I stood at the edge of a vacant field. Police who were not dressed as police were looking in the field for things that were dangerous. These were items left by a woman who was not dressed as a terrorist and who also was not one. She did wear a uniform. She was no longer there in the field.
An officer picked up a wrench and threw it in my direction. I protested, “You threw that wrench right at me.” He didn’t respond. I repeated. “He threw that wrench right at me!” Nobody heard me. The wrench had landed with a thud near me and had not hit me but could have hit me. I thought, “Someone threw a wrench at me.” Then I thought about the expression throwing a wrench into things and was disappointed in the lack of imagination reflected by this, my own thinking.
Of course, I walked into the office as planned. I always follow directions as well as I can. The officer waited for me with a measure of patience. I can picture her now. She was tall and had long light-brown hair. She was not Jane Goodall but stylistically resembled her—or at least what a therapist would look like in the 1970s in a movie. Trench coat, aviator glasses with honey brown lenses (opaque). Brown eyes, high cheekbones. She walked in slowly and sat behind her desk. Her movements were languid. In the dark, I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying, but, yes, I can picture her now. I asked her to repeat what she was saying. She said something about organizations, and I eagerly shared, “Actually, just this morning I wrote a sentence about organizations! The sentence I wrote was specifically: All organizations are insane.” A long, awkward silence ensued. I added, “Though it’s possible I got that sentence from Scientology.”
I thought she would ask how I had gotten it from Scientology. I recalled the book title, How to Live Though an Executive. The word though was surprising. This was an L. Ron Hubbard book I had borrowed from a hotel library overseas, by which I mean I had taken it up to my room and placed it into my suitcase. At this same hotel overseas, I had taken another book from the library and shoved it deep into a large flowering bush. I made sure the book fell all the way to the ground inside of the flowering bush, where I hoped that it would decay. That book was by an author who was very unkind. I had met her once, or rather someone had endeavored to introduce me to her. The author averted her gaze as if she had not heard the person endeavoring to introduce me to her, even though there were only the three of us in the otherwise empty auditorium in which we were all soon to read aloud from our books.
The officer made no response. There was a small window looking out onto the vacant field. I had been standing at the edge of the vacant field before my appointment, where the terrorist also had been, or the woman who was neither a terrorist nor an officer, and certainly no one I knew.
Outside, a female police officer jogged up to a smaller, sliding window, as if at a drive-thru. She leaned in casually and said simply, “Hello.” Well, it may have been a different but similar greeting. She jogged away. All of this jogging reminded me of the 1970s. My officer didn’t answer, but then she seemed to reconsider and got up to cheerily wave to the female police officer, sticking her arm out the drive-thru window in order to do so. The window was in an unusual place, sort of low and centered on the wall. My officer said something like, “Till later!” and then she turned back to me and said, “You see? Others can come into this room, many others.” I replied, “Yes, I knew that, I could bring anyone here, any number of them,” and my officer said, “Well, no, that’s not what I meant, and I would have to approve them in advance, and not too many a number,” and I said, “Yes, I knew that, of course.” But I hadn’t. To be frank, I had no idea what she was talking about, but still I assented, as is my general inclination in life. This is part of the reason I was there, after all.
And this next bit was upsetting, or rather, surprising, and possibly somewhat embarrassing, but she did a strange sort of back bend, quite acrobatic. Under a small table that was beside her desk but was also somehow over my head. I said, “Wow, you’re really flexible!” She made no response. I said, “I couldn’t do that, it would break my back,” and she said, “Yes, and I didn’t know that you can’t build new bones, you only can work with those that you have,” and I said, “I didn’t know that either! They don’t tell us anything about our bodies,” meaning women’s bodies, and I thought she’d find that last comment quite pleasing for me to have said, for this was a woman who looked like Jane Goodall, and she was, after all, a naturalist, in addition to being my officer. Yet she scowled like I had not understood.
My time with the remarkable woman was over. She shook my hand and turned to the wall, which was knotty pine, and I myself moved to stand at the exit. I arranged my face in what I hoped would be an appealing expression. Over and over again, I made the appealing expression. She said, “See you, then,” and I said, in what I hoped would be an appealing tone of voice, so as not to offend, “When?” And she said, “The end of next week,” and I said cautiously, “So, you mean Friday?” for work weeks do end on a Friday by some considerations, such as a datebook. Then again, the true and proper end of the week was Saturday, even though I personally think the week ends emotionally on Sunday. It’s so peculiar that Sunday is considered the first day of the week. Or is that Saturday? I realized that I had no idea when the week began or ended, something one is probably taught in elementary school. As I went through the different options of what “the end of next week” might mean to the woman, or to anyone for that matter, silently inside my head, she remained silent outside in the room. Finally, I admitted to myself there was clearly going to be no response, so I tried another way.
“Good, then I will call,” I supplied, but she said, “No, don’t call,” and so I added, carefully, “It’s not any trouble, for me,” and she said more firmly, “Really, I prefer to just get it done,” and I said, “Certainly, so do I,” and she said, “No, I prefer to just get it done,” and I was, once again, the fat little girl in a pantry.
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Kate Bernheimer’s newest books are the story collection How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales and the essay collection and design book Fairy Tale Architecture (with her brother, Andy Bernheimer).