Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

If only I already had a job, in a store or a factory, it couldn’t possibly be as boring as sitting in this room with my parents, bombarded by the terrible things they said about me, accusations I had no way to counter. Turning away from them didn’t help; there was no comfort anywhere else in the room. Everything just made me tired: the crocheted runner draped along the mantel, the sansevierias on the window sill, the portraits of dead relations everyone had hated on the walls, my father’s bulky armchair, with the worn stripe of fabric down the middle, that had long ago conformed itself to the shape of his body.

I am so tired of my father.

My sister and I always had to wait for him after school, while he placed his notebooks and textbooks in his briefcase with minute precision, stored his pen, eraser, and ruler in their special places, wiped the board clean, arranged the desks in orderly rows, picked wadded-up balls of paper from the floor and dropped them in the wastepaper basket, locked the schoolhouse door, chased away the kids who were hanging around the playground. After that, as we were about to cross the busy street in the shade of the tall chestnut trees, he would intone, with one hand tight on the back of my sister’s neck and the other tight on mine: “Look left, then right, then left again.” And then we would finally cross, our steps perfectly synchronized.

“La douce France,” he would say, peering at me over the top of my French reader, which he held open before him. “La douce Fraaaance.” Saliva would spray from his mouth and sting my face. “France is the cradle of Western European culture. She gave us famous philosophers, teachers, painters, authors, politicians. The French aren’t as crude as we Dutch. They prrrrrrrronounce their words like this.” He would trill the r like a songbird.

I had never been to France, and hoped I wouldn’t ever have to go there.

Except for Cora, we all worked in the licorice department, where Trix supervised the steady drip-drip-drip of the liquid licorice into the metal molds. Sometimes the flow was too fast, and the black goo spilled over the edges of the molds like molten lava, ran over the sides of the conveyor belt, and formed a glimmering black river beneath the machine. When that happened, Trix would shut down the line and call for a mechanic to set things right. Meanwhile, we had the chance to stretch our backs.

I was one of four women at the end of the line. Our task was to seal the cellophane bags of candy as they emerged from the previous step of the process. We cheered the occasional breakdowns, sometimes we prayed for them, just to get a momentary relief from the din that rattled our bodies and our souls.

Cora worked in bonbons. Every afternoon, she liberated a box for the next morning’s train ride. My eyes must have bugged out of my head the first time I saw her eating her daily “breakfast.” Her pudgy hands, rings on every finger, unwrapped one candy after another. “A body has to eat,” she said, absently smoothing out the wrinkles from a silver wrapper. “At home, I just can’t make myself eat a thing in the morning.”

She was so heavy she almost took up two seats. In her lavender dress with bright yellow buttons, she looked like a marvelous Easter egg. Above her head hung a photo of a slender woman in a white dress, leaning against an old-fashioned Dutch canal bridge.

“Why not?” I asked her.

“My husband,” said Cora. “He’s been sick for six or seven years. Parkinson’s, the doctors tell us. They could keep that little piece of information to themselves, in my opinion. What does my husband need with Mr. Parkinson’s disease?”

Her dark brown eyes glared at me indignantly, as if she’d heard the diagnosis only yesterday. I felt uncomfortable, as if it was partially my fault. The most serious illnesses could just suddenly be there, from one day to the next. Billions of bacteria and viruses lurking day and night, waiting for their chance to weasel into our bodies and begin their attack on the weakest parts of us. Even worse were the dangerous genetic elements, inheritances from our ancestors, already present inside us from the moment of our birth, quietly waiting for the right time to reveal themselves. Just thinking about it made me hot and sweaty with fear, feeling phantom pains in random places.

“He can’t control his muscles anymore,” said Cora. “I have to wash him every morning, get him dressed, help him downstairs, and feed him his oatmeal, half of which winds up dribbling back out of his mouth and onto his clothing.” She yawned widely. Her tongue was a pink animal, quivering in its den. “Now the children are out of the house, I wind up with this full-grown child to take care of.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw a cartoon image of a grotesque manly woman with a surly face, carrying her struggling husband under her arm as if he was a pile of kindling for the fireplace.

“Sometimes he announces that he’s going to go out for a bike ride,” said Cora, “but he’s already had three awful spills.”

“Let him ride his bike if he wants to,” murmured Trix. “Maybe next time he’ll keel over dead.” She gazed out the window dreamily. Streamers of mist drifted over the fields. When she closed her eyes, her long lashes almost touched her cheeks. “Then she’ll finally have some peace.”

Lien polished her glasses with a man’s checkered handkerchief. Her mousy eyes aimed at Cora, who shrugged her shoulders.

My first week on the job, I came home every evening dead tired. My limbs were leaden, my spine felt like I’d been tied to the mast of a sailing ship during a heavy storm.

At dinner, I couldn’t even sit up straight. My father criticized my table manners, and my mother seemed worried. I wondered whether she was afraid of a new battle breaking out or concerned about my health — and in my exhausted state, I figured it was probably whichever was the greater of two evils. When I finally went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. Images of the workday crawled through the labyrinth inside my skull, and a chorus of human voices tried in vain to drown out the echoes of pounding machinery and blaring music.

Mornings, on the train, if anything more tired than I’d been the previous evening, I couldn’t imagine how the others had been able to stand this for all these years. If this is my future , I thought, I’d rather be dead . But immediately my father’s voice began to protest inside my mind — not against the idea of my death, but against the possibility of my giving up the job. He challenged me with his beloved clichés: Work is honorable, the people have a right to work, workers of the world unite, idle hands are the devil’s playground, roll up your sleeves and get to work, many hands make light work. His voice was shrill, he laughed nastily and rolled his head crazily and cried: “We live to work! We live to work!”

Just like everyone who hates their job, I found Mondays the worst. The week was a mountain and I was Sisyphus, eternally rolling a boulder towards the top.

At first I thought it was that listless beginning-of-the-week feeling that kept Trix staring unpleasantly out the window when we came into the compartment, although the raindrops trickling down the glass clouded her view of the world outside. Like a dog shaking itself dry, Cora shook off her raincoat, spattering our faces. She took her place across from Trix, sighing deeply as her full weight landed on the seat. With a practiced hand, she opened her box of bonbons. Then at last she seemed to relax and become aware of her surroundings.

“Jesus,” she cried, startled by Trix’s appearance. “What happened to you?”

Trix shrugged. Their profiles — Cora’s with mouth open wide in surprise — appeared as shadows on the window.