Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

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Eighteen months ago, or twenty. It gets harder and harder for her to remember how long it’s been, how many summers she’s spent sweating in her car in polyester and tweed. One, two? She marks the time as one gives a toddler’s age, but she stopped marking at some point. Those months ago, those days and days upon days and more days ago, it was just an ad in the classifieds. She had been fired from another waitressing job, this time for continuing to pour iced tea after the glass was already full just one too many times. She always apologized, but sorry doesn’t get the stain out. It was their own fault for having those giant windows that looked out over a cliff. She would stare out, imagining that this was the edge of the earth, the spot where gravity petered out, that each time she stepped out the door at the end of her shift, she was taking the chance of drifting up and off. She couldn’t keep her mind on the task at hand.

She didn’t know what she should do instead, but something different seemed in order, something with less immediate potential for calamity.

Seeking receptionist for busy office. Must be self-starter, multi-tasker.

There was an address, and instructions to apply in person between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. She wasn’t sure what it meant to be a self-starter or a multi-tasker, but she had gone to college, hadn’t she? She could probably do anything she was asked to do. She showed up at 9:15 the following morning dressed in a navy pencil skirt and white blouse, her one professional outfit. She pressed the button for suite 2A and announced herself. She waited, but there was no answer. She tried again. “Hello?” she said, holding down the button. “I’m here about the job?” But there was only the faint radio crackle.

So she stood on the steps until a FedEx deliveryman was buzzed in and she followed him inside. When she found 2A, she knocked. She waited. She opened the door and walked into a flurry of activity, people huddled together over computers, arguing, doors flying open and shut, the phones ringing ringing ringing. It seemed to her that she had never heard anything so loud. She turned and walked out, she hoped, before anyone noticed she was there.

She went back a couple of days later wearing the same outfit, again waited for someone to follow, again walked in when her knock went unanswered. This time, things were calmer, just a few people at desks typing in silence. Then one by one, their phones started ringing, until everyone was saying hello how are you I’m great all at once and the din of voices was too much and she started to walk back to the door when a voice distinguished itself from the others.

It was clear and strong, and it said, “Can I help you?”

Iris looked back and there he stood, a small, pale, reddish-blond-haired man in a suit. He had translucent gray eyes that looked right at her.

“I’m here about the receptionist job?” she asked.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Good good,” and led her to his office.

Iris had never been in a professional setting like this. At least she had never gone past the lobby, into the guts of the place. A place. Since her dismissal from the Blackbird Diner, she had been coasting on her meager savings and postponing the inevitable until her time ran out and she was out of money, completely out, a balance of zero, satisfying almost, the flatline of it. As she followed him down the hallway, she glanced into each office decorated with fake plants and fake art and real families, tacked up in two dimensions on particleboard, everyone drinking coffee coffee and more coffee. Why don’t people drink lemonade or ice water, she thought. It’s hot out. Then the chill of the air conditioner penetrated her skin, and she understood that the weather didn’t matter. In here, her body wouldn’t know hot from cold or up from down either. When they got to his office, he sat behind his desk and directed her to the chair across from him. He pushed a few piles of papers aside so there was a clear space between them, where he rested his hands palms down for a moment before folding them.

She wondered if she was supposed to say something.

Seemingly sensing her discomfort, he nodded toward the mess of papers on his desk and smiled. “This is precisely why I need you. To rein me in.”

Iris nodded, smiled with closed lips.

“You’ve answered phones, yes?”

“Yes,” she nodded again. Her own phone. Her parents’ phone.

“Good. Listen,” he said, rising, “I need to be going now— we’ll go over everything Monday.”

She frowned, confused, but righted her expression quickly. She fumbled out of her chair and followed him out of his office, but he never looked back, and kept walking right out the main door.

Iris paused and looked around at all the desks. She didn’t even know what they were doing, typing, talking. They didn’t get that far. She had the job before she walked through the door. Even before she saw the ad, while she was lying in bed awake in the summer muck, wondering how, wondering what, she had it.

When she showed up for work the following Monday wearing the same outfit, as yet unable to afford another one, the layout of the suite had changed. Now there was only one desk in the lobby area, equipped with a computer and telephone. She sat down at it and waited. From time to time she heard a door open or close, or bits of conversation from other offices, but no one came out. She checked the boss’s office, but he wasn’t there.

When the phone on her desk rang, she picked it up.

“Larmax, Inc. Hello?” She looked around, hoping for someone, anyone to bail her out.

“Can I help you?”

The man on the other end asked to be connected to accounting.

“One moment, please,” she said, and tucked the receiver into her desk’s empty top drawer, trying in vain to place it gently, so the person on the other end wouldn’t hear a thump or clatter.

She knocked on the first door she came to and walked in, panicked, before anyone responded. A woman looked up from her desk, annoyed.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry,” Iris said, “but who does someone talk to if they want to talk to accounting?”

The woman paused a few seconds. “Voicemail,” she said.

Iris returned to her desk and figured out how to forward the call to voicemail, whose voicemail she didn’t know. She decided then that this woman would be her go-to until the boss returned to fill her in on her duties. She wondered if she should go back and introduce herself. She felt like a trespasser, an unwelcome addition and she needed an ally.

A few minutes later, the boss arrived, disheveled, blaming traffic for his tardiness, and gave her a quick rundown of her tasks: Phones, faxes, errands. She wrote down everything he said, hungry for instruction.

He coached her on her inflection.

“When you answer, say, ‘Larmax, Inc.’ with an upward lilt. Not like it’s a question, just… do you see what I’m saying? Just, inviting. Right?”

She practiced in the car on her way home, in the shower, again and again until it was perfect, a coo, automatic.

The next day, she looked for that woman, to thank her for helping her out on her first day, but she never saw her. Every time she checked her office, it was empty.

As the months wore on, the number of people in the office seemed to dwindle. At least seemed to. She didn’t know what number they had started at. Over time, the number of sandwiches she fetched at lunchtime fell to five, then four, then the lunch orders stopped coming. She could park anywhere she wanted. The boss was frequently away, but there didn’t seem to be anyone in charge in his absence. She never learned any names because she never seemed to see anyone more than once, or never for more than a minute or two at a time. She got so used to saying, I’m sorry, he’s not in right now, may I take a message? that she sometimes said it even when he was there, right down the hall.