Pastey Soled Lola (one)

Her armpits began to sweat, and she hated when they did, especially because the office was supposed to be climate controlled, but her boss’s office was always cold so they never turned on the air conditioning. She could smell them now, so she worked with her arms tucked close to her sides in case anyone came near. She wasn't a gross girl, she was pretty in the right light, but she knew she wasn't pretty enough for people to forgive her smelly pits. Her neck was stiff from leaning over her desk all day. A knotted muscle sat between her shoulders and she grimaced at the thought of one day not being able to rub it out. "It's gunna grow larger, and it's gunna make my shirts fit funny and I'll have to start sewing tails onto my blouses to cover the small of my back as the hump grows larger and carries my shirt up with it. The collars will begin to chaff the nape of my neck and I won't be able to wear my hair up anymore because I'll be ashamed of my irritated skin."  Lola often spoke to herself, discreetly of course, and tended to over think things a bit. Here she sat, her arms tucked close to her side, propping her head up above the desk so the hump would grow no larger. She looked to her side, and saw a phone with sticky notes all over it, she admired their bright colors and how they curled at the edges. She looked to her other side and paper without color was stacked sloppily in three piles, one of which was her inbox, but she had forgotten long ago what that even meant.  Throughout the day the papers would sway, back and forth, back and forth until they'd tilt into each other and stand slanted like a teepee. Sometimes when she was bored she'd put her stapler on top of the teepee to see if it would crumble. If it did, she'd file, organize and clean her work station. If it didn't, she'd leave it for another day. Today the teepee stood tall and proud, many people had commented on its grandiose stature. She felt satisfied that her lack of work had created such an attraction, something that said "on the clock, I create beautiful things." This made Lola feel better about her job, sometimes. The colorless paper loomed over Lola and she'd place her cheek in her left hand, stretch her eyeballs all the way to the side, and peer between the rim of her glasses and her cheekbone at the top, the pentacle. There the stapler sat, unmoved. It was getting towards the end of the year, and she knew if she didn't do something now, she might not ever, so Lola grabbed the two-hole punch. She removed the stapler and replaced it with the two-hole punch and then stacked the stapler on top. Still the teepee stood, stoic and true. She pondered for a moment, asking herself, “Is it worth it? Is destroying the teepee and dissecting it into hundreds of different folders worth the two thousand dollars a months, after taxes?” She thought about her hobbies and the things that made her truly happy, and realized she needed a little bit of money to continue on with them, so she grabbed the tape dispenser and put it on top of the stapler. Here sat the teepee, the two-hole punch, the stapler and the tape dispenser, and still it didn't fall. Now it was getting close to 4:15 and 4:15 was when Lola would stop working every day. She didn't leave the office until 5:30, but Lola never worked past 4:15. This was her time to unwind, to forget about the office and to ensure she took nothing home with her. As soon as she left, she wanted to be gone. If she missed her deadline tonight, it’d warp the rest of her week, and it was only Tuesday. Drastic measures were needed. In one sweeping move Lola grabbed the ruler, 3 highlighters, a whiteout pen and a label maker and quickly, yet efficiently stacked them on top of the teepee. She giggled through her nose and sat down just in time to watch the teepee, bend, bend further and break, all over her desk and lap, "Well, I guess it's time to get to work", she whispered.

Not everything Lola did at work was so extraordinary. There were a lot of things she did that she hated, there were a lot of instances that Lola would hate Lola for who she’d become at work. She found herself being so negative, overly negative at times. Lola saw her coworkers in a daze of settlement and while generally, this disgusted her, she couldn't help but feel jealous, broken, in that she too couldn't just settle. She had to fight every second of every day and even though she enjoyed the money, Lola swore up and down that she could do without it. She could, but she didn't, so she forged ahead. Besides for the teepee affair, the day had been quite rough. It was tax return season and Lola worked for the most prominent estate-planning attorney, Vince Del Monaco, in all of Eugene. Throughout the day she'd receive passive aggressive calls from wealthy blue hairs curious to the status of their returns. They'd insist on calling her honey or sweetie, sometimes the old men would call her baby and one client was brash enough to call her foxy, even though each time she'd interrupt them to proclaim that her name was Lola, simply Lola and that’s what she'd prefer to be called. "Lola, sweetie, did ya make sure to mark down the $10,000 I gave to my daughters husband as a gift?" She did. Lola remembered everything and often was offended by the clients and co-workers attempts at correcting her. "Just because they have a hard time with this job, doesn't mean I do", she thought. "Honestly, I can't believe people make this their life, it's sad... It sickens me. Did they wake up one morning thinking, hey, I'm gunna become a legal secretary. I'm gunna spend my days filing and scanning legal documents for an attorney who thinks he's better than me and I'm gunna laugh with the ladies in the staff meeting about glitches in our computer system and I'm gunna watch my ass grow flat and wide from sitting in my swivel chair for too long. It's gunna be great. I'm gunna be a legal secretary and I may be given the responsibility of a paralegal, if the office administrator thinks I can handle Google, but most likely I’ll end up just bringing in Friday goodies for everyone and listening to them shit it out because my cramped cubicle is right next to the restroom. It's not so bad though, I mean, I love the scent of generic Lysol. Doesn’t everyone? It's like taking a breath of fresh air in a lavender meadow." This was the negative Lola, the Lola that even Lola didn't like. She wasn't sure if work made her this way, or if there were other situations in the world that could compel this sort of reaction from her, but until she knew, she'd blame it on work and forge ahead. Lola restacked her teepee, this time in neat piles organized by client name and matter and began filing.

The piles had dwindled down and now only uncategorized documents remained. She never filed the uncategorized documents though, she always kept them in her inbox, easily accessible. Worse than being caught allowing your work to pile up, was being caught with no work at all. So Lola would use these random bits of teepee to hide in whenever her routine felt threatened. It had been 3:30 for hours now. Almost the end, but not close enough to just sit back without anyone noticing. She had to fight through until 4:15 because 4:15 was when she could slouch in her chair and work on her collages, because everyone shut their doors at 4:15. Each morning before heading off to work, she'd grab a knit sack that once carried her, and loaded it up with assortments of magazines. The magazines consumed her apartment. She wasn't a packrat, she was organized, and methodical and clean, she just happened to have hundreds of thousands of magazines. So not to be overwhelmed by them, she found creative uses for the glossy bound pages. Instead of legs under her tabletops, there were stacks of magazines. Some used, some new, some with pages hanging out and over the sides. Instead of bar stools, she had bound together and stacked hundreds of art magazines. The art ones always had the strongest spines, so she'd stack them, one upside-down, one right side up, until they reached her counter top. Instead of books, her bookcases were filled with magazines, everything from Playboy to Parenting, from National Geographic to the obscure pamphlets her local chapter of the NRA would send out, organized from small to tall, with the oblong issues placed neatly on top of the cases. Lola had a very tall bed. She was grossed out by carpet, and thought wood floors felt too cold, so she always enjoyed being as far from the floor as possible while sleeping. As a young girl her father had her built a custom iron bed frame. It was simple, yet elegant and lifted her mattress 4 feet off the ground. Lola still slept in this bed. Rather than running and jumping into each night, Lola had bound together some of her magazines to use as steps. MAD magazine for the bottom step, because she liked to smile before sleep. Cosmo for the second step, because sometimes she needed to be reminded that sleep wasn't just for dreaming, it was also for beauty and the third step, the third step was made of every magazine that her father had worked for. He had shot many, many photos, so the third step was very large, and it was also her favorite. Every night she'd laugh, pull her hair back, and say, “goodnight Dad."