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I began to dread Mary.
Not that Mary – 50-ish, short and dumpy in her blue uniform – looked particularly menacing. She was working away, gathering trays and plates and glasses and cups and saucers off the cafeteria tables, loading up her cart. Mary not contrary. Mary not unhappy. Just plain, dull Mary.
Except. Her cart loaded, headed back to the dish-washing line, I was caught in her eye. And she could see that I'd seen that she saw me. I could see the start of a little smile of anticipation on her face. I'd seen it now so many times. And though she tried to hide it as she got closer, once again, she just couldn't. Just as I tried, with more success I hoped, to hide my agony to come.
Because what we both knew, though she somehow didn't realize that I knew it, was that Mary was going to tell me her joke. Her one and only joke. The one that never failed to make her laugh. The one sure-fire, comrades-in-arms having a chuckle, social link she owned. And once again, she was going to offer it up to me.
I was Jim, then a 19-year-old university dropout, a familiar of Sartre's existential nothingness and Kierkegaardian despair. I was lost, but too clever to take direction, too independent to lean on my family, too individual to be confined by university classes and curricula, too revolutionary to be crushed and packaged by the system into a suit and an office job.
And apparently, I was too clumsy and unskilled to find work other than loading a dish-washing machine in a cafeteria. I was spending my days digging cigarette butts and napkins out of coffee cups. I was scraping congealed gravy and cold, floating bits of chips off plates. And I was stacking the dishes into a machine so that they could go round again, be filled again, go out again and come back again with Mary. I was bewildered and almost bereft of pride and dignity, out of my depth and out of any world where my once-penetrating critiques, my lightning ripostes and slashing sarcasms would ever matter.
Of course, I was still amidst a crowd of students, teachers and administrators … well, not so much amidst as on a curious interior edge. They flooded in and out of the surrounding classrooms and frequented the cafeteria. But I was no student and had no academic identity of any kind. Rather, I was just a guy out of sight in the back room of the central eatery: One of the "workies." We didn't mix.
And while I identified with the working class and opposed the indifference, greed and casual cruelty of the descendants and defendants of the Family Compact and the Château Clique, I didn't share much in the jockey-hockey-bawdy talk of the other young workies either.
Too prim and proper, educated and international, sophisticated and naive (stuck up and scared?), I found myself an odd fellow among older odd fellows.
I had tried to strike up conversations with the Czech woman a few times. Through our hash of common-English as a foreign language, gestures and a few words of my high-school French, I eventually learned a bit of her story. She had, in the old country, been in charge of an establishment five times as big as the one we now worked in. An educated woman, she'd seized her chance and fled toward what she hoped would be a better world for her children. Maybe it still would be. But now, without language and credentials, "Is hard."
It was a conversation that cost us both effort and paid off only in bleak anguish and helpless sympathy. We stopped trying and afterward passed like overfilled lifeboats in the night.
That left the guy with too many tattoos and a silent look of perpetual anger. And, of course, Mary.
And here came Mary. Was I at least still a decent middle-class kid, with manners enough to laugh at a joke I'd already heard? Or would I scorn and hurt the feelings of a slower, older woman? Would I once again smile weakly or would I shatter and burst into tears or rage at this nightmare repetition of futility?
Or would this cup pass?
No. It would not.
Rather, Mary passed me this cup – these cups, these plates, these empty sugar packages, these soiled napkins, these caked spoons and bent stir-sticks, these extra salt and pepper envelopes, these many trays of mess and waste, and – with a smile and a wink – the same, always the same, words.
"Never say I never gave you nothin', Jim!" followed by a peal of laughter.
It was too absurd.
And suddenly I got it. It was absurd. The whole mess. Being and nothingness. Me. My life. Mary's life. The students around us, the huge, recycling, mess of food and dishes and garbage, all my disappointments and pretenses, all our civilization, all our great institutions, all the students, all the workers, all the bosses – too absurd for anything. It didn't matter. All you could do was laugh.
And I found myself laughing. And Mary laughed with delight that once again, her wit had worked. I laughed some more and Mary laughed some more, every laugh setting off a new round of laughter. And when finally with tears running down our faces we wheezed to a stop, I knew I meant it when I said:
"No, Mary, I'll never say you never gave me nothin'!"
And we went back to work.
James Russell lives in Ottawa.