“You should just say it’s your grandmother,” Marie says, leaning over the cubicle wall so that her perfume drifts down into our area and, beneath it, a whiff of the Capri she just smoked. She is speaking to Becca, whose aunt died last week, and who just discovered that the day she took off for the funeral didn’t fall under ‘bereavement’ time, was instead deducted by the company as a vacation day. Aunts, apparently, don’t count.
Becca is annoyed. She doesn’t want to have to use one of her paid vacation days, and she thinks it’s wrong that deaths of brothers-in-law (she keeps stressing the indignity of this) are somehow classified as greater losses than that of her father’s sister. She’s writing an email to Accounting.
“Should I talk to Eleanor before I send this?” she asks me. Eleanor is one of the principals, and Becca will need her approval to submit a petition to have her hours changed.
“Definitely,” I say, “She likes you. She’ll totally understand.”
Marie shrugs, walks off.
*
It’s early Monday morning, a few weeks after Becca’s aunt’s funeral, and I’m catching up on email. Because I wasn’t in on Friday, my inbox is spilling over, a daunting tower of unopened subject lines. I squint, frown.
Toni interrupts me. She bursts out of her glass-walled office, planting herself in front of my desk, cocking her hip out. Her wooden bracelets clink against each other. Her skin is gleaming, her teeth impossibly white as she flashes them. She is smooth and polished as a piece of obsidian.
“Friday was crazy, I’m telling you girl.” Someone sent her a box from Tiffany’s, and inside was a charm bracelet with the inscription, “Happy Birthday Beeyotch!” She didn’t know who it was from; she had no idea, isn’t that crazy?
Her enthusiasm is infectious; I find myself raising my eyebrows, giving a titillated smile; my emails can wait. Becca is nodding conspiratorially. Thursday night, she’d drunkenly kissed someone in front of the man she’s seeing, and so Friday for her was a march of penance via Blackberry messages. “It was a scene here,” Toni continues, “The bracelet, Becca, and then John Brill, it was insane.”
John Brill. John Brill was our coworker, our senior mechanical engineer. I scan my emails, and there it is, his eulogy. He passed away on Friday after a three-year struggle with bone marrow cancer. The last we’d seen him, a bit before Christmas, he’d been bald and frail, an ancient eagle, smiling sardonically as he filled his coffee in the kitchen. The bracelet, Becca and John Brill. Right.
*
In order to change her hours from PTO (Paid Time Off, which is the accounting category for vacation and sick days) to the desired funeral category, Becca will need to edit her timesheet, entering the number 50003.00 next to the 8 hours she wishes to change. 50003.00 stands for Bereavement, and also for Jury Duty.
*
I sound vapid when I advise Becca about obtaining Eleanor’s signature. I say words like ‘totally’ and ‘for sure.’ As if we are discussing whether the shoes she wants to buy are ‘okay’ or ‘hot.’ I should sound more somber, more respectful somehow. But how else are we to talk about it? What we are talking about, accounting and HR rules, are dry and flat as the stacks of forms that record them.
The company has to keep track of hours. I know that. Someone, at some point, has to make somehow-objective decisions regarding familial closeness, what will likely necessitate time off for mental health, and what is more...acceptable. Words like cost-effective and bottom line bob on the surface of my thoughts. But I wonder. Maybe the person who decided what merits the special bereavement category for time off did not particularly like his aunt, or know her. Uch, Aunt Lucy, he thought with a shudder. Mothballs and lipstick marks.
*
When Vincent, the managing principal of our company, was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, we didn’t know. We still don’t know, officially, but have pieced his diagnosis together over the course of months, sifting through various bits of evidence and pasting them into a plausible shape.
He was here one week, and the next he was gone on a two-month hiatus, without access to email or phone. I had met with him just days before his departure and made plans for our meeting on Monday. It was strange, in retrospect, that he’d spoken of his involvement so convincingly. I re-read the email from Eleanor informing us of his absence, over and over.
After a couple weeks, people started murmuring. People whispered about brain cancer, mostly, but when he came back he still had a full, thick head of hair; so we decided that wasn’t it. We were half-baked detectives.
*
No one ever told us about John’s illness, either. He left in the beginning of the past summer to have “surgery on his knee,” and then he never came back – or at least, not fully, and not until winter.
We were assured during his absence that he’d be back soon, next month, which then changed to the following month when the promised month failed to materialize him, and I continued to track his accounts, updating his references and typing in his initials for him. “Updated 9/20/08, J. Brill.”
In October, he and his wife organized a benefit dinner to raise funds for their three children and the debt the family was accruing due to his hospital bills. There was a detailed, heart-stopping flyer with the specifics of his illness, an invitation to please attend and contribute, if possible. Almost no one in our company saw it. Vincent got it, but he never distributed it.
I finally received it the day of the event from an old coworker, who was wondering if I’d attend. That was how I found out the truth about what was happening to John. It was like stumbling upon a letter addressed to me, addressed to all of us, which had been squirreled away in a desk drawer. Holding it to the light and noticing how the seal had already been torn open.
I forwarded the invitation to a coworker or two. Would we go? Were we not supposed to? It was late to make arrangements in any case, and so we didn’t. I comforted myself with the lame hope that those who knew him better had been informed earlier, maybe (implausibly, I admit) by Vincent himself.
In the weeks that followed, I sat in Vincent’s office and watched him: busy, intent on his work, witty, stressed as usual. He seems like a good man, I thought. I pictured him with his family in Long Island on the weekends, sighing and pocketing his Blackberry and joining them by the pool. Smiling at his wife. Sweet smoke from the grill and a plate of upturned hamburger buns.
*
Vincent wrote the beautiful eulogy for John, the one I received in my inbox. As the head of our office, Vincent spent years working with John and held access to stories that many of us didn’t. In the eulogy, he referenced a joke John told him once, that his job was making him tear his hair out (he lost his hair to chemotherapy), and how it helped Vincent put his own troubles (cancer, I could hear the office collectively breathe) into perspective.
I wonder what that means. I wonder why he never gave us the opportunity to help John, if he felt so strongly.
Asking Vincent, of course, is out of the question; there are thick cords of privacy and policy and discretion here, growing up and up and into each other like vines absorbed by a tree trunk. Our office culture does not permit open dialogue between different seniority levels.
*
I decide Toni didn’t mean to dismiss the weight of John’s death by lumping it in with her Tiffany’s mystery and Becca’s relationship drama. Toni believes in God and God’s benevolence, and maybe she imagines John at peace now, with all his luxurious, silver hair back in place. Maybe death is not so terrifying to her.
Then again, Toni is the head of HR, and maybe she’s trained not to betray emotion so that we can enjoy a crisp, peaceful work environment. But that’s not the effect she has.
*
I was right. Eleanor does like Becca, and she does understand. She purses her lips with impatience while Becca describes the accounting policy, and waves a manicured hand. “That’s ridiculous – just give it to me, I’ll sign it.” Becca is relieved, and the thin thread of tension that’s been pulled between us all morning suddenly goes slack.
*
Becca never cries about her aunt in the office. She bickers with her brother about shiva, clucking like a mother whose patience is being tried. “No, Joel. Joel. You have to go. Yes, of course. Just be there.”
We sit next to each other, and so we have windows into each other’s worlds. We pretend not to eavesdrop when our phone conversations seem especially private, but it’s a farce, because when they’re light-hearted or gossip-based, we ask each other about them.
Obviously, I don’t ask Becca now.
*
The coffee machine hisses in the kitchen as it steams a single serving into someone’s mug. Becca’s phone chirps. I spill salad dressing on my chair and blot the stain with a napkin. The piles on my desk have been growing recently.
Becca signs her emails Kind Regards, and I sign mine Best Regards, Sincerely.
