Peppermint

Peppermint

Peppermint didn’t taste quite right since the snow melted. Dhry rolls the small, Christmassy- tasting candy around her tongue. Somehow, this bite-sized piece of hard sugar makes her feel the need to snuggle under a blanket in front of a fire with warm, cinnamon hot chocolate. It’s strange. Strange, because she’s wearing a sundress with a sensible green cardigan neatly buttoned almost all the way up. Dress code required closed-toed shoes for now but it’s almost warm enough to bend the rules. Outside the window, she can see shy spots of color peeking out of the ground like they’re intruding on a stranger’s party.

Yet, peppermint is all the office ever has in those glass jars at the check-in desk. She peels off the cheap, crinkly, plastic wrapper of another and pops it in her mouth.

            Across the room, the clock is twitching. It has the closest thing to a stutter an inanimate object can have. This clock refuses to follow the calming, constant heartbeat of a normal timepiece. Rather it just wavers all 360 degrees around the minute, taking four half steps before deciding to tick to the next second. It gives the illusion of going nowhere. Dhry averts her eyes. It’s too painful to watch.
            Instead, she shifts her attention to the man sitting in one of the chairs outside the main editor’s office. He’s one of the younger writers to walk in that door with a full manuscript—no older than she. Most her age can’t finish what they start.

He looks like he should be sitting in front of a typewriter in a 1930s silent film. Dhry watches his brown leather Oxford Wingtips tapping nervously under his dark wash jeans. His pants are rolled haphazardly at the bottoms in an attempt to make his stocky legs fit better. The self-made cuffs had jumped up to reveal dry ankles and mismatched socks.

The young man is leaning forward, trying to put as little weight on the chair as possible. Dhry wonders if the office chose those uncomfortable chairs purposely. Sort of like a power play: get people to feel as though they don’t belong before they even meet with the editor.

Or perhaps the chairs are meant to bring people back down to earth before they discuss their work. Most of the people who came in here were the definition of pretentious. They swaggered in like they had already written The Great American Novel and were just going through formalities. When more than one came in at once, they would take off their elbow-patch gray-tweed struggling-artist blazers and hang them all in a row along the backs of the chairs. Dhry would spend her extra time mocking them in her mind and writing down quotes to make fun of in her future pieces. Just a hint of judgment helped time pass so much faster. It was too easy. The way they spoke! Small talk just wasn’t good enough.  When more than one was in the room, they would try to compete for ‘most interesting’ or ‘most likely to go down in English textbooks’ by relating the weather and insignificant anecdotes to obscure metaphors. The typical, “Do you have the time?” could somehow result in the recitation of an excerpt from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:

“‘And indeed there will be time [...]

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of toast and tea ‘ “

And then, irritated—

“Never mind, I found my watch. So it’s 4:30. Thanks.”

            Pricks. They deserved those chairs. At least their absurdity gave her great ideas for characters. Most people are better in the abstract.

Like many of those writers, this man is trying his best to look the part of someone distinguished, but somehow it doesn’t quite suit him. Today, he seems to be going for the collegiate look. His corduroy blazer has patches on the elbows and is missing a button. Who even wears corduroy anymore?
            Geez. It’s like these people all watched Dead Poets’ Society one too many times.

But the effort’s endearing. The way he nervously slides his knuckles together as his head hangs down in prayer made Dhry smile. He really wants this. Maybe this one will actually get his big break.

While it wasn’t the job she planned on back in university, Dhry figured when she first started that she might as well make the most of it. That meant making friends with those who had even the slightest chance of actually breaking into the writing world.

Just as she’s about to introduce herself, the editor calls the man in to her office. He springs up faster than freshly made toast and drops some pages from his portfolio in his excitement. Dhry rushes over to pick up what she can. As she hands the last of the papers to him, she mumbles, “Good luck in there.” Somehow, he hears her. He looks up through his uncombed brown hair and smiles. “Fingers crossed,” he mouths.

Returning back to her desk, Dhry takes the client-free moment to open up the document of the “book” she’s working on. Originally, when she started, she knew exactly what she was doing. The protagonist would be named Iz, short for Isis-- like the Egyptian goddess of life and magic, but also like ‘is’ because of all she will be. On her 20th birthday (because 16th is cliché), Iz would discover that she has some major Challenge that she must face to find out who she’s truly meant to be. The symbolism in the narration would be a high school English teacher’s dream. The faded yellow drapes leading up to the climax would represent her fear going into The Final Confrontation, but also remind Iz of the sunny days of her childhood before her sister died, and give her the strength to stay loyal to her family and friends.

Unfortunately, after two months she’s still only an ambitious 3-page action scene and 7 other disjointed paragraphs in. The cursor blinks by the end of one of her sentences, waiting. What now? What now? What now?

A few minutes pass, and Dhry decides to just close the document. Maybe tomorrow.

What now? Two months had passed since Dhry first started as a secretary at this editing company. The company had a big name, even outside of the writing community. When she took this job, it had been out of a mix of necessity and fighting to impress her parents. They cut her off when she told them she was dropping premed to double in English and Creative Writing. Though she loved words, this was the closest she could get to actually writing before she paid off her student loans.

The original plan was to go to work, watch writers do their thing, and come home inspired enough to start her own novel. In reality, it went something like this: when she finally got to her broken down studio apartment after two trains and a bus, took off her pants, put on some sweatpants if she was feeling ambitious enough, popped a Lean Cuisine in the microwave and crashed in front of Netflix.

Maybe it’s just a rite of passage for any struggling artist.

Dhry leans back in her chair and attempts to twirl a pen in her fingers. She drops it. She tries again. It careens across the room. She picks up a different pen and pulls up a ‘How-To’ YouTube video. Too complicated. She starts on an origami box for her paper clips instead.

The door to her boss’s office opens. Dhry checks the twitching clock. Twenty minutes. That’s shorter than normal. She assumes it’s been a disaster until the man turns and she sees the comically huge grin on his face. He looks as happy as a middle school student who got his braces removed just in time for high school.

He’s shaking the editor’s hand vigorously. The editor looks somewhat caught off guard, but amused by his enthusiasm. She offers him one last firm shake and closes the door to her office. The man carefully puts his portfolio down on the nearby coffee table and thrusts both arms in the air. Completely shameless! He starts dancing, and not well.

Dhry figures he must think he’s alone and tries to blend into her desk, sinking deeper into her chair. But apparently that’s not the case. The man sees her, crosses the room in three great strides, and grabs both of Dhry’s hands.

“I’M GETTING PUBLISHED!!”

Screw it. Dhry gets up and joins him.

*

            The keys clang together as Dhry tosses them on her water-stained coffee table. She drops her bag and collapses onto her faded plaid sofa. God, what day was it? She glances at the free calendar she got in the mail with the small animals featured each month. This time it’s costarring two golden retriever puppies in Santa hats. Xs are drawn on every day until the 24th. She hasn’t updated it since Christmas Eve.

            I wonder what that guy today looked like on Christmas Eve growing up. If today was any indication, she could imagine him being quite a handful for his parents. That childlike, unrestricted joy-- Dhry hadn’t experienced it in awhile. Or witnessed it, for that matter.

She shakes out her hands, opens up her MacBook Pro, and clicks on the Netflix tab. What would it be tonight? After scrolling for a few minutes, Dhry realizes she’s shivering. She walks over to her bed and grabs her red comforter. Much better.

Returning to the couch, the opens up her laptop again. If not Netflix, what? She clicks on the word document for her story. That wretched cursor is still blinking pointedly. What now? What now? What now?

Dhry slaps the computer shut and tosses it to the other side of the couch. Not far enough. She grabs the nearest pillow and buries the electronic monster as deep into the couch as possible. Dhry draws her knees to her chest and rests her forehead against them. When did she start to define life this way?  Where was that young women with a feverish desire to pursue her goals? What now? What now? What now?

Last week’s laundry lies on her bed, pushed to one side. Tauntingly. This, at least, is one problem she can fix. Dhry gets to her feet and begins folding. She folds, irons, and organizes, not wanting to see a single sock from last week left behind.
            After the last folded t-shirt, she stretches, and pans her eyes around the rest of her apartment. When had it gotten like this? Dhry pushes up her sleeves. Next, the dishes. From the dishes, she organizes all of the books she told herself she’d read. She finds the vacuum. Her hands blur. She doesn’t remember where she is. She doesn’t remember the day. She doesn’t remember forgetting. She keeps moving.

When everything’s finally in order, Dhry finds her way back to the faded plaid sofa. She grabs a nearby pillow and pulls it to her face. She screams. She screams for every time she told herself she’d start tomorrow. For every time she said this was just a phase-- a rite of passage. For every time she watched others walk in and out of the office and judged them; some succeeded and some failed, but they were all doing more than she was-- elbow-patch gray-tweed struggling-artist blazers or not. When she’s done, she doesn’t know how long it’s been. Her throat is dry and her voice is raspy.

She needs a pen. Dhry digs around in her bag and, finding none, goes for her coat pocket. The first thing to come out is another one of those out-of-season peppermints. Sticking it in her mouth, she feels winter again. She puts water on the stove to prepare hot chocolate.

Christmas Eve it is then.

Finally finding a pen, she picks up her old notebook and repositions herself at her desk, still wrapped in her red comforter.

            She begins.