Rachel was a furtive mouse. Her desk was faux wood and only large enough for her computer and keyboard. An entire row of such desks lined the wall but were empty. The wall was bare concrete and three feet thick. She had been shoved into the fourth-floor basement next to the nuclear science lab. The blue and gold university seal above the school spoke of royalty, prestige, and world leadership. The dim lighting worn carpet spoke of forgotten, ancillary, and servitude.
Another keystroke, labor-fully pulled out of her, to copy-and-past data into her spreadsheet, and she sighed deeply - not like anyone would hear her down here. Her advisor Professor Schweinebacke had assigned her studies for which she should verify the experiment data. He had haphazardly checked a bunch of studies, paying no mind to the likelihood of catching a mistake. He simply wanted to be able to brag to his colleagues that he had caused a paper to be withdrawn from a prestigious magazine. Researchers were cheap and useless anyway.
She pulled herself off her chair. She let her Vans sneakers drag on the floor. At least nobody cared about what she did down here. Not having to put on a face, she let a scowl of frustration on her face hang out. Shanice was in the kitchen - white veneer on the tables and metal chairs. The ever-low lighting to save electricity painted the place drab. Shanice was a large Black African-American woman. She was jolly not minding the place at all.
"It's cupcake Thursday!" Shanice sang with joy and melody, holding a golden one with colorful dots to Rachel.
"Oh, they are so gorgeous!" Rachel bit into one. "It's unbelievably moist. You have to give me the recipe!"
Rachel knew how to play her part in the role assigned to her. Yet as she broke a piece off and got lost in the snap of it and the jagged edge of yellow bubbles in the spongey cupcake, she couldn't help but ponder. "Do you want to drown yourself in cupcakes like Shanice?" Shanice's obsession with cupcake Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and every day was a clear coping strategy of forgetting about how they were in a dead-end job in a basement for minimal pay. Every day of work was an agony of boredom and pointlessness. Shanice got fatter every month, slowly destroying her liver and wreaking her body with diabetes.
Every morning walking into the lobby of the university, she received a sting that kept her awake that kept her from giving up that injected her with bitter anger. Soft cashmere sweater, fabric so soft that it sculpted the body of the wearer, and a color tone so exquisitely chose that you had to marvel at the spark, depth, and uniqueness of it, the woman in passing the security gate in front of her held her head high and her heels higher. The body was sinewy, sculpted, and refined from pilates, yoga, and kickboxing. Her bone structure was so slender and tall like a much-praised sculpture at the Met. Her face was covered in freckles, the skin so clear it glowed, and the blue eyes looking most educated. She was a symbol of the Jewish women from rich families who got the jobs above ground and got the interesting research grants. It was unfair.
Some days like that day, it got too much. Rachel acted out. She'd burn to relieve that torment in her chest that made her whole body feel sick. Her outlet was like cutting her skin, she needed that sharp sting, but she got it from something else. From something that she could hide from everyone else, compartmentalize it, drain the ulcer in her soul with surgical precision.
She went into the bathroom and changed into a white jeans overall. Not wearing a bra, the front covered her boobs but allowed plenty of view from the side and top. Also not being form-hugging, the overall front moved around. Her breasts were fat-filled to be beautifully full - the picturebook example warm, motherly breasts with that youthful smooth skin and teardrop shape of a thirty-year-old. The overall also covered her figure that gave her a little too much to make her a real woman. She knew her cleavage attracted looks of clerks at takeout counters. There was something very alive and full about how her natural breasts moved, wiggled, and swayed.
Her hands worked her hair into a ponytail and used cream to slick her hair back along the skull. The hair glistened smooth, black, and wet like almost right out of the shower. Her lips turned into burning passion with red lipstick. She drew black lines near her eyes to create that timeless going-out-look. She was still a bit mousy from her figure and posture, but the accents said that she was ready for the night. She put a big, black jacket on and zipped it up all the way to cover up - let people believe she was going to go for happy hour or a concert.
Slipping out of the university campus, which made her the pride of her family, through a side exit, she hurried down the nighttime street. Dodging past an old, white-haired man with a walking stick taking his time and making the pedestrian traffic part around him, she quickly hopped down the stairs into the subway. The blue sign for the A train uptown guided her to a platform, gloom-grayed, grime-encrusted, and with industrial-sludge-hued puddles.
The train shook in turns made too uneven and rattled over gaps in the tracks, all the while the wheels were singing their steel whine grinding against the tracks. This late and going away from the center of Manhattan, the train had plenty of empty seats. The only people on the train were working people. A big man with hard boots held a toolbox in front of him. White paint slaps covered his pants and hands. He seemed entirely comfortable having paint on his hand and going about the city. Another Latino man wore all-black clothes and shoes with his hair slicked back and a sullen look on his face - the telltale sign of a busser. A big belied lady held a dozen grocery plastic bags with churros - those golden, sugar-covered sticks - on her lap and all around her seats. She was one of those subway vendors to make a seemingly easy buck that involved standing around for hours and being crushed by waves of people spilling out of trains and storming to appointments that they are late for. But now it was night. They were all peaceful, calmly awaiting their bed at home.
For half an hour, she waited in her seat. Now was her time to get up and walk out. The platform was empty and abandoned. She climbed up the stairs into the pitch-black of the night. A dollar store was on the corner, a 99-cent pizza place was still open, and a store offering to buy any gold was shuttered. You knew right away that you were in a poor neighborhood because all the signs were old and dirty. The sidewalk rim was cracked all over. Cars blew through the intersection. From somewhere, she could hear the dum-dum-dum-bam of bachata music playing. She was in the Little Republic, the largest Dominican community outside of the island at the northern tip of Manhattan.
Most people had left the street already this late in the evening. That was a good thing. Rachel was Puerto Rican. Usually, everything was fine, but sometimes she got called unpleasant things. There was friendship and rivalry between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, the dominant Latin groups in NYC. She preferred to get quickly off the street. A discomfort was in her belly. With quick steps, she walked uphill. The terrain at the north tip of Manhattan was wavy like the land didn't want to be flat to make it easy to cover it with buildings. A lonely traffic light played with itself changing the colors and shining the colors out into the night. A compact car blew down the street blaring bachata music. You could feel the island everywhere here. There was a flag in a window. There was a sign for a breakfast place offering sancocho.
Her breath got more winded. The barren trees got more elaborate crowns as she got higher up. Looking back, she could look down the straightness of the street to almost see the Hudson River. In the near distance at the peak of the hill, a wave of bachata music reached out to her and invited her. A door standing open with a golden glow flowing outside and lighting up a circle of people standing outside.
She approached and entered their circle. On their cheeks, she could see the joy. The cheeks were bunched up round from smiles. Sparkles were in their eyes. They had the bachata fever. Their bodies were hot and humid, almost venting steam into the cool night air. Quick words flashed over their lips telling how excited they were. The man at the door whistled an "oh la la!" A forbidden cheer in American culture because it constituted sexual harassment, but up here it had the sound of appreciation and celebration of femininity. She felt the wave of tingles running over her body in all the spots that she felt she was being evaluated on. And the warmth in his voice made her feel good about herself. She felt the research-in-the-basement identity slipping off and being replaced by the identity of attractive, desirable femininity.
The inside welcomed here with a wall of bodies - tightly packed together yet not touching each other. Every couple grooved in its own space, tightly wrapped into an embrace, hips shaking. A man raising his woman's hand high and creating a space for her to show off how she could play with her legs and fast footwork only to throw him a smoldering look to tell him that she was done doing a solo. A wall of men packed together like sardines at the wall. These were the lesser men, the ones new to dance. They were either too timid to ask for a dance or had been rejected due to their poor dancing skills. The music breathed into the room. Sucked up into everyone's lungs, it infused their bones to become incessantly alive. The bass echoed off the wall, sometimes clashing with itself.
