From the boss woman’s car you all cross the hot parking lot to that shopping mall restaurant where the server asks if anyone around the table has a food allergy.
“None,” says the boss.
“None,” chorus the other five girls in your office marketing team.
You have a gastro intolerance for garlic, but in this restaurant and at this table, you stay mute because nobody likes an outlier or an upstart.
The food comes and you girls break bread, as if this is a blessed communion and as if somewhere, a clock isn’t counting down and as if this shopping mall meal isn’t about ticking an “Employee Appreciation” box.
You push your food around the plate and sniff for garlic and nod and ‘uh-huh” your way through the chatter.
Rhianna and Claire, the two 20-something paid interns, are just out of college.
Two months ago, in spring, both girls’ parents had engineered their daughters’ gigs in your office. Now, it’s almost Autumn and Rhianna is talking about her upcoming move to New York City, where her mother has secured her a Manhattan apartment. Claire is headed to the west coast. Earlier this summer, her parents flew across the country to help her find an apartment and buy her new furniture.
Hold the breath. Push the food around that plate. This, too, shall pass.
Yikes! Now, Rhianna is looking down the table, straight at you. The way she asks the question, you know that it’s a repeat-ask of some question that you were too checked out to hear.
“Why did you come here, like, to America?”
Ah. Easy peasy. In three decades, the response has become a blathery jingle: I was bored back home in Ireland. Just wanted an American adventure. Ha. Ha.
The boss chimes in. “But who did you know here—like, when you landed?”
This is the 50-something boss lady who interrupts meetings to answer calls from Daddy because Daddy is at her house, fixing the sink or mowing her lawn. The previous winter, this boss lady asked you for ideas on workplace diversity and inclusion. You asked why this nonprofit doesn’t recognize Martin Luther King Day as a public or official holiday. “If a day like that means that much to someone like you, you can take it out of your vacation time,” she said.
Now, in this sub-zero restaurant in this shopping mall, on this hot summer day in America, you decide to liven up the employee recognition party.
So you tell about the airplane and how you spotted those blue swimming pools on Long Island, New York and, how, from your airplane window seat, you feared that those matching blue pools were actually nuclear spills.
You tell about the long, long immigration queues at JFK Airport. You tell about the Greyhound bus north and how you kept looking for a garden gate or a barking dog or any sign of human or animal life on that highway. You tell about the off-highway Holiday Inn hotel where you were supposed to meet a musician friend of your brother-in-law back home. You’d never seen a photo of this American man. So in that Holiday Inn lobby, you didn’t know who to look for. When you couldn’t find him, you checked the (borrowed) cash in your pocket and wondered how much it would cost to fly home tomorrow.
As you tell, you pretend not to notice the WTF and OMG looks that pass between these girls breaking bread around this table.
“Oh. My. God,” says Rhianna. You could’ve been, like, kidnapped or trafficked.”
“Yeah,” says Claire. “You really could. I mean, this would make a great Netflix series.”
Finally, the office lunch is over and you’re re-crossing that hot, blacktop parking lot. In her big, shiny car, Boss Lady turns up the air conditioning to keep you all cool, cool, cool as you head back to your office.
Some days in that office, you imagine the roof creaking open and an airplane flying overhead and the pilot or a passenger pointing down to say, “Look! Down there! All those matching chairs and matching desks and matching people in their matching blue cubes!”
