Barren

By Amy Cotler

My tiny work kitchen was a corporate afterthought on the 47th floor, intended for brief caffeine and sugar breaks. Worse, it had an electric stove, every chef’s nightmare. Its poor ventilation perfumed the sterile office with the sexy smell of garlic, which I was miraculously supposed to avoid. Each day I listened WBAI radio, while I cooked lunch for my boss and his top five executives, whose work was to trade in valuables. Their bullpen was tight with talk, phones on and off the hook, large computer screens glowing, always someone yelling about something urgent,  both in and out of the office. One day my boss’s wife slammed the heavy bathroom door behind her, snapping about the 1-ply toilet paper. What you they think this is?” she shreaked at office manager, “A third-world country?”

But mostly it was just me and my radio in my little kitchen, quite jolly, cooking up bright colors and expensive ingredients, while fanaticizing about the lovely baby I was going to have. She’d gurgle and coo, then lie across my chest, warming me as she slept.

Most of the staff ate lunch at their desks, corn beef sandwiches, piled high with layers of ripe meat, or sliced turkey with Russian dressing dripping out into their wrappings. I only noticed them occasionally, in their bullpen, or dark offices, as I walked through the lush carpeted halls to the bathroom with its insufficient toilet paper.

Occasionally, I’d peer into the half open doors, especially into my boss’s dad’s office, where the old man stared at a computer screen all day watching numbers dance across his screen. At noon, he’d swiveled around to the luscious plate of lunch my waitress brought him. Once, he fondled her breast, as she leaned over to serve him, though both she and the office manager dismissed my complaint. 

Each weekday I prepared these executives their lunches, which were both pretty and austere, like tight swirls of fresh and smoked salmon, atop green sauce, flattered with fans of slender French beans. The meals graced enormous white plates on the long conference table where the six men sat. I chose the menus, with the caveat that they could never feature ingredients that clung to their teeth or had to be fussed with or flossed out, and never harbored too much fat. My heart-healthy menus appeased their doctors and wives, but gave them leverage to dine at posh French restaurants at night.

This was the place I worked on the day I got the call. The office manager insisted I only take emergency calls at work then go out back past the copy machine to take them. No-one was at the machine, but a copy, just spit out, was waiting. I snuck a peak of the stub for my boss’s bi-monthly salary — $20,376.47 — before rushing into the tiny office next door, in my chef’s jacket, to pick up my call.

 It was my doctor. We volleyed back and forth, just a bit, though his sentences were a cipher to me. Then one held, “No, if you’re pregnant, you’d have to be the Virgin Mary.” 

Barren. That wasn’t the word he used, but it echoes through history, whispering its shame. Unproductive, unfruitful, sterile, arid, like a desert. My body was a desolate, unable to have children. An uninhabited wilderness that is worthless for cultivation. I placed one hand over what should have been my womb. 

“She was a barren woman,” I’d heard the expression somewhere, maybe as a child, late at night in a movie, flickering in the darkness while the rest of the house slept.

Through the room’s glass wall a pool of assistants were copying papers, then walking into the office nearby, the door silently shutting behind them. As my phone dropped from my hands onto the plush carpet below, I spotted the left pocket of my chef’s jacket. The raspberries I’d sautéed with a sugar and liquor had left a rouge smudge, leaving a stain on my breast pocket, right over my heart.