Hopeless Convention

Secretly she'd been removing one knick-knack at a time from her desk for three months. It was more than just coincidence that no one noticed her work space slowly become just a space. The only words anyone in the office ever spoke were piecemeal motivational prose learned at seminars and company meetings. Her colleagues were like pet parrots. Even with their cage doors wide open they wouldn't fly away.

Having to sneak away with her personal items from her own cubicle made her hate going to work even more. If they discovered she was planning to quit, termination was certain. She needed those last few paychecks. At least this way, she was able to control her fate. All her daily fences lacked living color. The drab metal cubicle frames outlined what amounted to nothing more than a 5'x 8' piece of Berber carpet. She cursed every square inch of it for boxing her in. In part, she cursed herself for letting it. There was even an "unofficial" company rule printed at the bottom of the last page in the employee handbook,..."No Peeking". It sounded like a slogan used to prevent school children from cheating on a test. This meant employees were prohibited from looking into another person's cubicle door or over the divider. Because of this, human interactions were limited mostly to walks toward the elevator or short jaunts on the ground floor from elevator to exit. Breaking this rule had always been her private rebellion.

With every stolen glance into the world of her peers she glimpsed the missing pieces of their lives. When time is money, love becomes a luxury. Family photos, seasonal calendars, clever stapler covers (made by children and grand children), and souvenir paperweights--these were the dusty proof of lives lived less than people intended. Ten years of "peeking" told an awful tale. She could see that times had changed. When she was a child, family photos looked like Mary Tyler Moore and sibling bunny ears. Now, they looked more like rolling eyes and I-phones. It was like watching the whole world slowly forget how to breath. A year at a time the faces in their spaces slowly dimmed. She imagined they'd someday all become soundless but living colorless smudges locked in their tiny cross hatched cubbyholes. Her own face was changing color. Now that she could hear her own gasping, it was time to go.

She had always imagined herself as the bulletproof exception to the pressures that so quietly cause a person to trade wishes for washboards. She never meant to become so aloof as a mother and friend. Indeed she paid the bills and kept food on the table. By most peoples' standards she was extraordinarily successful as a single mother. Yet, around her, eroding her, the spin of countless angry early mornings washed out her love of just about everything. Her drive to work made her feel like she was holding her breath at the bottom of a pool. Lying motionless under the pressure, there was always that same seductive temptation to stay down too long,...to close her eyes and perish in the quiet hum of her morning commute. As her dreams became unaffordable pleasures, death had become a romantic notion.

She started her corporate job with a sense of empowerment. After the divorce, she needed that kind of a boost. It let her know that she could keep going forward with school, work, parenting, or whatever she might plan for the future. When she and David split, she feared all her future plans would fall through. As time went by, Sara had come to realize that she'd betrayed herself over and over for the sake of the marriage. She had tied her own hands and David was more than happy to let her play the traditional domestic role. Now, she was grateful that her American nightmare was over. In 1981 however, the nightmare was over for many people. She and thousands of other women flooded the workforce. The day she was interviewed, she saw more variations on the pants suit than there were factories in Taiwan. She beat the odds and got hired in a skirt. In 1981 when Jimmy Carter was leaving office, he said "Our American values are not luxuries, but necessities--not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself." What he didn't know was that the time for "bread" and circuses was over. With a 50% divorce rate, Sara and many others were no longer content to put their happiness on the back burner for some antiquated idea of matrimony. As she gained a voice, she lost a husband.