United Box, Inc.

               I’ve worked at United Box, Inc. since high school, which was not that long ago. Everything about United Box, Inc., is boxy. The building itself looks like a large, corrugated box, puce-colored, plunked down on a flat roadway. The roadway itself could be an assembly line belt. It runs right up to the building and encircles it. Trucks and cars roll in and out on the circular road, picking up boxes, large and small. We only make three sizes. But those three sizes are apparently all that are needed.

               I work in sales. I’ve been promoted after two years of working on the assembly line. My supervisor, Mr. Nestor Lumplarder, said that it was important to know the entire business, so everyone starts on the assembly line. Actually, I would have loved to go to college, but my family didn’t have the money. Mom is dying.  She has a degenerative motor nerve disease, and dad works at the car factory, and nights at the local Wal-Mart, so there was really no money for school, and no time to apply for financial aid. But anyway. 

               When I began at the box factory, I had what I thought was a really revolutionary idea: we could make pyramid boxes for some of our customers. It would have made sense. I figured out the surface area, the compactness and structural soundness of packing and sending the pyramids. My plan was stronger, the pyramid boxes used less in the way of resources, and was more structurally sound. I was full of vim and vigor to present it to the company president. 

               As it turned out, I never got past my own supervisor. Mr. Lumplarder is a large man, has a gigantic belly that is too big to pull his pants over, and a large walrus-like mustache that would have been more suited to the 1970s. He can’t buy suits off the rack, and he thinks he is smarter than he is. He told me that my pyramid idea fell into a category of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and he lectured me on the costs of getting new machines and retraining workers and the numerous costs that I hadn’t figured in to my pyramid box. The thing is, I didn’t believe him then, and I still don’t. If the overall savings is great enough, how did he know that the benefits of pyramid boxes would be outweighed by the startup costs? But it didn’t matter, so I turned myself into a spider plant and sat in the corner while he lectured to the empty room.

               Until recently, my life has been pretty mundane. I eat cereal, grey-brown pillows that remind me of the boxes that we have to destroy when the box seam machine is off kilter. The cereal is packaged in a United Box, Inc. cereal box. I drink my milk only from the square cartons, shelf-stable, and I typically eat a roast beef sandwich for lunch. I pack it in brown paper, in, you guessed it, a United Box, Inc. lunchbox, made of 100% recycled cardboard remnants.

               It’s been three weeks since she came into my life. It was as though an angel had sent her to me. She is seven years my junior, and I knew that we would get along swimmingly when she arrived in the office in high heels and scarlet lips. It is so ridiculous to work at a place like United Box and wear something like a skirt, heels and lipstick that I almost laughed out loud when she arrived, but I could see that she was taking herself very seriously, so I simply extended my hand, and she shook it firmly.

               I don’t know how she managed to escape the “all employees must be familiar with all aspects of box-making” rule, but she never worked in assembly. She came straight to the phones and worked in the cubicle next to mine. At noon on her first day, she asked me where everyone went to lunch, and I was completely dumbfounded. “We eat at our desks,” I told her, and she grabbed me by the hand and led me all the way up the stairs, many flights, ten, twelve, all fourteen, until we came to a door that said, “do not enter,” and she pushed on it, like a dare had been made, and we ascended the last tiny staircase that finally popped out to the roof of the building, where she opened up a white bag and a red napkin and chopsticks and ate her lunch—black soy noodles with chicken and a sweet chili sauce, while I chewed on the white sponge that was my sandwich.

               She told me that she was only working at United Box, Inc. as a stepping-stone, that she planned to go to business school once she had enough money saved. She lived in an apartment, for now, she said. She told me that she had, in fact, saved enough money for college at one point, but that a family emergency had arisen, so she’d given the money away to her dad. This I found funny, because before she had started the rumor was that she could not afford anything, that her father was an alcoholic, and that she was working here only to support her no-good father’s alcohol habit. Rumors like that are ugly, so I chose not to believe it. I’d turned myself into a snake plant and sat on the shelf so that I wouldn’t have to hear it. In desperation, my co-worker, Lennie, threw water on my head. He does that when he gets frustrated with me. I’m OK with it. Actually, I find it refreshing.

               Anyway, her name was Letitia, and after that first week, I found myself counting the hours until it would be lunchtime. She always brought something different: pungent cold pesto on a chicken ciabatta, passion fruit salad or strong-smelling cheeses. My gray roast beef began to turn my stomach. I stretched myself one day and drank a red cylinder with my sandwich. It was a sweet can of Coke, dark and frizzling with carbonation. It danced on my tongue, all sweet syrup and energy. When I’d had the last drop, I vowed never to drink another Parmelat with my lunch again.

               Aside from her fantastical lunches, she was great at stories. She told me that she had her own box, a little cardboard number, that she’d hidden away at home, and that was how she was saving money for college. She also had systems, she said. She’d made friends with some of the regulars at the laundromat and would sneak her clothes in with theirs to save money on doing laundry. Nights, she worked at Soleil, the organic restaurant in the city. The head chef gave her leftovers, and that was how she was able to eat slippery soba and soy sauce, or flat squid ink noodles soaked in a briny seafood liquor.

               It was the day that we were to be audited that I decided to turn her into a plant. She was wearing a vermilion suit. It was vermilion, I kid you not. She’d purchased it at the secondhand store, no doubt, but on her, it looked like she was Barbie’s brown-haired best friend, come to life. She’d applied vermilion lipstick to match, and she walked proudly in the black patent leather heels that no one in United Box, nor any potential telephone customer would ever see. Mr. Lumplarder was in a horrible mood that day. Apparently, Letitia had gone about her normal routine and had made an unsuitably small number of sales that day.

               What is odd about our jobs is that there is no quota on the number of sales, nor the number of calls we are to make. That particular Tuesday of the audit, I had made two calls, to Yumm-o cereals, which always bought boxes in the same number on a monthly basis, and to the Sporty Shoe Company, which had never resulted in a sale. Letitia had made fourteen calls, and had garnered three new customers, but that apparently was unsatisfactory, for Lumplarder had come in, with his large walrus mustache and yelled at Letitia so mercilessly over the phone that I could hear his voice through the receiver and hers gasping in the cubicle next to mine. When I heard him yell that he was coming over, I took Letitia’s hand, and I turned her into a cactus. I became English Ivy and I let my shoots drift over her spines. Lumplarder never lifted his eyes from his clipboard, so he yelled and berated Letitia without even seeing that she had turned into a plant. When he was done, I turned us both back, and Letitia told me that it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever done for her. She cried, and I thought to myself, that in that moment, she seemed more the orchid-type.

               Unfortunately, the situation with Lumplarder did not get better. Sales at United Box, Inc. were purportedly dwindling. I was skeptical of this. When I contacted Sherm, the bookkeeper, he told me that our numbers were status quo, but I’d noticed that Lumplarder was coming into Letitia’s cubicle more frequently and pushing his large belly into her back as he breathed into her free ear about picking up the pace of her calls. Or, that was I presumed he had said. Letitia asked me to keep her company when he came in, so I turned myself into an African violet one day and stared up at him as he smooshed himself into the tiny cubicle and unceremoniously groped her waist. Letitia blanched. I saw her eyes become big as saucers, and I turned my face away to avoid witnessing the nasty stream of graphic talk that Lumplarder unleashed, supposedly to encourage Letitia to get her sales calls up. 

               Letitia cried after this, so we took an early lunch and went up to the roof of United Box, Inc. and I turned us both into sunflowers until Letitia smiled again. She started growing taller, and, since I figured that she’d be yelled at anyway if she returned to her desk, I let her stay as a sunflower and told her I’d pick her up and take her home after the day was done. I did it. She had grown three full feet in my absence, and when I brought her back to her little apartment, she was tawny and smiling, a blush of red from the sun from spending all afternoon on the rooftop.

               She whispered to me then. There was something she wanted to know, and couldn’t we try it out, and what if and just for one day, even if it was just for a little while and I told her I didn’t know and that I’d never tried, but I would. I would for her.

               So the next day we tried. Lumplarder came over again, at the same time he had been coming over lately every day. I’d decided to take the form of a succulent this time, and I think I actually do make a pretty good succulent if I do say so. Nice and hardy. Difficult to kill, not much in the way of needs. Anyway, Lumplarder put his hands where they didn’t belong again and this time I focused, as hard as I could. I put all my energy into it, until I could feel the power squeezing through my hardy little plate-like leaves and I saw the look of shock, surprise and delight come over Letitia’s face.

               “You did it,” she breathed. I switched myself back. Indeed, I had done it. He’d turned into something spiny, small and groping. I saw the tiny toothy pincers slowly moving backward and forward in Letitia’s direction. Something seemed familiar. The plant looked like something from my childhood. Then I recalled it. A Venus fly trap. I’d grown one from a tiny boxed kit in the second grade. I’d fed it tiny slices of hot dogs until I’d accidentally overfed it a beef frank slice that was too large. It had turned black and died. But even in its state of prime health, the Trap in second grade was not nearly as animated as Lumplarder was. He practically tremulous with groping. 

               “Now what?” Letitia whispered.

               “He’s hungry,” I said.

               “I’m afraid of him.”

               “Don’t worry. I know what to do.”

               I put him near the window. There was a large, black horsefly, wiping its slimy proboscis with its thick, oily front legs. The fly alit on Lumplarder. The heavy buzzing was competing with the buzzing of the fluorescent lighting in Letitia’s cubicle. “Just watch,” I said. Lumplarder the Trap was trembling again. He groped, blindly, in the direction of the fly. Letitia was watching through a net of her fingers which she had laced over her eyes. 

               We watched as, unceremoniously, Lumplarder snapped closed on the fly. The fly struggled briefly, but we noticed when his legs stopped wiggling, that Lumplarder had dripped a thick viscous liquid all over him and was now digesting the large insect.

               “I feel bad for him,” Letitia said.

               “No need to,” I said. “They thrive on large insects.”

               “No, I feel bad for the fly,” Letitia said.

               For three weeks, we left Lumplarder as a Venus fly trap. Letitia and I spent more time together, but in a more insect-free environment. At the end of the three weeks, Letitia told me that I should transform him back. So I did. Lumplarder remembered nothing about being a Venus fly trap, but I did notice that when there were insects nearby, he couldn’t keep his concentration on anything else, and I even saw him lick his lips once or twice.

               As for us, Letitia and I still take lunch on the roof for now. The weather is bound to get colder, though. I want to gather up a little more money and get out of the state and into a sunnier climate. I’m tired of living in a box, working in a box, going to bed in a box. Letitia has other ideas. She wants to go out into the stream bank near her house and dig our toes into the ground while the weather is still warm. She’s asked me to turn us both into Amaryllises. She wants to sleep the winter away, and to be born anew in the spring, unfurling to the world for the first time. In many ways, this is a plan that’s no odder than any others I’ve heard of. It’s no more ridiculous than working in a box factory, for example. 

               Letitia has picked out the day for our transformation. We will have what we need, warmth from the ground, sweet clear water and each other for company. We won’t have to wait until noon to know each other’s presence. We will simply be. In my opinion, that’s much saner than the conventional life we’ve lived up to now.