There is a woman returning from work. Her white Oxford is wrinkled at the waist where she has been bent over, shuffling papers in her lap while squinting, at intervals, into a computer screen, which explains the puffy, myopic eyes. Her purse is not real leather and she doesn’t seem to care that the flopping belt of her polyester khaki raincoat is lying in the aisle, being slowly blackened by cheap sneakers and the wet street outside. Her roots and her slip are showing. Careless, the looks on the passenger’s faces say, as they shake their heads. Or worse, they don’t think about her at all.
But ensuring that people not think about her is exactly what she wants right now. What she need. If they don’t notice her, they won’t think to question her, question her honesty or ability to do the job. They won’t check her numbers at the end of the week, just to make sure everything adds up. They’ll just assume, without taking the time to think about her – what kind of person she is or who she does or doesn’t relate to in the office – that everything is as it should be. She does what we pay her to do, no more and no less.
It is a payroll company. The whole purpose of the business is to pay people—to pay the employees of employers that pay her to pay them. Who can say who is whose employee, or how one employee is paid and another is not. He put her in charge of direct deposits—when they pay the employees directly into their bank accounts instead of forcing them to stand in a bank line for an hour on payday, that’s the selling point. They needed a reliable point man for electronic banking, Terry told her, not even making the fact that she is not a man a joke, that’s how sexist he is, and dropped the software manual in her lap. As if saying to himself, this one doesn’t have it in her, she wouldn’t dream of it, cannot even conceive of such a thing, a little girl with Daddy-pleaser written all over her. Well fuck you Terry, and Daddy, wherever he is.
She doesn’t even spend the money in a way that would be suspicious, buying new clothes, say, or getting those acrylic, filed-square French tips. There’s no reason to worry or be afraid, no reason to envy strangers for their peace of mind and evening plans. When she thinks about it like this, she finds it brilliant, actually. Completely untraceable. Unless Terry paid attention for longer than three minutes at a time, in between AA meetings and antiquing with the woman everyone knows is not his wife. If he actually looked at the statements, tracked each dollar, isolated the individual withdrawals, made in random order, did the math. She must have screwed it up, he’d say to himself, the one with the small tits and bad teeth. Figures. And even then, if he could pull himself away from golf with another asshole client, or flirting with the eighteen year old receptionist, and actually ask her, on his way out the door for a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, “Hey Diana, could you check the direct deposit balances for last month, I can’t make the numbers work,” it wouldn’t be a problem. She would have a plan for that too, a spreadsheet with just enough columns to bore him. He’d wave it aside, not even bothering to thank her
So, she doesn’t need to be concerned. She can just sit here and enjoy the bus ride. Maybe she’ll stop at the grocery store on the corner of her street, make an ATM withdrawal—they only let you take out $300 per day—and buy a frozen pizza, the fancy kind with basil and three kinds of cheese and a bottle of Riesling. She’ll put the remaining $294 in a suitcase beneath her bed with the rest of it, and watch her shows on TV. “Such a quiet girl,” her neighbors will say, when she’s gone. “So reliable and trustworthy. Whenever anyone in the building took a trip, she’d feed their cats. Wouldn’t charge a dime, either. Poor thing was shy, never really had any friends, at least not that came around. No boyfriends, dear me. But still, a real nice neighbor.”
No comments:
Post a Comment