In a narrow downtown skyscraper, its exterior paneled with mirrored glass, Vicky worked as a temp. Although she didn’t really work. She made copies and refilled the refrigerator with diet sodas and wrote emails to old girlfriends who responded with things like: V—It’s been so long. Why the sudden communicado? Luv ya. She looked up maps online of the United States, plotting her next move. She liked the color-coded maps, yellow and orange and blue and purple. Sometimes she chose a destination based solely on color, and found she gravitated towards the purples. Anywhere was possible, she would tell herself, although she made no money and not much was actually all that possible.

When she wanted a break, or got bored, she would wander. “I’m just going to take these copies down to Myra,” she’d say to anyone listening, or, most often, to everyone not listening. Fax machines spat pages and hummed with beige indifference.

She trailed the fluorescent hallways. Once she found a door that led to the roof, but it was locked. She looked forward to the end of the day, to the crowded bus ride home. Often she thought about those that rode her route, faces she knew well, and she made a game of assigning them secret names. She preferred those of the culinary variety, Olive and Egg and Peach. Irish Cream, his face like a withered orange rind. Truffle, a sleepy-lidded teenager with pale lackluster hair and a constellation of dandruff illuminating her shoulders.  Meringue. Fettuccini. Danish. Cherry Pie. Milkshake, with her chipped blue fingernails. Milkshake looked like someone Vicky might have been friends with in college, had she made any friends in college. She had attended a two-year program at San Diego Community Tech and had spent nights and weekends waiting on the men whose names she would forget.

She felt wildly ravenous in such moments, naming perfect strangers as if they were newborn children. Cannibalistic. Her mouth watered. Lemon and Sage and Tapioca. Yogurt and Pear and Melon and Black Bean. Black Bean lived in her neighborhood, and she sometimes saw her walking two Pomeranians with matching sweater vests. There was a well-dressed man, a regular, whose name she could not determine. He was tall and thin with wire-rimmed glasses and brown hair clipped short and straight. She had memorized his face but did not know his name and could not seem to find one that fit. Casserole, she’d think. Pea Soup. Green Bean.

When she was feeling brave, or skinny, she’d take a seat on his lap. His thighs were hard and steady.

“Am I crushing you?” she’d ask, flashing him a much practiced smile. Its particular curl-of-lip, she was sure, both flirted and seduced. Taunted and begged. Their faces were so close that Vicky hoped for a sharp turn or a pot hole, that it might send their lips crashing together in one hard sudden kiss.

He most often just shook his head and muttered, “Nope.” Then he would crane his head towards the steamed up windows, staring as if he could see through the white.

She knew this type, she thought. Quiet and Charming. She thought she could fall in love with this type.

 

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