Marcia’s pinched brown face peered around the corner of my cube.
“Is she out there?”
I rolled back my chair, stretching. “Who?”
“Jeaneen Geli from HR.”
I rolled back a little further and swiveled, lazily eyeing the corridor of our beige carpeted habitat. “Nope.”
Marcia scurried out of her cubicle and shot across the hall toward the bathroom. Her maroon skirted legs had barely flashed by when I heard Jeaneen’s foghorn voice. “Marcia! Marcia, it’s Fire Drill Friday! Why aren’t you wearing a Hawaiian shirt?”
“O, God, our help,” I muttered under my breath. Poor Marcia. She was an over-educated customer service rep at the mortgage insurance company, just trying to do her job. None of us went to school for this insanity. We were all humanities majors who had dutifully diagrammed sentences and wrote literary criticisms of epic poetry only to find after five years of upper division classes, we had no marketable skills. Marcia was the worst of all of us — a Women’s Studies major who had specialised in the literature of post-Soviet Russian women. Russian women’s literature! As if that there were any Russians in the Tech Valley! Our bosses were Asian, our coworkers were South Asian, and the rest of us were a motley collection of biracial hybrids who had sifted through the cracks from elsewhere, and had settled here, the sleepy sediment of the fast-paced, high energy Tech Valley. We’d been happy with our ragtag crew — until corporate sent down word that we weren’t happy enough.
Happy workers were more productive, corporate decided, when we reached our numbers for the second quarter. Sure, we’d met expectations, but we could probably be even MORE productive, if we were encouraged toward Further Happiness. In order to be Happy workers, corporate decided, we needed… Casual Fridays.
I put on my headset and stared morosely at my keyboard. All right, at first I’d been dumb enough to think Corporate paying more attention to us was a Good Thing. I’d been fine when they’d sent down the cheery yellow desk to the lounge area and installed their good times girl, Jeaneen Geli (or Hell-ish Jeaneen, as we called her), to brighten up the place with brown bag discussions, book clubs, softball clubs and popcorn Friday afternoons. They’d bought us a few rubber tree plants and a some air hockey tables, a cappuccino machine and another snack machine, and I’d thought, “Good.” And though I considered it stupid to arrive an hour early or to stay one more minute after work than I had to, the state of the art gymnasium and weight rooms, I considered to be another Good Thing.
But it never seemed to end. We had Casual Friday, Margarita Mondays, Fire Drill Fridays (quarterly) and Weekend Wednesdays (the first Wednesday of the month). Birthdays were celebrated — lavishly — with balloons and DJ’s and pizza or sushi or take out from the Greek deli, wrapped gifts from supervisors and embarrassing singing telegrams. Each special day was accompanied by a cheery, color-coded communiqué from Janeen, and her merrily croaking voice in everyone’s voicemail. “Don’t forget – it’s blue jeans and suspenders tomorrow! It’s a Wild West Wednesday, and you cowpokes are gonna have a grand old time. Yee haw!” We were meant to see each other as Family, enjoy each other’s company, swap recipes and tell jokes and find each other sitters for special company Date Nights. Together, we were meant to form an unassailable community from which would spring the company’s greatest quarter yet.
It felt rude to be anything but breathlessly enthusiastic, blindingly cheerful, relentlessly optimistic. We were dropping like flies, people were going on sick leave just to get away from the overpowering sense of cheer at work. Jeaneen tried so hard to make everything a constant party. When the seasons changed, she instructed reception to answer, “Happy Spring! This is HGIC, how can we make your day worthwhile?” Our secretary, Alys, actually cried the first morning she had to say that in October. She was a Goth, and felt it wasn’t worth her job to have to be that upbeat. We talked her down, and she stayed, but she started rubbing ashes on her cheeks instead of blusher, and refused to wear any color but gray. Our maintenance personnel worried whenever any of us went out on the balcony, or stayed too long in the bathroom. Our office manager was put on a quiet suicide watch.
We felt ungrateful that we cringed at the sound of Janeen’s voice. But we did. Especially Marcia. Her introverted soul bubbled up and dissolved like a slug spattered with salt in the presence of Jeaneen’s loud, good natured fun. “I just can’t stand enforced enjoyment,” Marcia had admitted one day. “She’s got to be on drugs. I just can’t… maintain that level of glee. Isn’t it enough if I just do my job?”
No. It was not. Corporate had determined that we should be happy. And woe to any of us who did not get with the program.
“Is she here?” Janeen’s leaned into my cube in late afternoon. Even through my headset, I heard that hoarse magpie cackle, and flinched.
“I think she had a late meeting,” I hedged, making excuses,” “Should I give her a message?”
“No, no, I’ll just see her tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow, too,” Jeaneen said,dimpling mysteriously. She fluffed her wild black curls and looked twinkly.
“What’s tomorrow?” I asked, alarmed. “Did I miss a memo? Is it Hawaiian shirts? Laurel wreaths?”
“It’s Casual Friday, silly,” Jeaneen laughed. “What else did you think?”
Hearing the hysteria in her laughter was what made run the last few steps to the office. The giggles were high pitched and nervous sounding, and she sounded slightly unhinged, laughing until she was out of breath, wheezing, and starting up again.
I rushed out of the stairwell toward the sound, a stitch in my side from walking up all twenty-two flights. “Marcia?”
Her back was to me, and she was staring out of the lobby windows. I joined her, and stared. I didn’t see anything.
“Marcia?”
“A bear,” she said, and giggled.
I stared at the window, at the yellow desk, at the potted plants. “Bear?”
“Vladamir Mayakovsky utilized animal imagery to depict human emotions,” she sing songed. “Especially bears.”
“Marcia.” I touched her arm, gently. “Can you show me the bear? I can’t see him…”
Marcia finally turned to me, her face sweat smeared and her wild eyes watering. “Emotions,” she went on as if I hadn’t interrupted, “especially suffering and despair.”
“O…kay,” I nodded, keeping my fingers clamped firmly on her blazer sleeve. “Why don’t you come sit in my cubicle.”
“Could I?” she asked desperately.
“Sure.” We walked slowly down the corridor. As we passed her workspace, I glanced in, and cringed. Electric blue bears in the form of stickers, posters, pencil tops, erasers, mugs and a mouse pad were stuffed into her cubicle. A six foot fuzzy blue bear was crammed into her desk chair. Marcia passed by quickly, shying away from the doorway.
“Lord love a duck,” I muttered.
“She’s only trying to help,” Marcia said, in a high, tight voice. “I love bears, don’t I? Russian literature is full of bears. Full of them.”
“Marcia? Are you going to be all right?”
Marcia smiled at me vacantly. “Last night I dreamed I’d applied to university for my doctorate,” she said dreamily. “I sat down in a room full of people, and none of them wore Hawaiian shirts. None of them looked at me and smiled. Everyone stared at a book, and left me alone.”
“Do you need a drink of water?”
Marcia swiped her forehead with the back of her tremoring hand. “No. No water. It’s Casual Friday, isn’t it? Where’s Jeaneen? Aren’t there martinis today?”
This photograph of silliness was taken by Flickr Person Altamon and inspired this equally crazy story. Find more with The Usual Suspects at Fiction.ning.