LUNCHTIME!!!

This is my midterm piece for creative writing. It's based on the story I wrote before, but its longer and A LOT diffferent. ENJOY!!!

“Living for Lunch”
By Meredith Perrin

Gretchen found her liberation at lunchtime. She put her feet up on her desk, pulled Tracy Chevalier’s newest novel out of her bag along with her lunch and watched through the slit window in her door as her co-workers scrambled around the office while she ate food and read.

She had volunteered to stay behind in the office during the “normal” lunch hours to man the phones and take her break when everyone else came back. She hadn’t minded the idea when her boss approached them at the last office meeting; she never took quite as much pleasure in sitting in one of the four restaurants on the tiny main street and gossiping as everyone else.

The first time she had brought her food and eaten at her desk instead of going out with her coworkers she felt awkward, like she was drawing a line between herself and them, but now she relished in that line. She relished in the fact that she was eating proper portions of the right number of whole grains and fresh fruits while they laughed over the appetizer special at Applebee’s and had no idea that it bloated them with more salt in one snack than they should eat in two days. She relished in the fact that while they talked about how Melinda from the Mail Room wasn’t sure the baby she was expecting was her husband’s she read through the New York Times bestsellers.

***

At the end of her hour Gretchen placed her feet back into the heels that she had slipped off under her desk, put her book back into her bag and walked to the kitchen to rinse out her dishes and get a cup of coffee.

“Hey Gretch.” Judy said as she walked into the room while Gretchen was rinsing out her bowl.

“Hey Judy, how was lunch?” Gretchen replied without looking up from the sink.

“Oh it was great. Best dessert special they’ve had in forever. Hot apple pie with Vanilla Ice Cream. You should try it. We could bring you back one tomorrow if you want. Beth-Ann and I split it, but man….I’m going to be paying for this for a week. ” Judy chuckled and patted her full stomach as she spooned sugar and cream into her coffee.

“Sounds good,” Gretchen replied, “but I’m not much of a dessert person.”

“Oh come on”, Judy said, “you cant tell me you’re not at least tempted.”

Gretchen shook her head. “Sorry, I’m just boring.” she lied.

Judy sighed and leaned back against the counter. Gretchen frowned. After taking a whole hour off for lunch, you would think that when they got back from their break people would actually take time to do their work. It had been the same way at her old office. After transferring to Seattle last month she had hoped working at the corporate office would mean that people were more focused on getting work done. Instead they just got paid more because they faxed insurance copies to more important people.

“So how’s your daughter doing?” Judy asked, interrupting Gretchen’s musings. “Did she make the cheerleading team?”

“Hmmm?” Gretchen was confused for a moment at Judy’s question and then remembered what she had told her on Friday, “Oh, that’s right. No…no she didn’t end up making it.”

“That’s too bad.” Judy said.

“She’s not that upset.” Gretchen replied, “it would have taken so much time away from her schoolwork, anyways. I don’t know how she would have done it all.”

Judy nodded.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “When Karen was in high school I felt like I was either picking her up from volleyball practice, dropping her off at practice or watching one of her games. Not that I minded, of course, but…well, you know what I’m talking about.” She laughed.
Gretchen nodded, her fingers fumbling with the cap of the skim milk she had taken out of the fridge. She hastily added a little to her black coffee and made an excuse to go back to her office.

***

Gretchen plugged her MacBook into the power cord and sat back on her new leather couch with the remainder of the bottle of wine she had received as a housewarming gift from her previous job in a glass. She had splurged on the new furniture after her cat spilled a cup of coffee on her old corduroy sofa a few days before moving, figuring that one of the benefits of not having a husband was getting to pick out the furniture you wanted instead of the furniture with the best recliner included in the set.

A crash from the kitchen made her jump.

“Julie, what are you doing in there?” Gretchen called out, setting her tea on the mahogany table and walking into the other room.

She flicked on the light. “Where are you?” she asked.

A small yellow cat looked up at her from the floor next to a container of almonds that she had knocked off the counter.

Gretchen righted the container and picked the cat up. “Julie, you are the most troublesome cat I have ever had.”

Dropping Julie on the couch next to her and picking up her laptop, Gretchen stretched her feet out, took a sip of her wine and typed “teenage girl with brown hair and blue eyes” into Google Images search and browsed through the pictures until she found the MySpace account of a girl who looked like she was picturing.

She was medium height, on the skinnier side, with short brown hair that was chopped off at her shoulders and a smile that made her eyes stand out. She was gathered by a group of friends outside a movie theatre. Gretchen stared at the picture before printing it out and slipping it into the picture frame she had bought after work at Wal-Mart.

She put it into her purse so she wouldn’t forget to bring it to the office the next day, and then went into the kitchen to put her wineglass in the sink before heading up to bed.

On the way back past her bag before walking up the stairs, she pulled the frame out again and ran her thumb along the edge of the girl’s face.

“What do you think, Julie?” She asked the cat who was brushing up against her legs. “Do you think she looks like an Abby?”

The cat looked blankly at her.
“I agree. She looks like an Abby. Abigail is such a formal name, but Abby fits her just fine.”

***
Gretchen couldn‘t say when she had adjusted to office life. Somewhere after her senior year in college the summer job she had taken to give her something to do before joining the Peace Corps had turned into her life, draining away 30 years before she even knew that they had disappeared. She had worked there up until last month when they offered her better pay here in Seattle.

Her father had died that summer, and his passing destroyed her mother and her future in one fell swoop, even though she didn’t know it at the time.

While her friends took off in the plane headed for rural Indonesia to build schools she had stood in a cemetery next to her mother, wearing the obligatory black dress with shoes that looked nice enough for calling hours but had heels that didn’t sink into the wet ground around the grave.
At that point in time, she had still wanted to change the world.

“Everyone takes their jobs so seriously!” she had complained to her friends when they called her collect from halfway across the world. Her friends spent the long days stacking bricks on top of each other and hammering boards together, work as tedious and mindless as filing papers and faxing insurance certificates, which was what Gretchen was spending her time doing now. Their work, however, offered a slightly better end result.

Gretchen’s felt her purpose in life at that point had still been focused towards doing something that would improve the lives of people everywhere, that would give little kids drinking water and a chance at an education. Living at home for another year was just a minor setback, a chance to earn some extra money while she stared at the plane ticket taped to the bathroom mirror next to pictures from graduation and bought clothes that would last in places where you wore the same thing for two weeks straight and no one looked at you strangely.

That had been her plan thirty years ago.

***
At work the next day, the picture in the frame appeared on Gretchen’s previously bare desk, sitting next to her inbox where her co-workers were sure not to miss it.

Beth-Ann stopped in her office five minutes later.
“Hey Gretchen, I was just checking to see if that fax came in last night after I left.” she said, leaning against the doorway of the office.

“Oh yeah, it did. One sec.” Gretchen dug around in her bag, her eyes following Beth-Ann’s gaze as they rested on the picture frame that hadn’t been there yesterday.

“Is this your daughter?” Beth-Ann asked, pointing.

“Yeah, that’s Abby.” Gretchen replied, pulling out the fax and sliding it across her desk towards Beth-Ann.

“She looks so much like you! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of her before, you know.” Beth-Ann said, taking the insurance form.

“Yeah, I just got them unpacked yesterday.” Gretchen replied.

“She is a pretty one,” Beth-Ann chuckled. “You’re gonna have to keep an eye on her when she gets to high school. But, you two really do look a lot alike. There must be none of your husband in her at all.”

“No, she takes more after me than him.” Gretchen said dryly.

“What does your husband do again? Actually, I don’t think I ever asked you.” Beth-Ann added as an afterthought.

“Oh, ummm…he’s in construction. A manager for a firm in the city.” Gretchen replied.

Beth-Ann had opened her mouth to ask something else when miraculously, the phone rang at her desk.

“Hold that thought.” Beth-Ann said as she ran out the door.

As soon as she left Gretchen picked up her own phone and held it to her ear while she checked her e-mail, so that if Beth-Ann remembered her question after finishing her call it would look like Gretchen was on hold with someone.

“My husband is in construction. Of course he is. What else would he be doing?” Gretchen muttered in her head.

A daughter who didn’t make the cheerleading team. A husband who was a construction manager. A cat knocking a roll of paper towels off the shelf the only noise in the house besides her own breathing. This was her life now. She couldn’t say when she had adjusted to it, but here it was, just the same.

***
That night, after finishing the last of the Elizabeth Kostova novel on the couch downstairs, Gretchen stood in the bathroom taking her makeup off before bed. As she ran the washcloth under her eyelids, practically pulling the skin back away from her face in an attempt to get every trace of mascara off, she let her gaze rest on the plane ticket she had taped to the corner of the mirror. She told herself when she moved she would put it away, pack it up, throw it out, paste it into a scrapbook or something, but here it was. On her mirror.

Her friends from high school still called every now and then. They had each moved onto their own lives after the Peace Corps. One was married with twin girls who both had children of their own, another was divorced twice, with a son from the first marriage and half-a million from the second, and another was already expecting her ninth grandchild. None of them had stayed in Indonesia forever, they had all come back to the states after a year or two of service.

About a month after her best friend had gotten back, about thirty or so years ago, Gretchen had met her for coffee at a chic little café in the city where they had talked for hours about Indonesia, the children and the schools that her friend had helped build, Gretchen hearing about her dream through someone else’s reality.

“I’m still planning on going, of course.” Gretchen had told her, sipping at the skinny latte while she talked. “Mom’s just in such a rough state right now…I couldn’t leave her yet. In a couple years she’s going to move in with her sister in Maine. I’ve got the application for a two year commitment saved on my computer, I just hope that I can get into the program still.”
That file was probably still on her mom’s old desktop, Gretchen thought, staring back and forth between the plane ticket and her reflection, one eye covered in mascara and the other red from cleaning. She reached her hand towards the plane ticket, but then stopped and dropped it to the counter to pick up the washcloth and finish washing the makeup off the other side of her face. She needed to get to bed if she wanted to be awake at work the next day.

***
It was her lunch hour again. Gretchen pulled a new book out of her bag along with a salad and swiveled in her chair so she could put her feet up on her desk. She cringed when she saw a run up the back of her stockings.

“Thank God it doesn’t show below my skirt.”, she thought, opening the Tupperware container along with her book and settling back to enjoy her break. Her foot brushed against the picture frame of the girl from MySpace, knocking it over. Gretchen stretched to put it back in place.

“She really does kind of look like me.” Gretchen thought, “We’ve got the same jaw line. I wonder how old she is?” She stared at the picture for awhile and then lowered her gaze to her book and dug her fork into a piece of tomato.

When she had been working at the first office for a little less than a year, back after college graduation, Gretchen had gotten up from her mother’s kitchen table one morning to rinse out her oatmeal bowl, finishing her rant on how corrupt working at the office was and how she couldn’t wait to leave and join her friends and “change the world.”

Her mother had looked at her from across the kitchen table and said “Gretchen, while changing the world is a wonderful thing to do, sometimes simply surviving in it is enough.”

That was what Gretchen was doing now. She was sitting in her swivel chair watching her boss and co-workers pass by the door, eating celery and musing about the history of the girl on her desk. She was surviving.