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“You’re listening to Jim and Dani in the morning on Channel ninety-four point two.” I jab the snooze button to silence the cheery morning jingle of the local radio station. I’m probably the only person on the planet who still uses a traditional alarm clock, but I can’t get out of bed this early without Jim and Dani. I hit snooze three more times with my phone an inch from my face, scrolling through Instagram between the third and fourth, living vicariously through the people of Instagram and their neverending vacations. Work is about as enticing as a prison sentence, but it has to be done, so I put aside my phone to get ready. Our plain bedroom comes into focus when I shove my glasses on my face. Dragging my heavy legs over the side of the bed to stand up, I stare sleepily into my side of the closet at a tightly packed jumble of clothing that all looks the same to my half-closed eyes. Another yawn stretches my face, making my head throb.
My morning routine is sluggish but turns into a lively race against the clock when I realize how much time I’ve wasted, and I almost forget to yank a frozen entrée out of the freezer in my hurried dash out the door. Squinting against the blinding sun, I climb into my car, apathetic towards the splendor of another sunny San Diego day. I make the short drive, clenching my jaw against a multitude of yawns.
The office walls assault me with a particularly oppressive olive-green hue as I make my way through a labyrinth of cubicles. Narrow slivers of floor-to-ceiling windows sporadically break up the drab, textured walls. The place purrs to life as those of us who start at 7:00 a.m. are settling in and getting down to business.
I try to get our insured on the phone to do a recorded statement about an accident that happened six months ago. I leave another long-winded message about how important it is for her to call us back. It’s a condition of her policy... blah, blah, blah. The claimant, Mr. Reeves, is going to call me like he does every day to ask if I got ahold of my insured and when can he take his car in for repairs.
The phone immediately rings again as soon as I hang up, as if on cue. “Claims, this is Alexis. Can I help you?
“No, Mr. Reeves, I was unable to reach the insured party. No, Mr. Reeves, I don’t know when you’ll be able to repair your car.”
Mr. Reeves sputters on about incompetence and the worse experience he has ever had before demanding to speak to my supervisor.
I transfer him, staring stonily at my phone that once again demands answering.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Daniels, but your rental car insurance only extends for up to five days after you’ve received an offer on your total loss.” I’m a robot who looks like a person and repeats the same words over and over again, all day long. I’m programmed to know all forthcoming objections, and my mouth is already formulating the response. “We apologize, but we are unable to extend your rental for the length of time it takes you to find a new car. Your policy indicates that we are only obligated to...” Click. She hung up.
Within seconds, it rings again.
“Hey, Alexis, what do you want to do for lunch?” my cubicle mate, Sarah, asks in a loud whisper. I hold up my index finger, pointing it at my head to indicate I’m on the phone. I spend the next twenty minutes explaining to a policyholder what to expect after he fell asleep at the wheel and rear-ended another car on the freeway, causing it to flip. He’s lucky the other party isn’t claiming any injuries. The people who get tapped in the rear at five miles per hour in the parking lot are always injured, while the ones who were in the roll over’s say they are “just fine.” By the time I finish with my phone conversation, Sarah is in the middle of a heated debate with someone who can’t understand why we won’t buy him a brand-new car.
It’s payday, so we get an hour lunch instead of the usual forty-five minutes. As soon as 12:30 p.m. rolls around, I bolt from my desk, ringing phone be damned, because every minute counts as we try to make the most of our hour away from the office.
Sarah and I are so predictable that we end up at the same place every time, even though we often talk about going elsewhere. Right now, it’s Black Angus. They have lunch specials, and we can get a sit-down meal because they’re quick.
We rush off in my car and arrive knowing exactly what we want. By the time the waitress comes over to take our drink orders, we tell her we’re ready. I order diet soda, but Sarah can’t stand any diet stuff so she orders the real thing.
“I’ll have a grilled chicken sandwich with fries.”
Sarah orders an Au Jus open face sandwich.
Everyone likes Sarah with her bubbly personality and perpetually pleasant smile that goes all the way to her eyes. Her trusting face inspires people to talk, so she finds out information before anyone else without even trying and is always up on the latest drama of the day.
“So, what’s new?” A long sip of ice cold soda chills my throat.
“Did you hear about supervisor George? Who just got a divorce?”
Of course I haven’t. “No.”
“Well, guess who he’s dating? Never mind, you’ll never guess. Red, from clerical.”
Her name isn’t Red. We just call her that because of her flaming red pageboy haircut nobody understands.
“Really? I think she’s about a foot taller than him and at least ten years older. Oddest pairing ever.” I shake my head.
I can hardly believe she’s talking about the same dismal place I trudge off to for work each day. The place she talks about is exciting and filled with the requisite intrigue and mystery you would expect from a steamy soap opera, but all I see when I look around is green carpet, drab walls, rows of cubicles, and stressed out drones. Sometimes, I’m convinced she must be making it all up until someone gets fired and I realize that person was the subject of some sort of controversy she was telling me all about months ago.
“Oh, and about Angela. You know, from Trevor’s unit? Rumor has it that she faked a pregnancy to steal her husband away from his first wife. She had a ‘miscarriage’ but the damage was done. He’d already broken the news to his wife and moved her out of her parents’ house and into her own apartment.”
“Wow.” I’m shocked. Well, just shocked in general but not shocked that Angela would do something like this. I get a devilish ‘hanger on’ vibe from her and there’s nothing genuine about the way she’s overly friendly to Sarah while acting as if I don’t exist.
“Yep. Mainly, I just feel sorry for the girl, if that’s true. Enough work gossip. How is Will? You haven’t said a thing about him in a while.”
“He’s fine. Tell me what’s going on with your cousin.” My sly reply successfully derails a discussion about my fiancé.
Our food arrives just as Sarah finishes the story about her twenty-year-old cousin Isabel who has just announced she’s getting married to a man twice her age with three DUI’s under his belt and four kids by two different women. Sarah pulls her shoulder-length, thick, brown hair into a messy bun and digs into her sandwich while I go straight for the steaming fries, careful not to burn my tongue in my impatience. Every time we go out, I tell myself I’m going to substitute vegetables for the fries, but when I open my mouth to give my order, it has a mind of its own. “Fries” always comes out. I savor each bite while Sarah continues to recap the rise and fall of Cousin Blanca’s turbulent marriage. The divorce will be finalized soon if he agrees with her ridiculous alimony demands. I swipe the last French fry on my plate through a smear of catsup and guzzle the last of my water.
The supervisors watch Sarah like a hawk. She doesn’t have the luxury of being even a few minutes late, so I drop her off in front of the building before finding a parking spot. I plop myself down at my cube, already in the throes of a carbohydrate-induced crash. I want to crawl under my desk and fall asleep. Instead, I position my headset and pick up the phone to retrieve my messages so I can get on with the rest of my day and get out of there.
At 3:45 p.m. on the dot, I’m out the door. Sarah remains at her desk, surrounded by piles and piles of files. She missed work yesterday to attend her brother’s child custody court hearing, so now she has to play catch up. If I’m the golden child of the office, then Sarah is the black sheep. She’s terribly behind in her file reviews, but so is almost everybody else. I don’t know why she bothers, but I need what is left of my sanity way too much.
I walk out to my trusty little Toyota and settle into the sun-warmed leather seats for my short commute home. It is just one of the perks of living in the centrally-located and much-sought after San Diego community of North Park. It takes me ten minutes to get anywhere I need to go, and I never tire of admiring the charming bungalows neatly lining the streets. Will and I used to stroll around the neighborhood on foot, wandering in and out of eclectic shops and trying new restaurants back in the days when spending time together mattered. Before he decided he hates California.
A sad sigh escapes my lips when I catch sight of his car in our parking space. I drive up and down the street until I find a spot two blocks down.
At about seven hundred fifty square feet, this is the biggest apartment we have ever lived in. “One whole bedroom and a hallway?” I marveled when we moved in. We joked that we were finally moving up in the world and really, we were—considering we started out in a studio the size of a postage stamp. Our décor could be described as drab industrial brown carpet, meets concrete cinder block walls. The kitchen and bathroom are straight out of the 1960s, but it was within our price range. When you live in California, you pay a Sun tax. It’s not an official deduction on my paycheck, but everyone knows we don’t get all this sunshine and blue skies for free.
I exchange my too-snug work pants and uncomfortable button up top for a pair of sweats so faded I can barely make out the triple row of pink stripes running down the sides and my favorite, oversized t-shirt. Finally comfortable, I rock my head from side to side, trying to shake out the days’ worth of constriction in my neck and shoulders—an unwelcome side effect of sitting hunched over a desk every day. The tension in my neck extends to my demeanor.
“Hello,” I say in a clipped tone, walking past Will.
“Hey,” he replies from his usual spot on the couch, without averting his eyes from the TV. He asks how my day was without listening for answer.
In the kitchen, I try not to look too hard at the yellow linoleum, potholed with grooves and crannies caked with dirt from tenants past, that I can’t get clean no matter how hard I scrub. I also try not to look at the growing pile of magazines in the dining room chair. Will gets five magazines a month from his magazine club, only reads half, then leaves them all on the kitchen table along with the rest of his mail and other various items. In an attempt to remove the mess from my line of sight, I stacked the magazines on the chair, but that plan apparently isn’t going to work anymore. The pile is growing higher than the table.
I take a personal size frozen pepperoni pizza out of the freezer and the party size bag of tortilla chips off the tiny shelf that doubles as the pantry to snack on while I wait for the oven to heat up. My mom gave up on teaching me to cook long ago and added it to her list of ways she failed me as a mother. Maybe if I had a kitchen from the same century I lived in, I might be more inspired, but for now, the frozen food aisle keeps us fed. Besides, I already do everything else around the house. I’m not adding personal chef to the list.
I get access to the television later that night, after Will finally shuffles off to bed. “You’re watching Model Mission on MTV. We’re getting ready to give one young lady an amazing opportunity at a $100,000 modeling contract with Imagine Models. One girl we have chosen from among thousands will have her life changed forever and be catapulted into a fabulous modeling career with one of the top agencies in the world.” I watch transfixed as the cameras take us to contestant Crystal’s hometown. She’s your typical small-town girl who goes to school at the same high school as everyone else in her town above age fourteen. She has long, blonde, straight hair and those really cute teeth, the kind where the eyeteeth on both sides stick out just a little more from the front four like that actress Kirsten Dunst. They aren’t perfect, but they give her smile unique character that I like.
Crystal has always dreamed of modeling, but currently works at McDonald’s for extra money. She must beat four other contestants from all over the United States in order to launch herself from Big Macs to the Big Apple. Cameras follow each young girl to their hometown where they talk about their dreams of traveling and making it big in the modeling world.
I’m twenty-four now, which is over the hill by anyone’s standards for a modeling career, but even when I was a teenager, there was no chance in hell that I could’ve been a model.
I was an okay baby. Chunky, but I guess I’d say I was cute. Somewhere around the third grade is when I imagine cute ended and painfully-awkward began. I had long, thick hair I didn’t know what to do with. The sloppy ponytail became my signature look. I don’t know which was worse, the extreme over bite or the large space between my two front teeth. To add insult to injury, I started wearing glasses in the fourth grade that got progressively thicker each year I went in for an eye exam. Getting to wear glasses like Mom and Dad was cool at first, but by the time I got to middle school, any perceived cool factor was gone and I was just a goofy looking girl with glasses and bad teeth. I started out tiny like the rest of them, but puberty hit at twelve and I was no longer the slim-hipped, petite pixie gymnast that my gym mates were. As the tallest girl, I was last to march in at every gymnastics competition, and our coach had to raise the high bar to keep my pointed toes from scraping the mats. By high school, I was all muscle from years of balancing on my hands. Sort of like the female version of a linebacker-turned-sumo wrestler, according to the current state of my thighs. I was too tall for a gymnast but, even at five-seven, not tall enough for modeling, especially without the collarbones and the long, slim torso to go along with it.
I am the antithesis of five-foot ten Crystal, who goes on to win the whole Model Mission competition. She is overcome with tears during her winning runway walk then falls triumphantly into the arms of her family. I wonder what it feels like to make your parents swell with pride and admiration. The show ends as she prepares to embark on an opportunity that most people can only dream about. It’s 11:00 p.m., so I click off the TV, brush my teeth and get into bed, all the while imagining how different my life would be if I were a fashion model on the fast track to fame and fortune instead of an overworked cubicle dweller with a forever fiancé and no wedding date in sight.
