Inga Totmianina squeezed her radio lunch box into the small
locker, which had been assigned to her, she remembered, only after the fourth
month of her employment at Publicz. The white fluorescent light in the break
room never grew on Inga. She’d hated it before, and she hated it now. It was a
cold, sterile kind of light, she thought, like the comfort of a stepmother.
Inga
inserted her time card into the square metal device mounted on the wall, which
then burped a beep and read forty-three hours. It’d been a while now that she’d
been trying to work overtime. Her rent expense had gone down since she moved in
with the neighbors from Peru, but it was lonely living with a loud, happy
family like them. She reasoned working late was the only productive way to deal
with the situation. Now that Igor was gone, it was becoming harder for her to
feel useful. She could always go and visit her cousin, or grab a coffee with a
fellow Russian, but to waste time and money, she thought, was foolish.
Swiftly,
she got into her green canvas apron, the initials of her name branded into its
worn-out fabric, and sat at the square table in the middle of the break room.
Her shift wasn’t starting until twenty minutes later, so she wiped the crumbs
off one of the greasy magazines left on the table and began flipping through
its glossy pages. She took notice of an article, two full pages devoted to it,
about a celebrity’s insight on good housekeeping, and she wondered if the lady’s
housemaid was present at the interview.
Sluggish
footsteps then approached the break room. Inga straightened her back and looked
at the pages with an extra intent gaze. She couldn’t stand him and his rude
ways. Kids nowadays showed no respect, she thought. James was a twenty-one-year-old
slacker who always idled the day away. The noise of his shoes alone turned her
stomach. He thought he was clever, but she was onto him. Numerous times she’d
seen him smoking marijuana in the back during his shift, and one day she caught
him hiding feather boas behind the Kraft macaroni and cheese packs.
“Wow,
wow, wow…look who it is”, James said rolling his eyes. “And she’s early again. What
a surprise!” He turned his back on Inga and started opening his locker when she
heard him add, “Get a life, weirdo.”
In times
like these was when she missed Igor the most. He’d been an indifferent bastard,
one who’d never cared what people said. That kind of attitude had been
refreshing after a long day of being invisible, neglected or ridiculed. She
hated the way customers asked where she was from, but never in fact waited for
her answer. She hated the way James always repeated what she’d said in a fake
Eastern European accent. Igor was actually bearable when he was on her side.
But his drinking was bad, he liked his vodka, and besides he was a callous man
most of the time. He’d never even tried to understand her condition. It’d been
Nature’s ruling that made her infertile, but that hadn’t stopped him from
calling her “a fat barren cow” countless times.
James slammed the tiny
metal door of his locker, its padlock snapping into place, and grandly left the
break room. Inga then looked at the white plastic clock on the wall, which
indicated seven minutes to twelve, and she estimated she had about three extra
minutes to pass, enough time to maybe go to the bathroom and rouge her cheeks.
She leaned sideways
against the bathroom door, and its weight gave in to the solidness of her body.
She stood rigid in front of the mirror, and with her plump index fingers traced
the dark, unruly eyebrows that contrasted a set of powder blue eyes. One of the
light bulbs must’ve burned out as the restroom was now darker than usual, but
Inga didn’t mind that one bit. She liked the way her silhouette exposed only
the substantial part of her, omitting the irrelevant little flaws of her aged
face.
A woman walked in,
bringing with her the cool, unintrusive scent of lilac, a scent that made Inga
think of great opulent terraces, ornate porcelain tea sets, and lush green
gardens. She never considered herself a romantic; those were notions
unattainable to people like her. She was a pragmatic woman and women like her
didn’t fit into that fine lifestyle, for their fleshy bellies and robust arms
poked out of it. She still missed Igor’s demanding tone when asking what was
for dinner. She felt useful then, at least, taking care of someone. She would
come home and make borscht from scratch, the way he liked
it, with more meat and less vegetables; she would make a potful of pelmeni, his
favorite, and slather them with warm butter, and sometimes even fry him blini
for dessert. Now she shared a crammed apartment with a family who lived like
gypsies.
The
lady who smelled like lilac walked out of the restroom, and Inga thought it was
probably almost time for her shift to start. She headed for the customer
service desk to check what register she was on. Kuammesha was there helping a stocky bearded
man fill out his Western Union form.
“Hey, girl. What you up to? Oooh, I like
that sweater. Very cute. Did you get it in Russia?”
“No, it is not from Russia. I purchased
the sweater from Marshals. I am going to go to my register now. It is my
shift.”
“Oh, by the way, your husband called.”
“My ex-husband called? Why? Why my
ex-husband called?”
“I
dunno. I didn’t ask. You, guys, need to work it out.”
An
uneasy feeling settled in Inga’s chest, cold and heavy like a coiled snake. She
rushed right past her assigned register, her steps small, but swift and
determined.
