The Pinecone
As night gave way to night, the dreams got more and more intense. The orgiastic rites with agave tequila and aerobic dance rhythms became more extreme and more surreal, incorporating the incidents and aggravations of her day—like birds’ nests which wove in hair and colored threads and bits of doormat. Mandy and her maenad companions in the urgent throbbing darkness of the night would tip over solitary Vmware golf carts, tear doors off giant LX Luxury Utility Vehicles, tie their latte-drinking, iPhone-wielding owners up in leafy vines ripped from the vineyard on Arastradero on the far edge of the Stanford Research Park and make them watch while they had enthusiastic sex.
She’d wake drained at dawn with her heart beating wildly, the covers thrashed into an impossible tangle. She’d drag herself exhaustedly from bed, have a shower and coffee without awareness of temperature or taste—and get to work early as a result. Five, seven days in a row.
Of course the beastly Brad didn’t give her credit for beating him in more often than not, now. Instead he gave her a 2 out of 5 on the evaluation he dropped on her desk at 4:30 on the last Wednesday in August before leaving for a bike ride with the Marketing Director and CFO—C-minus, he pointed out, because “we want to leave plenty of room for improvement next time around.”
He paused for effect in the doorway of her cube and told her with pious preachiness that he hoped she knew she couldn’t leave that thing on her desk—the pinecone she’d scooped up from the driveway on impulse and brought in to set jauntily next to her inbox. She could surely see, he said, that it was unprofessional. “K K?” he said, commanding her buy-in with the text talk that she hated like all other witless truncations, before heading out in all his neon Spandex-covered glory.
On her way home, the yellow Hummer with the 4 PLAY license plate that summed up everything that most annoyed her in the Golden State almost backed over her in the parking lot of Andronico’s, where she’d gone to pick up a “Mediterranean Box” with pita, hummus, dolmas, olives, and tabbouleh salad. So different from what Gretchen was eating in Crete (she’d described lemony octopus grilled over charcoal), Mandy thought with aesthetic and moral despair, sickened by the pretense that this was a civilized way to live.
*
That night, she dreamed again of being among the maenads, working themselves up slowly into a frenzy, running into the shadowy forests of oak and eucalyptus in the moon-silvered foothills. She felt the fawn skin slipping smoothly along her naked back, tasted salt and tequila on her tongue, heard all around her, in her, the shrill maddened crowd of women—numbers swelled now, every night greater—running blindly, but with every other sense alive, a kind of exquisitely painful joy, barefooted, ankles torn by underbrush, ready to tear to pieces any animal or gormless man they might happen across.