“They took all our furniture.”
They’re sitting across from me in the reception area. I can’t tell from the tone of her voice whether she’s sad or angry or just tired—probably all three. It’s as though her ability to express emotion has aged with the rest of her. They both have sagging faces, and are really adorable for an elderly couple—he has a fishing hat on and she has a kerchief.
“All our furniture is gone.” She keeps chiming in with permutations of the same two or three phrases, while he’s trying to explain this whole furniture situation to me. I’m trying to listen, but his story keeps jumping back and forth from February to December to March, even though I keep asking him to give me the details in chronological order.
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time for this one. They walked arm in arm into the office about fifteen minutes ago, looking for the alderman. She happened to be here at the time, and because her desk was covered in papers and the extra chair was missing, she instructed them to sit down in the reception area and pulled up another seat in front of them.
My desk is just behind the reception area, and I don’t have an extra chair that could go missing. The only reason it’s my desk is because I began squatting there shortly after I started working here again—it was unoccupied and had a decent computer so I let my folders and JTDC reports make their home on its surface, securing for myself a place to sit and access to the internet.
I tried to sit as inconspicuously as possible when the alderman began talking with them, looking busy by rereading some of my JTDC notes for the hundredth time. The alderman rarely has more than five minutes to spare, and I knew that at any minute she would hop up, catch me in her line of vision, and say, “Ilsa! This is (name of constituent with highly obscure issue that, while not within the jurisdiction of this office, I am going to ask you to solve because 1) I’m both an over-achiever and overly-concerned about my constituents’ problems, and 2) you don’t have much else to do, anyway). Would you please help him/her?” Maybe I should go to the back and get a glass of water…
“Ilsa!” Crap.
I jolted upright and spun around in my chair, even though I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“This is Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Would you please help them?” She turned towards the elderly couple. “This is Ilsa, one of my staff. She’ll help you.” She turned back to me. “Here, Ilsa, you sit here.” She stood up and tapped her hand on the back of the chair she had been using, beckoning me to sit down. Her face was beaming with the excitement of a child. Then she was gone, walking away from us with the usual bounce and pep in her stride. Her enthusiasm reminds me of a basketball coach—I can picture her pacing rapidly at the side of the court, whistle around her neck, so focused on the game that the bleachers behind her could fill with helium and float to the ceiling and she’d barely notice.
Far too uncoordinated for basketball, the only sports I’d ventured into back in the day were cross country and track.
“Hi. I’m Ilsa.” I extended my hand to Mrs. Smith and then Mr. Smith, not really sure if a handshake was necessary or appropriate. My hand stuck out for a second all by its lonesome until she reached out and took it. Her hesitation makes me wonder: does the gesture seem forced, like I’m trying too hard to seem professional and adult while actually falling short?
“So,” I sat down in the alderman’s former chair, “how can I help you?”
“They have all our furniture,” Mrs. Smith said, shaking her head slowly from side to side.
“You know,” Mr. Smith began, “I’m just so mad…” His sentence trailed off. Like his wife's, the emotion seemed absent from his words. He said he’s mad, and the only evidence I catch is a slight clenching of his hand muscles, not even a fist.
“What happened?” I asked. I crossed my legs and leaned back, ready to record their story on my legal pad. I carry the legal pad all over at work. It’s the only way I can genuinely remember an assignment from the alderman or one of her other, actual staff members. I try to pay attention, I intend to, but for the life of me the only way I can repeat something later, in a professional manner, is if I write it down first.
I’m really trying to catch what the Smiths are telling me now, but they’re especially difficult. Mr. Smith is saying something about how he hired a company called Famous Home Furnishings to clean and hang the couples’ drapes, but then the company didn’t return their furniture before Christmas as they had promised. Mrs. Smith chimes in every now and again with, “They say we owe them $1500!” or, “They owe us $1090!” Every time she says this, Mr. Smith leans over into her lap and says something along the lines of, “Now wait just a minute! You’re confusing her! Let me do the talking.”
If they hadn’t been such an adorable couple at first sight, I would have by default been offended by the subordinate manner he was treating his wife. Yet there was something in the way they held onto each other when they first walked in that I could catch a glimmer of deep, genuine care for one another, so I decided to write Mr. Smith’s behavior off as an unintended expression of his frustration with Famous Home Furnishings.
“It’s all right,” I say after he reprimands her. Although a weak attempt, it’s the best placating thing I can think of without stepping into their bickering, vague enough that I’m not taking sides. What I’m thinking is that she isn’t confusing me; he is, although I can’t say that.
Once more, I ask Mr. Smith to start from the beginning: “Famous Home Furnishings first came to your house at the beginning of December?”
“Yes! Yes! My wife called them in December because they were the only ones that would hang the drapes we already owned, without buying theirs.”
“And they first came to your home on the 15th?”
“Yes! Their representative came to our home on December 15th, and he didn’t show up until 8 o’clock, and do you know what, Ilsa? He didn’t leave until after midnight!”
Okay. Hopefully we’re getting somewhere now. I write December 15th, 2006 on the legal pad and try to ferret out the facts of what happened between utterances of “They just make me so angry!” and “They’re holding our furniture hostage!”
“Can you believe it, Ilsa? Midnight!” Mrs. Smith echoes.
For some reason it makes me uncomfortable when people I don’t know well call me by name. Maybe it’s too intimate, or maybe it’s a reminder that I’m present and should take more control over the situation at hand, whatever it may be. In any case, all I do is try to listen to them for now. They seem willing to tell me about what happened, which in a way I’m grateful for. I’m not good at guessing ages and can’t tell if they’re in their seventies or eighties. I hope my age is as much a mystery to them as theirs are to me—otherwise they might not be so willing to take the time to share all this information, because I’m probably just a kid to them, and what could I really do about it, anyway? I wish I’d worn something else to work today, something more professional-looking. As it is, I woke up late this morning. Rather, I woke up at the time I usually wake up, which is always late. For some godforsaken reason I then put on the pants from my old high school speech team suit, a black long sleeved t-shirt, and some stupid necklace from H&M. I’d be better off if I could forgo my affinity for gaudy jewelry at work—I’m sure the necklace is what gives my age away. A part of me won’t let it go, though, so here I am, plastic girl-playing-dress-up beads hanging tellingly around my neck. At least the Smiths haven’t said something like, “Where do you go to school?” “What do you study?” or “How long have you been interning here?” My answers to these presumptuous questions, which I receive rather frequently, always come off as curt: “When I was in school, I went to the University of Chicago and studied English. I interned here during my last two years of college and then started working full-time after I graduated.” The truth is, I hadn't planned on coming back to work here after college. But when the alderman found out that several months out of school I still had no job, she was “prepared to hire me,” she said, until I found something else.
This morning I opted to arrive at work only 25 minutes after nine, as opposed to 35 or 40, by neglecting to do my hair. I slept on it wet last night and am paying the price now because it’s sticking out at all angles and I look like a crazy person, not professional aldermanic staff. I feel about as shitty as I look right now. It’s one of those days where the coffee I made at home this morning never hit me, and neither did the two cups of office coffee that I drank afterwards. I’m trying to listen to the Smiths still (although I’d rather be listening to Morrissey…), but the sun is lowering over the office’s western windows and making me squint. I’m really out of it and feel almost like I’m high, which is strange because it’s probably been weeks since I’ve last smoked pot. I’m glad they’re talking so much, because I’m not sure I can muster a logical response to what they’re saying. Maybe if I’d straightened my hair this morning I wouldn’t feel so crazy. I can’t think of any reasonable explanation.