Friday, April 5, 2013

The Woman Who Screams When She Sees Orange will appear in the May issue of Bear River Review, a publication of the University of Michigan


The Woman Who Screams When She Sees Orange

By 

Randy Evans


As the incompetent grandson of the company founder, Matt Bert has sifted down through the organization to the mill management’s lowest position on the totem pole: personnel.  Most of the time, he feels like an actor faking the playing of a musical instrument in a movie.  This Friday morning, Matt looks down at his mug of cold coffee and squirms in his swivel chair.  He’s fat from sitting most of the time, and the chair helps prop him up (if only the chair back were higher, it would prop up his wobbly neck).  Beneath his chair, Matt has constructed a riser out of an old pallet, so he can look down on all who sit before him on the other side of the large desk that used to be his grandfather’s. He’s angry because he’s short, so he’s angry all the time.

He talks to himself while staring at an orange ceramic ashtray sitting on his desk. “Does nobody understand me?” he says.  (There’s a no-smoking policy at the paperboard mill, but he keeps the ash tray as a symbol of the way things used to be.)  “I may be personnel director, but I’m not evil.” (He thinks of Dilbert cartoons.)  “Not an idiot either...I knew our days were numbered when the Clean Water Act passed in ‘72...had to stop making colored paperboard.  So the dye turned the Kalamazoo River bright colors for a couple days; ‘Muskegon Orange’ was our best-selling shoebox board!”  He looks out of his floor-to-ceiling cubicle window at the long rows of cemetery gray desks: people strung out working under a high coffered ceiling.  

Unlike his black sheep father who quit the mill to start a car repo agency and loved to pull cars with past-due payments out of people’s driveways, Matt Bert hates controversy and discord.  He dislikes all the layoffs, especially the office people he works with; suspects the new management will ax him someday.  In his late fifties, he’s running a race between early termination and normal retirement; afraid of any missteps, his eyes on the dim distant finish line where he can collect his paltry pension.  This morning, Matt must layoff Rebecca Randall, one of the best employees in the mill. 

Matt fidgets with the pre-approved layoff notice, and pulls a ballpoint from the orange plastic pocket protector he wears inside his short-sleeved shirt pocket.  (He’s worn short-sleeved shirts since the day a supervisor caught his shirt sleeve in the rotating blades of the pulp beater.  He was beaten to a pulp, and made into paperboard. Only his belt buckle made it, buried in a cutoff sheet at the other end of the city block long paper machine.)  Matt used the embedded buckle to make a safety poster, until people complained (that’s when people started calling him an idiot).  

Matt notices coffee stains down the front of his dull laundered white shirt, and a glucose glob of pancake syrup on his shiny striped tie. (The tie has rows of orange liberty bells on a navy blue background.  He bought the tie by mail order in 1976 to wear during the Bicentennial.  Wears the tie every Friday.) 

 Alone in his enclosed office, he whispers to himself about how he will talk off-script to Rebecca: “Now Rebecca, you can come down here to the mill as often as you like, but we need to stop your pay today.”  Too brutal and abrupt...can do better.  “Rebecca, I know how you love the company and want it to succeed.  We have to cut back, and you were scheduled for layoff weeks ago, but I personally persuaded the powers here to hold off...until now.”  No, crap...she won’t buy it.  “Rebecca, you’re laid off as of today.  I’m really sorry to tell you the bad news.”  Or how about this?  “Rebecca, Michigan’s an employment-at-will state, so you're free to leave any time you want, and your employer can ask you to leave any time, so....”  No, I get in trouble when I use legalese, he thinks.  He continues murmuring.

Later the same morning, Rebecca pushes open the small-paned factory window of her third floor loft apartment to see morning shadows breaking away from her side of the street.  Twenty-eight, with dark brown hair and a thin face, she sits her long skinny body down facing the window on an orange vinyl kitchen chair with chromed tube legs. She still wears her work clothes: an oversize gray wool sweater, jeans, and black work shoes.  It’s early springtime, and she feels alone and lonely.  I don’t like Matt Bert, she thinks matter-of-factly.  He whispers too much...you can’t trust whisperers.  Now what am I going to do?   She says out loud, “Oh God, I've worked at the mill since high school, ten years!  How could I not see this coming?”  Rebecca likes to control her life like a song you keep on humming.  She feels ashamed for no good reason.  She’s done nothing wrong.  “Whether I leave or stay, I better clean this place up.  It’s a mess; I’m a mess.  What am I going to do, walk around in my underwear all day and watch TV?”

Rebecca’s surprised how angry she was when the little fat man fired her (“laid her off”).  She’s still angry when she thinks about what he said and how he said it when she walked into his office.  “Uh, Rebecca, we all like you, Rebecca...but the company has placed you on permanent layoff.  Since we’ll all have to work until we’re 100, look on your ten years here as a brief chapter in a long book.”  For a time, sitting there looking up at Matt Bert, Rebecca's speechless.  Her throat tightens, and she feels weak in her arms and legs.  She sees Matt’s orange pocket protector, the orange liberty bells on his tie, the orange ash tray, and the orange light of morning streaming in through the windows.  Now sitting in her kitchen, she tries to push the orange memory out of her mind.  Think other thoughts.  Take a deep breath and forget.

Outside her window, she hears birdsongs warbling everywhere, so many species interrupting each other talking of the cold spring, as if all the living tones and dialects of the world are speaking at once.  The noisy sounds overwhelm her.   She places her hands over her ears, and closes her eyes; tries to shut out the unwanted flood of light and sound.   Shutdown what is happening to her; what had happened.  As she takes another deep breath, she smells cooking odors from the diner across the street.  She can almost taste the bacon smoke; it reminds her she hasn’t eaten since the mid-shift break at three in the morning.

By now, she would normally have finished a breakfast, and be in her tidy single bed, trying to sleep before rising in mid-afternoon for her second job.  She stands up and walks over to her cupboard, rummages around and pulls out a bag of stale Oreos. A black ant skitters behind a box of oatmeal.  For the first time in years, she notices her broken orange bread toaster on the counter, and thinks how she has kept all the equipment in her quality control lab operating in perfect condition, each one labeled with the latest service date.  She returns to her chair, biting down on the outside layer of the Oreo, the outside as soft as the inside.

The shabby street where Victoria lives is shabby in many different ways: timeworn buildings locked day and night with water-stained walls under empty lofts, shutdown shops with weathered plywood boarded-up windows.  A few bars and restaurants remain with broken chairs and stained table tops, where from indoors, people look out on potholed streets--oil-streaked, lined with broken down cars parked beside remnants of what used to be busy side walks.  There are signs advertising businesses that no longer exist, and orange cones with “under repair” signs weathered over the years, bent-over but not quite fallen down, like beaten-down people.  The beeper on the coffee maker takes her again back to the counter.  Her eyes lock on the useless orange toaster, and she suddenly screams as she pulls the toaster cord out of its socket, raises the toaster high above her head, and slams it onto the floor.

Holding her white coffee mug in both hands, she returns to the chair by the window, and sits down looking out the window again.  She begins to perspire through her blue denim work shirt from the warmth of the rising sun filtering through the old factory windows and from the steam of the coffee.  Scratchy, her tortoiseshell tabby cat, shuffles in from the bedroom, and nuzzles the back of her legs.  The crashing noise in the kitchen has woken her from her morning slumbers.  Scratchy has no clue what has happened to Victoria at the end of the shift.  The cat’s indifferent, just like the people passing below her on the sidewalk.  Victoria watches the orange leaves scattering on the red street bricks below, left overs from the previous autumn, dried out in the morning sun.  It has rained briefly but hard the night before, and a Styrofoam cup bobs and twirls in a muddy puddle formed over one of the tire-busting potholes.

She keeps mentally returning to the scene of her demise.  “Rebecca, you’re in the latest wave of reductions.  You’ll receive a half weeks’ pay for each of your ten years of service,” Matt mumbles on.  Victoria had thought her job safe.  She had been a good employee, and kept a file containing her favorable performance reviews and perfect attendance awards.  This just didn’t make sense.  She had thought the world was fair, and if she played by the rules, everything would be okay.   She didn’t know what to say.  Matt’s use of the word, “wave,” gives her the feeling of a vast tsunami sweeping over her, a vast orange tsunami.  A sudden alarm goes off deep inside her, and surprised, she feels an uncontrollable upwelling from the base of her spine. She screams long and loud (not just a short, sharp yelp, but a long heart-stopping, horror-movie scream), as if she’s vomiting sound.

Matt and Rebecca both freeze, as if the scream has entered the office through the public address system, or from a third person hiding behind one of the old gunmetal gray file cabinets in the wood-paneled office.  She feels out of her body, as if Matt Bert and she have morphed into a Dilbert cartoon filled with absurd “bubble language” and “thought clouds.”  Matt reaches for the orange ash tray in case Rebecca tries to hurl it at him.  His shaking hand spills coffee on her exit paperwork.  Rebecca covers her mouth with both hands to keep further screams from coming out.  She shakes all over.  “These things happen,” he says as he looks sideways at her and reaches for his phone to call the security guard.  He backs up too far, and falls off his riser; rolling around like an overturned tortoise.  Rebecca sits rigid like an orange popsicle; and even now screams like clockwork when she sees orange.