CUSTOMER SERVICE
Image licensed through Adobe Stock. Edited.
Everyone has left the office around 7 pm on a Friday. Even the president of the company, who doesn’t talk to us as a general principal, and also to establish healthy boundaries, comes out of his glass jar and reminds me and Rache that it’s Friday and we need to go and live a little. We laugh profusely to no end and wish him good night, and to have a great weekend, and all the best in the near and far future. He is, after all, the person who gives you a raise if you feel like you need one. You always have to ask first, it isn’t automatic, nothing good in life is, I’m afraid.
The truth is we don’t know how to go and live a little, or where or with whom for that matter. Rache lives with a roommate, with whom she lives a lot, like all the time, so she doesn’t want to just go and live with her a little more. This is her situation and nothing can be done about it, because we have a salary frieze here.
I have never lived the way other people do—nightclubs, coke, sex in dirty bathrooms and the works. I guess you could call me a nerd, at least my brother and sister affectionately do, when I give them advice, or money for incidentals and accidentals. In return they tell me all about it, and I’m happy and sad for them, and for myself, but in a different way and it is hard to explain why. I’m happy that they definitely have lives, but more often than not, they don’t have the money for it.
According to them, I don’t have much of a life to speak of besides the fact that I am healthy, meaning that I don’t have the flu right at this moment. Sometimes I have it, it’s fairly distributed in our office like computers, free coffee and paid time off days. I also have food in the fridge and made rent. I wasn’t always like this. I started with just mayo in the fridge and stale bread for sandwiches. A company that came out with several different flavors of mayo made a fortune in Bulgaria, when mayo and bread was all that people could afford after communism fell.
I even have a few dollars on the side, and when I say a few, sometimes I have as much as twenty twenties. I save my lunch money by making mayo and cheese sandwiches. Took me a long time to get here—in addition to the fifteen hour flight that is—and I am grateful for it. But I also know that twenty twenties is not much. I possess things, like seven pairs of pants, three pairs of winter shoes, two pairs of sneakers, so, based on the fact that a pair of shoes with good soles was once a challenge, and I had to save for months to get it, or a pair of jeans, secondhand (or second butt,) now I’m living the life.
Speaking of pairs of jeans, because things sometimes come in pairs, I am all paired up. My grandma Borka referred to one’s other half as an esh, or more precisely iesh, because people in the part of Bulgaria closer to Russia speak in that dialect, softly. Iesh means the second thing in a pair; like she would ask me to find the iesh of every sock, when we took the laundry in. Or when angry, she would tell me and my siblings that our iesh is missing, like we didn’t have one, because it hadn’t been made yet, since there was no need to make two of the same bad kind. To be one of a kind was a bad thing, like she had never heard of a kid like that before, who wouldn’t eat a home-cooked, freshly fried piece of fish. And she had come across many different kids, since she had been a teacher for thirrrrty-thrrrree yearrrrs. She rolled her R’s threateningly, and “thirty-three” sounded scary when she said it. Since having no iesh was clearly the worst thing that could happen to a person, as soon as I found a guy, who was civil and not a heavy drinker at the time, I called him my iesh and married him. My bar has always been low, but this is because we were taught to be humble and not to ask for much.
Rache does not have an iesh at the moment. Her bar is high, but she is very career-oriented, because she wants to make sure she can afford to leave for a few months and have a baby when the time comes. She hopes that the opportunity doesn’t just come and go one day. She jokes when we are alone in the office that she only has a few more days left in her biological clock. Then she sugar coats this by saying, ”I’m doing great in other areas of my life.” She sprinkles lavender oil on herself and gives me some, so that we can calm down and continue to read and write our emails until our inboxes are as empty as our hearts. Lights automatically switch off when no one’s moving and it gets dark. Rache jumps up and down, dancing and pretending to fly in the air like a fairy until the lights come back on, and she sprinkles some more lavender drops like fairy dust all over our desks. We still expect good things to happen.
Lavender is a tricky smell for me. My grandma Borka, the one who was a biology teacher for thirrrty-thrrree yearrrrs, had cleared this field, called opitno pulie or experimental field, where kids from her classes planted lavender amongst other things, and when my siblings and I went to visit in the summer it was in full bloom, and hairy bees would fly around it, smelling the nice smells. Grandma Borka also had the kids plant potatoes, which, she loved to repeat, came from America, together with the Colorado beetles, who were these depressed and slow-moving black and yellow beetles all over her potato flowers. She caught them in her bare hands and squeezed them until they popped. She was never squeamish, and had no fear of anything in nature. But she was sincerely scared that my siblings and I may not find our iesh, if things kept going the way they were going, and if we continued to be so picky about food, or continued wearing socks on the beach, not wanting to show the world our toes. Those sorts of things made her afraid.
Rache is on the phone with customer service now, and her voice is the deep voice of a woman eating chocolates and drinking champagne while wearing a bare-backed evening dress and an all-bets-are-off bracelet. She uses this voice on sales calls sometimes, and on Friday evenings. The guy on the other side has probably just landed this tech support job and is lonely and roommated himself. Something is wrong with Rache’s PDF, but judging from her voice, nothing is wrong. She laughs her velvety laugh and pretends to not be able to find the file she had in front of her, “just a little while ago.” She uses “little” a lot when she wants to sound cute and helpless, which some men love. “Play the damsel in distress,” is what she told me the last time I went to ask for a raise. She starts to spell things like “L as in Love, R as in Romeo, F as in…” then she laughs and corrects herself, “F as in Far away land.”
I remember that I have to activate my Citibank card and decide to call customer service too. I don’t like the robot-lady, so I press hard zero, zero to show them that I require a human to continue. I get a guy who is the suspicious, authoritative kind and cannot be convinced that I am who I say I am and that I deserve a credit card. I immediately start to doubt myself, always an immigrant afraid of authorities. I know very well that I am an impostor, uninvited and not belonging, but I have managed to cover up that affliction for years, hoping no one notices, like a balding man I have combed my hair to the left
I begin to make mistakes entering my card numbers and typing in the codes the Citibank man is texting me. He gets more and more suspicious and tells me he is going to ask me one last question. I expect to hear one shot after that, or to feel a long cold blade enter slowly through my heart, or for poison to dry me out completely until I turn to dust.
“Who is your best friend?” he shouts.
“I don’t have one,” I honestly answer, and I produce a tear.
“No, you do,” he screams. “It starts with the letter M.” Shame on you, you don’t remember your best friend’s name, did you enter a fake name back when they were giving away free money only to people with friends? I apologize and start listing the names of all the men and women I’ve ever met, as if this is Rache’s baby shower and I am suggesting names. I start with M, then N, then O and P. In the mode of a multi-tasker, I cut up the old credit card, while carefully balancing the phone on my shoulder, trying to not hang up on the guy with my ear. I have hung up on many potential friends with my long earlobes.
I am quietly wetting my hands with salty tears, and I have to blow my nose or it’s going to drip onto my keyboard. He hears, and the damsel in distress detecting gene in him kicks in. “It ‘s the last name that starts with an M,” he says, after I have buried him in all sorts of first names. “Mihaylov!” I scream. “My husband’s last name! Can that be it? Is he my best friend at the end of the movie?” The last scene where the man says, “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Or this other movie, where this other man messes up the stress and goes b-E-ginning, rather than beg-I-nning, since English is his second language too.
“Yes, Mihaylov is your best friend,” the Citibank man now whispers playfully, as if talking to a two-year-old, since that’s how you deal with crybabies, his manual instructs. He activates the card and wishes me a happy Valentine’s Day, of all the things I need. I’m wishing for more friends, that’s what I need, and a box of tissues. I realize that the sad, wet pile of small squares in front of me is my old and my new Citibank cards both, completely cut up in the spirit of multitasking, which is encouraged by this office. I separate the pile and throw it into two different trash cans, so the person who goes through the trash at night and puzzles back credit cards won’t puzzle back mine. I’m not calling back to ask for a new card now; maybe in the spring, maybe when Rachel gets pregnant.
Right now I feel like the only sensible thing to do is to put on my coat and make sure my best friend with an M has food and drink and company to watch a movie with. Rachel is giving her phone number to her customer service guy, who asked for it in the first seconds of their conversation, so he could identify her. But now, she is making him work for it and who knows, maybe he could call her later on. It looks like they may get together as long as he is on the same continent, since she travels for work anyway. She looks happy. Lights go out, and it’s my turn to do a few jumping jacks to get the light to shine on us again. I succeed and exit like a star, bowing low while Rache is laughing at me and with the man, who can service all her needs, if she doesn’t run out of bubbles in her voice. I exit, walking backwards. I am very good at walking backwards, since I worked as a tour guide once.
I wish grandma Borka could see me, no, scratch that, I know she can see me, walking forward in the lavender fields in the sky. Her students are all around, a small village of people really. They go through the blooming potato fields, laughing, catching up on old stories, collecting Colorado beetles, and moving them to a reassigned heavenly area, specifically for them, so they can do no harm.
On my way home I pass by the graveyard entrance with the welcoming sign “One Way.” There’s got to be another way, I always answer. And in the spirit of that, I decide there’s no way I am cooking today. I sit at a table at the taco place around the corner. A young woman with a water jug carefully pours water, looking like a sculpture from three thousand years ago. Every empire needs girls from somewhere else to pour water to people with a few more coins in their pockets. The service people don’t speak the language much and they fly by on tiptoes, bent over slightly, tightrope walking over a sea of mistakes. The girl brings me a glass and a fork.
“It will be two of us,” I say.
She looks at me very carefully, scientifically almost. Not knowing the expression, she is trying to establish how crazy I am and if she should call her boss.
“It will be two… of you?”
Sofi Stambo was awarded the 2024 Restless Book Prize for New Immigrant Writing (2024), and LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction. She won the first prize in fiction in the 2015 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International literary contest, selected by WIGLEAF Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions (2016), was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2018, and her novel All In was a finalist for the LANDO award from The de Groot Foundation (2023).
Stambo has a master’s degree in literature from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria, and was a graduate student in literature at City College, New York.
Her work has appeared in AGNI, Another Chicago Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Epiphany, Fourteen Hills, Granta (Bulgaria), Guernica, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, New England Review, New Letters, Proethean, The Rumpus, Stand, and Tin House.