Valentina practically leapt on her. “Becky!” she looked frantic. “Can you do the Whole Foods run?”
“Um… yes? Wait—what?”
“We have office meeting tonight? You know about office meeting?”
“We have a meeting tonight?” Becky died a little inside. She was so ready to go home.
“Office meeting! No one told you about this? Figures. It’s not really a meeting. We just eat a bunch of food and the partners drink scotch and that’s about it. It’s one of our ‘job benefits.’ Ha.”
“Oh.” That sounded bearable.
“So can you go? To get the food?”
“Sure. Yeah, no problem.”
Valentina frenetically wrote out a list, with very specific instructions about what sort of sushi was Tom’s favorite (spicy tuna), and exactly which loaves of bread she should look for, and which items to get from the cold case. Becky started to perk up a little bit. It was a nice break to get out of the office, for sure, and she purely enjoyed food shopping. Laura gave her a company credit card—telling her not to spend over $150 exactly, or Judy, the bookkeeper, would kill someone—and she was on her way. Company credit card in one hand, scribbled list from Valentina in the other, she stepped into Whole Foods, breathing a sigh of relief while surveying an impressive pyramid of grapefruit. Then she checked the time.
It was 4:45. Meeting, as Valentina had strictly admonished her, would start in exactly 15 minutes.
She grabbed a cart and started running.
“Spicy tuna… Sonoma chicken salad… Sour Batard? No, it was the Sweet Batard…” The other patrons were giving her looks. She didn’t care. Seriously—who are these people? With nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon than do their leisurely overpriced shopping—they’d never understand.
She rounded a corner to the cheese section. “Two soft cheeses—” she instinctively grabbed a brie, then dithered before pulling a Dutch wedge with an orange rind, “—and one hard.” Manchego? Gouda? Wasn’t that a semi-hard, technically? She started to panic, and just grabbed a Huntsman cheddar in front of her. ‘You can’t go wrong with cheddar, right?’ she thought to herself. ‘And besides—it’s just cheese.’
She rounded the corner to the checkout, and sweating it out in line, attempted to tally the cost of everything in her head, while simultaneously trying to double check that she had pulled everything on her list, which proved both counterproductive and headache-inspiring. Mercifully, it all came out just under $150. She grabbed the bags and ran to the parking lot.
When she pulled into the NAB lot, Kunyu met her at the car and helped her quickly unload the bags and take them into the patio. Laura had already pulled plates and glasses, which she was setting out. Liz was already there, of course, asking where the food was, but Tom was not.
‘Thank GOD.’
Valentina came out as well, and helped unpack the items. “This looks great,” she said, smiling at Becky, “you did a great job.”
Becky attempted a smile.
One of the junior attorneys, Nicole, was holding a wine bottle and looking around helplessly.
“Did we—” she asked Kunyu, “—bring out the wine opener?”
Kunyu gave a dark look. She went into the kitchen.
Liz was reaching for a drinking glass. “Do we,” she turned towards Laura, “not have any water??”
“No,” said Laura, though only Becky seemed to hear her. “The whole office is out of water. There’s no more water in the world.” She went into the kitchen.
And so it went, the clerks running in and out of the kitchen to grab items as needed, people opening bottles and passing food. Becky started to perk up after a glass of wine, and really, the food was delicious. Tom finally seemed to be in a better mood, which in turn led the entire office to breath a sigh of relief.
“Pass the salmon,” Dan, the youngest of the three partners, said while intently texting on his Blackberry. ‘Please?’ Becky thought to herself, before passing it down. Dan was supposedly the office manager. The longest conversation Becky had ever had with him was the fifteen minutes he interviewed her, before needing to take a phone call. Dan had just screeched in from court, and he and Daniel embarked on a lengthy discussion about a case with which Becky had no familiarity. Valentina was able to ask one or two semi-informed questions, but really the male attorneys dominated the bulk of the conversation.
“The thing about these kinds of cases,” Tom was really working himself up now, pounding the table next to his glass of scotch, “is that they have absolutely nothing—no research, nothing—to prove that these people are any threat whatsoever! We really need to—”
Here Liz muttered something. Someone passed the cheese plate to her. Tom spoke louder, visibly irritated.
“We, as a society, should really do something—”
Liz muttered something else, interrupting again. Tom glared. Liz muttered into her plate.
“People just always have to find someone to blame, it’s amazing—”
This time, Becky, Valentina, and Laura all distinctly heard the words “hard cheese,” followed by a shaking of big hair. The clerks exchanged looks amongst each other.
“What—what,” exploded Tom, turning on Liz, “is your problem? Can you not see,” here he gestured the entire table, “that we’re talking? What, what is it? You want something else? What?!!”
Liz shrugged, and started to mutter.
“WHAT?!” said Tom. “We can’t HEAR YOU!”
“Well,” Liz shrugged her shoulders, holding up her hands, “Well, ya know, I was just looking for the hard cheese…”
“There!” said Tom, “right there! You have the cheese right in front of you!”
“Well, ya know… there isn’t any hard cheese… ya know, the hard cheese? That hard cheese that we usually get? I was just hopin’ for the hard cheese…” and then she devolved into muttering again.
Dan looked up from his phone. “I didn’t see any hard cheese either.” Mouth open, he and everyone inspected the table.
Tom’s eyes bulged out of his head. “Well,” he pronounced disdainfully, “did we,” now turning to Valentina, “not manage to get any hard cheese?”
Becky had that shrinking sensation again.
Valentina did her best to diplomatically state that no, ‘we’ had not gotten the particular cheese that Liz was thinking of, but that there was a very nice alternative, and that ‘we’ would certainly make an effort to get the cheese in question next time. People passed and helped themselves to more food, and there was a semi-awkward lull. Becky could have sworn she heard Liz iterate the words ‘hard’ and ‘cheese,’ in varying combinations, at least twenty more times during this space of a few minutes.
“Well,” Tom pronounced, “did anyone catch what happened on Dancing with the Stars last night?” Suddenly Tom was amazingly animated, and the table erupted in laughter and banter, and the conversation moved on.
Becky, who did not happen to own a television set, once again had little to nothing to contribute. For the rest of the evening, she sat silently in her corner, spitefully drinking wine and fretting about cheese, and thinking it was stupid to be fretting about cheese, but still fretting about cheese.
“But—but—you don’t understand. They were swim goggles. He was making her work on his swim goggles.” Becky was standing in their kitchen in her pajamas, having just put some water on for tea. She was appealing, as best she could, to her boyfriend’s sense of moral justice in this world.
He was drawing a blank.
“What? Swim goggles?”
“He was making her upload audio books onto his personal swim goggles!” she heard herself reaching hysterical. She crossed her arms over her chest, and watched a wisp of steam curl out of the mouth of the humming kettle.
He tried to process this. “But—I mean, he’s paying her, right? So who… cares?”
“But you don’t understand—he’s just so—pedantic—and—belittling—and—but—but—swim— Stephen!”
“It’s okay, Miss B.” Stephen folded her into a hug. He reached over and snapped off the stove, just as the kettle started to scream. “You’re right, you’re right.”
“You just—you couldn’t understand,” Becky sighed. “They’re so—so—”
“Swim goggles?” Stephen offered, handing her a box of chamomile.
“Swim goggles!” Becky sighed. She poured herself a cup, and together they headed off to bed.
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