Coffee in hand, she put on her make-up without thinking, without needing to. Base, eye shadow, mascara, blush, then lipstick. Lipstick always last because by then she had finished her coffee. This order was burned into her mind, she did the same thing every day, without fail, except on weekends, when she omitted the eye shadow, unless, of course, she was going out. But that would be unusual, as she kept mainly to herself these days.She divorced her husband three years ago, and she didn't think she would ever get used to living alone. The silence in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, had made her timid and she was almost always cold, physically cold, no matter how high the temperature was. Her lover could not be relied upon, and she knew that he was merely passing through her life.
She got up from the table where she sat and padded up the stairs to retrieve her shoes, which lay in the closet on the far side of her room. Stepping softly, as to not wake the man that had sprawled across onto her side of the bed, she slid the door open and removed her simple black shoes. She kissed her lover good-bye and headed downstairs where her large square purse awaited her. Dark coloured glasses rested firmly on her nose and she, clad in trench coat and scarf, with an umbrella, just in case, left the security of her house and passed unnoticed onto the street.
She was looking again for work. She tried not to feel too excited, but the phone conversation she'd had yesterday with this Jason Fielding seemed promising. And it was such a good company. He had asked her about her schooling. He sounded bemused when he quizzed her on her knowledge of the company. Did she know about their child care facilities? She did, but as she had no children, she did not intend on using the facilities. Was she informed about the number of sick days and vacations she would be allowed if she worked for the company? She confessed that she did not, but that she had not been sick in the last three to four years as far as she could remember, and she very rarely took vacations so this would not be important to her anyhow.
Having sent her running down a gauntlet of questions, they had made this appointment for her to come in to meet with him in person.
Travel card in hand, she boarded the Number 23 for the city. She caught her reflection in the glass windows and smiled at herself. It was strange, she thought, how you could be trained to make it so that a smile from your self was all the reassurance you needed to get through the day. She checked the address on a small slip of blue paper. Getting off the bus she unfolded the piece of paper again, the way you do when you don't believe your eyes had read it right the first time. Surely enough, it said 10:30 a.m., 203 Hurley Street, Mr. Jason Fielding. Firmly grasping the paper, she consulted her map and started towards Hurley Street. At 203 she stopped, checked her paper again, and pushed her way through the stubborn wooden doors that marked the entrance to the office.
She pressed the bell marked "Fielding". An excruciatingly long moment later, she was buzzed in to see him.
Her first impression of him was that he was a kind man, even she could not immediately see his face. A noise outside in the street had distracted him as she entered, and he seemed to have settled into position facing the window, watching the even ts as they unfolded below. Because of this she based her assumptions on his appearance. He was a short, fat man who wore wire rimmed spectacles on the end of his small, pudgy nose, she saw that much from the generic but necessary picture of him and his wife that rested on the desk.
As he swiveled around to face her, she removed her dark glasses. His greeting stopped halfway out of his mouth.
Here it was again, she thought.
"I'm afraid there's been a terrible mistake," Fielding sputtered, "There isn't any job here for you."
He looked down, mumbled a Good day, and turned around again to face the large picture window out of which he had been calmly gazing two minutes prior.
She should be used to this by now, she thought. But today she was just tired. She pulled herself up and stood tall as she asked him if Thursday would be a good day to start. No intelligible reply followed, just another mumble. She said that she felt Thursday would be an excellent day to begin, and that she would see him then.
With this Fielding snapped.
He spun around to face her and began to become extremely worked up. Angry. She stepped closer to the sprawling mahogany desk that separated them, gripping the edge of it with her thin, pale hands. As gracefully as she did this, he pushed his chair back away from the desk. She distanced her thoughts from the booming voice of Mr. Jason Fielding that was spewing the same old slurs she'd heard so many times before. In the midst of all this, her thoughts turned to Frank Sinatra. They'd called him "Ol' Blue Eyes" as a compliment. God, to be b ack in those days!
When he finished telling her what she could do with her blue-eyed-self-righteousness, she thanked him, as it was her cold custom to do, and stepped back from him. Visibly unnerved and perplexed by her presence of mind and control, Mr. Jason Fielding shook his head and stood as well. She was used to this response as well, and she preferred it when a man stood as she was leaving, inst ead of sending her off as though she did not matter. She wouldn't have that. She refused to have that, it was degrading. She collected her resume from his desk, the paper now sweaty from the palms of Mr. Jason Fielding. On her way back out through the giant doors she replaced her sunglasses onto her head where they fit so nicely.
She had accepted her life as a coloured person, what else could she do? It was a simple accident in the lab. She could hardly blame them for the mistake; they must have made 3,000 babies that day. She was one of the unlucky two. One of the two in 3,000 that showed up in the lab statistics as a "margin of error".
What could she do? Coloured contacts? The constant deception... she could not live a lie. The way her former husband had lied. The way he'd said her eyes didn't matter, but soon after they married he took two brown-eyed wives, and looked at them more. And now this lover. He was married to only one brown-eyed woman that he planned to leave. But that was two years ago. He would never leave his brown eyed wife for a blue one.
For the rest of her life she would be lied to.
She boarded the 23 out of the city and because the bus was almost empty, she allowed herself the defiant pleasure of sitting on a seat. When she reached her home, she got off the bus and looked to the west, and she shivered as her eyes fell upon the city's skyline, outlined in the brilliant blue that was so common to th e afternoon sky.