One of the last bits of writing of the year.
Eleanor
I never meant to take the job.
Dishing out drippy fruit salad in styrofoam cups wasn't exactly my idea of prime "workplace experience" when I started looking for employment. The hours just fit - and I need the extra cash for grad school and Christmas presents.
I come home at eight every night. I live in an old house on University Avenue. From the outside it looks like a crumbling mideval castle. There's even an arched window for a maiden to lean from. There's also a rickety spiral staircase just inside the front door. I live in what must have been a dining room at some time - it comes right off the kitchen and has a rotting reddish-brown wood floor. I ripped the peeling magenta 80s-style watercolor wallpaper off about a month ago. I haven't had time to paint over it yet, but the crimson red is waiting beneath the staircase with a light frosting of dust on its lid. I have all my stuff shoved into plastic bins on the side of my room. No dresser.
I don't see my roommates really. There are two of them who live in the bedrooms upstairs. One is a beauty school student who likes to disappear in her 92 tercel every morning only to re-disappear every night.
The other is a microbiology major who lives at the library. When she does come home she definitely is not waving handkerchiefs and leaning from her arched window. She stays in her room until 2am when she wipes the cobwebs off her elbows, creeps down the stairs, and runs out to pick up a Bacon-Sausage-Muffin value meal at Fatty McLard's House of Heart Attacks in a Bag.
I like being in an empty house. This happens on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I don't have classes until 4pm. I can play my jazz records full blast and paint for hours.
I'm an art major. Eventually I want to have my own studio and my own students. I see myself standing behind a row of wood easels - watching my brilliant pupils turn out their own inspirational interpretations of what I like to call "the staple gun Dad gave me for Christmas." They will all wear white smocks and get smudges of blue and red on their chins. I will turn the staple gun on its side and tell them to "capture the essence of horizontal staples." They will furrow their brows and mutter "mmmnnyes" to themselves.
For now I'm just trying to sell a few pieces.
I have sold a few.
A few.
I keep staring at the advent calendar Mom sent me in the mail. I've eaten up to day 12 and it's just the 7th. The serving size says 12 pieces - so that's what I ate for dinner last night. I found that the nauseous "chocolate for dinner" feeling was worse than that twisting "nothing for dinner" feeling. I won't be doing that again.
There is a festive holiday scene on the front. Santa is bending over a young boy sleeping in his little heart-quilted bed. There are also two angels glowing and leaning over him in the room. It's the true meaning of Christmas, I gues. You can market angels to a wider audience. People don't want to see baby Jesus wrapped in rags and stuffed in a horse-food tray while they pick out their little chocolate-bits and count down to "getting lots of stuff for free day." They don't mind happy little angels with fluffy white wings and spiky glowing halos.
There are snow-decked trees and tiny yellow stars outside the little boy's window. Then, in the corner, there's a little girl waving and looking in on the whole scene through the window. She doesn't have wings - she's not an angel. I can't figure out what she's doing out there. I almost couldn't find door number five because it was tucked into her hair. Santa doesn't see her - nor do any of the angels or the sleeping boy. She's just standing outside the window - her hand pressed against the glass and a pinkish glow on her cheeks - just watching.
I'm not feeling ready to cram down any advent calendar chocolates tonight. I'll see if there are any Power Bars left from when microbiology major fell off her health kick.
Mom always asks me what I had for breakfast, lunch, dinner - I've taken to lying a bit. She just doesn't understand what "starving artist" really means. Dad just tells her I'm a grown-up girl and she can stop trying to fix me sack lunches over the phone. They're kind of spread thin lately - I don't want them to think I need money. I'm doing fine.
I get a discount at the Wrap and Dash now that I have a job there. I also get to take home a few leftovers or screw-up orders. I'm not starving so much as I am getting sick of Navajo Chicken Taco and Oriental Crunch Medley.
There weren't any today. That's okay, turns out there are six more Peanut Power Bars left.
It's been snowing nonstop for the past three days. They go around campus with a mini snow-plow and clear the walkways so we don't have to walk in knee-high snow. The plows don't get all the snow, so after one of them has cleared a patch away there's still a thin layer of packed snow on the pavement. It freezes over quickly because it's so thin. I sit in the library and watch out the window as trails of people fall all over themselves just behind the plows. I make sure to walk on the unplowed patches.
The sidewalk next to my house has been packed down by the busy footprints of one hundred pedestrians. They pass beneath the window with their chins tucked in their collars and their shoulders bunched up around their ears. It is too cold to be outside.
I haven't seen my roommates for a few days. I think beauty school went to her parents for Christmas. Microbiology left, too, or she's finally saved up enough Sausage-Mc-Cardiac-Arrests to stay in her room for the next three weeks. I don't hear her midnight study-shuffling at night anymore - so I'm pretty sure she's home for Christmas.
I put on Nat King Cole and lit my pine-scented candle. I don't quite have the money for a tree this year so I wrapped a strand of Christmas lights around my easel and hung a few candy canes on the screws. There also aren't any presents beneath it - I'll dump the rest of the Power Bars just there. They may taste like cardboard, but their wrappers reflect the light of the "tree" and splay little wrinkled dots of light all over the walls.
There's a group of people passing under the window. A man and a woman and two young boys. The man has his arm around the woman - he is rubbing her shoulder to keep her warm. She has a little lump of something tied in brown paper tucked under one arm. The two boys are stooping over every two steps to collect handfulls of powder and fling them at each other. Their black hats are flocked with white specks and their noses are red from the cold. The man turns around to tell them something. They walk for just a second then start kicking snow up at each other's knees.
My hand is pressed up against the window. My cheeks are turning pink from the cold and I am watching quietly. The man, the woman, and the two boys don't notice me here. No, I am chewing up peanut-flavored cardboard in my cold cheeks, listening to Nat King Cole, just watching.
I never meant to take the job.
Dishing out drippy fruit salad in styrofoam cups wasn't exactly my idea of prime "workplace experience" when I started looking for employment. The hours just fit - and I need the extra cash for grad school and Christmas presents.
I come home at eight every night. I live in an old house on University Avenue. From the outside it looks like a crumbling mideval castle. There's even an arched window for a maiden to lean from. There's also a rickety spiral staircase just inside the front door. I live in what must have been a dining room at some time - it comes right off the kitchen and has a rotting reddish-brown wood floor. I ripped the peeling magenta 80s-style watercolor wallpaper off about a month ago. I haven't had time to paint over it yet, but the crimson red is waiting beneath the staircase with a light frosting of dust on its lid. I have all my stuff shoved into plastic bins on the side of my room. No dresser.
I don't see my roommates really. There are two of them who live in the bedrooms upstairs. One is a beauty school student who likes to disappear in her 92 tercel every morning only to re-disappear every night.
The other is a microbiology major who lives at the library. When she does come home she definitely is not waving handkerchiefs and leaning from her arched window. She stays in her room until 2am when she wipes the cobwebs off her elbows, creeps down the stairs, and runs out to pick up a Bacon-Sausage-Muffin value meal at Fatty McLard's House of Heart Attacks in a Bag.
I like being in an empty house. This happens on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I don't have classes until 4pm. I can play my jazz records full blast and paint for hours.
I'm an art major. Eventually I want to have my own studio and my own students. I see myself standing behind a row of wood easels - watching my brilliant pupils turn out their own inspirational interpretations of what I like to call "the staple gun Dad gave me for Christmas." They will all wear white smocks and get smudges of blue and red on their chins. I will turn the staple gun on its side and tell them to "capture the essence of horizontal staples." They will furrow their brows and mutter "mmmnnyes" to themselves.
For now I'm just trying to sell a few pieces.
I have sold a few.
A few.
I keep staring at the advent calendar Mom sent me in the mail. I've eaten up to day 12 and it's just the 7th. The serving size says 12 pieces - so that's what I ate for dinner last night. I found that the nauseous "chocolate for dinner" feeling was worse than that twisting "nothing for dinner" feeling. I won't be doing that again.
There is a festive holiday scene on the front. Santa is bending over a young boy sleeping in his little heart-quilted bed. There are also two angels glowing and leaning over him in the room. It's the true meaning of Christmas, I gues. You can market angels to a wider audience. People don't want to see baby Jesus wrapped in rags and stuffed in a horse-food tray while they pick out their little chocolate-bits and count down to "getting lots of stuff for free day." They don't mind happy little angels with fluffy white wings and spiky glowing halos.
There are snow-decked trees and tiny yellow stars outside the little boy's window. Then, in the corner, there's a little girl waving and looking in on the whole scene through the window. She doesn't have wings - she's not an angel. I can't figure out what she's doing out there. I almost couldn't find door number five because it was tucked into her hair. Santa doesn't see her - nor do any of the angels or the sleeping boy. She's just standing outside the window - her hand pressed against the glass and a pinkish glow on her cheeks - just watching.
I'm not feeling ready to cram down any advent calendar chocolates tonight. I'll see if there are any Power Bars left from when microbiology major fell off her health kick.
Mom always asks me what I had for breakfast, lunch, dinner - I've taken to lying a bit. She just doesn't understand what "starving artist" really means. Dad just tells her I'm a grown-up girl and she can stop trying to fix me sack lunches over the phone. They're kind of spread thin lately - I don't want them to think I need money. I'm doing fine.
I get a discount at the Wrap and Dash now that I have a job there. I also get to take home a few leftovers or screw-up orders. I'm not starving so much as I am getting sick of Navajo Chicken Taco and Oriental Crunch Medley.
There weren't any today. That's okay, turns out there are six more Peanut Power Bars left.
It's been snowing nonstop for the past three days. They go around campus with a mini snow-plow and clear the walkways so we don't have to walk in knee-high snow. The plows don't get all the snow, so after one of them has cleared a patch away there's still a thin layer of packed snow on the pavement. It freezes over quickly because it's so thin. I sit in the library and watch out the window as trails of people fall all over themselves just behind the plows. I make sure to walk on the unplowed patches.
The sidewalk next to my house has been packed down by the busy footprints of one hundred pedestrians. They pass beneath the window with their chins tucked in their collars and their shoulders bunched up around their ears. It is too cold to be outside.
I haven't seen my roommates for a few days. I think beauty school went to her parents for Christmas. Microbiology left, too, or she's finally saved up enough Sausage-Mc-Cardiac-Arrests to stay in her room for the next three weeks. I don't hear her midnight study-shuffling at night anymore - so I'm pretty sure she's home for Christmas.
I put on Nat King Cole and lit my pine-scented candle. I don't quite have the money for a tree this year so I wrapped a strand of Christmas lights around my easel and hung a few candy canes on the screws. There also aren't any presents beneath it - I'll dump the rest of the Power Bars just there. They may taste like cardboard, but their wrappers reflect the light of the "tree" and splay little wrinkled dots of light all over the walls.
There's a group of people passing under the window. A man and a woman and two young boys. The man has his arm around the woman - he is rubbing her shoulder to keep her warm. She has a little lump of something tied in brown paper tucked under one arm. The two boys are stooping over every two steps to collect handfulls of powder and fling them at each other. Their black hats are flocked with white specks and their noses are red from the cold. The man turns around to tell them something. They walk for just a second then start kicking snow up at each other's knees.
My hand is pressed up against the window. My cheeks are turning pink from the cold and I am watching quietly. The man, the woman, and the two boys don't notice me here. No, I am chewing up peanut-flavored cardboard in my cold cheeks, listening to Nat King Cole, just watching.