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by Sarah Silberman — Age 24 — Brooklyn, NY
The architecture firm where I worked as a receptionist was understaffed, and sometimes I escaped from behind my desk, littered with paper clips and tedium, and went uptown with the architects to document apartments. The first space I measured was a brownstone near the Natural History Museum. I was surprised that the interior looked so nicely lived in — snapshots propped on the mantle, a half-finished crossword puzzle on the coffee table — and when I stretched the yellow tape across the study, I felt like an intruder in a JD Salinger novel.
*
The office was a loft in Tribeca. Sometimes I listened to my boss drum his fingers on the plywood surface he used as a desk before he picked up the phone and dialed my two-digit extension. I let it ring two or three times before I picked up. ‘Hello,’ I would say. ‘This is Sarah.’
*
I was on the train, on my way to work, pressed between the Do Not Lean On Door door and a man in a damp raincoat. My socks were wet and I could not remember what day of the week it was. I watched the subway stations flicker by and thought about how, even though the days of the week were clearly marked, they had become difficult to discern from one another.
*
My boss lived on the Upper West Side and frequently referred to the Catholic guilt that shaped his personal and political philosophies. Occasionally he clipped articles from The Nation for me to photocopy and distribute to the office, but more often he asked me to order lunch.
He also sketched powder rooms, terraces, and foyers on tracing paper, studies that were beautiful in their quiet precision. When I pressed the frosted paper to the copier glass, I thought about how comforting it was to reduce complex structures to lines and dimensions–sketches that would be reproduced, minimized, and folded into rectangles the size of manila envelopes.
*
One night after work I wandered north, past a yarn shop with colors like a paint fan and vendors who sold jewelry and film scripts. When I turned right or left, I pictured the compass rose as it appeared in my third grade Social Studies book. Two people stopped me for directions on Sixth Avenue and I could only smile and shrug, perplexed that someone was more lost than I was.
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