Free Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Page B

want to be bullied back to our desks by Joe Pope when Benny was in the middle of a good story. “How is everybody?” asked Joe. We looked around. We shrugged. Pretty good, we told him. “Good,” he said. He finally left and we raised our brows at one another.
    “That was a disgusting display of power,” said Karen Woo.
    We told Jim he had to leave if he was the one attracting Joe Pope’s attention. If he was the reason Joe was on the move in our direction, Jim had to go.
    “But this is my cubicle,” said Jim.
    “Maybe he was just trying to be friendly,” Genevieve Latko-Devine suggested. Genevieve had blond hair, cobalt eyes, and a tall, gelid grace. Even the women admitted her superior beauty. For Christmas one year, she was given as a gag gift a set of twisted redneck teeth, which she was instructed to wear year-round in an effort to even us all out. But when she put them on, we discovered — the men among us, that is — a desire for rotted teeth we never knew we had. We told Benny to go on with his story.
    He picked up where he’d left off. Carl and his wife sat in silence a long time after hanging up their respective cell phones. Finally Marilynn, with tender, firm insistence, turned to him and said, “You need help, Carl.”
    Shaking his head resolutely, Carl replied, “I don’t need help.”
    “You need medical attention,” said his wife, “and you won’t admit it, and you’re hurting our marriage because of it.”
    “I’m not depressed,” said Carl.
    “You are a
textbook
case of depression,” Marilynn persisted, “and you need medication
so
badly —”
    “How would you know?” he asked, cutting her short. He had turned at last to stare at her with an outraged and lonely expression. “You aren’t a psychiatrist, Marilynn, are you? You can’t know
every
angle of medicine — can you, can you possibly?”
    “Cancer patients, Carl,” she said, exasperation rising in her tone, “are not the happiest people, believe it or not. I recommend antidepressants for many, many of my patients. I know a depressed person when I see one, I know the symptoms, I know the damage it can do to families, to . . .”
    He let Marilynn fade out. Just then, crossing the street on her way to work, was Janine Gorjanc.
    Janine looked to Carl perfectly motherlike. Unpretty but not ugly. Hippy but not fat. Puffy about the face but with a youthful cuteness buried somewhere in there that might have caused someone to be crazy about taking her to the high school prom. A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day — nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone’s mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part. Insulated from her as he was by the car, he could look without the urge to turn and flee, and it was the first time he had seen her in months, maybe years. “Carl?” Marilynn was saying. “Carl??”
    “Marilynn,” he said. “Do you see that woman? That woman there, in the wrinkled blouse. She looks like a mother, doesn’t she?” Marilynn followed his gaze. “That’s Janine Gorjanc,” he said. “That’s the woman, I’ve told you about her,” he said. “Her daughter was killed. You remember? She was abducted. I told you about her. I went to the funeral?”
    “I remember,” she said.
    “She stinks,” he said.
    “She stinks?”
    “She emits some kind of smell, I don’t know what it is. It’s not every day. But some days, I think she just lets herself go. She doesn’t shower or something.” He watched her enter the building. Marilynn was looking at her husband, not at Janine. She was listening, trying to understand. “Marilynn,” he said, “I hate the woman for how she smells.”
    “Have you ever tried talking to her about it?” she