Laurel's Big Day

The members of the department had worked together for going on twenty years, but now two of them were moving on to other jobs. Those remaining were planning a farewell gathering in which everybody would have the opportunity to say the usual formulaic things, say how much the two of them would be missed, wish them the best of luck. That was what you’re supposed to do on these occasions. It’s what polite, educated people do.

Laurel, Amalia’s best friend, had been selected to give the main speech because she was good at addressing groups, good with words, could insert a bit of humor in her talks, and often people found themselves enjoyably entertained by her creativity. The others were convinced that Laurel would know exactly what to say, and Laurel took her role very seriously. She wanted to send Theresa and Greta off with the knowledge of what they had meant to their colleagues. It was a challenge, true, because there were many years of sharing the same building, work areas, meetings, projects, and goals. It was important to get it right, to honor the two people who were moving on with their lives.

The best way to go about the eulogies was to provide portraits - not too long because other people were scheduled to speak as well - portraits that would capture who the two women were. They should be honest and respect their contributions to the department, their legacy if you will. It took over a week to get thoughts down on paper regarding certain personality and work traits, special abilities, meaningful occasions they had all shared. After hours of laboring over just the right way of saying all this, of saying good-by to companions with whom people had worked side by side over two decades, the task was complete.

Laurel printed out both parts of her speech, slipped them into a blue folder with pockets, with Theresa on the left and Greta on the right. She slipped the folder in her book bag, and found herself actually humming as she got in her aging Toyota, turned the key, and backed out of the driveway. It was only a fifteen minute drive to work, even with traffic, so she was there with time to spare and headed to the large room used for galas, conferences, and other meaningful events. It would be a good idea to check the microphone and to see if a bottle of water had been provided. It had, and everything was in order for the event that some feared might turn out to be tearful, as attendees recalled all the time the two women had spent working with them.

The head of the department spoke for two minutes, keeping her intervention brief so Laurel could take the floor and preside over the group for as long as she wanted. From behind the podium, the words began.

“I’m going to start with our friend Theresa,” indicated Laurel, smiling benevolently at the person to whom she was alluding. Theresa, for her part, and looking proud of herself, proud of her accomplishments as a respected member of the department, satisfied with the large audience that had come to wish her on her professional journey, nodded to Laurel, lowered her gaze, and waited, thinking she might be somewhat embarrassed by the kind thoughts about to come her way. Laurel began reminiscing:

Theresa was and is a shapeless blob. A huge, shapeless blob. Her kaftan has forever flopped around her gouty ankles. Her midriff is a Michelin tire – not at all resembling the sensuous pear-shaped form of the Earth Goddess Anesidora she has on her living room wall above the hearth.

Her shoulders are rounded slopes, but not ones that’d ever entice you to ski down them. They waddled when she walked down the corridors, even though one would think it’s legs that waddle. or maybe they were waddle echoes, following – as they had to – the lurching shuffle she displayed when traversing the few yards from the main office to her own little lair. The lair she thought of as a cubby.

She has always looked so unhealthy, and a few of us were so ungenerous as to hope her grotesqueness isn’t contagious. (I might have been one of them.) However, it wasn’t the gout, the lurch, or even the lumpy ski slopes that gave that impression. It wasn’t even her thinning, salt-and-pepper (the salt being closer to the yellowish inside of an onion) pixie cut. Nor was it the inch long hairs – three of them – that grew out of her chin in a slight spiral.

The unhealthy part was truly, forcefully, in the way she looked at you and tilted her head to one side, nodding or rather bobbling as if she were listening to a distant drummer – which one suspects she was. That look, accompanied by a kewpie smile that charmed the socks off of nobody, had an angle to it that, horrifying as it sounds, recalled Emily Dickinson’s beautiful line, “a certain slant of light.” A certain sinister slant of light, to be honest. A dullish gleam emerging from onion-skin orbs, joining with the kewpie lips as if hoping to block out the rather bulbous nose, in order to curry favor with her admirers.

Nevertheless, Theresa seemed to think she was utterly charming – disarming – with her downward and (in other cultures but not hers) respectful gaze. She coupled this gaze with the phatic, staccato “you know…. you know… you know… “ that populated her conversation, probably because she really didn’t know much, this earth mother (who always looked like she wore a thin layer of dirt in her infrequently-washed, wrinkled clothing). The irksome staccato was something she used as a come-on and a caress, inviting you to be complicit, to know what she knew. Welcome to my parlor, said the spider, even as the fly was saying no thank you, I’ll pass, I can’t stand the coffee breath and smell of stale pipe smoke. I can find a better web.

At meetings she would just sit there, all lumps and slopes, placing her sausaged fingers in the old temple position, fingers pointing skyward, then rolling them in ways that reverted her audience to the rolls of digit fat whose knuckles seemingly bent in the opposite direction of normal. The stiffness of the rest of her body contrasted with the apparent double-jointedness of her hands. (Sometimes I had the urge to grab those fingers and bend them all the way back.)

Double was putting it mildly and was applicable to more than her knuckles. The downward slant of shoulders and eyes, quite successful in creating a submissive body mountain language, was a two-faced ruse that actually worked. It hid the mask – ironic, if you think about it, since most masks do the hiding – of… evil. How could such a gentle, sloping, unhealthy woman not be everything her outward appearance portrayed? Any normal person would be forced to feel compassion for this pitiful being.

Her words (I insisted silently, screaming only into my own ears), listen to her words. Forget the phatic “you know,” repeated ad nauseam as she laid out her ideas in meetings or intimate conversations over coffee. Forget the soft voice, cultivated to seduce you to help with her schemes without saying anything. Listen to the contradictions, hear the untruths, pay attention to her actions, which are actually concealed knives and sneak up behind you while all the time you can only hear how she is cooing “you know… you know… “

A snake makes little noise. Its slither is nearly silent. If venomous, its bite can be fatal, though, and it strikes so quickly. True, she was neither quick nor slender, but her bite was deadly because she had others who would strike in her place while she sat and templed her fingers. Those of us who were not deceived by her slopes and gout-wracked lurching, the veil of her confession to suffering from multiple personality disorder that caused frequent manifestations of flat affect (I’d just call it dullness disorder), were appalled. We couldn’t understand why others couldn’t read her like an open book. She was, to them, kind, gentle, generous, a true Gaia, a learned follower of ancient Goddess teachings, a wise woman, a warrior Amazon, a bold leader for the rights of the voiceless, a healer, a… 

Liar.

And the worst part of all of this was not knowing if she ever knew, deep inside her fleshy sacred space, the crimes she was committing. (Do you, Theresa? Do you know yet all the evil things you did?)

Utter silence. The loudest hush ever heard coming from the mouths of the fifty or so people who were in attendance. Nobody moved. Nobody looked at the person sitting to the left or right of their chair. Then a timid clapping began and grew until it was as loud as a hundred hands can make it. When it died away, Laurel removed the other part of her speech from the right-hand pocket of the blue folder, noticing her fingertips had grown ever-so-slightly moist. Still, she wasn’t nervous. She’d worked hard on this. It must be the emotions of the moment, the good-byes, that sort of thing.

“Our other colleague who is leaving is Greta, and everybody knows her well. What I’m going to say will surprise nobody.”

Logically, Greta had begun to squirm after what had been said about Theresa. Still, she knew she shouldn’t expect anything similar. After all, she was clearly the best member of the department, she was always on time, and she worked harder than everybody else put together. She had made sure everyone knew that, too, so her eulogy would be a proper one.

Laurel was beginning:

Greta (our beloved colleague) was, or rather is, a cow.

You couldn’t tell her that, but she has always been a cow. It wasn’t clear whether she knew it while she was in our department, but I suspected she didn’t.

She didn’t see how her bovine body displaced the air around her as she heavy-hoofed it down the corridors at 8 A.M. She must have thought hers was a stately presence, with the stately part defined by clomping and staring at the world with an air of superiority. She was only superior to a scorpion, which is nothing to try to model oneself after.

No, stately she was not. She was a Jersey cow with straight red-blond hair, broad shoulders and hips, solid. It was a good thing she didn’t wear make-up, because cows shouldn’t wear anything to enhance their natural complexions. Greta’s double udders were tucked tightly under knit tops. Her squarish jaw looked like it longed to be chewing on a cud. (I don’t like Jersey cows. There are others that are gentler and more attractive.) When she wanted sympathy she would slip on a wrist support to show us she had carpal tunnel syndrome from working so hard. All that typing put a strain on her thick arms, we guessed.

The difference was that a cow is a stunning and gentle animal. Greta was not. She never has been. She has seemed more like the clown from It in cow’s clothing. It wasn’t so much her size, although she isn’t exactly large now that she’s been on a diet. We have to give her credit for making the effort. 

It has always been our Greta’s belief that she is the only one around with any weight, any worth. But I already pointed that out, I guess. The biggest issue is that in her opinion only she worked hard and produced high-quality milk, I mean teaching and research. We didn’t see a lot of evidence to that effect, because all we could see was the cow part. A German Kuh or maybe Hathor, Kamadhenu or some other cow deity. (Go look up the references. I didn’t invent any of them.) There was forever a danger of being trampled.

Greta, however, has always seemed unaware of what a cow’s nature is really like, that it has no killer instinct, and would only trample another animal if threatened. You can see that in the cow’s kind eyes. That expression was entirely lacking in our colleague. She’s kind of more like a viper, in fact. Nobody dared to threaten her for that very reason. (I know I always backed off when I saw her coming my way. She had taken verbal hacks at me and my family and was one of the reasons I developed PTSD.)

You never wanted to cross Greta. Around her, you never wanted to be good at anything, because if the clown in cow’s clothing did not lash out with its venom, she would swiftly become a raging Minotaur, frothing at the mouth. No thread would save you then. You were trapped in her labyrinth. You were her target and she meant for you to die, either executed by her big foot or by her big words.

Luckily, I found the key to escape. After I’m finished speaking, if anybody wishes to know what that key was, I’d be happy to share it. For now, everybody should be celebrating Greta’s accomplishments and the fact that she’s lumbering, er, moving, on. May she find fulfillment in her next position, and may she take her destructiveness with her.

As with the presentation for Theresa, the shock and silence were deafening. Nobody could think of a way to unthaw the air that was breathing for them, so they cautiously sought to put two palms together and clap, weakly. Laurel smiled, took a sip of water, placed both eulogies back in the blue folder, each in its proper pocket, and stepped away from the podium before moving to the front row of chairs and sitting down.

The next morning Laurel awoke and saw it was a perfect day. She noticed a downy woodpecker and two Carolina wrens feasting on the new suet cake and checked to make sure the cats were in before grabbing her purse, a blue folder, and a traveling mug of coffee with lots of milk. By the time she finished the coffee, she thought, she’d be pulling into the parking lot at work, the one overlooking the river. The first thing she needed to do was make photocopies of the speeches because she imagined the two colleagues who were departing would appreciate receiving hard copies. 

She was ready for this. For the first time in nearly twenty years, she would be walking into the department with her shoulders back, her chin up, and a gleam in her eye. She would assume the role of truth-teller and would be respected by everybody because she had done the hard work of providing an honest, well-deserved farewell.

Too bad that hard work had been for naught.

Too bad the speeches had remained in the folder (although she’d hoped to pull them out by accident).

Too bad nobody had heard any of those comments.

Too bad they were true.