Fiction: Where Will All The Buildings Go?
Ellen is still searching for the right way to describe what happened to her. Here is one place she could start.
Last winter, when she was supposed to be designing a parking garage for a luxury shopping center in McLean, she built a city instead. She got the idea when she was surveying the lot where the parking garage was supposed to go. In her leather pumps and peacoat, she stood on the flat expanse and looked out; the land was a deep brown, lightly marbled with snow. She walked the perimeter, her hands in her pockets, her heels sinking into the dirt, her breath a white cloud in the air. She felt on the edge of something.
The McLean parking garage would be her third, although it was by far the largest and most expensive. Still the scale of this project seemed small compared to the grandeur of creating an entire city, the parameters in which people would live their lives. A city had the power to change a person, to change the way they experienced the world. No one would be changed by a parking garage.
That night, she began a blueprint. A small city, she decided. She sketched a downtown, an unusual number of parks, a river that split the city in half. At first, the downtown was a tight fist of buildings. She added a single skyscraper that sprouted from the center. She liked the idea of a skyscraper existing in such an unexpected place, like a wayward tree growing through the roof of a house.
In January, she was scheduled to give her boss a presentation on the parking garage. Instead she carried a scale model of the city into the conference room. She placed it on the oblong table and started explaining the river and the parks, the logic behind the single skyscraper.
“You’re confusing your days,” her boss said. “You’re supposed to be talking about the garage. I don’t even know what this other thing is.”
“Please consider what I’m going to say next very carefully.” Ellen looked down at her city—still struggling into existence, but at least it was there, an idea made concrete—and took a breath. This was her chance.
Her boss leaned forward in his chair.
“Does Virginia really need another parking garage?” she began.
“Does this firm really need another seven billion dollar project?” he replied.
And there was her answer.
That afternoon, she was fired. She took her city with her. “You did what?” her husband said when she told him what happened, her half-formed city at her feet. They were standing in the living room, by the bay window overlooking the street. She knew she had been reckless. Their rent was expensive, impossible on a single income. What would they do now?
At her husband’s urging, she saw a therapist, who wrote a prescription. When you reach a certain age, you feel your possibilities begin to narrow, the therapist said, making a little tunnel with his veined hands. Some people panic. That was as close as he could get to an explanation.
In the spring, she had yet to find another job and when her husband announced that he wanted to leave D.C., to go back to New England, where he was from, she didn’t feel she was in any position to object. His solution was to take a job in Connecticut, in a town outside New Haven, and vanish into the lives of his students. Ellen was left to find a solution of her own.
That evening, her husband wants to know if she’s ready for Monday. They are standing in the kitchen and eating cubes of orange cheese. For weeks, she has been scheduled to visit one of his classes to talk about the construction of the Eiffel Tower. A good opportunity, he keeps telling her. He has been a teacher all his adult life and is used to having knowledge to impart. Ellen can tell that, with her, he is no longer sure what he is supposed to be imparting.
“One hundred percent ready,” she says.
He squeezes her shoulder. In the last six months, he’s gone gray at the temples.
“One hundred percent,” her husband replies.
