Legal Pads and Spilled Coffee: How Much Is The Midlife Crisis Mocha?
In six minutes, Ms. Maggie Butler could go up to the machine and stamp her time-sheet. For the two-thousand one-hundred and thirteenth day, it would register, in smudgy red ink, “overtime.” 7:16 PM. Technically, she was allowed to leave at five every day, but she couldn’t think of much else to do anyhow. Restaurants were expensive, and she couldn’t imagine convincing herself that waiting a half hour to spend six dollars on whatever a “Cronut” is was in any way worth it. Clubs were loud and filled by songs she didn’t listen to and men she didn’t want to listen to any more. Television was boring, and somehow - without even addressing her directly - seemed to nag her to get her roots done, get a hot boyfriend, and find herself in the middle of dramatic arguments more often.
At least the bookshelves in her office would always keep her company. They were filled with a motley of world history, classic literature, overly-optimistic guides to “Making it in This New Economy” from thirty years ago — an assortment quite different from the the fluff-filled magazines in the kiosk on the corner, promising to “Spill the Latest Style” and “Make Sure He Likes It.” Above that kiosk stood a tall billboard advertising the newest Kindle: apparently its new and improved design is excellent for watching TV - supposedly so one could have their two-hundred-dollar ebook and not read on it, too.
Maggie was secretary for a Charles Yang, a rich twenty-nine-year-old software entrepreneur who’d recently risen through the ranks of the education publication company she’d worked for for the past decade. Her boss was, as far as she was concerned, illiterate. He was an expert in making schoolbooks short, sweet, and available in 13 sickly colourful fonts. She could swear that, last week, he’s mumbled under his breath if Jack London was the “Great Expectations British guy.” Her “Great Expectations” of the potential impact of her career remained, clearly, unfulfilled. She heard him call her name from his office and sighed as she stood up from her desk chair. It was on grey, Tuesday evenings like this that she felt she had the most useless job in the world.
Mr.Yang’s voice carried across his large office: “Yes, order them by last name, absolutely. Oh, and don’t bother sorting the Classics — we’ll be getting rid of them anyhow.”
“Getting rid of them ‽ You mean, throwing them away? Or just reshelving them in another office?” she replied, surprised and confused.
“Oh no, I can’t imagine keeping these in the building any longer than we already have. I just ordered new dusters for the custodial staff. Swiffers - they’re microfibre! Books produce dust. Dust has dust mites. Have you seen those pictures on Dr.Oz? Ew. Last thing we need around here is a thousand pounds of them. No modern business ever got anywhere by staring at the two-hundred-year-old words of some old white guy. We’ve digitized them all. I’m sure there’s one of those Salvation Army places around here that accepts donations if that makes you feel any better. Give them away or add them to that strange little collection of yours. Worst case scenario, the boxes go on the curb. Now I’d like you to be out of here by eight: our new team of college interns is coming in and I’d like them to use your desk,” said Mr. Yang.
The bookshelves in Mr. Charles Yang’s office were seven feet, four inches tall. Maggie Butler stood five feet three inches, from the top of her mousy, lopsided bun to the thick soles of her outdated brown Oxfords. If she stood on tiptoe, her outstretched arm reached just short of the top shelf of “20th Century Fiction.” Ms. Butler was part of that rare set of people who maintained their agendas daily and continued to carry postage stamps and pocket maps in their wallets. Now, her right hand also held her time card, covered with large red “Overtime” stamps.
She left the high-rise office building and set off down the street. It had been a long, difficult day and her large carpet bag was weighed down by the unwanted words of Shakespeare and Dickens.
She always told people she met that her apartment was her hideaway - her reading alcove. She painted a picture of a bright, sunny apartment stacked floor to ceiling with with beautiful, seemingly untouched editions of the world’s greatest writings, like flawless paper bricks in her literary castle of knowledge. Somehow she always expected, every time she trudged the three blocks from the D train to 530 Cropsey Boulevard, to see just that as she opened her dull grey door.
She tossed her keys on the coffee table, nearly tripping over her cat’s hair-covered plaything and surveyed the few teetering Ikea bookcases (she never did quite figure out where to insert those last ten screws.) They were piled with dog-eared, battered paperback worlds with cracked spines that showed the attrition from every one of the dozens of times she’d sank down onto her couch and begged for the faraway lands and the handsome nobles and the strong, gorgeous heroines to take her away someplace, any place that wasn’t here. Any place where she wasn’t Ms. Butler the Bookkeeper for the thirty-year-old millionaire who probably thought Hemingway wrote Don Quixote.
Thank goodness she’d brought home two new ones. All her other books were getting far too familiar, too memorized. When her mind finished the author’s sentences, she was, for a moment, forced to remember that these worlds weren’t real. She wondered aloud: “What’s for dinner?” As her voice bounced around the minimally-furnished apartment, she figured she might as well be grateful for her languid literary companionship - it’s not as if she had anyone else around whose sentences to finish, anyway.
She took off her blazer and, after draping it over the back of a chair, half-heartedly began to sift through the stack of mail on the dining table, tossing envelopes of various shades of white into messy piles. Dull letters from the insurance company, bills that she had the money but not the energy to pay, catalogues from that new Eco-Friendly tableware store addressed to “current resident” of this apartment where nothing ever happened. A cheery card with a fake handwriting font from a new dentist’s office advertising a free checkup was the closest thing in the pile to a personal letter. She wondered why she even bothered feeling disappointed. What did she expect? A bulky envelope with a letter from a faraway pen pal? A romantic card from a handsome stranger professing his undying love? Anything worth keeping and rereading on a rainy Sunday? Not like that would ever happen.
Only in a book, maybe. And probably some cheap drugstore chick lit at that. Her life was just about as far away from being packaged into 312 pages of 10pt. Sabon between two smooth, pretty covers as it could get. Reading a good book cover to cover took her somewhere far, far away. A day of her life, from the moment she kicked off her covers to the time she got back under them, solely filled her with an inexplicable, intangible heaviness that somehow made it very clear that she would be waking up in the same bed, in the same place, for the same job for a very long time. Not where she wanted to be, but probably where she was supposed to be.
If she was going to live a life of boredom, she might as well live it caffeinated. Besides, the idea of heading off to a local coffee shop to work on Her Novel was just cliche enough to be embarrassingly appealing. It was the sort of thing she would love to say she was doing to a friend who happened to call. Someday it would happen; someone would decide to see what she was up to at a time when she wasn’t standing in the aisle of SuperMart, staring at the shelf and comparing the sodium content of three kinds of canned beans. Exactly what Her Novel was was hard to say. It wasn’t what one would call written, or even really “being written” for that matter. It was a few scratched-out false starts on a yellow legal pad that in her mind was a beautifully bound, strokable, well-titled published book about something.
Twenty minutes, five dollars, and a quarter of a sweetened cappuccino later, the number of scrapped grand beginnings on the first pages of the legal pad had increased by two. Maybe the coffee was too strong, or the smooth jazz was too loud, or it was just too much of a Tuesday. Either way, today clearly wasn’t the day she would turn into Ernest Hemingway or Jane Austen. Why couldn’t her writing ever quite do what she wished it could? No one reading her story would ever suddenly find themselves to be the rebellious, adventure-craving young duchess of strict parents, clutching her long skirts as she ran down a forest path, turning to look back, quite cinematically, every so often. The chirping of dozens of birds and insects she would never know the names of wouldn’t fill their ears, and they would never feel the surprise of running straight into the tall, well-dressed stranger with an accent from somewhere Maggie Butler never been, with perfect hair, and pants of a fashionable level of tightness for the time - a phenomenon she had yet to witness.
Feeling quite hopeless about her chances of suddenly blossoming into the writer she wished she were, she played with her coffee cup, moving the eraser of her pencil in circles just inside the rim. Moments later, coffee rushed across the top of the table, heading straight for the piles of notes of her table mate - a college-age student clearly engrossed in his studying. Before she had a chance to think, a stream of indistinct “Oh my god, I’m so sorry’s” came from her mouth as she tried to push papers away from the spreading brown liquid.
Were this scene occurring in the pages of one of the books she ran away to, perhaps the student would stand up, take her hand, say “screw the coffee, screw the books” and whisk her off on a grand adventure. Maybe she’d end her day sipping whiskey on a fifth floor fire escape, or maybe he’d just turn around and say: “Hey.” But, this wasn’t page 45 of The Bookkeeper’s Escapade - it was just Tuesday, October twenty third in the life of a dinosaur with brown Oxford shoes and a half-empty legal pad.
The student swept up his books and mumbled “God, some people” as he moved to another table across the cafe. The coffee grinder whirred, the smooth jazz played, and the couple in the corner went on chatting. The dark coffee seeped into the pages of Maggie Butler’s legal pad, making the edges stained and soggy, and she realized that in her book, with its pages of white cubicle-walls and manila envelopes from the insurance company, nothing would ever happen.
