About This
Part One
LAWRENCE BRIDGES
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PUBLISHED BY:
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About This – Part 1
Copyright © 2009 by Lawrence Bridges
Best selling eBook author of
Martin and Martine and Gina, Found Again
ABOUT THIS
JEANETTE GETS UP EARLY to practice her harp. It’s five-forty and the Mr. Coffee left behind in the studio apartment she rented a month ago in La Cañada, California is half way through its brewing cycle. She goes to the sink and takes an unwashed glass from the basin, fills it with water, and takes a long drink. The apartment’s thermostat is not working properly; it’s always too hot when she sets it to “heat.” If she leaves it “off” the apartment becomes too cold to get a good night’s sleep. One of the first things she will buy with her first paycheck from her new job at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena will be a down comforter for her bed. She looks out through her small kitchen window and sees the sun coming up between two buildings across the alley. Her apartment is a converted garage detached from the main apartment building. The main building is trimmed with redwood shingles and white window frames with decorative shutters to make it look like a vacation lodge in the Adirondacks. All the residents pass by her kitchen window on their way to the alley garage in the back of the building, so Jeanette seldom stands looking out. But at this hour it is quiet. The dense phone lines and the overgrown shrubs make it a moment of orange and black. She wishes that the world could always look like this, so definite and uncomplicated with colors, possibilities, and choices.
She pours a cup of coffee from the coffee pot before the brew cycle is complete. Fresh coffee spits onto the base of Mr. Coffee, hissing and steaming as it hits the hot plate. She is quick with her pour and notices that the new coffee has evaporated when she replaces the pot. She sits down behind her harp and places the coffee cup on top of the current issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, which rests on small circular table that came with the apartment. The magazine protects sheets of music placed under it from coffee spills. The sheets contain ideas for songs, mostly horrible, she thinks. She puts her fingers on the strings to form a “G-major” chord to get started. She plucks the strings in unison, softly and slowly, then plays a quiet arpeggio, then up and down the scale; “feathers” as she thinks of them, those flights of fingertips over strings she has always been able to do flawlessly to the amazement of others, mostly her friends, parents, and classmates at Pawnee High School in Illinois where she lived up until last September when she decided to move to Los Angeles to become a musician.
She has a small cut on her right index finger, which is covered with a band-aid. Her movement on the strings is inhibited and uneven and she cannot enter her meditative zone, which she needs to reach before her first day at her first job as a temporary receptionist. The cut occurred when she was opening the stubborn plastic packaging of a new set of ear buds for her aging iPod. She tries to block out the flaws in her performance caused by the bandage and knows the cut won’t heal if she plays at performance level. She is worried she will disturb the other residents if she plays with her full energy, which she wants to do this morning. The landlord said it was fine to play loudly. There used to be a drummer living here, he said, and that Mr. Phil, who lives in the closest apartment to hers, is almost deaf. She noticed that Mr. Phil leaves his dog outside in a small side yard at night in the cold. It barks for hours until he lets it in.
She has been the only person to complain about the dog. One morning she bumped into Mr. Phil while fast-walking in the neighborhood listening to Jerry Harrison and told him she liked his dog except for the fact that it barked all the time. At first Mr. Phil seemed offended. She mentioned gently that it was perhaps because he doesn’t hear well. When they first met, the week she moved in, Mr. Phil told her that he didn’t hear well. After that exchange Jeanette stopped noticing the dog and Mr. Phil was remained friendly toward her. If she were the only person bothered by Mr. Phil’s dog, she reasoned, he would probably be the only person bothered by her music. Her bungalow is separated from the rest of the complex by the garage and the laundry room. She likes to think that harp music would be nice for anybody to hear in the quiet of the morning. There are other old people in the complex. It might make them think of heaven.
She takes a deep breath and starts to sing quietly. In her unusual childlike voice, she sings her outlandish poetry:
The base jumper tickled the rampart,
where green things, with armies of seeds
planned blind revival. Down there,
by the limp road, are this year’s
abandoned houses, yours
across the mustard field
with the light still on after two.
You’ve sold your troubles,
or death gobbled them – tricked you death!
So now you’re left with just your enemies
as you tumble down your street to a stop.
You’re part falling, but the earth races faster ahead.
So fly as you fall, liver left on rock faces,
ghost town on the mesa
fizzling with souls.
You leap, building new wing on the way down,
screaming over riverbed of green valleys below.
Jeanette looks at herself in the mirror. She avoids looking at herself at first, sees only her shoulder in front of the raised counter behind her that separates the kitchenette from a small dining area. She looks small. She is small. Her strawberry blond hair falls straight down beside her face, a face she never makes up, with the complexion everyone compliments. Small eyes, small breasts, short waist and plenty of hips and legs under the long burnt orange frock she has chosen for her first day on the job. She tries to see her profile by turning her head to the side, but she runs out of eye. She turns her head back toward the mirror far enough to see her long face and droopy nose and high cheeks.
“I’m an original,” she thinks.
She holds her long arms out to the side and thinks how fortunate she is that her arms are long enough for the harp. She is made for the harp. People have said it makes her look pretty… prettier, sufficient… nothing great.
“Our shapes compliment each other. The harp is the one that is too large on top,” she always replies when women talk about how lovely she looks while performing. Standing in front of the mirror, without her companion, she feels incomplete. She is dull to the idea of a day at work and the days and weeks ahead as she thinks about starting her first job in Los Angeles, the music capital of the world. She has second thoughts about the orange frock – too “hippie.” She changes into a skirt and white blouse and feels utterly unlike herself. But it’s her first day. Outside her kitchen window a man passes, glancing in as he walks by; a new neighbor who parks his yellow Pinto in the last space in the garage next to the laundry room. The window is high so she only sees his eyes and the top of his head. He has his red hair like hers. It is uncut and combed over a bald spot. He probably glanced at himself in the windowpane, she thinks, not at her. She wishes she had the power to see the world through a one-way mirror, to watch Mr. Phil moving his two retired police cruisers and rusted Chevy Suburban to new parking places in the neighborhood every night, to observe the red-haired man combing over his bald spot in the morning and leaving his apartment somewhere in the complex then driving in his yellow Pinto to his job. She wishes she knew why he didn’t offer to hold the gate open for her last Tuesday when she was leaving for open mic night at Tips-for-Teens in Gardena, pushing her harp with diffuculty over the broken asphalt on its dolly. That was the first in a series of courtesy lapses toward her that night, ending in not getting a chance to perform before the club closed at 2 AM because the other musicians failed to limit their performances to thirty-minutes each.
Jeanette pulls into the employee parking lot at JPL and looks for a parking space large enough for her van. When she started playing professionally in Illinois, mostly for weddings and Sunday brunches at the local Weston Suites, she needed a vehicle to transport her harp. Her foster father owned a Snap-on Tools franchise and, when he bought a larger van to sell automotive tools to auto repair and body shops throughout Sangamon County and southern Springfield, he offered her the old Dodge Sprinter 3500 for $500. He sprayed white paint over the Snap-on logo and handed her the keys. The van came with a small ramp convenient for rolling her harp up and in, and various anchor points where tool racks once stood for securing the harp with assorted colorful bungee cords. When she drove across the country she saved money on motels by stopping at KOA campgrounds and sleeping in the van on a couch she brought from her first apartment in Springfield. These savings were eaten up by the headwinds she fought all the way from Oklahoma to the Texas Panhandle when she could only get the van up to fifty miles per hour at full throttle. The van got eleven miles to the gallon and needed two quarts of oil each day. She calls the van Sheila. Her younger stepsister, sitting in one of the raspberry seats, spontaneously christened the van Sheila Sherbet the day she drove it home, and the name stuck. In California, Jeanette sometimes circles the block for thirty minutes looking for a parking space big enough for Sheila. She often walks a half-mile home. Today, fearing she would be late if she took the bus, she decided to drive. She cruises slowly through the parking lot of JPL looking for two empty spaces next to each other. Oak trees shade many of the cars making the parking lot look like a picnic area, but the parking lot is almost full. The rows are narrow and the parking places are shallow. The backs of SUV’s stick out beyond the many hybrids and compacts. She finds a space at the far end of the parking lot at the top of a gently sloping hill.
She turns off the ignition, grasps her purse and slides the door open. The mountains behind JPL rise into a deep blue sky. “Rose Parade weather,” the interviewer called it on the day she was hired. A perfect day in February, no wind, no clouds, seventy-one degrees, something incomprehensible to her, something made by Disney or Apple, compared to the nineteen Februaries she lived through in Illinois. She feels a gentle breeze on her cheek as she slides the door shut and locks it. She looks up at the sky to the west and sees a long cloud disappearing over the mountains, the spreading contrail of an early morning airliner heading north.
The weather makes her feel imperfect, as if she stepped outside of time and viewed a world that invited life in and encouraged it to grow. There should be babies parachuting from the high mountains above her, she thinks, babies in the flowerbeds, swelling organ music as the soft green pepper trees become gates that open upon a world without stress.
She looks back at Sheila and sees the tall double doors and dented bumper sticking out into the parking lot and realizes that she might not be far enough into the space. She goes back and parks closer to the low concrete block at the top of the parking space. The underside of the front bumper begins to scrape on something and she stops abruptly. She gets out and sees that the front bumper is covering the concrete block but is probably all right. She looks at the car next to hers and it, too, is covering the block, but it is a Jeep with big tires and clears it by a foot or more. Time to stop worrying about the car, she thinks, and heads for the entrance to the building. She looks up toward the San Gabriel Mountains again. They glow in the soft blue air as if they were there to protect her. This is why people like California, she says to herself: a room temperature world where the weather makes you feel at peace, in the opposite way that the cold in Pawnee made you retreat inside yourself and grow darker each winter. She had seen this weather many times on New Year’s Day while watching the Rose Parade on television, and later while her foster father watched the football game on the small TV in the living room in their house, a foot of snow on the ground outside. “Earthquake Weather”, John Moore called it as he popped his head into the personnel office on the day she was hired. She would be John’s receptionist.
She is early. She walks into the lobby of the building and sees the panorama built in tribute to all the successful programs originating at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: the Mars Rover, the Hubble Telescope, the deep space probes that are still sending data back from the outer reaches of the solar system: Viking, Galileo, Phoenix. There is a cockpit of the Space Shuttle for the many children who must come here on field trips, she thinks. The lobby is like the Air and Space Museum in Washington she visited with her foster parents and her foster brother, Rob, at the end of her junior year in high school. There is an actual model of the Lunar Lander, Lunar Rover, pictures of the first astronauts on the moon, a diorama of the actual Mars terrain with a working Mars Rover, and a long hallway with tributes to all the early space programs of the 60’s: Sputnik, “Loki” the space dog, the chimp they sent into space, the Mercury program, Gemini, Apollo, and lots of pictures and diagrams of rockets.
Jeanette takes a seat in the empty lobby on a long bench with chrome legs upholstered with black imitation leather. The lobby is enclosed in glass surrounded by tropical plants. Jeanette watches as employees walk up the wide concrete causeway and enter through the glass doors. She hears soft Muzak playing, a harpsichord version of My Green Tambourine by the Lemon Pipers. The night watchman at the end of his shift leans against the reception cubicle in the middle of the room and points to a computer screen in front of the receptionist. Earlier, when she approached the reception desk, the night watchman asked her to wait till John arrived. John, as an independent contractor and one-man operation, has his own set of keys. Several men of different sizes and shapes walk down the causeway toward the glass doors of the lobby. Two wear pastel short-sleeved shirts with khaki pants, their identification badges clipped to their shirt pockets. An older man wears a suit with a salmon colored shirt and a knit tie, hopelessly out of style. Two women smoke at the foot of the stairs at the far end of the causeway. A man in a great hurry skips up the stairs and walks rapidly toward the lobby. Jeanette thinks it is John and she stands to greet him. Jeanette has a good memory of John’s appearance after their first brief meeting but not his body type. She remembers his dark brown hair combed straight back with a slight widow’s peak above the worry lines on his forehead. She remembers his hair, full on the sides, giving him an aristocratic appearance, and his face, contemporized by a small mustache. When the man walks through the glass doors and takes off his sunglasses she sees thick eyebrows and a clean-shaven face. She sits back down, embarrassed. She picks up and puts down a copy of Aeronautics then wanders over to a wall with an immense photograph of Jupiter on it. She feels someone tap her on the shoulder.
“Jeanette?”
Jeanette turns and sees John Moore standing behind her. He is holding his briefcase and wearing a dark knit sweater with a high collar. He is different than she remembered. He is not tall. Five-feet ten, she guesses. His clothes convey a message of leisure, luxury, and independence, different from any of the men or women who entered the building while she waited, all of whom seemed vaguely backward. The fabric of his sweater is cashmere, she guesses. The pupils of his eyes are dark as olives, his skin is soft and brown from the sun or heritage, she cannot tell. She remembers the strong features of his face she noticed the first time they met: long tapering nose with small nostrils, thin lips, and a cleft chin, a strong anchor to a kind, handsome face. His manner of speaking is reserved, as she also remembers, and oddly formal.
“Yes. I’m Jeanette,” she replies, extending her hand. John pauses and shakes her hand graciously. For a second neither knows what to say next.
“They didn’t take you to my office?”
“No,” she says. “They told me to wait until you arrived.”
Jeanette feels at ease, because of John’s gentlemanly manner and because he sets himself apart from the others by his appearance. The interviewer told her John was kind and that people liked him. As a non-conformist he might not find her high child-like voice too strange and he might understand her present fear that she might not fit in here.
“Well they should have taken you down… what if I had been at a meeting…”
“The guard said something about not having a key.”
John turns to the night guard and receptionist and smiles without mentioning the key. Jeanette smiles too, glad she hasn’t started a dispute, glad to see John’s show of restraint.
“I’ll take you down myself. We might as well get started.” He turns to the receptionist. “Can we get a badge for her?”
The guard nods and starts filling out a temporary badge and asks Jeanette to sign for it and for John to sign his name on a release form. The receptionist looks at Jeanette as she takes back her pen and hands it to John.
“Once you get used to him everything will be fine.” she says. “Make sure he takes his meds.”
John does not respond to her comment but finishes his signature and looks up at the receptionist and guard.
“I suppose you know only the reason you do not have a key to my office is the avoidance, by this esteemed institution, of the expense of cleaning my office at night.”
“Typical,” the receptionist says and hands John a stack of mail. John sorts through the stack of mail looking for something. He holds up a thin envelope to the weak neon light above the reception cubicle and puts it back in the pile.
“If they were serious about making cuts they would be a little more careful with subscriptions.” John holds up two identical copies of Business Week.
“If anybody asks, I also get two Times and three Aviation Weeks.”
“I’ll bring it to their attention, sir,” the night guard says with mock obedience. John smiles at the guard and gives him a quick salute, shifting his eyes to Jeanette.
“This means you work for me now, and the first thing you’ll learn about me is that I make a terrible tour guide, but I will do my best.”
John and Jeanette start walking down the long hallway past the space programs of the ‘60s.
“I like to walk backward down this hallway. You end up in the ‘50s when we were not yet in space. We were much better off before we went into space in my opinion.”
They take a few more steps in awkward silence. Jeanette struggles to keep up with his consequential strides.
“People think actually we work on things down here. We do astrology.” Jeanette laughs, she troting to keep up with John’s pace as they approach a security door. John leans into a scanner and positions his badge just right until the door clicks.
“When you get your badge you’ll be able to go right through this door,” he say, “Otherwise dial 117 on that phone and security will buzz you in. See that little opening? It’s a camera. Smile.”
Jeanette looks at a little hole in a plastic plate above the phone and gives a quick smile, nervous about what she might looks like to some unknown person watching her somewhere on close circuit TV. John goes through the door ahead of her and turns left at the end of a narrow hall. Jeanette notices several women already sitting at their desks, staring at their computer screens.
“Copiers are in there, mail room is in the next building, coffee machine, the one reliable piece of technology in this facility, is right there.”
They come to a stop by a door leading to a small room with a coffee machine and a young man, a dwarf, is stretching to reach the top of the coffee machine to insert a filter.
“Hi Andy,” John says.
“Hi,” Andy replies without looking, holding a filter in one hand and a packet of Starbucks French Roast in the other.
“Meet Jeanette,” John says. “Hi Jeanette,” Andy says flatly, then looks in her direction.
“Am I just the latest in a series?” Jeanette thinks, hearing Andy’s inflection.
“Andy’s the Union Steward,” John says. “He’ll come by at some point and teach you the secret handshake.”
“Union?”
“Later Andy,” John says as they continue down the hallway. “All the white collar workers are unionized here.”
Faces of women in their 40’s look up at Jeanette and John as they approach a door at the end of the hallway with an “Exit” sign above it. The door opens on a canopied landing with a short ramp that leads to a trailer positioned on risers next to the main building. John unlocks the door to the trailer and Jeanette follows him in.
“I just took you the long way.” John says, placing the mail on a desk opposite the door that opens inward, just clearing a wooden desk. Jeanette realizes it will soon be her desk.
“Actually you can get here by coming around the building and walking up the ramp. Security hates that but you’ll soon see that everyone in the building uses the back door.”
John stops and looks around the cluttered room. Jeanette smells mildew in the stale air. There is just enough floor for two people to stand in room. Jeanette brushes John’s shoulder as she closes the door behind her.
“Welcome to my humble abode. Make yourself at home.”
John picks up a box of wires from Jeanette’s desk and pulls the chair out for her.
“This is what they gave me for the projects I’m working on here. I’m a subcontractor and this is the best one can expect.”
They both look up as the back door to the building opens and they hear the thump thump thump of someone jogging down the metal stairs.
“You have to use your badge to get back into the main building. You’ll like the access to the garden for lunch breaks.”
As she sits down, John finds a path through boxes on the floor and to a door close to her desk. He unlocks the door and goes inside, leaving Jeanette abruptly alone, as if she knew what to do next. The first thing she notices is that her chair, contoured to minimize back pain, is wobbly in the middle. She finds paddles on the side of the chair and presses one randomly. The chair suddenly collapses to its lowest position. This startles her and makes her feel ridiculous and inept. Her first action on her first day at her new job results in her sitting with her chin just above the level of the desk. She looks over at John’s door and it is still closed. She presses the paddle again and the chair rises gently to a comfortable height. She presses a second paddle gingerly and the chair, though still wobbly, tilts forward so her feet almost touch the floor. She is still uncomfortable. She opens the desk’s drawers and looks for an empty space big enough for her purse. In the second drawer on her left she finds a phone book. She takes it out and places it under her feet and puts her purse inside the empty drawer.
On the corner of her desk, behind her computer, there is a box of old office supplies; dividers, colored transparent tabs for labeling, a pencil sharpener, and a stapler. They are all dusty and entangled in the power cord of the sharpener. She places the box on the ground next to her desk but realizes that it will block the way to the font door of the trailer. John might trip over it the next time he passes by her desk. She places the box back on top of her desk and looks for a way to make room on the shelves behind her. The shelves are filled with large three-ring binders labeled with black marker: Aeronautics and Astronautics Reprints Nov 02-04, Fasteners, Power Supplies, Who’s Who in Aerospace. There are hundreds of catalogues on the lower shelves. She pulls one out and sees pictures of mounts for electronic equipment with detailed measurements in the metric system. She takes a deep breath and looks around the small room and sees no place to put the box. She puts it back on the corner of her desk. Slowly another moment of panic overcomes her. This is what “working” is? Here she sits on a wobbly chair in the first hour of her working life and independence, confined in cluttered space inside a windowless trailer after all the romance of coming to Los Angeles. She looks up and sees John.
“Comfortable?”
Jeanette smiles. “Getting there.”
“I have to go down to shipping. I’ll take you there later and introduce you.”
John starts to leave.
“Mr. Moore?”
“You can call me John.”
“Can I throw out any of these things?”
“Depends.”
He looks at Jeanette, nested in a cave of shelves bending under the weight of catalogs and proposals. Stacked in front of them are towers of thick binders, paper side facing out, with hand written acronyms like NASA-NAV, and M-ARPS.
“Yes, certainly. Good idea. Many are obsolete. But show me before you toss anything.”
John smiles and leaves. Jeanette listens for a moment as John’s footsteps go up the steel stairs and across the resonant landing to the back door of the building. She hears the beeping of the security lock as John swipes his badge. The security door closes and the only sound in the trailer is the hum of the fluorescent lights above her. She is afraid the musty air of the trailer will give her a headache, like the headaches she used to get in the back office of the UPS warehouse where she studied after school, waiting for her father to get off of work, before he went into business for himself selling tools. How do adults tolerate these places, she thinks. Is all “work” as bleak as this? Do people become drones and just get used to it? She wonders how long she will last.
“Hello”, she says. The voice on the other end sounds confused.
“Hello?”
“Can I help you?”
“Is this John Moore Enterprises?”
“Yes it is, good morning.”
She realizes that she should have answered according to the notes she was given when she left her final interview: please answer the phone ‘Good morning (afternoon) this is John Moore Enterprises, my name is Jeanette, how can I help you?’