Jumping to Conclusions

I'm almost thirty five years old, I mean I would've been thirty five next month, and ever since I can remember, I get up at 7:00, feed Sheila my cat, call my mother to see how she's feeling and catch the D train downtown to work. A few times when I overslept and didn't call her, my mom went berserk and left me a whole bunch of messages at the office, so I try to say a few cheerful words to her while putting on my makeup and doing my hair. On the train, I think about the TV shows I saw last night, or maybe I read a few pages of my library book, or sometimes I just think about life. When I change trains at 59th St, I have this ceremony of unwrapping the first piece of chewing gum of the day. That's how my day begins.

My Uncle Joe got me this job as a secretary in one of the most important accounting firms in the country. Our offices take up almost two whole floors. Because I'm just a secretary, I only get a little workspace, it's not even an office, but it's near the reception desk where my friend Brenda works, so I can look out the big glass wall opposite the elevators and see all of New York. I was born here, and except for that one time when Brenda and me went on vacation to Bermuda, I'm a full time Bronx girl. So every morning I brownbag a bagel and coffee, punch in at the office at 8:30 am, and work straight through till the lunch break. Brenda and me used to take the elevator down and wait in line at the Italian deli for a tuna on rye and coffee, but we decided that lunch break was the best time to do our nails without being interrupted, so now we file and polish while everybody else is shoving their way to lunch. The truth is, I never really liked to go up and down in the elevators. It's silly, I know, and I feel perfectly safe here in my office on the 90th floor, but I'm just a little uneasy about the whoosh of the elevators. It's a kind of quiet whoosh, and I think that strong machinery should make a stronger statement, if you know what I mean.

That vacation in Bermuda with Brenda was the best week of my whole life. I went shopping every day for a whole month, so I'd have a real vacation wardrobe. I got these cute capri pants and bare-midriff tops and two bathing suits and a beach coverup and I even bought this huge straw beach bag with bunches of plastic grapes on the handles. I figured that if I skipped supper and going to the movies for awhile, I'd be able to manage without a nasty letter from my bank manager. Brenda borrowed a lot of stuff from her rich sister who's married to a very successful doctor. The only thing that crazy girl bought was a pair of swimming goggles.

Anyway, we flew down to this gorgeous hotel. The cute guy who carried our bags to the room showed us where all the light switches were hidden. In the Bronx, we put our light switches up on the wall but I guess it's classier to hide them. And in the marble bathroom we had two toilets and a shower and a bathtub, and they gave us soap and shampoo and the biggest towels you have ever seen.

So after unpacking, we put on our bathing suits and beach coverups and went down to the pool. It was so relaxing, everywhere you looked people were just hanging out on lounge chairs and rubbing in suntan lotion and drinking fruit shakes. Everything smelled coconutty and pineapply, and I was sure this was what Heaven was all about, so I parked myself on a lounge chair, closed my eyes, breathed in deep and said Hey Brenda, isn't this awesome, but Brenda didn't answer. I waited a few seconds and when she still didn't answer I opened my eyes and there she was, wearing her goggles and jumping off this really high diving board into the pool.

Hey Brenda, I yelled, that's dangerous. Come back here, you crazy girl. But she kept jumping in the water and climbing back up that ladder which looked as tall as the telephone pole next to my apartment in the Bronx, which is really much too tall to climb up safely.

Now I know this sounds crazy, but the whole time I was lounging around the pool, working on my tan and catching up on Cosmopolitan and Hair Beautiful, Brenda practiced her high jumps. She was diving backwards and forwards and doing somersaults in the air, and even in the evening, when we were hanging out in the disco, she would talk my ear off about the jumps and dives she was planning for the next day. She even tried to talk me into jumping but no way, I told her, was I going to get far enough off the ground to need goggles. Brenda is my dearest friend but this was getting obsessive, so after three days I said to her, Brenda, enough is enough, give me those goggles. She saw I meant business so she handed them over and I hid them where she'd never think to look, in the bottom of my straw beach bag.

We had a really great time together. We did each other's toenails in Marvellous Mauve and drank Pina Coladas on the beach and danced at night with all these suntanned goodlookers, and we even did a few things I wouldn't like my mother to know about, but those goggles in the bottom of my bag kept bugging me. I even tried them on in our marble bathroom once or twice, but they looked really weird and there's no way you'd catch me dead wearing them. Besides, why would I want to jump off a telephone pole into the pool? Brenda was too busy relaxing to worry about her goggles, so they just stayed buried under a pile of magazines and suntan lotion in my bag.

What a great vacation that was. We still talk about it, Brenda and me. Last week, we went to see the latest Julia Roberts movie, the one where she and this guy really hate each other before they fall in love and then for old times' sake, we went to a bar and ordered Pina Coladas. Remember that gorgeous hotel, I said. Remember that gorgeous pool. Hey, said Brenda, you still have my goggles. Are you gonna give them back or are you planning to jump somewhere. Yeah right, I told Brenda, the only jumping I do is in my exercise class when Big Marge yells 'jump'. But when I got home, I remembered to look for the goggles, and there they were, still in the bottom of the straw bag.

I put them in my tote bag, along with all the other stuff I was going to take to the office, and that's why, when the plane crashed into my office building next morning and everyone was screaming and shoving to get down the smoke-filled stairs and the floor was shaking and the elevators weren't making their whooshing sounds anymore, I put on the goggles, pretended I was diving from my Bronx telephone pole into the cool blue Bermuda pool and jumped.

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