It was my first working interview, and I asked the girl at the front desk why she was leaving.
“I got my dream job,” she said, “at an organic dog food company.” I asked what she would be doing there, and she said, “Working at the front desk.”
I didn’t dream of being a receptionist at a dog food company, but I also didn’t dream of being a receptionist at a global financial firm, which was what I was, after my working interview. The outgoing incumbent had worked at the financial firm for a number of years, despite being twenty-three, a full two years younger than I was at the time. Her main priority was answering the telephone, she told me, but sometimes she also put client meetings on the calendar or did light filing around the office. Within a day of my interview, I had a 9 to 5. I was the girl at the front desk.
In the seven months I held that job, the phone rang no more than twenty times. I did light filing around the office and put client meetings on the calendar. Every morning, I picked up the New York Times from the basket outside the office doors, and placed it on the foyer table, throwing away the previous day’s edition. Twice a month I printed and spiral-bound client presentations, which ranged between 15 and 96 pages, depending on the size of the portfolio. In the six weeks leading up to Christmas, I hand-folded, hand-stuffed, and hand-labeled approximately 1,890 holiday cards (1,450 domestic, 440 international). And on Friday nights, I cleaned the kitchen.
There were three other women in that office, two executives and an associate, and none of them ever learned my name. Rosie, who approved my timesheets and sent them to the temp agency every week, called me Hallie. Elizabeth and Anjali just called me “the girl.” Even before I walked out, this didn’t offend me one bit. It was comforting. If I wanted to leave their lives forever, they would be eager to forget. They clearly didn’t care about me, but I didn’t mind that either. They disliked one another so openly, I was happier unnoticed.
This is the part I didn’t like: I was not allowed to do anything.
My most important duty was answering the phone, but no one called. I was not permitted to use the computer, except to add meetings to the calendar, or print presentations. Filing took up an hour of my time each week, but when I stood at the filing cabinets, Rosie and Elizabeth would sigh and glare at me. I tried to get it done before or after they were in the office. I was not allowed to read (it would look unprofessional if someone walked in), or use the internet (it would look unprofessional if someone walked in). I learned not to write in my notebook while at the front desk because Anjali would ask questions about “what I was working on” if she suspected it was a project for someone else.
The girl who trained me did not give any indication that my days at the investment company would be spent in complete silence, but on especially tense days, none of the other staff would speak at all, even to me. During my shifts, I would sit, quietly, and listen, quietly, to the corporate void’s unlimited echo. We were on the 24th floor in midtown. Packages were received by a concierge downstairs, who left them wordlessly in the basket with the New York Times, but every now and then we got visitors, all men. The IT guy who came to check the servers. The IT guy who came to check the printer. The secure shredding services guy who came to move the papers from our locked trash can to his locked trash can. Once or twice, a guy from the real estate office across the hall wandered in, and would ask Rosie to notarize documents.
My jobs before this one had all been journalism jobs, which required me to put words on paper and then talk to other humans to collect more words. I was a chute. Now I was a vessel. This was new to me. I was not talking or listening. I had never had silence in my life but I had never looked.
The first few weeks weren’t so bad. I was not unhappy, but I was concerned I was doing something wrong. To fill my time, I allowed myself more performance anxiety than is typical for me. Before she left, the original girl assembled a manual with all of her knowledge, and once I had it memorized I went through every email template and filing index to make sure they matched. Some days, I tried to keep busy by cleaning out an old desk or organizing the supply drawers. Everyone in the office hated that.
There was never even any paperwork or clutter on my desk. I memorized its surface, the nicks and dings, an amateur traveler wringing meaning from stars. There were two types of pen in the office and I formed opinions. Elizabeth loved the Pilot Precise V5 Rollerballs, and when we ordered supplies, I would get a multi-pack of colors and keep the greens for myself. Paper Mate InkJoy Gels came in an array of colors too, but we went through the blue and black ones so quickly I never added other colors to the order. I never felt bad for slipping several into my purse. Many of those pens still work, years later.
My brain was static, as in immobile, as in a thin electric buzz. My desk was across from the conference room, which had a wall of picture windows. I trained my ears to hear commotion on the street, and I could tell traffic from protests from accidents. When the phone did ring, I jumped, startled. Everyone on the other end of the line heard my voice an octave higher than normal. Once in a while, Rosie would come to my desk and hand me a packet to FedEx to the European office, and there was a momentary thrill in that, racing down to the courier’s room in the service elevator with a thick envelope under my arm.
Once my restlessness wore off I was embarrassed. My thoughts were so boring! I tried to remember the name of a girl I sort of knew in college, and when I gave up, I texted somebody to ask. I decided not to cheat when trying to remember the name of her boyfriend, and as a result, I’ve still forgotten him. Did I still remember all the state capitols? Yes. Could I list them in alphabetical order? Yes, after a day of practice. Sometimes my fingers would hover over the keyboard, and I’d eye a new word document. The moment Rosie heard me typing she’d hurry to check on me.
I sat in the silence. Then, one day, I bloomed, not like a flower, but like a teabag, steeping. There was silence seeping into me and I couldn’t help but fill it back. Questions came into my consciousness and pictures followed to answer them, the saturation increasing slowly, developing before my mind’s eye. Why didn’t women carry eggs around in their mouths, soft, like golden retrievers? Could I remember the prettiest shades of every color I ever saw? What if a man wanted to smell good so he drank perfume? Would I have been happier if I were a cowboy? I had not asked questions like this for a very long time.
At first I thought they came from nowhere. As time went on, I realized the questions were emerging from the silence. The silence, of course, was inside me, at this point. It took months to understand the questions came from me. The more nothing I did, the less logic the questions followed. In fact, I couldn’t even tell what the questions were anymore. Images came one after another, erupting in vibrant detail, and I sat in a trance, working backward to try and find out what I was answering.
Time passed quickly once I found my rhythm. My body was on autopilot, printing and binding presentations, but my mind was careening through new territory, unencumbered by sound or attention. The conference room where I assembled 1,890 holiday cards had a big-screen TV that I wasn’t allowed to turn on, since it might impede my ability to hear the phone at the desk outside. My muscles cramped as I used a pair of scissors to make crisp folds in thick cardstock. Among the images in my mind, I began to see familiar faces. None of them were people I had met. While I peeled labels from adhesive sheets, I collected names, tucking some away for later, pairing others up with the people living in my imagination, wishing for the stickiness of recognition. When they fit perfectly, I felt a click behind my ear.
Silence wasn’t something I would’ve chosen. But I surprised myself, becoming attached. No one in the office knew my name, but on days when my silence went uninterrupted, I went home feeling more firmly myself than ever before. The quiet got quieter: Anjali went on business trips, Rosie went on vacation. Elizabeth napped at her desk, sometimes leaving in the middle of the day to take lunch and returning after several hours. When it was just the two of us in the office, she lingered at my desk anytime she walked by, suddenly responsible. We were the same age and didn’t attempt friendship, but sometimes she bound her own client presentations. I couldn’t tell if she was sparing me the work or only trusted herself.
My silence grew, in and around me. There was nowhere for it to go. I sat with my hands spread over the freckled desk. During lunch breaks, and in the last thirty minutes of the day if everyone else left early, I would try to record what I had seen. Scribbling frantic notes with stolen pens, I crammed journals and paper-clipped scraps into my bag. Some were ideas, and some were memories I knew I could use. Elizabeth asked why my purse was “always full of trash.” At home, I had bigger notebooks, my own computer. On days where Anjali was the only other person in the office, enclosed behind her locked door, I would spill everything into an email to myself, a line or two at a time throughout my shift, sending it to my personal address at the end of the day and deleting the missive from temp.admin.email’s history.
In my real life, I began to want silence, too. I could no longer ignore urges that had always tugged at me. I would interrupt myself mid-sentence, sliding a notebook onto my lap and jotting down brief, broken lines. I missed train stops. I missed dinners. Every night in bed, I stared at the ceiling, willing myself awake, trying to assemble the answers and their questions into an order.
At Christmas, I mailed the last of the cards and went home to my family, paper cuts crisscrossing my creaky knuckles. By the time I got back, my hands were healed and the office was in disarray. Some interpersonal, political thing had happened while I was gone, and everyone was off-kilter. Along with glaring and sighing, there was now stomping and slamming. Elizabeth left for long lunches and came back in house shoes. Anjali took up whispering. Rosie stood in front of her desk, tight-lipped, at the end of every day, staring out at skyscrapers, gripping her backpack straps like there was a parachute inside. My silence was unsettled and so was I.
They turned their little barbs into genuine cruelties. I called my temp agency, not willing to be caught in crossfire. All my silence dried up, just like that. The office was hot with anger and I was sweaty with desperation. I couldn’t wait to get out before they finally learned my name. Hearing it would break the spell. My brain was fond of itself, and that quiet which made me so uneasy months ago.
I had an interview somewhere else – a normal interview, not a training – and the temp agency called me while I was on the way home. When they offered me the job, starting Monday, I accepted, and in the same breath asked not to return to my temp job. My temp agency said yes. They had already planned to cancel their contract with the investment firm. They would handle it. On the train home, my mind raced, sounds and sights strobing in warning, the onslaught of imagery flashing me into a panic.
I spent the days before I started my new job “decompressing.” I spent them sitting, cross-legged, comfortable, in my own home, with my own pens, my eyes blank as I held a séance on the page. My hand jerked across sheets of paper. I purged up the deep things. After I started the new job, it did not stop. I wrote stories. I wrote poems. I had downtime, and I spent it transposing now-familiar faces. Months went by and my life changed but the quiet was steady and clean. Silence, which lived inside me now, had given way to an abundance of language. When I think back on that job, what I liked about it best was nothing at all.