Crystal Grader, Tag Cavello [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

“I’m going to lie to him.”

“Don’t do that. Tell things to him like they are, Crystal. Break it off clean.”

“I can’t. He might put up a fight for Luke. And who knows? Maybe things really will get better between us after some time apart.”

“Now you’re lying to yourself.”

“Mom—“

Lucretia waved her hand at the screen. “Never mind. I shouldn’t be passing out advice from halfway around the world.” She took a moment to blink, leading Crystal to wonder if there were tears behind those wide blue eyes. But her next words came out steady. “Just come home, honey. Any way you can. Do you need help with plane fare?”

“No, I’ll be all right with that. Listen, Mom, it’s almost one a.m. here.”

“Go to bed.”

Crystal laughed. “God, you just made me feel thirteen again. Only this time I’ll listen to you.”

“I knew I’d break through eventually.”

“I’m going to call you again when I’m ready to leave.”

“I’ll pick you up at Hopkins. Just give me your plane number and arrival time.”

Crystal opened her mouth to agree…and was shocked to find that the words would not come. Her throat tightened, her vision blurred.

So, she thought, I’m the one who’s going to cry.

Either having the finality of her marriage spoken out loud to another had hurt more than she’d anticipated, or Lucretia’s clear desire to see her again in the flesh was bringing back love for the woman in earnest. Whichever, it made Crystal snatch at the tissue box on the table. She was too slow. Tears spilled down her cheeks and she had to turn away from the screen.

“Sorry,” she got out, chest hitching.

And when Crystal looked at the screen to see that Lucretia was crying, too, she started to laugh instead. Her giggles were every bit as contagious as her tears. Upon seeing what was happening to her daughter, Lucretia instantly followed suit, until neither woman (or so it seemed to Crystal) could tell her pain apart from her pleasure.

***

On the following Monday night a chaos descended upon Benton, Asia. This stood to reason, as it was Monday morning on the company’s front-burning stew of clients—the United States—a time of week which never failed to induce boisterousness among its blue-carpeted rows of tech support agents.

Voices of every pitch on the musical scale swirled around Crystal’s workstation. Her quarterly report to Roberta, due this coming Wednesday, proceeded like molasses as a result. She couldn’t seem to keep her mind focused on the charts and numbers glowing above her computer keyboard. Compounding the issue was the near perpetual foot traffic that to-ed and fro-ed in the aisles. Some of that traffic would even stop from time to time to ask about her next class or her next smoke break.

By midnight Crystal decided that a smoke break was precisely what she needed. Grimacing at the nonsense she had typed and would later delete, she stood up. Her chair rolled backward over a pair of prim, black boots belonging to DoDo Garcia.

“Hey!” she giggled. “Why don’t you install a pair of reverse lights on that thing?”

“Cut due to budget constraints,” Crystal told her.

Like Crystal, DoDo had been a slave to the cigarette since her early teens. Now at forty, the constant worshipping showed mainly through dry, leathery skin, and a head of hair that had gone chalk gray around the ears. Premature dotage notwithstanding, she never made Crystal want to quit. She was always too cheerful, always too willing to either tell or listen to the latest joke making rounds among the agents. She also spent off and on time with Roberta at some of the bars in Quezon City. This provided Crystal with a nice pipeline of dirt on the woman with her very own penis dangling between her legs.

It so happened that tonight DoDo had enough dirt for a backhoe. She offered to join Crystal outside for a yosi, as smoking was called in the Philippines. A look Crystal had seen many times before shined in her eye, a shark-grin look that seemed to whisper: Wait ‘til you hear this.

All too willing to entertain, Crystal accepted, and soon they were standing beneath the trains along Aurora Boulevard, fully indulged in their habit as traffic raced everywhere. Nor were they the only ones. Other employees of the call center waved from the shadows. Homeless children held out their hands for money; stray dogs sniffed for food.

“Well!” DoDo shouted over a Jeepney horn. “I am done with alcohol! No more getting drunk on the weekends!”

Crystal’s cigarette froze halfway to her lips. Here was a resolution she never expected to come from this particular woman.

“Come off it,” she said. “Whatever happened couldn’t have topped the anniversary party in Subic.”

“I don’t remember that party.”

“Exactly.”

Smoke puffed from DoDo’s mouth as she shook her head. “But this tops it, Crystal. This tops everything.”

“So let’s hear it.”

“Okay. First of all, were you here Friday night?”

Growing more intrigued by the moment, Crystal nodded.

“But you know that Roberta wasn’t?” DoDo went on.

“She called off sick. No one on our floor was especially heartbroken.”

More smoke chortled through the other woman’s nostrils. “Ha! Sick, right! She suffered an acute and rather painful kind of ailment.”

“What—“

“You’re gonna love this, Crystal, oh God!”

“Well spit it out, girl!”

DoDo took a few moments to compose herself, during which time two other female agents joined them. The extra company didn’t make her hesitant in the least. Quite the reverse.

“I got a text on my cell phone,” she began, “from Roberta. She wanted a ride home from the hospital. It scared me at first. She didn’t tell me what was wrong. Just that she needed a ride.”

“And?” one of the agents goaded with a sparkle in her eye.

“And I went to get her. She’d gone through the emergency room. That scared me even more. I asked for her by name and one of the doctors cut me off.”

“Let me guess,” Crystal said, “she got drunk and passed out in front of a bar.”

“Way better than that. And what makes it funnier is that she wasn’t even drunk when it happened.”

“When what happened, DoDo?” the other girl pleaded. “Come on! Tell us!”

But Crystal’s friend had begun to laugh too hard to answer. Crystal patted her on the back and told her to calm down. It did very little good. Now doubled over in guffaws, DoDo gasped that she couldn’t go on, she just couldn’t.

Crystal had had enough.

“Somebody stuck a firecracker up her ass,” she ventured.

Much to her surprise, DoDo’s posture instantly straightened, and her eyes bulged.

“Close!” she nodded. “Very close!”

“I—“

“She stuck a flower vase up her own ass!”

“What in the fucking hell?” Crystal shouted as a train roared by overhead.

Within seconds the laughter had spread from DoDo to the rest of the group. In between breaths Crystal noticed several inquisitive heads turn in their direction. Their curiosity, she knew, would be short-lived. Word traveled fast in a call center.

“Why, DoDo?” one of the younger girls finally managed.

“Oh she insists it was an accident! She says she sat on it!”

“Yeah!” Crystal clapped. “She probably did—while watching a porn video!”

“That’s where my money’s at,” DoDo said. “Anyway, I guess the vase went in really deep. She couldn’t get it out herself.”

All four girls stared at each other…

And then it was off to the races again. Crystal knew that she and DoDo—and no doubt the entire call center—would be laughing about this story for years to come. It was so much fun she forgot to tell her friend that tonight began the first of her final ten at Benton, Asia. She forgot to tell her friend she was resigning and going back home.

 

She forgot to tell DoDo, but she could not forget to tell Roberta. They had a meeting scheduled for two a.m. to discuss it, and thanks to what she’d heard on her cigarette break, Crystal looked forward to it like a glass of Beck’s after a hot day.

With her mind cleared of its previous muggy fog, the quarterly report came out in a clean flood. Her fingers raced over the keys almost as fast as the thoughts that stimulated them, so that by the time two o’clock rolled around she was halfway finished with the whole thing. She stood, stretched, and took a long swig of Coke from the bottle on her desk.

“Thanks,” she said to DoDo, who grinned up from her seat.

“Where you off to?”

“Meeting with Roberta.”

“Send her my love. Or maybe we can just buy flowers.”

***

“Sit,” Roberta said, glancing up from the frog on her desk.

Be mindful of the corn, the frog’s caption now read.

Crystal looked at the chair but didn’t sit. No matter what other consequences arose from leaving Benton, she would never take orders from the cold, dark individual sitting in this room again. She—he—didn’t know it yet, but Roberta was about to lose a sled-puller.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

Maintaining her disobedience, Crystal said: “I’ll be resigning from the company. I’d like to put in my two weeks’ notice.”

“I see. Are you going back to the States?”

“That’s right. I bought a farm,” she suddenly added, without knowing why. “I’m going to grow crops. Raise pigs and chickens and horses.”

“Sounds like a lot of hard work,” Roberta replied, her face stony. And I know you’re not much for working hard, she may as well have clipped on, to judge by her tone.

Crystal refused to let it phase her. “I like to get my hands dirty.”

“Indeed you do.” The account manager’s brow went up. “When is your next class?”

“Four.”

“Great. Make sure that Arthur Ramos accompanies you so he can report how things went. In the meantime…what’s so funny?”

Crystal’s hand went to her mouth, but she’d gotten to giggling as Roberta spoke and it normally took her a long time to get stopped.

How’s your asshole, Roberta? a voice in back of her mind kept insisting to know.

“In the meantime,” the dark woman went on through tight teeth, “you can submit your LOR to me ASAP.”

F-U-C-K, the voice said, in perfect mockery of her boss’ tone.

Now it was either lean on the desk or fall into the chair. Crystal chose to lean, nodding as best she could through laughter almost as impish as it had been with DoDo outside.

“Would you care to let me in on the joke?” she heard Roberta say.

In no way did Crystal wish to respond to that with a yes. She regained her composure by force of will and repeated some folderol about an agent ripping his pants that was already months past. Roberta did not so much as pretend to find it funny (no surprise there), but did dismiss her without further comment. Relieved, Crystal made her escape.

***

An hour later she returned to the office with her letter of resignation, only to find Roberta’s chair empty. She was about to leave the letter on the desk and be gone when a convenient piece of office bric-a-brac caught her eye: A flower vase, also empty, stood next to a row of books on a stainless steel shelf.

Pocketing the letter for a later time, Crystal grabbed the vase and carefully placed it in the middle of the account queen’s chair.

15

 

What time is it now?

Said the fish in the hall

To the clock on the wall.

I cannot see your face.

 

What love do you nurse,

Said the clock on the wall,

For these blood-black lines

Mapping out your disgrace?

 

What time is it now?

Said the fish in the hall.

Please, I have no room

In this ice-cold place.

 

But the clock on the wall

Maintained its resolve.

For oh that little fish!

She did not have a case.

 

She did not have a case at all.

***

For the first time in a month, the school cafeteria was noisy.

Crystal heard it before