The Gerbils in the Machine 2
Continued from last week.
"You've just earned $40," I thought to myself.
I headed into the kitchen, to make myself a sandwich. While I was laying out the mayonnaise, I could see the blink-blink, blink tail end of the lights flashing again. I strolled into the living room and saw a few lights blinking in the gathering dark. I played my hand over the scrolls, and thought how unlike the bowl of M&M's I used to have there it was. The bowl of M&M's was nowhere to be found, come to think of it. Not in the drawer in the side table, not underneath the table, not anywhere in the living room. The men must have taken it when they placed the basket of little scrolls there. I shrugged as only someone who has recently had their chocolate fix for the day can when they discover their primary source of chocolate missing. If it had been two hours earlier, before I wandered through the living room and snagged a handful of the little candies while the men worked, I'd have been livid, and on the phone to the phone number left at the bottom of the note the guys had left behind.
The lights continued to blink, so I forgot about the missing candy and dipped my hand into the basket. This trip to the wall, I carried two scrolls, deposited each in a different hole, and went back to my sandwich in the kitchen. I spent the first evening on the couch, watching the lights, twinkling away in the darkness. This is mildly embarassing to admit, but I imagined the lights were content, happy, murmuring away while they waited for their big brothers, the lights up above, to do their rumba, in order to get the little ones fed. I awoke the next morning, face and couch cushion sticky with saliva, neck cricked beyond all belief.
Since this was my new occupation, I didn't need to go out for work that morning. I grabbed a bowl from the kitchen, splashed some cereal in, splashed a little milk in on top of that, and settled into the couch to watch for the lights to go off again.
My mom rang around 11 that morning. "Oh? Are you home?" She made everything sound like a question. There are days when I wonder how Dad ever deciphered her response to "Will you marry me?" if she talked that way back in the day.
"Well, sure, I'm home. I've answered the phone, haven't I?"
"Oh. It's just, I thought, you know, you'd be at work. Or something."
"I quit yesterday. They said they were downsizing, anyway, so it's okay. I still got to get redundancy. They were very nice about it. I've got a new job now."
"Oh? Where?"
"Well, here. Home. It's a work-from-home sort of thing."
I could tell by the silence that she was still digesting this one.
"It's something new."
"Ah." She was still digesting this one, I could tell, and could also tell her friends in the gardening club that I was still selling televisions. I would have this confirmed a few days later when Mrs. Robinson, who played her role a little like the movie character of the same name, would ring me up, and, after a few harmless minutes holding a one-way flirting session, would ask if I couldn't get her a deal on a new television, as hers seemed to have broken when her husband through a shoe at it. I told her to go down to Whitco and tell them I sent her. I'm sure they wouldn't give her any better price than they'd give anyone else, but at least she'd feel like an insider, dropping someone's name.
To be continued... ?
disclaimer:
We're not late this week, either! Let all the angels rejoice!
This one is continued from last week, and written on an entirely different machine.
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