Caren Lissner - Starting From Square Two

“Then why was he at the bar?”

“Why not? We were waiting to meet friends.”

The waitress brought their water, and she stood at the table expectantly. “You ready?” she asked.

“I guess we should pick up our menus first,” Todd said, smiling, and the waitress nodded and took off.

Todd added, “Brian lived in England for a year and he said they never give you water when you sit down. You have to ask for it or you’ll never ever get it.”

“Really?” Gert said. Then, in a barely passable British accent, she added, “That’s rather peculiar, don’t you think?”

“I rather believe so,” Todd said.

“A shame, old boy.”

They ordered appetizers and talked more. Todd spoke animatedly about his job. He said his company’s trains ran from Croxton Yards in Jersey City up to Binghamton, New York. It was a six-hour run, and usually it was just him on the train, plus an engineer who was driving it. There was a children’s hospital that they passed in upstate New York each time, and the kids would always wave out the window at the train. Sometimes, they’d make a sign, like Blow Your Horn! This was Todd’s favorite part of the run.

Todd said to Gert, “Do you like your job?”

Gert told him about working for a marketing and public relations firm that handled only pharmaceutical companies. She had majored in communications in college, but she wasn’t sure what she’d do afterward. She’d finally found a job as an assistant at a PR firm. The pay was low and the people seemed phony, so she kept her eye on the want ads. Then she saw an ad to be the assistant to a vice president of a different firm. The pay would be much higher, and the building was right next to a midtown subway stop, but she’d be less focused on creative work and more on meeting her boss’s needs. Still, she had been happy enough outside of work that she didn’t really care what she was doing during those hours. If she wanted, she could work on a portfolio and move over to the creative side. She actually had wanted to do that for a few years, and had tons of good ideas for product promotions. But for some reason she hadn’t gotten around to finishing her portfolio yet.

“Are you guys responsible for the goodies?” Todd asked. “Like the notepads and rubber pill toys and clipboards doctors get with the names of drugs on them?”

Gert laughed. She usually just got blank stares when she told people what she did. At least Todd was creative. “Our company doesn’t make them, but it does research to see if they’re a good way to increase product name recognition,” she said. “We might get twelve people in a room and bring out a tray full of those toys, then take them out of the room and see which ones they remembered.”

“Wow.” Todd closed his eyes. “I remember…that you’re wearing a red shirt and you have long hair, and dimples.”

Gert smiled shyly.

The waitress set down a bowl of calamari, along with a huge, soft stuffed red pepper. Gert was hungry. She hadn’t eaten Italian food in a while.

They made up their plates, and they ended up talking so rapidly that Gert only ate half her meal. She barely even tasted it. She hadn’t expected to enjoy Todd’s company so much. He told her that if the train broke down anywhere along the route, whether it was pouring rain or sloppy snow or in the middle of a dangerous city at 3:00 a.m., it was his job to jump out with a flashlight and walk the length of the train to find out where the problem was. “Some of those trains are a mile long,” Todd said. “And you don’t want to get out and walk the length of a train in a desolate area at 3:00 a.m.”

“I wouldn’t try it,” Gert said.

She told him about the worst part of her job, dealing with her often-cranky boss, Missy, and about the odd cast of characters at her old job. They had been so brain-dead that after a certain point, she’d stopped smiling for fear they’d complain about not getting the joke.

“So how did you end up in your line of work, anyway?” Gert asked Todd.

“Well,” he said, wiping his mouth, “it was strange. It wasn’t a job that would have occurred to me at all.”

“So what happened?”

He hooked some linguine around his fork. “I majored in history in college,” he said, “and I wasn’t that great a student in school, but history was the one thing I was interested in. I love finding out how things came to be. There are so many stories. I knew I wouldn’t have lots of jobs lined up after graduation with that major, though. For a while I led tours in a museum part-time. Then I was reading the help-wanted ads in the paper one Sunday morning, and I saw this boxed ad at the bottom of the page for an information session for a train company, and something kind of clicked. Working for the railroad is kind of a cliché, but I’d never actually thought you could do it.”

“It seems like a job people had a hundred years ago,” Gert said.

“Exactly!” Todd said. “That’s what I thought. But that’s what interested me. There’s such beauty in trains. Cars and planes and buses change every year, but if you look at a passing freight train, with its string of yellow and orange and brown boxcars, it looks the same as it did fifty years ago. And trains travel through the most historical points in the country, too. They’re like moving museums of America. But when I first saw the ad, I didn’t know if I should go to the info session. It didn’t seem like a job that people who went to college did. I tried to talk myself out of it.”

“Yeah….”

“But I realized something: I had majored in history because I loved it. And now I could look into a job I might love, too. My heart told me to go.”

“And you went,” Gert said.

“And I went. The recruiters actually try to talk you out of it. They tell you about the crazy scheduling, the long hours, the drug testing, and the hard work. But everything they said to scare us off was something that made me want to do the job more.”

“That’s great,” Gert said. “A lot of people don’t follow their heart.”

“Especially about work.”

He asked Gert where she’d grown up. She said she was from L.A., and that her parents were still there. She said she’d come east for college. She didn’t say she’d stayed and married a Bostonian, though. She told Todd that her younger brother was still in L.A., and that he’d done nothing for two years after high school and was now waiting tables. She told him about her best friend from childhood, Nancy, who lived there with a husband and two kids. She said she usually talked to her about once a week, and the same with her parents.

Todd told her that the friend she had met at the bar, Brian, was someone he’d known since elementary school. He said he only had a few close friends, but once he got along with someone, they were friends for life.

Gert realized by the time they’d finished dessert that she had gone for more than an hour without thinking of Marc. It was the first time in a year and a half that that had happened. Even when she was sleeping. She’d had a dream two days earlier, in fact, in which she was sure he was right next to her. She could even smell him. Then she awoke. She wanted to crawl back into the dream. She wanted so desperately to fall back to sleep.

When Todd asked whether she still wanted to see a movie, she was glad, because she’d been wavering on it. What she really wanted to do was find out more things about him—not sit in a theater with her mouth shut. But she wasn’t going to say that, because then he might suggest going back to his place, and that would ruin everything.

“Well,” she said, “it is pretty late.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Todd said. “I hate to be a wet blanket, but I have to go to work at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow. Could we do it another time, though?”