case. “What do you think of the Boston Red Sox losing to the New York Yankees?” Questions like that.
Fortunately, I haven’t had to use any of my prepared questions. When I come in the morning Jasmine is already here. She hands me my daily list and we each go about what we have to do in silence. I like it that way. I think Jasmine does as well because most of the work she does at her desk, she does with headphones on. But sometimes I wonder what Belinda was like and whether Jasmine would put her headphones on if Belinda were working here instead of me.
Opening up boxes and taking out packages of paper is something that I can do without too much concentration. Many of the jobs here at the law firm are like that, which is fine with me because then I can think about other things like I’m doing now. What I’m thinking about now is whether there is ever any “large talk” in the law firm. Sometimes I overhear the lawyers talking about their work. They talk about the content of letters they received or what someone said to them over the telephone or about what happened in a meeting. I hear a lot of “Then he said” or “Then she said” and this reporting of what other people have said is retold with a lot of emotion. This I think is the law firm’s equivalent of large talk, since emotion is not something that accompanies small talk.
I wonder how I would define large talk. Most of my talks with Rabbi Heschel are large talk since they involve questions about God. The conversation that Aurora and I had after Arturo told me about the summer job at the law firm was large talk. All of my conversations with my friend Joseph at the hospital were large talk, even if they were about small things. The reason for that is that both of us knew that each word counted. The one thing I don’t understand is why I never made a distinction between small talk and large talk at Paterson. I know it doesn’t make sense, but for some reason all the talking that I did and heard at Paterson seemed like large talk.
“Excuse me.”
Someone is speaking to me. I turn around and there is the secretary who sits in space number eighteen. I search for her name. Space eighteen. Beth. The lawyer she works for is Harvey Marcus. I stand there not knowing exactly what to say to her.
“Where is Jasmine?”
I like those kinds of questions. “She went to the post office.”
“Shit!”
This is an unexpected response. Then I see a small stack of documents on the counter and I understand that she needs Jasmine to do something for her. I catch her looking at the big, white clock that hangs above my desk.
“I told her I was bringing her some documents that needed to be bound before eleven.”
I know about binding documents because Jasmine pointed out the machine in the back that is used for the task, but Jasmine has not yet taught me how to use it. “She will be back by ten.” I turn around to look at the clock. It is nine-thirty.
“Harvey needs these for a Board of Directors meeting that we’re having here at eleven.”
I look at the documents that she has placed on the counter. “There are only six documents there,” I say.
“I need ten copies of each, and each one of them has to be tabbed and bound.” She is not looking at me. She is writing on one of the request slips on the counter. She presses so hard on the slip as she writes that the slip tears. “Shit! Tell me this is not happening to me.”
I don’t think she is asking me to tell her this. I don’t know what “tabbed” means and I don’t know how to bind, but I can make copies, so I say, “I can make the copies. I can start.”
She looks at me. “Aren’t you supposed to be re…I mean, slow or something?”
How can I answer that? I know in this case what follows after she stopped: “retarded.” So Beth somehow expected me to be retarded or slow or something, and I said something or offered to do something that deviated from that expectation. But where did she get the expectation that I was retarded? Who put it there in the first place?
“Hey, are you there?” She is snapping her fingers at me. “I guess if you work here it means you can do the work, right?”
I don’t respond. But I don’t think that the conclusion to her assumption is necessarily correct.
“You see these yellow stickies? These are the places where the tabs are going to go. You need to take them off the documents when you make the copies, but then you need to put them back on so you can place the tabs.”
“What are tabs?”
She looks at the clock on the wall. There is a grimace on her face. I have seen kids at Paterson make that grimace seconds before they break down in tears of anger and frustration. “I really don’t have time for this. Here’s the request slip. I got it here in time for it to get done on time. If the firm can’t hire decent support…Harvey is going to have to deal with it. I did my part.” All the time she says this, her hands are in the air moving about. I wonder how it is possible for her to feel what she appears to be feeling over a simple task like copying and binding.
At ten Jasmine arrives. She is carrying a plastic bag, which she places on her desk. She comes over and looks at the six stacks of documents that I have made: Ten copies of each of the documents that Beth left with me. I can tell she is wondering what I am doing.
“Beth,” I say. I hand her the torn request slip. “They need to be tabbed and bound. There is a meeting at eleven. She was very upset that you were not here.”
Jasmine nods. Unlike many of the other people who work at the firm, Jasmine is always calm. Even when she is angry, like at Juliet for example, you can tell that the anger does not affect her. The reason I can tell is that her breathing never alters. A person who is truly angry has physical reactions that last for a while, even after the event that caused the anger is gone. “You started with the copying,” she says. She picks up the top copy from the first set. “There is no table of contents. How do we know where to put the tabs?”
I walk to my desk and show her the six documents that Beth brought with the yellow stickies. Jasmine picks one up. “This is the way she brought them?”
“Yes. Like that, with yellow stickies to mark where she wanted the tabs.”
“So you took the stickies out to make the copies and then you stuck the stickies back on Beth’s original. You stuck them on the same page they were before, right?
I pick up a piece of paper from my desk and show her my list of page numbers where I found the stickies. I don’t have to tell her what they are. I force myself to look carefully at Jasmine’s face and see the smallest of smiles beginning to form. “Okay, let’s get this done so Beth doesn’t have a nervous breakdown.” She says this as if Beth has had nervous breakdowns before.
We work in silence except for when I read out a page number. Jasmine sticks the tabs in all the copies and then she brings out the binding machine. She shows me how to place the document between two plastic sheets before it is placed in an electric press that makes the holes and binds it. After Jasmine does a few, she stands to one side and waves for me to do it.
I look at the clock. It is now ten-thirty and Beth needs these at eleven. I know what to do, but I don’t think I can go fast enough to finish fifty-six documents in half an hour. “I am not sure,” I say.
“About what?”
“Marcelo is not as fast as Jasmine.”
“Marcelo is wasting time talking about it while he could be doing it.”
Then she goes to her desk and puts her headphones on.
The first document I try comes out wrong. I do not align the plastic covers correctly. I decide to put that one aside and move on to the next one rather than ask Jasmine how to fix it. The second one comes out right, but it takes me three minutes to bind. There are only a few manual movements required, but somehow the knowledge that time is passing is slowing me down. Then I think that perhaps this is the assignment that will send me to Oak Ridge. Wasn’t that the deal? “Each assignment will come with its own rules,” Arturo said. “Your success will depend on your ability to fulfill those rules.”
I stop. I take a deep breath. I close my eyes. I think, of all things, of shoveling manure at the Paterson stable. I think of the slow movement of the shovel, of filling the wheelbarrow and wheeling it outside where later a truck will come to haul it away. Harry used to say to me that I shoveled manure as if each shovelful was gold, so carefully did I do it. This is the way I need to work now, slow and steady but continuously. What else can I do? Can Marcelo be someone other than Marcelo? When I open my eyes, I see that Jasmine has turned around and is looking at me. I look in her face for worry or for anger that I am not working fast enough, but instead I see her look at me in silence without any reproach.
At ten fifty-five I see Beth at the counter. She looks first at the documents I have bound, then at me, and then at Jasmine.
“I don’t believe this,” I hear her say.
Jasmine removes her headphones but doesn’t stand up. “Did you say something?” she asks Beth.
“Didn’t I put on the request slip that Harvey had a meeting at eleven and we needed the documents bound by then? He’s about halfway done and people are already here. Harvey needs these to hand out as soon as the meeting starts.”
“Harvey should have given us the documents with more leeway.”
“I brought them in at nine-thirty. An hour and a half ago. I don’t care, I have a copy of the request slip to prove it.”
“You’re going to have a heart attack. Look at you.” Jasmine is seeing what I see. Beth’s face is so red it is beginning to turn purple. Her hands are grasping the counter so hard that her knuckles are a pale white. She is starting to shake.
“Why aren’t you helping him? If you helped him this would be done by now.” Now Beth is yelling at Jasmine. I go back to the binding. “What is it with you? Do you want him to fail so you can get Belinda? Is that it?”
I stop to look at Jasmine. I wonder if that is the reason she didn’t help me. Jasmine slowly gets up from her chair and stands in front of Beth.
“Everyone in the firm is going to hear you yell. Is it really worth it? Harvey’s going to get his documents in half an hour. That’s the same time he would have gotten them if I was working on them. And it’s a one-person job. I can’t help him.” Jasmine walks to the table where I am working and picks up one of the documents that I recently bound. “Look. The binding is perfect. They wouldn’t have come out this good if I had worked on them. I would have rushed the job and there would have been mistakes.”
There’s a moment when Beth looks as if she suddenly discovered that an audience of people witnessed her outburst.
“You’ll have to deal with Harvey,” she says. “I did my part. I brought them in on time. I have a copy of the request slip.” She walks away.
Now Jasmine looks at me and shakes her head. I don’t know what that gesture means. Maybe it means that I shouldn’t believe anything Beth says.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You did not tell the truth to Beth. The documents would be bound by now if Jasmine had done them. It took Jasmine thirty seconds to bind a document. The fastest Marcelo could do it without making mistakes was two minutes and twenty-five seconds.”
“You timed it?”
“I had to in order to determine my optimum speed.”
“Your optimum speed.”
“At Paterson we call it optimum speed. It means finding the best speed to accomplish a task given who you are. Everyone has one.”
“Unbelievable,” she says. Then, “You better turn on your optimum speed to finish those documents before Harvey comes in here huffing and puffing. You think that Beth was high drama, wait ‘til you see Harvey act out.”
“The documents will not be done in time for the meeting.”
“But you knew that already. All you had to do was multiply your optimum speed by the number of documents you still had to do.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t speed up.”
“No.”
“How come?”
“It was not possible to meet the deadline without making mistakes.”
She walks over to me. “Everyone here thinks their deadlines are important. Some are and some aren’t. Nothing will happen, the world will not end, there won’t be any lives or, heaven forbid, money lost if the documents are not there at eleven. The worst that can happen is that Harvey will have to say that the documents will be there in a few minutes. But he won’t say that because the documents will not be discussed or even opened during the meeting. Harvey wants the people at the meeting to take documents when they leave. So the eleven o’clock deadline is all about Harvey looking good. He wants the reports on a table when people come in because he thinks that will impress them.”
“It is not important to impress people.”
“It is extremely important!” She shakes her hands as if with fear, but I can tell the shaking is not real. “The meeting breaks up for lunch at noon. We can take the documents then and Harvey will still look good. I’ll go see if I can keep him from having a cow.”
“It was Marcelo’s fault.”
She looks down. I thought I was the only one afraid to look people in the eye, but she seems afraid as well. “Listen, there are some real deadlines where people will, maybe not lose their lives, but they’ll lose money if they’re not met. It takes a while to recognize them.”
“Even if I recognize the deadlines, Marcelo can only work so fast.”
“What we’ll have to do is divide up the work. You’ll work on the jobs that are not time-sensitive and I’ll do the others.”
“I am very good at concentrating when I can work at optimum speed.” I try to say this in a way that is funny, but Jasmine does not smile. Then it occurs to me to say, “Belinda would have met the eleven o’clock deadline.” I mean to phrase this as a question, but it ends up being a statement.
“Yes.”
Then I see her walk out of the mailroom. She is going to stop Harvey from having a cow.