At quarter past one, Amanda had not left yet. Debbie sat perfunctorily at her desk, poised to answer the ringing phones that would deluge her suddenly and then stop, only to start again. Finally, the handsome Bruce, Debbie's boss' boss, left for lunch, passing her desk, Lolita and Amanda in tow. Debbie would have Lolita's phones for an hour. At 3:30, no one had returned.
Debbie looked up from her watch. Amanda strolled slowly past her desk. Debbie frowned, hoping Amanda would not notice the fury that shone in her eyes. "Your face tell a story," Amanda had once told her. She noticed a slight smirk on Amanda's freckled face but she said nothing. She dialed Lolita's extension.
"Lolita, I need to go downstairs. I have to buy a present for Amanda. I didn't have enough time on my lunch hour," she said, emphasizing the word "hour."
The elevator took her forty floors down to the brown marble lobby. She pulled open the glass door of the card and gift shop. She thought of the gifts Amanda had given her, going away presents. In two weeks, she would be leaving New York, forever. One present was a small magnetic creature with the words, "Debbie's Kitchen." "Maybe you'll have your own kitchen someday," Amanda smiled.
"Yeah, maybe," Debbie wondered.
The other gift was a round plaque with two small bears holding a wooden heart. The inscribed heart read,
Some people come into our lives and quickly go;
Some stay for a while
and leave footprints on our hearts
and we are never the same.
She had opened the tissued things at her desk before nine o'clock Monday morning. She thought she might cry. Why did Amanda do this so early in the morning? She had to walk away from her desk for five minutes, before all the phones started ringing. She would be stuck with them all day.
Inside the gift store, she gazed at the jewelry boxes and figurines behind glass. She finally settled on "The Bears' Picinic," a round glass object with a family of bears inside it, settling down to a blanketed afternoon feast, a delicate whimsical tune playing as she wound it. Amanda would love this.
Once, on a Saturday at Amanda's fiancee's house on Long Island, Debbie had wound every jewelry box in the house and listened to their dainty conflicting tunes. She had laughed giddily as Amanda said, "I'm going to kill her."
Now, she wound the thing, put it in a glossy gift bag, and carried it upstairs, its tune muffled by the tissue. She wound it again and delivered it to Amanda's office.
"Happy Birthday," she said hurriedly and ran to Lolita's desk in the corner, to pick up her messages.
"Debbie," Crystal, her boss announced, "my phone rang three times. How come there are no messages for me?"
"Um, I don't know," she faltered.
"Why don't you go back and see if Lolita has a message for me on her desk?" her boss regarded her coolly, her blue eyes expressionless.
"Hey, I was on the phone. Unless I can grow hands out of my ass, I can't pick up every phone that rings," Lolita said, in between calls.
Debbie looked at Bruce.
"I hate this place," she said.
"What?! You're leaving next week! The light at the end of the tunnel, Debbie! Someone can say to you, you're fat and ugly and you can say, hey -- I don't care, I'm leaving!" Bruce chided her.
There was a light at the end of the tunnel, finally, but she could not see it. She walked over to Lenore's desk.
"I hate this place. Can't she answer her own f-g phone for once in her life?!" Debbie shouted.
Lenore giggled. "Sshh. My boss...he's right in there," she said, chuckling. Debbie could always make Lenore laugh, even when she wasn't trying.
"The phones, the phones, the phones. The phones, the phones, the PHONES," Debbie would say in mock annoyance, reminiscent of the tone of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Bells." This always sent Lenore into hysterics.
Amanda stepped out of her office as Debbie strode by.
"Debbie, come here," she said.
"Debbie. Debbie!" Mary shouted from her office.
"She's in here," Amanda said.
"Debbie!"
"Debbie, I want you to ask Crystal if you can leave tomorrow," Amanda said, clutching her gift bag.
"What!"
"You're going to start a mutiny. People are going to start walking out after you, if you keep it up with 'this place sucks,'" Amanda told her. "If Bart knew..."
"All right. I'll think about it. Won't Crystal mind?"
"At this point, I think she'd be glad," Amanda said.
Finally, it was 4:30. Amanda hugged Debbie, thanking her for the present.
"I'll think about it," Debbie promised.
