The Office
A Short Story
Summary
Every day Lydia Watson reports to The Office for work and every day The Office delivers only what it had the day before: more of the same and promising nothing different for tomorrow. As a young woman who should be in the prime of her life, Lydia finds herself abandoned by love and buried in the tedium of her own existence. She suffers a life seemingly without any hope of change.
Lydia is a waitress. The Office is a bar. The name impishly invites the misunderstanding that one has been substantively and productively engaged in the world, not simply wasting time with a pool cue and a beer and a handful of peanuts. On that score, Lydia has no one left in her life to convince. No one left who cares. Worse, after too many years of cleaning up after lecherous men in her short-skirted uniform, Lydia has almost given up trying to convince herself that her life will ever hold anything better.
Lydia’s eleven-block walks to and from her work are getting harder and harder for her to take. In the early evenings, on her way to The Office, Lydia bears uncomfortable witness to the 1960’s middle class American contentment blooming in every yard, rolling into every driveway, creasing every face but her own. On the late night walks back to her tiny apartment, the world has turned dark and menacing, as though in its daily plunge into the horizon, the sun had plowed something hungry and heartless up out of the soil, leaving it to roam the streets while everybody but Lydia is sleeping safely inside their perfect little houses.
But where once she was terrified on those late walks home, sprinting the last few blocks, she is no longer. It is the very measure of Lydia’s despair is that she is not afraid when perhaps she should be terrified. She seems to have lost the capacity for fear, which, like the rest of life, has grown too distant to touch her. What else is there to feel in the world when even fear and all of its self-preserving intent has abandoned you? A life that could touch her, surprise her, even if from out of the shadows to terrify her, would be a blessing. It would, at least, be different. And anything different, anything, would be welcome sign that change – and therefore change for the better—is possible.
Late one night, after her shift ends and The Office is quiet; long after the sun has plowed its way back behind the cooling earth, something different happens to Lydia Watson.
Change arrives. It will either be the end of everything, or the beginning.